The down-to-earth smartness and sideways-glancing, sardonic humanity of Mike White (actor, screenwriter (The School of Rock, and co-creator of Freaks and Geeks -- the one who in retrospect deserves the credit for balancing that show away from full Apatow-ness) seems to be especially well-suited to the theme of true, searing, single-minded idealism hitting the impenetrable wall of humdrum, decidedly non-idealistic reality: Whether it's the adult, played by White himself, clinging to a perfect but long-gone childhoo...Read the entire review

It can seem at times, for anyone who keeps up with the movies, that a certain kind of nominally "independent film," while perfectly worthwhile and enjoyable, has become self-limited, maybe even a bit tiresome, a predictable genre unto itself -- the Little Miss Sunshines and the Way Way Backs and The Perks of Being a Wallflowers, comedies with heart that flirt with the deep end but make sure to stay quirky and pleasant, odd but funny, "dark" but not too<...Read the entire review

If only the world paid as much attention to Russia's frequently great cinema as we do to its imperious, jingoistic prime minister, its political/economic shadiness, or its legislated-homophobia public-relations disasters, we might have a more balanced or favorable view of our former Cold War adversary. Consider Sergei Loznitsa, the young Russian auteur who -- continuing a venerable tradition of unabashed poeticism, historical hyperawareness, and narrative innovation in R...Read the entire review

The title suggests something profoundly disturbing, perhaps trading cheaply in shock value, yet to dyed-in-the-wool American independent filmmaker Dan Sallitt's credit, The Unspeakable Act keeps its head well above the waters of sensationalism at all times. This is much easier said than done when your protagonist's driving motivation and your film's principal dramatic conflict is not just taboo, but the taboo, the one from which Freud's Totem and… derived its name. Yes, Sallitt's 17-year-old contemporary Brooklynite Jackie (the captivatingly lunar-faced Tallie Medel) doesn't love her one-year-older brother Matthew (Sky Hirschkron) in the usual fraternal way; she is sincer...Read the entire review

As far as I know, I greatly admire André Gregory, the now-octogenarian actor/stage director who grew up artistically in all the groundbreaking actors' revolutions of the 20th-century New York theatre world and would, in later years, garner a well-deserved name as a collaborator on film with French cinéaste Louis Malle , first as the namesake of 1981's My Dinner with André and then as the maestro of the magnificently eccentric "stage" production that Malle made into the excellent Vanya on 42nd Street in 1994. But "as fa...Read the entire review

What did Oscilloscope Laboratories, the risk-taking American independent distributor that's already brought us a rich cache of relevant and intrepid documentaries from Exit Through the Gift Shop to If a Tree Falls, do when it found itself with two disparately lyrical and open-hearted nonfiction features about coming of age in very specific American regions and milieux? They sagely and generously made them into a DVD double feature that's more than the sum of its parts, with the films echoing, reinf...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are from promotional material provided by The Cohen Media Group and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review.

I'm prepared to accept that smart, crowd-pleasing French filmmaker François Ozon (8 Women, Swimming Pool), whose work I've often enjoyed and appreciated, is middlebrow, a skilled and intelligent writer/director whose ambitions usually reveal themselves to be too comfortable and easily attainable ...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from the 2004 DVD release of A Letter to Three Wives, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

When it came to forever associating his name with a kind of sparkling, witty, genuinely smart and classy peak of Golden-Age Hollywood filmmaking, writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz paved the way for his 1950 masterpiece All About Eve with 1949's lesser-known but just about equally laudable and gratifying A Letter to Three Wives. Like Eve<...Read the entire review

