By Michael Koresky | December 24, 2014

Reminiscent of Spielberg’s Lincoln in the way it limns the edges of its central great man by intensely focusing on practical matters—how, not just why, he forced and instituted political change—Selma is more procedural than biopic, although it doesn’t shy away from attempting nuanced, human portraiture.

By Nick Pinkerton | December 22, 2014

Mr. Turner, an unconventional biopic of England’s most famous landscape painter from director Mike Leigh, does not endeavor to show the world as seen by Turner, but to show Turner in the world. It’s a movie about a man who isn’t particularly pretty—neither physically nor morally—but who produces beautiful things.

By Adam Nayman | December 22, 2014

On stage, Into the Woods is intimate despite its sprawling cast of characters. Onscreen, though, it feels desperately dispersed and that sense of visual displacement gradually affects the thematic and emotional continuity between the different storylines.

By Keith Uhlich | December 19, 2014

Jackson’s at once digressive and bombastic style clearly grates for some. But there’s a singular earnestness and enthusiasm to these movies (as, too, to the Lord of the Rings films) that sets them apart from their many soulless imitators.

By Jeff Reichert | December 12, 2014

Maidan shows how documentary works at its best and most pure—assemblage and accrual. His vast shots are made for the cinema—they hold so your eye can roam at will.

By Jeff Reichert | December 9, 2014

It’s a production that required the full support of those titans of cultural conformity toward which Pynchon’s novels have long cast a wearily jaundiced eye. Return of the repressed or just further proof of the mainstream culture system’s massively absorptive qualities? Does it matter?

By Eric Hynes | December 8, 2014

There are very few cinematic” moves in Liv Ullmann’s Miss Julie, but every last one lands like a blow, forces you to re-find your footing. Choices carry more weight when there are less of them, and Ullmann doesn’t make any of these choices lightly.

By Michael Koresky | November 28, 2014

The Babadook takes the form of a somewhat conventional bogeyman story, but it has much more on its mind. With this frightening, seemingly simple story of a children’s book monster come to fearsome life, Kent burrows into the mindscape of two people—a mother and son—contending with delayed post-trauma.

By Justin Stewart | November 27, 2014

Begging forgiveness, it’s the film equivalent of a pretty bouquet tossed in the general direction of Turing’s columbarium, carrying a card reading “Oops.”

By Nick Pinkerton | November 20, 2014

A thought that occurred to me while watching Albert Serra’s Story of My Death: the lot of filmmakers traveling the prestige Euro festival circuit is not incomparable to that of the itinerant gentleman of prerevolutionary Europe.

By Nick Pinkerton | November 14, 2014

This may be difficult to believe today, but there was for a moment a sense that Carrey was an actually dangerous, destabilizing force.

By Michael Koresky | November 12, 2014

Bennett Miller’s bleakly efficient film is not only about America. It’s also about masculinity, brotherhood, fatherhood, class, competition, the drive for self-definition and expression. (It’s about just about everything except, of course, women, save one looming, destructive mother figure.)

By Nick Pinkerton | November 11, 2014

The first thing that you should know before watching Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman is that it operates under the fundamental assumption that everyone who took part in the settling of the American West was, by almost any contemporary standard, insane.

By Adam Nayman | November 7, 2014

Christopher Nolan usually makes movies about characters who are prisoners of their own devices, which makes Interstellar a departure. This time out, a protagonist’s single-minded obsession leads him to liberation rather than entrapment.