Everybody knows Elmo. Everybody loves Elmo. (C’mon, even if he gets on your nerves, you can’t really hate him.) But nobody knows anything about the man behind Elmo, or at least they didn’t until filmmaker Constance Marks’ documentary Being Elmo: ...

As is typical of the Danish writer/director Lars Von Trier's mature work, Melancholia is masterful, visually sumptuous, surprising, and provocative. But as has been typical of Trier’s work all along, it boasts its share of distracting idiosyncrasies.

In 1999, The Matrix wowed audiences with its action, its futuristic look, and its vision of the world as a controlling digital construct put in place by a superior power. If critics and viewers failed to make the connection between ...

In 1973, a linguist named Herbert Terrace adopted an infant chimpanzee from a research lab in Oklahoma. “Adopted” is perhaps too neutral a term, though. As director James Marsh’s recent documentary Project Nim (Lions Gate DVD and streaming) reveals, he ...

If you’re Meryl Streep, you get asked to play Margaret Thatcher. If you’re one of the tens of thousands of other actresses in Hollywood, you most often get asked to play a wife, a mom, a girlfriend, a best friend, ...

More reactionary American viewers will no doubt have a hard time with aspects of Essential Killing. Not only are a number of Americans/Westerners killed, but live Americans are typically portrayed as callous brutes fond of drugs and thudding bro metal—the ...

The Western has been dying for more than 40 years, and maybe as a result, many of the best films in the genre in that time have an elegiac quality. Spanish writer/director Mateo Gil extends the long swan song with ...

Our critic picks the best home video of the year.

The Future is an intimate drama as well as a quirkfest. Miranda July captures the frustration of finding yourself in an ordinary life, and for all the film’s magic realism, the relationships feel real.

If you pay attention to the flood of little movies that spew forth from smaller distributors every year, sifting through the shameless exploitation, self-impressed indies, and genre rehashes, every now and then you spot something new. Not just newly released, ...

Magic Trip manages the neat trick of offering a scrupulously coherent narrative of an unhinged time, while also visually exemplifying that deranged quality.

It would be something of a comfort to be able to dismiss A Serbian Film as exploitation trash. But like recent outrage-cinema sensations Martyrs and The Human Centipede (First Sequence) before it, it’s a bit too smart and well-crafted for ...

If you like your monsters bare-chested and angsty, you’re in luck—Hollywood has defanged the vampire, neutered the werewolf, and served both up on a whiny silver platter. Those of us who would rather our monsters be, well, monstrous can have ...

Projecting dreams and visions onscreen for mass consumption is a big part of the point of movies, period, and dreams—not to mention nightmares—are a standard device/lens for even the most prosaic cinema.

As director Richard Press’ new documentary Bill Cunningham New York (Zeitgeist DVD) shows, turning the camera around on the photographer proves every bit as fascinating as the people he’s documented over the past 50 years.