Bright Star

Having seen only Jane Campion's debut Sweetie , I cannot comment on whether her latest, Bright Star is, as some say, her finest since T...

A Serious Man

Throughout their careers, Joel and Ethan Coen have drawn heavily upon the work of grotesque moralist Flannery O'Connor. Black humor, ble...

1989 Rewind: Sweetie

Jane Campion made a splash in the mid-'80s with a series of short films that received considerable critical acclaim. Her first, An Exerc...

Paris, Texas

The wilderness through which Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) wanders at the start of Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas is alternately beautiful and...

Taste of Cherry

The action, for lack of a better word, of Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry occurs almost exclusively inside the cramped car of one Mr...

Black Dynamite

In general, parodies only work if the creator loves whatever is being parodied (mocking that which you hate is satire). That's certainly...

Assassination of a High School President

Brett Simon's Assassination of a High School President wants to be many things -- a straight film noir, a tongue-in-cheek spoof of same...

Away We Go

Perhaps it's the indie quirk, the token acoustic pop soundtrack and the simplistic parallels between plots, but as I watched Sam Mendes...

1989 Rewind: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Films concerning food, or featuring food prominently in certain sections, typically work up an appetite in their audiences. Eat Drink Man Wo...

The Horse Thief

I first heard about Tian Zhuangzhuang's film The Horse Thief in a retrospective "Best of the '90s" episode of At the Movi...

Where the Wild Things Are

There are so many places where Spike Jonze's third feature Where the Wild Things Are could go wrong. If I told you that the first ten m...

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

For the first hour of Michael Powell's epic The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp , I felt slightly uncomfortable at its overt Britishness...