There's a significant moment about a third of the way into Laurence Anyways, the latest movie from young Quebecois writer-director Xavier Dolan (who, at 24, is on his third feature) that exemplifies both how powerful and engaging the film can be and how it undermines itself, how far Dolan has come and how far he has yet to go: After a slow, complicated, and tumultuous coming to terms with the fact that he is transgendered, a woman with the misfortune to have been born into a body of the wrong sex, 35-year-old Laurence Alia (Melvil Poupaud), a celebrated Montreal writer and high-school teacher, has finally summoned the confidence to present herself, as a woman, to his classroom full of la...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from the standard-definition 1999 DVD version of the film, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

The Ingmar Bergman Close-Up is one of the treasures of the cinema -- an stylistic signature so inspired and honed and skillfully conjured/rationed that there's no way it should appear so simple onscreen as it devastates us, brings us uncomfortably close to a character's emotion. When Bergman fills the screen with his actress' faces (and it is, more often than not, an actress; he had a way with women, with women's stories), it's not a glamor shot, not that kind of beauty. These too-close framings, minutely lit and composed ...Read the entire review

There's a swift, cutting satire to be had from the entirely believable, if extreme, example of pop-culture immersion and devotion that we witness in Reality, the latest film from Italian director Matteo Garrone. Garrone and his coscriptors have apparently used real events as the basis of their story, which involves a regular Italian men's inexplicable obsession with becoming a participant in a reality-TV show, and such a treatment for a movie, with a protagonist who's sucked into the appeal of that most often petty, competition-obsessed, and sensationalistic brand of TV programming, would seem to cry out for some sort of full-on satirical approach, whether harshly critical and mocking (a...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from the standard-definition DVD version of Blancanieves also included, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

Pablo Berger's Blancanieves is a pastiche of selectively recruited silent-film stylings that, like its inevitable comparison-point The Artist (a film that beat it to the punch even though Berger's was already well into production when its buzz began to spread), fails to take that part of its conceit very far, certainly nowhere innovative or earth-shattering. It is, however, more solid, less winking and showy (and sometimes nea...Read the entire review

Pauline Kael once dismissed onetime photographer Stanley Kubrick, a favorite target, and his masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, by claiming that "the cinema is not a cameraman's medium." But the extent to which that assertion is, at most, an exaggerated half-truth is nicely illustrated by the 1960 big-screen adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's 1913 novel Sons and Lovers, which was directed by the legendary British cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Cardiff (the subject of a must-see documentary entitled, very fittingly for what I'm trying to say here, Read the entire review

"He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand…." - Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

It's almost impossible not to project an important, "Final Statement" status onto the late Raul Ruiz's fantastic film Night Across the Street, but it's also pointless to avoid thinking of it in those terms, treating it as the movie that just happened to be the last rich deposit into Ruiz's long, hugely varied, bursting filmography of over 100 films spanning five decades. Not only did th...Read the entire review

I suppose there's a certain degree of "shock value" to the work of the fascinating, tremendously gifted Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas. In films like his debut, 2002's Japón, or his despairingly gorgeous 2005 masterpiece, Battle in Heaven, a deadpan, unflinching, near-pornographic (except much too dispassionate) sexual explicitness vis-à-vis physically regular, unglamorous people (the elderly, the saggily middle-aged and/or obese, etc.) flows seamlessly with Reygadas's unerring eye for mystery and beauty...Read the entire review

The description on the back cover of this vital DVD containing British artist Ben Rivers's mind-blowing, near-spiritual experience of a feature film, Two Years at Sea, makes it sound as if there's a story being told: It names the film's subject, a man called Jake Williams, and informs us of the origin of its title, that Williams spent two years working at sea (on a fishing boat, presumably) to finance the isolated, cabin-in-the-woods wilderness existence he's always dreamed of. But, interesting as it is, none of that information is mentioned at all in the film, nor is it in any way necessary to understanding it. Rivers's aims are not by any stretch documentarian in that way; he has littl...Read the entire review

The Munich-based imprint Edition filmmuseum, with its region-free DVD releases of hard-to-find art-film titles from around the world, is fast becoming a premier source for great, less-discovered work available, at long last, for home viewing. After having made available rare selections from Wilhelm and Birgit Hein and James Benning through previous, indispensable releases, the label has now compiled a two-disc set dedicated to New German Cinema outlier Werner Schroeter, a renegade's-renegade dir...Read the entire review

