Lee Gardner

As much as it continues in the same fashion as their previous films, Belgian writer/directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Kid With a Bike brings to mind/nods to a few other finely observed urban realist gems, specifically Vittorio De Sica’s ...

By the mid-’50s, Corman was scraping up tiny budgets for lurid horror films such as It Conquered the Earth and Attack of the Crab Monsters, which he would shoot in days (usually less than a week) and then dump into ...

If there’s anything the movies love more than a hitman, it’s a hooker. It sometimes seems that the oldest profession is one of the most common professions onscreen, a blank canvas for filmmakers to smear with their notions about women, ...

Any action fan who watches the Wales-born, Indonesia-based Gareth Evans’ new film The Raid: Redemption will recognize an epochal action prodigy/game changer at work and want him to make many more like it as soon as possible. To put it ...

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: ...

Lynne Ramsay’s films have all had an instinctual quality, but this time her instincts fail her as often as not.

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.

From the outset, again and again, you are asked to judge the situation, evaluate the arguments and those making them, weighing each statement and each action that results. That process never stops as the Oscar-winning A Separation expands into both ...

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, ...

Albert Nobbs knows what he’s about. He is always perfectly groomed, eminently capable, and scrupulously unobtrusive. In short, he is the perfect manservant, except that he’s not a man.

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 ...

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, ...

Having crafted perhaps the finest American film drama to emerge in years out of the husk of a straight-to-video premise, Nichols builds to a climax that offers both a big suspense set piece and an emotionally satisfying ending to the ...

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 ...

There’s a cry at the heart of alto saxophonist Darius Jones’ sound.

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.

Depending on how literally you want to take it, the “thing” referenced in the title could be Bill Orcutt’s guitar, a battered acoustic with the A and D strings missing. Or maybe the “thing” is Orcutt himself, the former guitarist ...

Not only is Restless a preciously quirky romantic comedy, it’s a preciously quirky romantic comedy about a pair of death-obsessed teen misfits, one of whom faces death herself. Basically, it’s Harold and Maude reimagined and sanitized for the Teen Disney ...

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.

On the surface, Drive rolls like an homage to ’80s neon noir. Just under that surface, it’s a story of desperation and thwarted desires and tough decisions with a surprising emotional heft to it.

South Korea boasts perhaps the most interesting film scene in the world right now, and part of the reason it’s so interesting is that, on the surface, it’s not that interesting.

Krallice advances its own BM-influenced heaviness agenda with the kind of spacious (and non-dogmatic) touches that can only open more ears and blow more minds.

Things you may not know about Norway, if you are the average semiclueless American: First, it is quite gorgeous, in its spartan, Scandinavian way. Second, Norwegians have a thing about trolls, which function as half folkloric icon, half kitsch mascot. ...

Metal just gets weirder and weirder as it expands, and that can only be a good thing.

The Criterion Collection recently re-released The Killing, Kubrick’s 1956 calling card, in typically pristine DVD and Blu-ray editions. It is a must-see, most especially if you only know Kubrick from his sprawling, glacial later work.

It seems the only sort of horror more popular than the zombie-apocalypse flick these days is the vampire flick, and on its face, Stake Land (Dark Sky DVD and Blu-ray) looks a bit like a craven cash-grab combo platter of ...

Towards the Megalith subverts most of the tiresome conventions of death metal. A throwback never sounded so fresh.

Early in her career, Welch’s image was as studiously dour and retro as her songs and music were, full of soldier’s joys and orphan girls. On her more recent albums, she has deigned to notice the 20th century, and her ...

Uncle Boonmee fractures into multiple narratives, broken up into other times and other places and filmed in slightly different styles, united by a soul in common and by this cinematic account. It may not always be clear what’s going on, ...

After years of pushing contemporary Japanese cinema into new realms of wrong with films such as Audition and Ichi the Killer, Takashi Miike reaches back to chanbara, the venerable samurai film that most Americans probably think of when they think ...

What makes one drone as soothing and encompassing and soul-tugging as the sound of the womb and another a flat, dull noise? Maybe it’s as individual as, well, the womb, but it’s possible Romain Barbot of Toulouse, France, has discovered ...

The trailer for 2010 South Korean film The Housemaid (MPI DVD) makes it look like the kind of late-night Cinemax “erotic thriller” melodrama of which the world needs no more. But writer/director Im Sang-soon and his film have a lot ...

The Tree of Life arrives in multiplexes on a wave of advance buzz highlighting both its profound beauty and its confounding obliqueness; only its obliqueness is somewhat overstated.

In the 1970s, the Western was dying. The sociocultural revolutions of the ’60s had left the old white hat/black hat staple of the Hollywood cinema looking quaint, and even Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah couldn’t stave off sclerosis. But as ...

Ever wonder why most movies are between an hour and a half and two hours long? Undoubtedly there’s a commercial element that keeps movie times in that ballpark: Once a film stretches toward the 150-minute mark or beyond, movie theaters ...

Kung Fu Panda 2 takes itself somewhat seriously. Rather than contenting itself to pump out slapstick for the kids and cheap pop-culture references to keep parents amused, it puts that energy into a tale of overcoming an uncertain upbringing and ...

The world needs another serial-killer movie like it needs another hitman-out-for-one-last-job movie. Leave it to cult fave Korean director Kim Jee-woon, though, to come up with a twist that makes one of the hoariest screen clichés of the past decade ...

Cass McCombs writes and records great songs. His albums are sometimes more problematic.

Many film nerds count 1981’s Blow Out as their favorite Brian De Palma flick, and it’s not hard to see why.

“Action-packed double feature,” the keep-case screams over two tiny reproductions of movie posters fit for the cinder-block wall of a drive-in snack bar circa 1975: Dirty Mary Crazy Larry and Race With the Devil. The ostensible hook here, one supposes, ...

The third album from Baltimore indie-rock duo Wye Oak strips away some of the extra instrumental touches (pedal steel, strings) that highlighted 2009’s The Knot, leaving just Jenn Wasner’s voice and guitar and Andy Stack’s drums and keys and backing ...

Mike Leigh’s work has always encompassed a thoroughgoing realistic approach to contemporary life, exemplified by rich ensemble films such as Naked, Secrets and Lies, and last year’s Another Year. A period piece seemed out of character, let alone one about ...

The rise and genre domination of bloody-tank-top gorno films and their hard-R hijinks over the past half-dozen years—in large part thanks to the success of the Saw franchise—made it harder for teens and tweens to get scares at multiplexes. Now ...

o far the closest thing to a comprehensive indictment of the companies and practices that allowed, even encouraged, the economic collapse of 2007—and of those in an oversight role who allowed, even encouraged it to happen—to emerge is Charles H. ...

What does one say about a new album from Tim Hecker? How do you assess another disc of diaphanous drones and waxing and waning slabs of sound from the Montreal-based musician in a standard music-review format?