“There has always been a conflict at play in Nicholson’s screen presence: between ‘Nicholson’ and ‘Jack.’ The desire to be taken seriously and the lure of the riotous Jack persona have always done battle across his decades of stardom.”
“‘Z’ is thoughtful, provocative, impassioned entertainment, stylish and teeming with conviction.”
“Ghost Dog glides through the story with the swiftness of an avian being in a film that never fails to be cathartic.”
“At some point, you’ve got to take down the celebrity posters, or at least reassess what they represent.”
“Within the context of a cinema that is high-strung and often defined by its over-the-top, spectacle-driven family dramas, ‘Ribbon’ and its smallness (and everydayness) is not just a refreshing break but an extremely well-timed breaking of the mold.”
“Renzu’s film gives a face to the thousands of women featured in the papers, disturbingly called ‘half widows’ — not just defined by the lack of a husband, but also by this ‘half,’ not full, not a complete status of being.”
“Although individual grief may be colored by guilt or loneliness, jealousy or the passage of time, ultimately everyone who knows love will know a ghost story, and suffer the same grief or become a ghost in the end.”
“If Murphy’s Law were to be made into a film, it’d look a lot like Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s ‘Long Live Brij Mohan!’ His production, in more ways than one, is also a metaphor for the city of Delhi.”
“A dance of layered visuals and eye-popping patterns, ‘Coco’ is well balanced with the understated”
“Martel’s film is an absolute masterpiece in visual symbolism and deserves to be seen on that basis alone.”
“Painfully ironic, aggressive and humorously on point, Östlund’s films are timely cinematic pieces that put their characters’ moral compasses at stake.”
“In ‘Crash,’ sex feels like a traffic accident. In ‘Videodrome,’ it becomes the subject of a warped, projected fantasy.”
“He always took the horror genre seriously, and that often meant daring to laugh in the face of the darkest horrors, toeing the line between irony and total seriousness.”
“Observing the dangerous consequences of retreating too far into escapist entertainment, these two films suggest that beneath all this cultural noise is the unacknowledged truth that the most fervent of music nerds and fanboys may indeed be ‘scared as shit.’”
“In ‘Human Desire,’ the train tracks carry its hero into the sunny paradise of the American Dream, not the depths of noir’s endless night.”
“The DC Extended Universe is not doomed, but it needs its own clear identity and purpose. Rebranding ‘The Avengers’ is not the answer.”
“‘Festival’ challenges our preconceptions about the past – in this case, that of folk music and of music documentaries themselves.”
“‘Greed’ is like the gold within the soil, a gem that must be mined from its sullied context.”
“‘Kho ki pa lü’ is about a lot of things, but it’s mostly about music. It is about Li, the songs that people sing when they cultivate rice in small müles.”
“Mortensen uses his body to display his characters’ essential tensions, as they ride the line between truth and lies, loyalty and betrayal, chaos and control.”