Rabbit Hole is filled with the anger and inconsolable grief of parents who’ve lost a young child, messy emotions that never manage to disrupt the phony tidiness of John Cameron Mitchell’s carefully arranged drama. An about-face from his prior Shortbus, Mitchell’s film – written by David Lindsay Abaire, based on his Pulitzer-winning play – picks…

An exemplary examination of coping that expands to entail questions of morality, absolution and faith, Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine is a masterwork of incisive melodrama. Opening to a shot of a clear blue sky that’s ultimately juxtaposed by a haunting image of a garbage-strewn dirt patch, Lee’s film concerns Shin-ae (Cannes best actress winner Jeon…

Part fictional drama, part documentary, part concert film – Our Beloved Month of August doesn’t so much blend disparate genres as collapse them into a uniquely evocative collage, albeit one that remains something of a detached formal exercise. The first half of Miguel Gomes’ sophomore effort (after 2003’s The Face You Deserve) purports to be…

Inside Job doesn’t elucidate much about the 2008 American (and subsequent global) economic collapse that couldn’t have been gleaned from regular newspaper reading over the past two years. That simply means, however, that Charles Ferguson’s documentary is merely an exhaustively infuriating recap of the causes and effects of our country’s three decade-commitment to financial deregulation.…

With uneven if generally charming results, Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s directorial debut I Love You Phillip Morris straddles the fine line between outrageous farce and heartfelt romance. Based on a true story so unbelievable that the intro credits must restate the fact that “it really did” happen, the film charts the…

Creative inspiration springs forth from endless repetition in Ne Change Rien, Pedro Costa’s non-fiction portrait of French singer/actress Jeanne Balibar. Shooting in luscious black and white and long, static takes, Costa opens on Balibar singing a sultry version of Kris Jensen’s “Torture” on stage before segueing to the recording studio, where endless rehearsals of the…

A visually ravishing, structurally beguiling portrait of post-colonial race-conflict as a hallucinatory apocalyptic dream, White Material finds Claire Denis operating in a somewhat more abstract mode than her prior 35 Shots of Rum. Working from a Marie N’Diaye script, Denis sets her tale in an anonymous African nation at an indeterminate time, a vagueness that’s…

An unconvincing ending doesn’t derail the otherwise nuanced complexity of Hideaway, François Ozon’s latest investigation of female alienation, sexuality and maternity. Ozon’s film begins with junkie Mousse (Isabelle Carré) passed out in her drug-den apartment as her boyfriend Louis (Melvil Poupaud) buys some smack, shoots up, and drifts off to the hereafter. While mourning her…

Capturing the Friedmans documentarian Andrew Jarecki segues into reality-based fiction with All Good Things, the based-on-real-events tale of a NYC real-estate tycoon heir’s rebellion against his father, his marriage, and then the apparent cover-up of the murder of his wife. Filling in back-story with staged home movies that creepily echo Friedmans’ footage, Jarecki’s fascination with…

If you’re going to imitate, you may as well imitate the best, a fact embraced by Anton Corbijn, whose The American is – in terms of tone, character and fatalism – an American rendition of Jean-Pierre Melville’s seminal existential Euro-noirs. Jack (George Clooney) is an assassin defined by a ritualistic code of conduct that, at…