Before any of the action in Mustang starts, we see at least a dozen different international companies attached to its production, which is how a film by a Turkish filmmaker which takes place in Turkey and castRead Full Review

Consider the opening shot of Youth. It’s not incredibly complicated. It consists of a young woman singing into a microphone, in the middle of a circular stage. A band surrounds her, but we don’t get aRead Full Review

If you want to watch a prime example of how poor editing can really dismantle a film, I’d suggest watching Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl, which spends two hours with a story that it can’t seemRead Full Review

The Rocky series is one of the few film franchises that I truly love. The original film is one of the great American classics, mostly because its screenplay (written by its star, Sylvester Stallone) is a masterpieceRead Full Review

The Good Dinosaur feels like such an odd child within the rest of the Pixar films. It seems like their most outright for children since 2003’s Finding Nemo, and yet, it feels particularly dark, tackling aspects ofRead Full Review

Legend contains such a brilliant fusion of the two personalities that Tom Hardy so often inhabits in his movies. On the one hand, there’s the brooding, but suave man behind Locke and Inception, but then there’s also the TomRead Full Review

Todd Haynes’ ballads of female domesticity are such a treasure to American independent film. His ability to tap into this world with such passion and ferocity, but also with tenderness, has produced what I wouldRead Full Review

The James Bond franchise is one that I’m not totally familiar with, I will openly admit. Spectre clocks in as the fifth Bond film I’ve seen overall, along with Goldfinger, Goldeneye, Die Another Day and last year’s Skyfall. The allure of theRead Full Review

The sincerity of a movie like Brooklyn is something to behold. It takes place in world that’s inherently cinematic, with a hard-felt belief in lasting romantic love and the unbreakable bond of family. It’s utter sweetness neverRead Full Review

A movie like Spotlight almost feels like a miracle. To find screenwriting so precise, an ensemble performance so sharp, in an understated film made for adults is truly rare. Films like this do indeed have an audience,Read Full Review

Suffragette is a purposefully-directed film with good intentions. It gets a performance out of Carey Mulligan that proves that she is one of the best young actors working right now. In a time where the reproductiveRead Full Review

Truth is based on the memoir of Mary Mapes, the CBS news reporter and 60 Minutes producer fired after the Dan Rather scandal. Whatever objectivity James Vanderbilt reflects upon Mapes and her journalistic integrity, Vanderbilt does not holdRead Full Review

Guillermo del Toro sure knows how to make a movie look good. The main set of Crimson Peak is a crumbling mansion in rural England built upon a vast landscape seeping with red clay. It’s seeping so much thatRead Full Review

When Room surprised many by winning the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival – besting what many saw as the easy favorite, Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight – it was confirmed that it was more than just your garden varietyRead Full Review

Steven Spielberg has been living in the past for quite a while now. Not since War of the Worlds has he made a film taking place in something resembling contemporary times, and in that film he destroyed theRead Full Review

It’s hard to conjure initial thoughts of Steve Jobs because it’s so rare to watch a film in which its plainly obvious just how un-fucked-with the screenplay is. If it wasn’t obvious just how much Aaron SorkinRead Full Review

A story of space survival should not be as airy and fleeting as The Martian is. 2001: A Space Odyssey set the standard, and Gravity perfected it. Outer space is an unkind, asphyxiating experience; out of the control of your meticulouslyRead Full Review

You could spend a lifetime watching films dealing with World War II, the Holocaust and the ripple effects it has had on Europe, America and nearly all advanced nations in the world. You could spendRead Full Review

There’s an inherent dichotomy in most gambling movies in the vain of Mississippi Grind. They usually are very fatalistic about the consequences of gambling: lives ruined, families and friendships torn apart, broken trusts that are beyondRead Full Review

The idea of casting Johnny Depp as James “Whitey” Bulger is comical. I’ve seen Black Mass and I’ve seen how good Depp is in it, and I still think it’s comical. It’s brazen stunt casting, but thisRead Full Review

Denis Villeneuve is a French-Canadian director, but his last three releases have been American films for American audiences (Enemy was shot in Canada, but it was a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal, so it obviously had aRead Full Review

The dynamic of a film like Sleeping With Other People is interesting. It’s very dependent on its cast for entertainment, and luckily for the film, it’s stars are Alison Brie and Jason Sudeikis, two actors whose comedicRead Full Review

I can’t think of a better time for Lily Tomlin’s performance in Grandma to present itself to us. She’s reached the beloved third act of her career, has come out on the other side of the I HeartRead Full Review

Noah Baumbach’s image of New York is as romantic as Woody Allen, but he’s willing to admit that there are cracks on the infamous visage. He does not treat New York as a place thatRead Full Review

Diablo Cody’s preoccupation with outcasted women trying to fit into Middle American normalcy has given us Jason Reitman’s two best films, Juno and Young Adult. Her collaborations with Reitman have been the best thing for the two ofRead Full Review

The roots of the Holocaust are felt deeply in Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, a quaint tale about a Jewish woman named Nelly (Nina Hoss) who survived Auschwitz, but not without suffering wounds so devastating that she requiresRead Full Review

