Joseph Jon Lanthier

Andrew Rossi's documentary allows The New York Times a kind of nail-biting self-portraiture as it peers off the precipice of (hopefully) a 2.0 rebirth.

A uniquely passive reminder of the dangers of showering exotic creatures with anthropomorphic affection.

The opaque ethics of The Chaser elide the reductive nature of binary pairs, focusing instead on the far more piquant complexity of human behavior.

Divorcing New Orleans from its stereotypes (there’s no ham-fisted Creole dialogue, no digs at the indigenous cuisine), the filmmaker imagines the boiling, boggy city as a purgatory for lost souls, spotted with cinephiliac mold.

Mystery Train is a singularly enthusiastic American anthem that trenchantly interprets the cult of audiophilia as filthy gas stoves roasting marshmallows, raspy radio DJs hawking fried calamari, and ill-equipped racial armies ignorantly clashing by night.

The Pulitzer-winning playwright’s movies are often a few steps ahead of their audiences, but Homicide seems to have intuitively anticipated its now-exemplary status.

To his credit, Cimino renders us helpless not before carnage or greed, but before his epic’s breadth of motivation and circumstance. It’s not the past’s ugliness that terrifies us in Heaven’s Gate, but its far more intimidating immensity.

It would all be laughable if the evil deeds and premature deaths and withered witch doctor hands led us to more than the protagonist’s unnecessarily messy self-discovery. As it is, it’s mostly just gratingly pointless.

Lookin’ to Get Out, however, though pieced together with Ashby’s trademark character sympathy and technical aplomb, is one toke over the line: Unkempt and unconvincingly funny, the film is infused with the thin, despondent languor of a mourning man’s second-hand marijuana smoke.

Paris, Texas may be missing a crucial piece of authentic Americana, but it still evokes an America most Americans yearn to gaze on. An America as thorny and carnivorous as a hawk talon, as raw and smug as a downtown mural, and as sweetly enigmatic as a vacant lot that doesn’t—that can’t—exist.

America exploded in the ’60s; Two-Lane Blacktop is the post-apocalyptic road trip.

Touted at the time of its release as a comparatively enlightened western, A Man Called Horse now looks like well-researched sensationalism—and is, admittedly, all the better for it.

Garfield’s likably unlikable protagonist provides Force of Evil with a semblance of cohesiveness, even if the film often feels like the product of dueling fetishes and pet symbols.

The fact that people don’t talk like this in real life isn’t a flaw in the film: It’s a tragic social deficiency.

A delirious rejoinder to the post-sexual revolution counter-culture wars, director Paul Bartel’s script crosses the let’s-get-down-to-social-brass-tacks satire of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which was respectfully vindictive of Los Angeles’s middle-class hedonism, with the straight-faced über-misanthropy of Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Cul-de-Sac remains a searing reminder that Roman Polanski’s idiosyncratic grasp of the human mind was once evinced theatrically, rather than through narrative ferocity.

This piquant control over cinematic grammar doesn’t quite rescue the film from a laughably zombie-tinged climax and an anomalous deus ex machina denouement, but it makes The Magician one of Bergman’s more accessible failures, and collapses any suspicious connection between him and the fretful Vogler.

If only Beineix could have imagined an existence for his star-crossed protagonists beyond the source material (the question of whether successful maternity would have sobered Betty yelps for an impossible sequel), he may have managed a sultry masterpiece.

8½ works best as a self-deprecating comedy, a fact revealed most forcefully in the folly of film production on display.