Charlie Kaufman’s view of the human experience can be so despairing, so bankrupt of cheer and spontaneity, that one must thank their lucky stars that he is incredibly funny, and also that he is anRead Full Review

Domestic dramas are a dime a dozen, and while many can be histrionic amd verbose like Revolutionary Road (a good film in its own right) , there are times when you get something as subtly beautiful and stunningRead Full Review

In our latest podcast (shameless plug!), I had outed myself as a Star Wars agnostic. My appreciation for the films’ effect on the culture far outweighs any appreciation I have for the films themselves. Any childhood enthusiasm I’d cultivatedRead Full Review

The glut of Holocaust films can lead some to wonder whether filmmakers have ever heard of a single other human tragedy. The evil behind it is so calculated, so diabolical, it still seems like humansRead Full Review

What we see here with Chi-Raq is the Spike Lee of Bamboozled. That 2000 film was an extraordinarily bleak satire that seemed to epitomize Lee’s ultimate frustration with the use of black culture within the greater pop culture. Bamboozled isRead Full Review

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