Alan Turing is a fascinating man whose life was ended tragically early by a society that was so intolerant of homosexuality that it couldn’t even tolerate one that helped keep it from being destroyed. HeRead Full Review

Citizenfour is less of a nuts and bolts documentary and more of a political thriller. It’s edited for optimum suspense and even frames itself with protagonists. Those protagonists are American journalist Glenn Greenwald and controversial NSARead Full Review

Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is one of the most beloved pop culture institutions in America, and one of my own personal favorites. So yes, I went into Rosewater very much wanting it to be good,Read Full Review

Bennett Miller is an actor’s director, unafraid to let his leading men (and so far, it has always been men) take the spotlight. His movies seem to lack a singular voice, and in the caseRead Full Review

Those who may have a distaste for Chris Nolan’s movies may dislike his redundant narratives, his over-reliance on pathos as a motivating tool, his high-class manipulation no doubt helped by a lucrative partnership with musicRead Full Review

If we’re to believe that Disney Animation Studios is going through a renewed spurt of creative output, a run of films that can compete with their overachieving little brother, Pixar, than what does it meanRead Full Review

James Marsh is a commendable documentary filmmaker. His Man On Wire won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2008, mostly because it understood that the film’s star, Phillippe Petit, was the sole focus. With The Theory of Everything,Read Full Review

Films as close to a cultural heritage as The Book of Life is run the risk of becoming overtly self-serious history lessons, especially when you consider that the main audience draw for this film is children. SoRead Full Review

A movie like Force Majeure puts the audience in a pretty precarious position. Like the American film Compliance from 2012, Majeure presents us with a situation and we watch as a character makes a split decision that effects several people. We’dRead Full Review

Nightcrawler accomplishes what few films can: to create a heightened reality that is also effected by the reality of day-to-day life. It’s a scathing look at local news journalism, but it’s mostly an eerie character studyRead Full Review

It’s been speculated that writers hate clichés, and that’s true in spirit but is often incorrect in practice. Listen Up Philip documents one young writer’s journey, hurtling toward the self-fulfilling prophecy of loneliness and bitterness. The film’sRead Full Review

There are four credited screenwriters for the script of Birdman which makes a whole lot of sense once you’ve seen the actual movie. It flies (bad pun, sorry) in a lot of different directions, it’s incredibly self-consciousRead Full Review

David Ayer makes Man Movies with a capital M. His films are a bit more cerebral than, say, the Expendables franchise, but in the end both selection of films are reaching toward the same core audience andRead Full Review

Whiplash was this year’s Sundance darling, winning hyperbolic praise from nearly all who managed to see it and leaving Park City, Utah with the film festival’s two biggest prizes: the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award. ThatRead Full Review

We’ve seen this movie before. A rascal curmudgeon finds humanity in the form of a small child. Paper Moon may be the definitive example. Bad Santa gave that movie a holiday twist. But it’s been done, over and over.Read Full Review

I remember being in college when Jason Reitman’s film Up in the Air was about to be released in the Fall of 2009, and Reitman made a stop at my campus to talk with all of usRead Full Review

Nobody does the major Hollywood thriller better than David Fincher. Perhaps Christopher Nolan comes close, but Fincher is less sentimental, his films are more sleek and unforgiving. There’s a distaste for humanity in a lotRead Full Review

The work from Laika Studios – the only major animation studio focusing exclusively on stop-motion animation – is unique in a very charming way. They have not given in to the cheaper, less labor-intensive, moreRead Full Review

The new documentary Art and Craft delves deeper into the subjectivity of art appreciation than any other film I’ve seen in a good long while. What makes art, in all its forms, so fascinating to the humanRead Full Review

They say authors shouldn’t adapt their own novels. The connection to the story is too strong, and the author will feel too loyal towards things that work very well in one medium, and not veryRead Full Review

There’s a measure of unhappiness that’s displayed in The Skeleton Twins that’s hard to pull off in most movies. The kind of depression that comes with everyday life, that’s easy to dismiss when watching from the outside.Read Full Review

Outside of their breakout hit from 2005, The Puffy Chair, the Duplass brothers’ films have always felt like high concepts searching for a meaning. The plots and scripts are tight and the performances are inspired, butRead Full Review

Love is Strange is such an understated piece of filmmaking that some may not realize just how powerful it is. The story’s protagonists are two upper-middle-aged gay men who’ve just gotten married, but it is notRead Full Review

Life After Beth is another in a string of projects headed by Aubrey Plaza in an effort to streamline the comedienne’s transition from television’s hit show Parks and Recreation to film stardom. Plaza is beautiful and legitimately funny,Read Full Review

