Director-screenwriter Cregger displays an obvious perverse glee in guiding his audiences through his outlandish twists and turns.

Feature debuts don't come more audacious than this effort by Gaspar Noe, a filmmaker in his mid-20s obviously determined to shock - and he achieves his goal. The difference is that he also displays real style and intelligence, and this brilliantly controlled effort marks the emergence of a true talent. [14 Sep 1998]

Happily, the film is more than a greatest-hits rundown (and at nearly three hours, it had better be): In addition to nuts-and-bolts musicology, it offers real engagement with a complicated character, endearingly stubborn and self-effacing, whose inventiveness changed both his chosen field (“absolute” music) and the one, film scoring, he entered only reluctantly.

While the film’s emphatic style can become draining, and its attention to technique risks overshadowing the interpersonal drama, there’s an operatic grandeur here that won’t quit, giving the constantly escalating violence considerable power.

Despite its vivid and electric space sequences, the visually striking movie often feels like a throwback analog good time, which certainly worked for me.

Guadagnino has made a kind of emo horror movie. He’s far less interested in the shock factor than the poignant isolation of his young principal characters and the life raft they come to represent to one another as they slowly let down their guard.

Like the previous Kirikou movies, the combination of classic animation and straightforward storytelling provides a welcome antidote to the kind of overcaffeinated cartoons gracing today’s screens.

The result is an expressive and moving portrait of a tempestuous marriage, one told with elan that feels rich in feeling even if its entire budget probably wouldn’t have covered the cost of croissants on an average film shoot in France.

A true-crime picture whose chilling effects are generated without a whiff of the manipulation that often comes with such films.

For all the clever satirical touches and asides, the gorgeously intricate, wondrous stop-motion landscape is ultimately pure Selick, imbued with a fitting color scheme of swirling, eerily glowing greens and purples choreographed against a mischievous score by Bruno Coulais that effectively sets the mood for the film’s pre-Halloween arrival.

Rare is the reflection on Black cinema that even tries to address all these critical points. Still, it makes digestion, especially on the first watch, overwhelming. Is That Black Enough for You?!? is layered and informative but, like a scholarly thesis, requires a bit of work to unpack. It’s a challenge worth accepting.

As tenderly observed as it is laugh-out-loud funny.

Isolation, emotional distance and (mis)communication are all on display in Love Life, though these subjects are approached with a disorienting but welcome lightness, underlining the absurdity of family life.

Rock ’n’ roll mythologizing is one of the subjects of Squaring the Circle and Have You Got It, but it’s not their method. Rather than reaching for a neat or aggrandizing summing-up, they grapple with the passage of time and the perspective it brings.

That the story of someone so off-putting climaxes in a moment as profound and moving as the penultimate scene of Return to Seoul speaks to the subtle power of writer-director Davy Chou’s storytelling and the portrayal by Park Ji-Min, a visual artist making a strong impression in her first screen role.

A Compassionate Spy borrows the look and feel of a historical espionage thriller and builds some momentum and moral complexity along the way, but it finds its real potency as a generational family drama.

Combining comedy, action, drama and an impressive number of different animation styles, The People’s Joker is a self-conscious, intentional cult film, crafted with genuine love for everything in the margins.

With her angular face and penetrating gaze, Mackey commands the screen, confidently shepherding us through Emily’s mercurial moods. Her eyes — darting nervously at one moment, squinting suspiciously at another — tells us what dialogue can’t.

One of the most absorbing parts of Alice, Darling is watching Alice, Sophie and Tess interact with each other throughout the weekend — to witness the frustrating moments of misunderstanding and the triumphant ones of clarity. Kendrick, Mosaku and Horn sustain a natural rapport, which makes investing in their friendship easy.

One of his most piercing inquiries yet. ... Herzog is the clear-eyed student — at times amazed and delighted, and, at others, skeptical and alarmed. Amid the cryostats and nanoparticles and fiber optics, the clunky gadgets and impenetrable-to-the-layperson diagrams, he summons a wry and lyrical mix of awe and foreboding.

It’s never assembly-line generic: Zlotowski is coloring within the lines here, but with generous strokes of nuance and feeling.

Missing succeeds at maintaining a propulsive, nail-biting atmosphere and overcoming the boredom of its conventional narrative beats by treating each tool — Gmail accounts, iPhone photos and company websites — as a deeply layered puzzle, one that gathers and offers more information than most people realize.

When Foxx is onscreen with Parris, a certain kind of magic happens. The pair treat their characters’ verbal tussles like rappers in a cypher: Their metaphors are smooth and their egos huge.

The deep fondness for the source material comes through, and the painterly hand-drawn aesthetic is enchanting.

What Demoustier has done here, and done quite successfully, is taken a basic mystery plot, like something out of a TV movie, and used it to ponder how each one of us could react to a ghastly crime, and how we expect others to react in turn.

Perhaps inevitably, the film moves toward a deeply poignant conclusion, but there are enough rambunctious and slightly zonked-out moments to provide a vivid, full-blooded portrait.

Josh Friedman’s smart screenplay takes its cue from its recent predecessors in reflecting the politics of its time. But the movie works equally well as pure popcorn entertainment, packing its two-and-a-half-hour running time with nail-biting thrills but also allowing sufficient breathing space to build depth in the characters and story.

Whether you call it a relaunch, comeback, return or rebirth, it’s captured in a fittingly down-to-earth, memory-infused documentary that’s a gift to fans — moving, thoroughly engaging, and a chance to see a remarkable sexagenarian at a turning point, doing what she does best.