Queens-born horror specialist Stevan Mena has mastered the slow camera creep and the unusually artful vista-he even composes his own orchestral scores, good ones. But he needs to give up screenwriting, pronto. Put down the laptop, Stevan.

The film ham-fistedly hammers home its message more than the usual collateral-damage drama.

You can easily see why Ichikawa's vision of the 20th-century Japanese-lit landmark is considered definitive; the way he elevates the story's soap-operatic elements to a level of extraordinary sublimity makes the melodramatic seem positively majestic.

Suddenly, everything clicks; this snooty art merchant may love the sound of his own voice, but you're reminded how much Rohmer valued the sound of others' voices above all, and why going out on a whimper occasionally works wonders.

Best seen on the big screen; even those with a cursory grasp of avant-garde cinema are likely to come away with their minds opened and altered.

Turning the on-location Tokyo streets into the perfect backdrop for a cartoonishly colorful version of hardboiled drama - call it Pulp Art - House of Bamboo keeps its story line about an undercover Army cop (Stack) battling a gangster (Ryan) on the lean and mean side.

Unfortunately, Truffaut fell into a pit of awkwardness on the project; editingwise, he's hardly in the league of Hitchcock, his sequences rushing ahead, his ironies too obvious. The Bride Wore Black only makes you yearn for better imitators like Brian De Palma. (Unlikely agreement came from Truffaut himself, ever the film critic, who hated his own movie.)

You think you're in for another coming-of-age movie about getting into someone's pants until you realize Deep End's real goal is getting under your skin.

Blessed with a weeklong run at the end of Film Forum's bliss-inducing Robert Bresson retrospective, the French filmmaker's 1956 tale of steel bars and iron wills boils a true-story prison break down to its bare necessities.

Come Back, Africa is a work of amazing grace - and a forgotten treasure.

Once the story takes a murderous turn, things quickly fall apart. Too many perfunctory side characters, such as Dennis's clueless parole officer, dilute any sense of tension; the bargain-basement visuals-all overlit interiors and unmotivated zooms-never rise above the luridly cheap; and hoo-boy, those final scenes.

Only Dissolution's divine climax feels truly poetic. Having the stamina to not break down on the journey to that moment is half the battle.

Shockingly modern and the most politically enlightened (and enlightening) comedy of the 1930s, Leo McCarey's winning quasi-Western is a model of Hollywood broad strokes coalescing into a sophisticated whole.

If you know nothing of the concentrated work of France's Robert Bresson, it's almost a crime to start here - like launching yourself, on the "expert" level, into the most boring, baguette-laden video game ever.

Ron Honsa's PBS-appropriate doc pays lip service to the utopian space's history, and features (too-)brief snippets of performances and modern-dance legends - Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris, Suzanne Farrell - praising the landmark.

By boiling a dysfunctional couple down to a worst-hits clip reel, the director created one painful autopsy of an affair, the polar opposite of those frolicking montages so prevalent in American rom-coms. (He's also gave his actors a hell of a valentine; neither Yanne nor Jobert has ever been better.)

Thirty-six years later, this Molotov cocktail of fizzy champagne and feminist theory has not lost any of its combustible carbonation.

As a tone poem, Tocha's documentary can be mesmerizing. As a memento mori, It's the Earth feels a little lost in space.

The haphazardness of the film's structure mutes the power of the subjects' recollections.

The deep cynicism would be depressing if it weren't so riveting.

It may be a stretch to call the filmmaker a forgotten genius, but if nothing else, Le Grand Amour makes a case that Étaix was a fertile clown, overdue for a bow in the spotlight.

The young actors' vacant-eyed brazenness may be true to life, but there's a whiff of exploitation, matched by the script's disinterest in exploring any friction that isn't skin on skin.

The result is less an ode to late-'60s California dreamin' than an NYC-hip riff on SoCal somnambulism, one that occasionally Pops with Warhol's mondo minimalism yet never snaps nor crackles. "Lonesome Cowboys" this is not, despite the fact that Surf uses virtually the same cast.

Smitten to a fault with high-art predecessors, Eric Atlan’s excruciatingly bad drama takes place in an abstract Buñuelian hotel room, glows luminously like Last Year at Marienbad and concludes with a Bergmanesque card game on which the fate of souls rests.

The longer the film goes on, the more it seems like a collection of gorgeous images without an overall organizing structure. Our youthful lead’s slow disillusionment with his complicated surroundings ultimately plays less profound than petulant.

The extreme variance of style and scrutability makes for wildly disorienting viewing.

Stations of the Elevated plays like a time capsule, particularly for having no dialogue or plot. It swings to Charles Mingus’s hardest bop and evokes a long-gone city, somehow more adult and confrontational even in silence.

Music’s healing power fires off rays in all directions. Cave often looks like a healer himself, swooping about among the front-row faithful, a shaman in a sea of desperately reaching, lit-up hands.