When I saw Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing in 2012, it completely transformed the concept I had for what contemporary human beings were capable of. That film explored the killing of one million Indonesian ‘communists’ (prettyRead Full Review

The concept of David Lipsky’s 2010 book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself always felt a little gross to me. The book consists solely of a weekend-long interview between Lipsky and legendary author David FosterRead Full Review

Since Judd Apatow’s 2005 masterpiece The 40-Year-Old Virgin, his feature debut, the comic’s films have been spinning closer and closer to the sun. His insistence on indulging his and his friends’ egos has left his filmsRead Full Review

The spirit of a film like Tangerine is contagious. It’s lack of shame and sense of thrill is hard for even the biggest prude to resist. The film is the latest from Sean Baker, always a fanRead Full Review

Earlier this month, Grantland published a piece about new-arriving filmmaker Patrick Brice and his interesting predicament: his first two features were coming out on the same day. His first film, Creep, is a mumblecore thriller starring Brice andRead Full Review

You watch a film like Dope and it makes it very clear just how uninspiring most mainstream films can be. When a film this fresh comes along, it’s hard not to be enthused by its very energy,Read Full Review

The preciousness of Pixar Studios – the wholly brilliant subgroup of Disney Films that’s created several classics, including WALL-E and The Incredibles – is nothing new. It’s one thing for a single director to possess the talent to produceRead Full Review

Before Jurassic World even starts, we know that the logic here is all wrong. If we’re meant to believe that all of the Jurassic films exist in the same universe (and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t) then it’sRead Full Review

The first half-hour of Sundance indie Me and Earl and the Dying Girl was close to unbearable to me. It’s overwhelming supply of indie dramedy snark felt suffocating. Here’s Nick Offerman inexplicably cuddling a cat. Here’s theRead Full Review

After I saw Welcome To Me, I was impressed by Kristen Wiig’s continued efforts to carve out a filmography within quirky independent films, as opposed to taking advantage of the commercial appeal of her breakout hit Bridesmaids.Read Full Review

Mad Max: Fury Road is demented poetry; watching it is probably the closest I’ll ever come to mainlining amphetamines. The film is the fourth of the Mad Max series, and while all have been directed by Australian filmmakerRead Full Review

The literature of the Romantic-era poet and novelist Thomas Hardy is amongst the most-read of the Victorian period. Like his predecessors, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, his work is so rich with narrative and heavyRead Full Review

Kristen Wiig’s post-Saturday Night Live career has been exciting and unforeseen. She could’ve taken a path similar to her Bridesmaids co-star Melissa McCarthy, accepting any and all major studio offers for broad, belligerent comedies made for mass boxRead Full Review

Before the latest Avengers movie, I was privy to a half-hour’s worth of previews that presented an entire generation’s worth of superheroes for audiences to enjoy. There’s the upcoming Ant-Man which has a trailer that seems to prove theRead Full Review

The kind of science fiction that we get from Alex Garland feels inherently cynical. It’s based in a latent distrust in humanity and convinced of their inability to adjust to the speed in which technologyRead Full Review

Noah Baumbach made his career on a certain kind of crankiness – a crankiness no doubt born from his troublesome childhood which was well documented in his not-so-fictional film memoir The Squid and The Whale. ThatRead Full Review

J.C. Chandor’s latest film, his third feature, recalls Francis Ford Coppola’s first Godfather film. Cinematographer Bardford Young is doing his best Gordon Willis impression, drowning the characters in the shadows of backdoor dealings and corruption. Both filmsRead Full Review

Most people discovered Marion Cotillard when she won the Best Actress Oscar for La Vie en Rose in 2008. She was a beautiful, exotic unknown who hyperventilated on the stage and won our hearts. La Vie en Rose wasRead Full Review

The reason why we’ve never had a truly impactful feature film about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is because it’s hard to tell an honest story about a deity. When the man himself is legend,Read Full Review

Chris Kyle’s reputation precedes him. His record as a Navy SEAL seems impossible, inhuman. As he’s touted on the cover of his memoir and in the trailer for Clint Eastwood’s latest film, he’s the mostRead Full Review

There isn’t a single Mike Leigh film which doesn’t feel like a passion project of his, and so it’s almost surprising to learn that Mr. Turner is the film that he had hoped to make all hisRead Full Review

There are logistical reasons why famed post-modernist writer Thomas Pynchon hasn’t had any movies made from his novels until now. His books are all about mood and feeling, wondrous prose surrounding characters that are moreRead Full Review

Still Alice is Lifetime Channel-level melodrama. It’s based on a Lisa Genova novel about an Ivy League linguistics professor who’s life is dismantled by early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. The story is ripe for tragedy and, directedRead Full Review

One figures that when Reese Witherspoon negotiated the purchase of the film rights to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl in 2011, she may have pondered tackling the role of Amy Dunne, the fascinatingly evasive anti-heroine of Flynn’s novel.Read Full Review