Loneliness, anger and fear are primal emotions that, in the hearts of children, can swell and consume with great tumult, a fact that Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are taps into with tenderness and respect. In adapting Maurice Sendak’s beloved 1963 children’s book for the screen, Jonze adds much – an unavoidable result of…

Aiming to incite shock and outrage with Antichrist, Lars von Trier instead merely produces numbing indifference. Working from a template that strongly recalls that of Don’t Look Know, the Danish filmmaker’s latest begins with an overwrought intro – shot in look-at-me slow-motion and black-and-white, and scored to classical music – in which a husband (Willem…

Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates gets little right. Its first crucial misstep is an inability to properly set up its own fiction, positing a world in which people now interact with each other and society via robotic avatars known as Surrogates, but failing to ever explain why such a radical development would be welcomed by humanity at…

Everyone dies at the end of Wild Grass, mercifully. But before the four protagonists’ private plane takes a fatal nosedive, 87-year-old Alain Resnais’ latest has long since gone down in flames, partaking in meta gestures and random flights of fancy with a reckless abandon unjustified by its perplexing, off-putting tale. When 63-year-old Georges (André Dussollier)…

Like his counterpart Michael Haneke, Bruno Dumont’s oeuvre consists of one film made over and over again. And though its wartime setting seems apt for the L’Humanite director’s belief in man’s bestial nature, Flanders nonetheless proves his most trying regurgitation to date. Another tale of Neanderthal simpletons screwing, killing and staring off into the remote…

Bruno Dumont’s controversial Cannes Grand Prix winner L’Humanité attempts spiritual inquiry with a rigorousness that’s lacking from its actual police-procedural plot. In a gray, underpopulated northern seaside French town, detective Pharaon (Emmanuel Schotté) runs madly through the countryside and lands face down in the mud, from which director Dumont cuts away to a shot of…