An unbearably taut, slow-simmering noir transposed to the vast countryside and its patient, drawn-out rhythms, Revanche (translation: Revenge) would – at least for its first two-thirds, plot-wise – be a rather standard-issue B-movie were it not for writer/director Götz Spielmann’s entrancing investigation of character, motivation and fate. In a story whose convenient coincidences would reek…

With A Single Man, renowned fashion designer Tom Ford does what he knows – shoot in an immaculately beautiful, excessively chic style that’s fit for a men’s cologne commercial. The trouble is that his film, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel, has a plot and characters rather than just pretty surfaces to gussy up with…

Impeccably formalized but rife with dissonance, The Sun charts the last days in the rule of Japanese emperor Hirohito (Issei Ogata). The third entry in Aleksandr Sokurov’s “Men of Power” series, this haunting portrait of the vanquished WWII Japanese leader is another of the Russian Ark auteur’s strange, beguiling ruminations on mortality and power, here…

The once-great Robert De Niro plummets to new lows with Everybody’s Fine, a story about listening, understanding, forgiving and other mushy platitudes that begins as merely intolerable and ends up borderline-reprehensible. In this remake of Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1990 Italian original, De Niro is Frank, a widower who decides, when his four kids cancel their plans…

Duck Season director Fernando Eimbcke continues to refine his signature style – long, static takes, rhythmic (and often transitional) cuts to black, silence pregnant with both humor and sorrow – with Lake Tahoe, another tale of a boy abandoned by adults. That narrative similarity, however, isn’t immediately apparent from Eimbcke’s set-up, which begins by following…

Chris Fuller’s Loren Cass invites comparisons to Harmony Korine’s work not simply because it’s a ragged avant-garde snapshot of wayward teens living despairing lives in a ramshackle environment, but because Gummo’s spaghetti-bath-water “protagonist” Jacob Reynolds is actually part of the cast. The difference between the two works, however, is that Fuller’s portrait of three St.…