Everyone has made difficult choices and faced the consequences. But those choices and their consequences can be different in a place like Iran, a theme that carries Asghar Farhadi's insightful new movie, A Separation. more ›

If you head over to the IMDb, look up Roger Corman, and start scrolling through his filmography, make sure your scrolling finger is limbered up. The list of producing credits alone stretches, as of this writing, to 398. And Corman, well into his 80s now, is still consistently averaging two to three movies a year. Many of those aren't just putting-up-the-money executive producer credits, either. Corman, as Alex Stapleton's documentary Corman's World demonstrates in its opening minutes, is a hands-on producer, offering directorial input onset (keep scrolling down the page and you'll find over 50 directorial credits from 1955-1990), and sitting with the editor and guiding the cutting process. more ›

Many of the scenes in Pariah, Dee Rees' debut narrative feature, are shot in shallow focus closeups, actors' faces filling much of the screen as the background is lost in a soft blur. It's an unforgiving shot for an actor, every subtlety -- and, potentially, deficiency -- of their performance magnified by the proximity of the viewer. But what it demonstrates is an overriding confidence in the abilities of her performers on the part of Rees. That confidence isn't misplaced: The intensity of these performances, and their gorgeous rendering on film by cinematographer Bradford Young, carry a film that could easily have sunk into Sundance-indie inspirational cliché. more ›

The Hollywood adaptation of the Stieg Larsson bestseller might not have been needed considering a Swedish-language film in 2009, but David Fincher's efficient direction is more than welcome. more ›

You could spend an entire essay talking about the visual detail of Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy. This is a film that never needs a word to express that it's not just about the Cold War, but about cold men, cold interactions, a cold decade. There's the grey, muted color scheme that creates an eternal autumn out of the entirety of the 70s. The pale, doughy faces of men who look as if they've never seen the sun, faces sitting under bad haircuts and worse combovers, sequestered in smoky, soundproof underground rooms discussing the activities of their intelligence counterparts in other countries, who are likely also overwhelmingly pale, male, and grimly disaffected. The wallpaper is textured, the filing cabinets metallic and industrial, and the secretarial pool seems designed to take leering gazes just as much as they take dictation. more ›

Some biopics are destined to end up as educational supplements for teachers looking to engage students in a subject with a little more entertainment value than a lecture can provide. David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method at times almost seems to be playing directly to that market. This loose history of the evolution of the working relationship between two of the 20th century's most prominent psychoanalysts -- Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) --practically follows a Psych 101 syllabus: Freud's obsessions with both relating all psychological issues back to sex; his rigid categorizations; Jung's uncertainty about those simplistic assessments; Jung's fascination with parapsychological phenomenon and the resulting battle for the heart of psychology as hard science or metaphysical theorizing. more ›

Mavis Gary, author of a once-popular series of young adult novels, is 37 years old. What that probably means, even though Jason Reitman's new film doesn't address it explicitly, is that she's just a year shy of her 20th high school reunion. With that in mind, many of the events of Young Adult feel like a last ditch attempt to prepare for going back home and facing friends with impending middle age suddenly feeling uncomfortably and uncontrollably close. The years that seemed like eons to accomplish her ambitions vanished, and, in the grips of alcoholism, arrested development, and cold sweat panic, Mavis (Charlize Theron) decides the best course of action is to retreat from the big city for a little while and head back to the her small town roots. Oh, and while she's there, to steal her high school sweetheart away from his wife and infant daughter. If she could pull it off, she'd sure make a splash at that hypothetical reunion next year. more ›

A detective walks into a bar wearing a black suit, hat, tie, and trenchcoat, carrying nothing but a pineapple. No, that's not the setup for a joke. Rather, that is the joke, or at least the source of laughs in once scene from Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre. It's a deadpan and strange little sight-gag, and typifies the kind of offbeat humor the Finnish director is known for. Showing the absurd in a stripped-down, matter-of-fact fashion is how Kaurismäki gets his laughs, even as he tells a story with serious themes. more ›

Let me just clear one thing up, lest there be any confusion a few paragraphs down the page. The Sitter isn't a great film. In all likelihood, it may not even be a very good film. But the mostly-praise you're about to read about this movie is a reflection of the fact that despite its deficiencies -- and they are many -- this film is a dumb comedy made by smart people who know how to make you have fun despite what might be in your best interest. more ›

Addictions are time-consuming disorders. There's the time spent finding the object(s) of your addiction, the time spent actually engaging in them, the time spent dealing with the highs and lows, and the time required to cover up and compensate for all of those activities in your straight life. Of course, life in general can be hard enough to keep everything balanced; add in an addiction, and there's that many more balls to keep in the air. Steve McQueen's new film, Shame, shows what happens when they all come crashing down. more ›

