In the City of Sylvia would be trying if not for the confidence, grace and subtlety with which José Luis Guerín handles his deliberately open-ended material. In Strasbourg, artist Él (Xavier Lafitte) struggles to find inspiration in his cramped bedroom, eventually moving outside to a café where he intently studies the faces and forms –…

John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt is, as you might assume, about the titular condition, as well as about its counterpoint Certainty, two big themes that the Pulitzer Prize-winning play-turned-film treats with intelligence and subtlety if not, ultimately, great insightfulness. As on the stage, Shanley’s story is a battle between Brooklyn Catholic school principal Sister Aloysius Beauvier…

A B-movie that self-reflexively distills genre tropes (and their consequent pleasures) to their lean, potent essence, Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate has a convoluted thriller plot to ignore (or, rather, to get lost in), a frazzled, frantic aesthetic to adore, and a lead performance from Asia Argento to get hot and bothered over. As in demonlover…

As with The Queen, screenwriter Peter Morgan once again pits a Michael Sheen underdog against a titanic adversary in Frost/Nixon, Sheen in this case embodying playboy cream puff British talk-show host David Frost, and his nemesis being Tricky Dick (Frank Langella), whom Frost famously interviewed over several months in 1977. Adapting his own play, Morgan…

The cinema of Arnaud Desplechin is a literary one, insofar as his sprawling, multi-character, usually family-oriented films seek a richness, complexity, and scope reminiscent of grand novels. A Christmas Tale is no different, a drama about the holiday gathering of the Vuillard family that’s at once quite confined in terms of focus, and yet wide-ranging…

Adam Resurrected has a slackness that makes one think Paul Schrader had to actively try to maintain interest in his project during production. Penned not by the celebrated writer/director but by Noah Stollman (adapting Yoram Kaniuk’s controversial Israeli novel), Schrader’s film is beleaguered by a general dearth of energy, despite being an eccentric time-hopping saga…

Australia is a deliberate throwback to David Lean-esque historical romantic epics, replete with classic Hollywood’s favorite bigoted trope: the mystical dark-skinned native. Baz Luhrmann’s bloated saga tells the cusp-of-WWII tale of prim-and-proper English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), who journeys to Australia to visit her husband’s cattle ranch Faraway Downs, finds him dead, and…