There's a scene in Xavier Dolan's (Heartbeats) 2009 debut feature, I Killed My Mother, in which high-school senior Hubert Minel (played by Dolan himself) and his boyfriend, Antonin Rimbaud (François Arnaud) arrive at an ad-agency office to do the Jackson-Pollock paint job requested by Antonin's exceptionally cool mother. It's a super-cool scene, too, all fancily edited to a raging alt-rock tune with quick cuts and jump-cutting paint drips and a sexy lovemaking break sped up like A Clockwork Orange. It also has no d...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are photos provided by Sony Pictures Classics and do not directly reflect the picture quality of the Blu-ray edition under review.

Without a doubt, writer/director Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo) has a head on his shoulders and a thoughtful engagement with the impact of our social, political, cultural, and economic climate and its impact on individual's lives. As his latest, At Any Price, demonstra...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from the DVD edition also included in this retail package, and do not directly reflect the picture quality of the Blu-ray edition under review.

Let it be said from the start that, although co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel's new film What Maisie New is based on an 1897 novel by the forbiddingly masterful Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady), its trueness to the book from which it derives its name is negligible. What the script (by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright) has to offer is less an adaptation of James's ...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are photos provided by Sony Pictures Classics and do not directly reflect the picture quality of the Blu-ray edition under review.

Robert Redford's latest directorial effort is a sort of coming full circle, both for this most famous of actor-directors and for the American cinema itself. Redford, along with Dustin Hoffman, memorably played journalist Bob Woodward in Alan J. Pakula's 1976 Watergate film, All the President's Men, and The Company You Keep is the capper on a long string of millennial/po...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are photos provided by Sony Pictures Classics and do not directly reflect the picture quality of the Blu-ray edition under review.

"A lot of rubbish is talked about love. You know what real love is? It's wiping someone's ass, or changing the sheets when they've wet themselves, and letting 'em keep their dignity so you can both go on." - dialogue from Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea

Q: When does an extreme, up-close, and sustained look into the private lives of an elderly couple being slowly b...Read the entire review

Teresa (the captivating, fearless Margarete Tiesel) is an overweight, middle-aged Middle-European divorcée with job duties, a home to keep, and a sullen teenage daughter -- the of busy but lonely middle-class woman who's watched too much of life pass her by when it hasn't actively been treating her badly. She is, in short, the kind of character the Lifetime Channel or Cougar Town or The First Wives' Club might hone in on as ripe for "empowerment," someone who will final...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from photos provided by the Cohen Film Collection and promotional materials, and do not directly reflect the picture quality of the Blu-ray edition under review.

The French director André Téchiné, like his more internationally famous filmmaking countrymen François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials provided by Music Box Films and do not directly reflect the picture quality of the Blu-ray edition under review.

A few years back, there was a glossy, nasty little Joel Schumacher picture, 8mm, that, while just the kind of tawdry, rancid experience one had by then come to expect from Schumacher, at least had the courage of its (lack of) convictions: It was "fun," a ridiculously grim mystery-thriller about a snuff filmmaker, sordid but disposable, baldly absent of any other aspiration than...Read the entire review

The "Lubitsch touch" -- that special tone, very light but rarely trivial, that marks off the clever yet genuinely tenderhearted comedy-dramas of the great German-expat Hollywood director Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka, etc., etc.) -- remains difficult (if eternally pleasurable) to try to define, but the 1945 picture A Royal Scandal offers an unusual opportunity to pin it down. It's about the legendary, equally feared and beloved...Read the entire review