Martin Scorsese hardly seems the most obvious choice for a whimsical 3-D children’s movie about a big-eyed, scruffy-haired young scamp who winds the clocks of a Paris train station, but for the movie that Hugo becomes, there's no one else for the job. more ›

Director Alexander Payne returns after a seven-year absence with a wry family drama that, while lacking the edge of some of his past work, takes an honest and moving look at familial failings. more ›

In Lars von Trier's Cannes hit Melancholia, the director asks, "What does depression feel like?" His answer? "Like a massive rogue planet on a collision course with Earth about to wipe out all existence." more ›

Last year's Blue Valentine followed one couple on an endlessly dark journey through a relationship; Like Crazy looks, on the surface, to be a lighter approach to similar material, but don't let that fool you into thinking this is the hope-filled antidote to Valentine's pessimistic darkness. more ›

Andrew Niccols' sci-fi class warfare allegory -- in which time is currency and the rich can live forever -- is great in concept, but never really rises to its aspirations in execution. more ›

Elizabeth Olsen and John Hawkes deliver unforgettable performances in Sean Durkin's equally unforgettable film about a woman trying desperately to find her way back to the person she was after extricating herself from a cult. more ›

Pedro Almodóvar's window into his work of art turns out to be no less obsessive, meticulous and distanced than his character's attitude towards his own creation. more ›

Most of us have probably felt it: that unexplained feeling of dread that less rational people might mistake for a premonition of real impending doom. The prickle on the back of the neck, the uneasy feeling in the gut, the certainty that something bad is around the corner. It's usually fleeting: The chill runs down your spine and is gone. Curtis (Michael Shannon), the central character in writer/director Jeff Nichols' transfixing sophomore feature, exists in that state pretty much all day, every day. more ›

You may feel the need to shower after seeing The Ides of March. The film's marketers could have repurposed No Country for Old Men's tagline, "There are no clean getaways," because in the cutthroat political stage on display here, nobody gets out without slinging not just mud, but probably some raw sewage as well. more ›

Asking people to stay up late on a school night is never an easy sell. However, The Rapture played to a packed U Street Music Hall on Sunday night and made the venue jump. more ›

Moneyball manages the surprising feat of being recognizably a sports movie without succumbing to genre cliches, with an appeal that should work for hardcore baseball fans, or those with no interest in the game. more ›

Never has a bowl of peanuts been so portentous. Director Steven Soderbergh lets his camera linger over a bowl of airport bar peanuts after a coughing, sniffling Gwyneth Paltrow leaves the frame, and the message is clear: the next person to reach into that bowl is getting more than a snack. more ›

Maryam Keshavarz' sensitive take on cultural tensions in Iran is almost -- but not quite -- derailed by a fascination with the more lurid details of the story. more ›

Boys will be boys. Badass car-building, homemade flamethrower manufacturing, violent bloody knife-rape fantasizing boys. And girls, if they know what's good for them, will forgive their wounded men the transgressions that spring from their inability to fit into a society that no longer values their physical strength or pities their pain. more ›

Decades ago, United States armed forces were shipped off to southeast Asia to fight in a jungle war against an enemy that used guerrilla tactics, in a conflict that was meant to finally liberate a population recently divested of a European occupying force, but as yet unused to democracy. Opinion back home was mixed, and prominent figures in the media called the whole affair a "quagmire". No, not that conflict. Keep going a few more decades back. more ›

Ned's not really an idiot, and Our Idiot Brother is no dumb summer comedy. Paul Rudd makes sure of that in an excellent performance at the center of this sweet -- but never cloying -- comedy. more ›

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. more ›

Oh, the Irish and their love of words. The lilting rhythms of Yeats, the biting satire of Shaw, the heady impenetrability of Joyce. And then there's the London-born, but Irish-derived McDonagh brothers, Martin and John Michael, and their great love for the many uses of the word "fuck". more ›

Can you crowdsource an entire feature film? Of course you can: getting a massive number of people to respond to an online call to action is the easy part. But can the result be something worthwhile? When you've got talented filmmakers guiding the project, as is the case with Life in a Day, you can not only get worthwhile results, but even something approaching extraordinary. more ›

Kids, I just want to be clear on this point: performance enhancing drugs have no place in sports. Being that all's fair in love and war, when faced with difficulties in either of those arenas, you go ahead and do what you need to do. It was war that birthed Captain America, née 98-pound weakling Steve Rogers. Chosen by the army for an innate courageousness that far outpaced the abilities of his scrawny body, he participates in an experimental program designed to use chemicals and some really cool-looking and completely unexplained technology to create a super-soldier. OK, so the rippling pecs don't exactly hurt Rogers' chances in the love department, either. more ›