By Benjamin Mercer | December 19, 2012

The first feature film written and directed by Sopranos creator David Chase, Not Fade Away is principally a period film: a small-scale dramedy set against the backdrop of the tumultuous sixties as they unfold in a tri-state town within spitting distance of—but a world away from—the Village’s bohemian mecca.

By Adam Nayman | December 18, 2012

The equivocation of a freed slave and Siegfried—the most resplendently blonde-haired, blue-eyed hero of Scandinavian lore—is a self-consciously audacious joke, and it's one that Tarantino carries through as Django pursues his own version of the hero's quest.

By Max Nelson | December 18, 2012

It may lack Rings’ rounded, three-dimensional contours, but it still gives us the impression that we’re inhabiting the unfamiliar world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, a place with its own laws of physics, its own history, languages, and social rituals.

By Jeff Reichert | December 12, 2012

Rick Alverson’s The Comedy is the latest in a long tradition of films that adhere to a program of aesthetic distancing in order to level scathing sociocultural critique.

By Jeff Reichert | December 7, 2012

In the latest documentary from Western Ohio’s young Bill and Turner Ross, Tchoupitoulas, named after a street in the Big Easy, three young, African-American protagonists scamper through the city over the course of one long evening.

By Michael Koresky | December 3, 2012

Providing evidence that hyper-verbal does not equal hyper-articulate, the characters in the latest David O. Russell film are constantly firing blanks on all cylinders.

By Adam Nayman | November 28, 2012

For all of its aesthetic and political posturing, Killing Them Softly is a toothless creature—a cinematic paper tiger. Pitt makes for a telling emblem is this regard.

By Michael Koresky | November 26, 2012

We shouldn’t be shocked when movies as emotionally generous as In the Family fall through the cracks; we should just be encouraged when they get noticed. And that’s the case with Wang’s film.

By Michael Koresky | November 20, 2012

The flamboyant color palette and liquid camerawork help justify the film as above all a fairy tale, which early on gives Lee free reign to indulge in a self-aware exoticism.

By Jeff Reichert | November 20, 2012

The best that the filmmaking Cerberus that produced Cloud Atlas can muster is a kind of rote blockbuster-ized uniformity which irons out all idiosyncrasies.

The Twilight franchise has a reputation for lacking subtlety. The choice between a shirtless werewolf boy-man (Team Jacob) and a sparkling vampire (Team Edward) has thus far been the series’ major cultural contribution.

By Max Nelson | November 16, 2012

Hong equates language and cultural barriers with other sources of alienation—for instance, a character’s dim awareness of her status as a character—but In Another Country isn’t as weighty as that sounds.

By Adam Nayman, Julien Allen | November 12, 2012

The delight of Sam Mendes’s movie (what an odd way to begin a sentence!) is its indulgence in a kind of shameless showmanship that’s quite distinct from the all-out sensory assault practiced by so many contemporary action movies.

By Chris Wisniewski | November 5, 2012

The gambit of Spielberg’s Lincoln is to humanize this almost mythic figure. Its triumph, thanks largely to an erudite and ambitious screenplay that places utter faith in the intelligence of its audience, authored by the playwright Tony Kushner, is to do so without trying to deconstruct his greatness.