Set in the months before and after 1900, Bertrand Bonello’s glamorously louche House of Pleasures projects nostalgia for the Paris…
Iranian writer/director Asghar Farhadi’s fifth feature is an urgently shot courtroom drama designed to put you in the jury box….
A Dangerous Method, the title of David Cronenberg’s viscerally cerebral new film, is something of an understatement. As cataclysmic as…
1. A Dangerous Method See review. 2. Melancholia On any other day, this might have ranked first. Directed by Lars…
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is hardly a personal project. Still, David Fincher’s sveltely malevolent remake of the 2009…
A doggedly overwrought production less felt than facile, Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is an essentially uninvolving prestige adaptation. It might…
John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the 1974 spy novel generally regarded as the writer’s finest, is predicated on…
Described as a “psychotic prom-queen bitch,” the antiheroine of Young Adult, directed by Jason Reitman from a Diablo Cody screenplay,…
Steve McQueen’s first two films star Michael Fassbender, feature virtually interchangeable titles, and are nearly as grueling to watch as…
The first thing you see in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is a close-up of Kirsten Dunst’s face. Behind her, slow…
Clint Eastwood goes deep into Oliver Stone territory and emerges victorious with J. Edgar. Although hardly flawless, Eastwood’s biopic is…
Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre is something of a comeback for the Finnish filmmaker. His warmhearted comedy of underdog, working-class solidarity,…
Pedro Costa, legendary for his intimate, epic, underlit, and often inaudible portraits of Lisbon slum dwellers, here ponders the mystery…
Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, The Rum Diary adapts a novel Hunter S. Thompson began in the early ’60s…
As taut and economical as its title is unwieldy, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene is a deft, old-school psychological…
“The revolution will not be televised.” So Gil Scott-Heron asserted in 1970, and so it was not—at least not on…
French cartoonist Joann Sfar’s first feature is an ambitious attempt to cage the career of legendary French singer/songwriter/scamp Serge Gainsbourg…
Romanian director Cristi Puiu’s Aurora is a continuous search for meaning—a murder mystery, shot vérité-style, in which, for most of…
“Convoluted” does not begin to describe this four-hour-plus movie, based on a sprawling three-volume novel by prolific 19th-century Portuguese novelist…
Joseph Dorman’s film essay–cum–biodoc concerns author Solomon Rabinovich (1859–1916) who, taking as his pen name the Yiddish greeting Sholem Aleichem…
Tsui Hark’s visually sumptuous Detective Dee is a strong comeback for the veteran Hong Kong wuxia-maker. Magnificent and cheesy, the…
As stripped-down and propulsive as its robotic title, Drive is the most “American” movie yet by Danish genre director Nicolas…
John Sayles’ Amigo aspires more to educate than entertain, but it’s no less engrossing for that. Torn from the pages…
