Drama

We Are What We Are

I loved Jim Mickle’s remake of Jorge Michel Grau’s equally impressive Mexican cannibal drama. Script changes all justifed & well handled, performances strong & Catskills setting beautifully eerie. Read More
Resurrection of a Bastard

Visually arresting Dutch crime drama succeeds in bringing humanity and empathy to a repulsive monster. Read More
Nothing Bad Can Happen

Insane, terrible, brilliant and powerful exploration of victimization and the power of faith in the face of evil. Never has a film had a more ironic title. Read More
Fatal

10 years after he is colluded into participating in the gang rape of a classmate, a young man is still haunted by his crime. Approaching a Christian support group in… Read More
Borgman

Taking its cue from Pasolini’s Theorem, Alex Van Warmerdam’s absurdly comic psycho drama Borgman sees the eponymous antagonist (Jan Bijvoet) literally emerge from the ground and into the home of… Read More
The Company You Keep

Robert Redford is reliably strong as the reclusive Weather Underground member who resurfaces decades later to get his daughter to safety and clear his name. Brit Marling continues her ascendancy… Read More
Van Gogh

There is a lot of love out there for Maurice Pialat’s 1991 biopic, detailing the final weeks in the life of the famous Dutch master. While the cinematography constantly evokes… Read More
The Bling Ring

Sofia Coppola’s latest has a serious problem at its core – it is not nearly condemning enough about its vacuous, materialistic, fame-obsessed protagonists, who rob the Hollywood homes of famous… Read More
Before Midnight

The third installment in Richard Linklater’s series of films examining the evolving relationship between Jesse and Celine proves to be the best yeat, and one of the year’s most accomplished… Read More
REVIEW: Before Midnight

Richard Linklater and his stars/co-writers Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy revisit Jesse and Celine once more in the third installment of their ever-improving Before franchise. It is fair to say… Read More
Before Sunset

Set nine years after the events in Vienna, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) meet again in Paris, where Jesse is giving a reading from his new novel –… Read More
The Grandmaster

A re-watch of Wong Kar Wai’s beautiful meditation on martial arts and heroism, shot through with his perennial preoccupations of time, aging and fading memories. Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi… Read More
Prince Avalanche

After a troubling daliance in stoner comedy, David Gordon Green returns to the more independent, thoughtful material on which he made his name. Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch play maintenance… Read More
Mr. Go

When her grandfather dies, 15-year-old Wei Wei (Xu Jiao) inherits his circus, particularly their star attraction: a baseball-playing gorilla, Ling Ling. Unfortunately, she also inherits his huge gambling debts and… Read More
The Look of Love

Michael Winterbottom’s rose-tinted biopic of Paul Raymond, purveyor of pornography and sleaze in London’s SoHo, creates a wonderfully authentic sense of time and place, and boasts a pair of knockout… Read More
Mud

Excellent folloy up to Take Shelter from director Jeff Nichols, starring Matthew McConaughey as a fugitive hiding out in the bayous of Arkansas, who is discovered by two young lads,… Read More
Pickpocket

There are some epic displays of sleight of hand in Robert Bresson’s tale of crime through desperation, but it’s not much of a thrill ride. Many great filmmakers of crime… Read More
The Tarnished Angels

My first daliance with Douglas Sirk saw me inadvertently stumble onto a classic. Rock Hudson plays an ambitious journalist, who bumbles into the world of daredevil stunt pilots and gatecrashes… Read More