1. Johnny Guitar Nicholas Ray, 1954 2. Mouchette Robert Bresson, 1967 3. Laura Otto Preminger, 1944 4. Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick, 1975 5. Muriel Alain ...

The movie starts with the usual sci-fi tropes: mankind’s experiments go haywire with destructive results. The epidemic begins with chimps infected with “rage” (as part of research into what we presume ...

Time is a formidable enemy in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and thus it’s appropriate that its scenes, shot in handheld cinemascope, are built around prolonged, pitilessly unblinking ...

Why do contemporary American documentaries tend to shy away from the character ambiguities that are so productive for fictional cinema? Is it that the talking heads who inhabit these films happen to ...

Swooping across sparkling azure waters, the first shots of Neil Jordan’s Ondine envision Ireland amid a sea bubbling with ancient mystical forces. When the camera settles on the boat of a glum-faced, ...

Documenting a road trip undertaken by one of the most plausibly despicable brother-sister pairings in all of cinema, Alex Ross Perry’s second feature The Color Wheel is an astonishing work of pathos ...

Combining documentary and fable, Le quattro volte depicts life in an unnamed hilltop town in Calabria, Italy’s southernmost region. The village is surrounded by a vast tract of forested countryside ...

Even today, he still frets about the undue attention to his youthful beauty. For him it has been almost a straitjacket. “You want to be seen for what you can do… The ‘golden boy’ thing became a screen ...

When is the audience allowed to laugh at a serious movie? How do you gauge whether the laughter expresses surprise, shock, nervousness, disdain, feigned superiority, genuine mirth, or some combination ...

Editing has very simple origins: a camera couldn’t hold much film. Even if it could, a given “good” take isn’t good for very long. If you want to make a film that lasts more than the length of a take ...

Camera comes in low over an immense Western lake, its destination apparently a small island at the center that seems to consist of nothing but treetops. Draw nearer, then sweep over and pass the ...

Much has been made about Xavier Dolan’s age. I Killed My Mother, written when he was 17 and shot two years later, demonstrates the kind of phenomenal precociousness that publicists adore, and the film ...