I’m not sure who was asking for a Big Chill for millennials, but we just got it. It’s an interesting thing to watch a film like About Alex which is so sentimental and obsessed with nostalgia that it’s bothRead Full Review

The Vatican sits in Rome, but no culture is more tightly linked or more implicated by the Catholic Church than the Irish. A large part of their existence is dictated by the strict ideals ofRead Full Review

If we’re considering Guardians of the Galaxy to be amongst the very best of the twenty-first century superheroes movies era – and it seems like we are – I think that most of it’s success, and thatRead Full Review

Here’s an interesting statistic: there hasn’t been a single year in my life in which Woody Allen hasn’t released a new film. His institution is well known, but for me personally, the arrival of each new filmRead Full Review

The two main characters in Land Ho! are purposefully crafted with such contrasting personalities, a boon toward the odd couple dynamic that’s played throughout the film. Paul Eenhoorn is an Australian actor whose silky accent compliments hisRead Full Review

In Richard Linklater’s beloved Before trilogy, Ethan Hawke plays a novelist named Jesse. In Before Sunset and Before Midnight, Jesse is given a particular scene to describe his ideas for future novels and all of his interests seem to dealRead Full Review

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is not like most of the sequels coming out this summer (or the last five summers, really). The only characters that have stuck around from the 2011 Rise of theRead Full Review

When Roger Ebert died in April of last year, I wrote a long piece about it on this blog in which I hoped to put across that there is not a single writer that I have readRead Full Review

With the release of Once in 2007, Irish director John Carney showed that he has a real connection with pop music and a real talent for displaying that connection on the big screen. Most of the creditRead Full Review

Films with inherent nihilism, like Snowpiercer, usually fight an uphill battle with American audiences. The film is made by famed South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho, whose Mother and The Host showcased his incredible talent with tension and stylistic violence. Snowpiercer is hisRead Full Review

The How To Train Your Dragon series has very quietly become the best that DreamWorks Animation has to offer. The original film and its new sequel are funny in a sweet kind of way and market themselvesRead Full Review

There have been many films that strive to be the kind of subversive romantic comedy that Obvious Child is. The film is the brain child of filmmaker Gillian Robespierre, who made the film as a short backRead Full Review

Comedies like 22 Jump Street are always one step ahead of you. It’s seemingly perfect contrast of absurdity and subversive realism makes it impossible to make judgments – you can’t nitpick because it’s already nitpicked itself. 2012’s 21Read Full Review

When I initially saw the image of Tom Cruise running around in a metallic exoskeleton from the first production still of Edge of Tomorrow I was overcome with disappointment. Cruise has spent the better part of aRead Full Review

We see We Are The Best! through the eyes of adolescents seeking attention and adoration during a time in their lives where they are at their most emotionally vulnerable. It showcases a time where all can seemRead Full Review

If classic Disney fans were as rabid as comic book fans, I think there may be some flames and pitchforks coming after the revisionist history within Maleficent. The character, so popular as the antagonist from 1959’s SleepingRead Full Review

James Gray makes movies suited for a bygone era. His best film (Two Lovers) has several calling cards of the more personal dramatic films of the 1970’s. He doesn’t seem to have much an appreciationRead Full Review

Say what you will about Jon Favreau the filmmaker, he’s always had a knack for finding what most audiences want. His taste is just the kind of broad competency that a major Hollywood studio canRead Full Review

If we weren’t living in a world in which 12 Years a Slave was released just a year ago, Belle‘s release may have been considered more important. Belle‘s approach is almost completely inverted from Steve McQueen’s film. It seesRead Full Review

In 1995, during the Fourth of July Weekend, Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day dazzled moviegoers with the grandiosity with which it chose to destroy the world. Los Angeles? Boom! The White House? Zap Bang! The Statue of Liberty?Read Full Review

It must be embarrassing for Lars von Trier to watch Young & Beautiful and realize that French filmmaker Francois Ozon accomplished everything that he wished to accomplish in his opus Nymphomaniac in nearly a quarter of the time. IRead Full Review

At its basest form, Locke is a gimmick film. Whether it’s fair to do so or not, it’s easy to imagine the responsible filmmaker creating the basic conceit (for this film: one character driving in a carRead Full Review

Nicolas Cage is a fascinating Hollywood persona. He has serious acting chops, but they’re so often misplaced in performances and films that can’t handle him. He’s not like other movie stars, who can just turnRead Full Review

Last year’s Prisoners proved that director Denis Villeneuve wanted to be included in the club of contemporary filmmakers trying to become this generation’s Hitchcock. David Fincher, generally considered the best, most formalistically proficient director of Hollywood suspenseRead Full Review

The quality of narrative within American animated films has risen so incredibly within the last two decades, so much so that Pixar is far from the only animation studio making delightfully entertaining movies for allRead Full Review