By Jeff Reichert | January 30, 2014

There is no narrative arc to the 3D-shot Charlie Victor Romeo; there are just different planes, different reasons for the crashes, all left opaque to the viewer until the arrival of a series of clinical slides announcing casualties and causes after abrupt cuts to black signifying the plane has gone down.

By Max Nelson | January 24, 2014

Certain elements of Visitors suggest that Reggio has grown closer in spirit since Koyaanisqatsi to the wide-eyed young stoners who helped catalyze that film’s success.

By Michael Koresky | January 22, 2014

The political weight of representation inevitably bears down on the viewer of Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, an explicit film about amorphous desire that unapologetically combines menace and eroticism, and daringly—and most alienatingly for those who want to be told what to think at the movies—it has no agenda at all.

By Adam Nayman | January 21, 2014

It’s possible to detect more than a few hints of detachment or even derision in the way that Gloria treats its protagonist, but Garcia’s performance stands up against these moments in the screenplay in a way that creates genuine friction—the fraught quality that generally makes for worthwhile filmmaking.

By Michael Koresky | January 16, 2014

Without the dynamism of the staging, Letts’s play comes across as merely depressing, even taking into account the excitement with which Streep draws out her syllables. It’s a film in which family is malignant and the only pure loving couple is, ironically, an incestuous one.

By Michael Koresky | January 13, 2014

Like Father, Like Son has the unfortunate effect of making Kore-eda’s greatest attribute as a filmmaker—his sensitivity—into a liability.

By Tyson Kubota | January 2, 2014

Peter Jackson has directed five J. R. R. Tolkien films so far this century. In the end, the movies in that universe will span two trilogies and nearly a full day’s run time.

By Violet Lucca | December 22, 2013

Walter Mitty may be a film that features a character who’s basically a retargeting ad that speaks in sponsored tweets, but it’s beautiful in a way that neither mainstream nor independent films aspire to anymore.

By Benjamin Mercer | December 20, 2013

The Past, the latest film by Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi, has been frequently likened—politely, if not always enthusiastically—to his previous effort, the 2011 near-consensus masterstroke A Separation.

By Max Nelson | December 19, 2013

With Her, his fourth feature, Spike Jonze has made a movie so unambiguously, pointedly about The Way We Live Now that we might wonder if it could speak to any moment other than Now.

By Adam Nayman | December 18, 2013

Based loosely on the true story of an FBI operation targeting public corruption, American Hustle is basically a less exotic, polyester-clad doppelganger for Argo—a lushly produced, seventies-inflected crowd-pleaser about a showbiz-style sting.

By Elbert Ventura | December 13, 2013

Halfway through Alexander Payne’s remarkable Nebraska, a man walks into a newspaper office in his father’s childhood town and learns that the woman who runs the place was the old man’s sweetheart long ago

By Michael Koresky | December 3, 2013

Theirs is admittedly not an open-arms type of filmmaking, but no one could accuse Inside Llewyn Davis, at once their warmest and most fragile film, of treating its complicated, imperfect protagonist with disdain.

By Nick Pinkerton | December 2, 2013

Seidl sees the twenty-first century using the compositional values of the fifteenth, as evidenced in his flat, compressed tableaux, in which cell-like interiors are captured at a stationary medium long-shot, figures held flush in their center.