By Julien Allen | February 24, 2010

Rather than seeing Audiard as a successor to Bresson or Scorsese, it is more helpful to our understanding of A Prophet to position Audiard within France's post-war existentialist literary tradition, and more specifically alongside the work of Albert Camus.

By Michael Koresky | February 23, 2010

It’s easily the most “genre” film of this late pack, both in conception and execution, and the one that remains most trapped within its circumscribed horror boundaries.

By Matt Connolly | February 22, 2010

With the possible exception of the post-Tarantino crime thriller, has any genre been as good to American independent film over the past 20 years as the family dramedy?

By Jeff Reichert | February 18, 2010

Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes, a starkly designed inquiry into the nature of miracles, exists in a lineage of films that includes Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse, Jacques Rivette’s The Nun, Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, and professed inspiration, Carl Dreyer’s Ordet.

By Michael Koresky | February 17, 2010

Whatever suspense Julio DePietro’s The Good Guy seems to think it’s generating is predicated upon the supposedly surprising twist that its central Wall Street wannabe tycoon is not, in fact, a standup guy.

By Leo Goldsmith | February 15, 2010

Each episode—1974, 1980, and 1983—casts its own particular pall over the twisted characters and inevitable tragedies, and each episode's director visualizes the story's sense of dismal and inescapable horror in his own way.

By Michael Koresky | February 9, 2010

The people onscreen are uniformly engaging, but unlike so many other creators of these personal docs, Mosher and Palmieri wisely know that may not be enough

By Justin Stewart | February 9, 2010

Following Taken, this second version of A Heavily Armed American in Paris exchanges the revenge architecture for cop buddy digs, though it never settles into them in a predictable way.

By Michael Koresky | February 4, 2010

It’s so tempting to treat Eyes Wide Open as the preposterous melodrama that it easily could have been, but Tabakman manages to make a well composed, unemphatic, and fleet-footed drama out of the overheated material.

By Eric Hynes | February 3, 2010

Ajami gets right to the tragic heart of the matter. Before the viewer knows what or whom he’s watching, a young boy is gunned down in the middle of a city street in broad daylight.

By Farihah Zaman | January 29, 2010

The feature debut from documentary filmmaker Nicole Opper, jumps right into the existential crises of its heroine, Avery Klein-Cloud, dispensing with the introduction of background information before delving into conflict.

By Julien Allen | January 28, 2010

About three quarters of the way through 44 Inch Chest, a battered and bloodied Melvil Poupaud, sitting handcuffed in a chair, looks at the camera for the first time. The expression on the art-house heartthrob’s face betrays fear, bewilderment, and possibly a tinge of regret.

By Jeff Reichert | January 27, 2010

The lineage of cinematic mountain climbing extends back to the films of the 1900s. These early efforts evolved into the hugely popular German Bergfilme of the Twenties, the Alpine equivalent of the American western.

By Jeff Reichert | January 22, 2010

Charles Darwin’s articulation of his theory of evolution by natural selection was less a discovery or invention in the sense that those words are typically used than simply the recognition of a fundamental order in the world we inhabit.