The British filmmaker Sally Potter burst onto the radar of cinephiles everywhere (giving Tilda Swinton her first big taste of well-deserved international stardom) in 1992 with her highly intelligent, highly sensual debut feature, the Virginia Woolf adaptation Orlando. Since then, Potter's career has progressed amid rather choppy waters; she's admirably refused to rest on her laurels or repeat herself, demonstrating with each unpredictable new project that true artist's dedication to challenge and resistance to coasting in any comfort zone. The downside of Potter's adventurousness and need to conquer new territory, though, is an ...Read the entire review

It seems serendipitous that I was granted the opportunity to view and review Andrei Ujica's stunning 2010 documentary The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu so soon after having experienced (under the same DVD Talk auspices) Jean-Luc Godard's 1976 film Comment ça va?, which has a strong thematic connection to Ujica's film. The Godard movie is all about (over)interpretation and (over)manipulation of documentary footage and news-media photographs -- omissions, reframings, and captioning, "helpful" information and commentary fixing and reducing an image in a way that robs it of its nuanced complexities, and us of our ...Read the entire review

Every once in a while on The Simpsons, there's a glimpse of an archaic, badly produced educational film being shown in a classroom, which always features a googly-eyed, sickly sweet and naïve little urchin learning about DNA, the food chain, local history, etc. It's a parody of an unimaginative, low-production-value cliché so familiar to every former schoolkid or viewer of the kind of bad B-movie they used to show mid-afternoon and late at night on network TV that a specific example seems uncalled for. But if you ever need a tangible example, look no further than the 1932 cheapie Hell's House, whose hero ...Read the entire review

The more humble and reasonable among us don't like to dwell too often on it, but isn't it true that some part of any human being, no matter how generous, ethical, kind, or conscience-driven that individual may be, is a preening, self-regarding egotist convinced it's more important than anyone else and looking out exclusively for number 1? Fortunately for fans of TV comedy, Fiona Wallice (Lisa Kudrow), the ostensible therapist from whose "innovative modality" of three-minute Skype psychotherapy sessions the Showtime series Web Therapy derives its name, is anything but humble or reasonable. She belongs to an impressive lineage of TV personages -- self-involved, self-deluded examples of b...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from the DVD edition included in the release, and do not directly reflect the picture quality of the Blu-ray edition under review.

If you look up page for director Curtis Harrington on IMDB, you'll be confronted with an extremely checkered Hollywood filmography, one that begins promisingly enough with the personal/auteurist Dennis Hopper-starring 1962 feature Night Tide but then quickly begins a descent through a purgatory of interestingly half-rancid B-movies (like 1971's Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional and other materials and do not directly reflect the picture quality of the current Blu-ray edition under review.

Comment ça va? (How's It Going?) is an audacious experiment from the height of director Jean-Luc Godard's long-running collaboration with his life/creative partner, Anne-Marie Miéville, with whom he co-directed a trilogy of features through the '70s and '80s in a similar formally innovative, minutely deep-thinking vein (the peak example from which remains the middle entry, 1975's Numéro deux). In ...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional and other materials and do not directly reflect the picture quality of the current Blu-ray edition under review.

There's rarely been a great mind at work, in any art form, as voracious and restless as that of the legendary French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who, as Susan Sontag once noted, "offend[s] veteran admirers in numbers almost equal to the new ones he acquires." Once the celebrated, highly influential ringleader whose Breathless really set off the international clamor over the "New Wave" of French cinema ...Read the entire review

There are at least two separate moments in Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's challenging, excellent documentary The Law in These Parts where Israel, the director's homeland, is referred to as "the only democracy in the Middle East." This is key, because the documentarian's subject -- Israel's military-legal dominance since 1967 of its neighbor, Palestine, and the Palestinian people -- and even moreso his approach, weighs and rigorously tests the idea that Israel is an exemplary beacon of democracy in a region of theocracies, dictatorships, and/or monarchies. But this film is no disgusted, denunciatory anti-Israel screed; it gives one the strong impression that it could only have been made by a nat...Read the entire review

...Read the entire review