For its first half, Michael Haneke’s Hidden (aka Caché) feels like the year’s best film, delivering gripping tension and mystery while simultaneously, and craftily, exploring the allure (and ramifications) of cinematic voyeurism. Commencing with an extended static shot of an apartment complex that soon reveals itself to be a VCR videotape image, Haneke’s latest critique…

Loggerheads’ endangered turtle symbolism is perhaps its only significant misstep, as writer/director Tim Kirkman’s multilayered tale of adoption, atonement and acceptance is otherwise characterized by an assured restraint and attention to the subtleties of human interaction. Kirkman’s narrative (“based on a true story”) is divided into three related strands which take place in successive years:…

Biopics may be the most unbearable of cinematic genres – what with their superficial, impression-heavy lead performances and reductive reconfiguration of messy lives into tidy three-act narratives – but Bennett Miller’s Capote narrowly avoids such pitfalls thanks to a bravura turn by Philip Seymour Hoffman as the titular writer and an economical script that focuses…

Like being trapped in a car with a music-obsessed hipster intent on proving his coolness by playing every classic rock album in his Case Logic CD Wallet, Elizabethtown proves to be an excruciatingly narcissistic nostalgia trip saturated with writer/director Cameron Crowe’s favorite tunes. Crowe’s semi-autobiographical melodrama involves a sneaker designer named Drew (Orlando Bloom) who…

A delirious orgy of self-reflexive ridiculousness, Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story makes up for its thematic thinness with boisterous, buffoonish extravagance. Constructed as a film-within-a-film-within-a-film (or something like that), Winterbottom’s rollicking exercise in mirthful meta mayhem charts the making of a movie about the making of a cinematic adaptation of Laurence…

Often vilified as one of the most contemptible films ever made, writer/director Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (also known by the more upbeat title Day of the Woman) largely fails to live up to its horrendous hype, turning out to be simply another crudely made, explicitly violent ‘70s-era exploitation flick. Naïve Manhattanite Jennifer…

As its term paper-ish title implies, David Cronenberg’s neo-noir A History of Violence is more than simply a classy B-movie; probing the pervasive influence of violence on modern existence is its real ambition. More formally and narratively conventional than 2002’s Spider (or anything in the Canadian auteur’s oeuvre, for that matter), but nonetheless similarly preoccupied…

Nick Park’s cheese-munching inventor Wallace and his mute pooch sidekick Gromit finally get the feature-length treatment in Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a cheeky homage to classic Universal monster movies in which the claymation, stop-motion-animated heroes are forced to stop a mutant vege-eating bunny. Having found success with their “Anti-Pesto” pest control…

Hong Sangsoo’s Tale of Cinema is the year’s second feature (after Apichatpong Weerasethakul Tropical Malady) to abruptly shift narrative paths mid-course, beginning as the story of a morose boy named Sangwon (Lee Kiwoo) who convinces his girlfriend Yongsil (Uhm Jiwon) to join him in suicidal death, and ending as the tale of an aspiring filmmaker…