A period piece typified by restraint, delicacy and the romantic spirit of its renowned subject, Jane Campion’s Bright Star details the amorous three-year affair of 19th-century poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Cornish). In keeping with Campion’s career-long interest in investigating and depicting the female perspective, the film sticks closely to Fanny, a…

Claire Denis has an almost-unparalleled gift for blending poeticism and realism, a combination once again seamlessly achieved in 35 Shots of Rum, her magnificently understated and piercing portrait of the difficulty of letting go. With a tip of the hat to Yasujiro Ozu via the recurring sight of trains (specifically, the dawn, midday and dusk…

Beautifully designed but short on depth or novelty, 9 posits a post-doomsday world in which the preceding war between man and machines resulted in the almost complete annihilation of both, leaving behind only a band of animated cloth-like dolls to pick up the apocalyptic pieces. Expanded from his Academy Award-winning short, Shane Acker’s directorial debut…

Mike Judge returns to the workplace with Extract, but unlike Office Space, he seems not only somewhat unfamiliar with his chosen milieu – a suburban extract plant founded and owned by Joel (Jason Bateman) – but uninterested in actually exploring its unique employer-employee dynamics. Instead, the actual setting feels like something of an afterthought, which…

Still Walking has a modesty that’s apt to be mistaken for slightness, as Hirokazu Kore-eda’s (After Life, Nobody Knows) tale of a day-and-night familial reunion has such a patient, tranquil surface that it’s easy to overlook the complex interpersonal dynamics at play. Indebted to the domestic-strife dramas of both Ozu and Naruse, Kore-eda’s latest assembles…

Quentin Tarantino’s cinema has always been one of authorial wish-fulfillment, his gangsters’ pop culture-inflected tough talk, his African-American badasses’ use of the n-word, and his fetishistic love of fierce femininity (and women’s feet) all reflections of their maker’s deeply rooted concerns and compulsions. QT’s work is the lens through which his own desires (and innumerable…