Those who find Danish auteur Lars Von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) to be an insufferable, egomaniacal pain-in-the-ass will undoubtedly find much to loath about The Five Obstructions, a fascinating (and oft-times infuriating) documentary in which Von Trier instructs filmmaker Jorgen Leth to remake his abstract short film The Perfect Human (which Von Trier…

While neither as visually nor as thematically intricate as Millennium Actress, Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers – a reimagining of John Ford’s weepy Western 3 Godfathers in which three homeless friends attempt to return an abandoned baby to its parents on Christmas Eve – is nonetheless a delightfully rambunctious holiday fable about the vital importance of…

“If you go fast enough, you can’t see where you’ve come from,” says a cohort of Andre Stander in Bronwen Hughes’ Stander, and it’s an outlook the notorious South African cop-turned-thief apparently held dear. Disgusted by his participation in the state-sanctioned murder of innocent blacks, Stander threw away a promising career in the police force…

Michael Mann’s beautifully hard-edged direction – not unlike a sports car that masks its brawn underneath a beautifully elegant exterior – was never more muscular or sleek than with Heat, his near-masterpiece about the cat-and-mouse competition between ruthless thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and cagey lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Mann strives for epic…

(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) In a marketplace dominated by flashy, hyperactive, bathroom humor-centric extravaganzas like Shrek 2 and Shark Tale, it’s refreshing to find, in Wayne Wang’s Because of Winn Dixie, a children’s film that embraces storytelling modesty and a balanced view of the world as both depressing and joyous. Told with a…

The finest anime film I’ve ever seen, Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress concerns a documentary filmmaker’s interview with legendary Japanese film actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, who retired from the business 30 years earlier to live a hermetic life in her forest-shrouded home. The life story Chiyoko recounts is one which melds authentic memories with both her movies…

Ben Stiller headlined six films last year (Duplex, Starsky & Hutch, Envy, Dodgeball, Meet the Fockers), and Along Came Polly may be the worst. Inane, inorganic and predictable from the start, the film exists solely as a reason for the clumsy comedian to behave ineptly while simultaneously giving Jennifer Aniston some post-Friends big-screen exposure. Ruben…

Korean provocateur Kim Ki-Duk sets aside his penchant for misogyny and violence with Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, and the results are somber, serene and stirring. Split into the title’s five seasons, the film is a simple fable about the different stages of a young man’s slow but steady maturation. A boy lives on a…