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

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