The work of James Baldwin is exquisite, articulate and essential. That last part, the essentialism, is rooted in its passion and anger. His ferocity spilled upon the page with such beauty, but you could notRead Full Review

Asghar Farhadi’s ability to so scrupulously dissect the nature of humanity is one of the best things one can see in a movie theater these days. 2012’s A Separation was a masterpiece of tension, a bitingRead Full Review

The coupling of legendary Oscar-winning Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and Nobel Prize-winning Canadian short story writer Alice Munro might seem surprising on paper, but not when you get the chance to see Julieta. Both are suchRead Full Review

Studio Ghibli has been fascinating audiences for decades, mostly as the main export of Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki. Ghibli is usually synonymous with excellence within Japanese animation, but The Red Turtle comes from Dutch animatorRead Full Review

I find myself completely baffled by Toni Erdmann. What can one say about a comedy that sits at 162 minutes and isn’t funny? The film follows a father named Winfried (Peter Simonischek), divorced and reeling afterRead Full Review

As I watched Pablo Larraín’s Neruda, I was reminded of two releases from the end of 2016: Jackie and Paterson. Jackie was also a film by Larraín and, like Neruda, also a biopic (about Jacqueline Kennedy) that played with the mythologyRead Full Review

Say what you will about Martin Scorsese, and whether or not he still has his fastball, there are still very few directors making studio films on a large scale about harsh, complicated issues. Silence is obviouslyRead Full Review

Hidden Figures is a cinematic exercise in sincere good-heartedness. It’s a film that wants to be about race but never wants to risk actually challenging the racial dynamics of its audience. It’s safe and isRead Full Review

Paterson, New Jersey has a rich history with poetry, including being home to Allen Ginsburg and William Carlos Williams. Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is an ode to the poetry of life, told through the life of aRead Full Review

The protagonist of 20th Century Women is a teenage boy who’s trying really hard to understand women. He calls himself a feminist at one point, and makes a point to let women know of his awarenessRead Full Review

There are few actors more fun than Denzel Washington when actively engaged. He’s one of our greatest movie stars, a true legend, an actor who’s skill and authority is rarely rivaled. It’s hard for WashingtonRead Full Review

The Star Wars stories have always had a root in political upheaval, but George Lucas never really had the knowledge or the bravery to really portray what an actual political revolution would look like. The filmsRead Full Review

Consider the passion in a film like La La Land. It’s a film that is passionate about a great many things – music, cinema, love, heartbreak, Los Angeles, to name a few. It carries its passionRead Full Review

This is my introduction to the young French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve, and I must admit the introduction was made possible by Isabelle Huppert. Huppert, one of our greatest living screen actors, is such a splendid, brilliantRead Full Review

The JFK assassination is such a ferocious seam within the fabric of American mythology. His death, captured on television for the world to see, revealed a first-hand barbarity that most people weren’t used to outsideRead Full Review

Disney veterans Ron Clements and John Musker are masters at the kind of low-stakes sweet spot that most family films aim for. Their films are sweet, deceptively intelligent and filled with the kind of good-heartednessRead Full Review

Miss Sloane aspires toward a place between Sorkinian intrigue and Mametian outrage, with acidic dialogue that dances the line between expertise and verbosity. The film is directed by John Madden who is a dependable, professional –Read Full Review

Whether fair or not, Lion being distributed by the Weinstein Company carries with it a certain expectation. Again, fair or not, Lion will be labled as “Oscar bait” because of the reputation of the Weinstein brothers, twoRead Full Review

Nocturnal Animals has two stories running concurrently with one another. Both are pieces of fiction, but one is a piece of fiction within the fiction of the film’s actual narrative. A visual artist (Amy Adams)Read Full Review

Kenneth Lonergan is a kind of genius. There are more talented filmmakers formalistically, and there are screenwriters who have more power with words and how to use them, but there are so very, very few likeRead Full Review

If you’re making a film about communication, it’s important to make a point about just how bad the human race is at it. On the surface, Arrival is nothing new. When the Earth is visited byRead Full Review

I’ve never quite grasped the films of Paul Verhorven. The sheer magnitude of his capacity for provocation has always seemed somewhat beyond me. I can’t manage to see much beyond the extreme images he’s puttingRead Full Review

Films like Loving are not supposed to be this quiet. At times, it feels almost aggressively understated. When placed under the weight of racial injustice, cinema usually has the tendency to aggrandize, fill itself with aRead Full Review

Park Chan-Wook’s latest film, The Handmaiden, sits comfortably between eroticism and romance, between love and depravity. In a way, it’s about the difference between caring deeply for another person, and caring deeply about sleeping with anotherRead Full Review

