Everyone’s emotionally disconnected from everyone else in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, but like the director’s prior two efforts (Amores Perros and 21 Grams), every storyline and every incident is also inextricably interconnected. Screenwriting gimmickry increasingly seems to be Iñarritu’s primary stock and trade, his desire to link apparently unrelated narratives so contrived and so tired…

As with 2001’s The Devil’s Backbone, director Guillermo del Toro confronts fascism in WWII-era Spain through the filter of the fantastical with Pan’s Labyrinth, a lush gothic fable whose exquisite production design masks a rather stiff, schematic narrative skeleton. After her widowed, pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil) agrees to marry boot-stomping Captain Vidal (Sergi López), young…

Hollywood actress Nikki (Laura Dern) nabs the lead role of Sue in director Kingsley’s (Jeremy Irons) next project – a remake of a supposedly Gypsy-cursed Polish film called “On High in Blue Tomorrows” – only to find herself stalked by a mysterious murderer as the barriers separating waking and dreaming life, reality and art, disintegrate…

Unceremoniously given the direct-to-DVD treatment while countless sub-par studio thrillers glut multiplexes nationwide, Lucky McKee’s The Woods nonetheless proves to be one of the most polished and inventive horror flicks of the still-ongoing year, a synthesis of classical supernatural and sexualized imagery that expands upon, rather than simply regurgitates, its celebrated predecessors. Carrie, Suspiria, The…

A soporific 1960’s coming-of-age saga in which the protagonist is a twit and the mobster is an only-in-the-movies sage prone to wisely pontificating when not whacking guys in broad daylight, Robert De Niro’s directorial debut A Bronx Tale promises a conflict between competing paternal role models but winds up reveling in a fantasy vision of…

Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress auteur Satoshi Kon’s interest in the flimsy boundary between dreams and reality manifests itself once again in Paprika, a techno-organic fantasia best enjoyed without any preconceived demands for narrative lucidity. An animé filmmaker whose lushly fluid visuals glide, swagger and throttle about with amazing dexterity, Kon’s latest is an aesthetically…

With Offside, director Jafar Panahi (The Circle) once again tackles systemic inequality in his native Iran, charting the ordeal of a group of young girls who are detained after dressing like boys in an attempt to sneak into Tehran’s men-only soccer stadium for the country’s 2004 World Cup-qualifying match. Using a subtly complex verité aesthetic,…