The idea of identity is something movies (and, it should probably be said, humans) have tried to come to grips with since the very beginning. The process of finding out who you are is life-long. WeRead Full Review

I’ve worried that I don’t possess the kind of patience a viewer may need to sit through a Kelly Reichardt film. It’s not that her films are bad or even boring. They always contain aRead Full Review

A film like Aquarius – a patient, thoughtful film that takes on a wide variety of themes including gentrification, mortality and gender – is something to be cherished. Is it perhaps too long? Definitely. Kleber MendoncaRead Full Review

Paula Hawkins’ novel The Girl on the Train is the kind of not-very-good pulp fiction that is capable of making a very good movie. The book was packaged as a sort of further reading suggestion forRead Full Review

Nat Turner is a historical figure that too little has been made of. Actor Nate Parker has decided to give him the biopic treatment. In The Birth of a Nation, Parker is taking a manRead Full Review

Director Mick Jackson has produced a lot of work for television, and that makes a lot of sense when you watch a film like Denial. I don’t mean to denigrate television – lord knows weRead Full Review

Other People is the kind of Sundance-y tragicomedy that has the capacity to really produce a heavy duty eye-roll from me, but Chris Kelly (a comedy writer for Saturday Night Live and Broad City) does deliver someRead Full Review

One cannot make the claim that Elizabeth Wood’s White Girl puts on any airs. Even its direct title puts an image in the audience’s mind of a certain kind of person. Leah, the film’s protagonist playedRead Full Review

Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans is probably too long. It’s probably too dependent on overwrought emotion, manipulating its audience with tight close-ups of its beautiful cast crying with forlorn pain. But the film reached me.Read Full Review

The emergence of the prestige horror film this decade has allowed very strong filmmakers to work within a genre that’s cheap, prolific and comes with a guaranteed audience. Sam Raimi gave Uruguayan director his commercialRead Full Review

It never really seems like Morris From America has enough story to fill out its 91 minutes. It’s a unique take on the coming-of-age tale, but it never really puts itself into any unique territory. NewcomerRead Full Review

Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay for Hell or High Water is amongst the most masterful depictions of a specific, decaying American culture I’ve seen in a while. It’s right up there with No Country for Old Men and TheRead Full Review

If Pixar has stood out amongst animation studios for its unmatched critical and commercial success, than Laika has also stood out, for its dogged dedication to the labor-intensive art of stop-motion animation. Travis Knight hasRead Full Review

Ira Sachs’ last two films are such a beautiful distillation of everyday life, a peep into the domestic sides of New York City living that is both poignant and direct. 2014’s Love is Strange was aRead Full Review

The Bourne franchise isn’t nearly as intelligent as it thinks it is. It’s suggestion of commentary on our political climate is shallow at best, but that’s okay. The original Bourne trilogy was the perfect action seriesRead Full Review

Mike Birbiglia’s transformation from cult favorite stand-up comic to filmmaker makes a little bit more sense than Louis CK’s. Birbiglia’s comedy was always more story-oriented, more of a one-man show than a traditional comedy set.Read Full Review

Woody Allen has finally achieved a complete separation between his films and reality, and his films now only exist in that ulterior universe. To the degree that Woody Allen movies are bad, they’re usually badRead Full Review

Grounded in the shockingly politicized release of Paul Feig’s remake of Ghostbusters is this cold truth: we didn’t need a remake ofGhostbusters. That said, we also didn’t need a remake of Point Break, Annie and we CERTAINLYRead Full Review

The most foolish aspect of the early-decade McConaissance (which inexplicably ended with the Academy giving him an Oscar for the vapid, polarizing Dallas Buyers Club), was that everything we were drooling over – the earthyRead Full Review

The literature of John le Carré has long been a favorite of film studios. His stories of espionage and betrayal are always ripe with character and complex plotlines that weave together brilliantly, almost too conveniently,Read Full Review

The first thirty minutes of Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest film, The Neon Demon, really is marvelous. It presents a haunting but colorful universe, filled with beautiful but sinister people. Even the manager at the runRead Full Review

Movies as delightful and unique as Hunt for the Wilderpeople are rarer than you might think. It may seem so simple: a young man comes of age while surviving in the woods with a crotchety oldRead Full Review

This is the Todd Solondz we know so well. Where the return of Welcome to the Dollhouse‘s Dawn Wiener would come packaged haphazardly within an aimless anthology film titled Wiener-Dog. The film is four stories,Read Full Review