Gus Van Sant’s squarest work since Finding Forrester, Milk turns out to be that rare, heartfelt biopic disinterested in egregious chronological compression or psychological reductiveness. Gone is the avant-garde experimentation that characterized much of Van Sant’s previous decade, here replaced by an uncomplicated – if nonetheless finely crafted – aesthetic that conventionally and empathetically considers…

Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor is a character study drowning in liberal guilt, equal parts social-message movie and in-depth portrait of a figuratively dying man’s rebirth. Connecticut professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is a despondent walking corpse whose life is shaken by his discovery that – for reasons left absurdly oblique – a Muslim couple, Syrian…

There goes the reboot. Picking up where its predecessor left off in terms of plot but not skillfulness, Quantum of Solace squanders most of the potential generated by 2006’s Casino Royale, providing a brisk, grim story that might as well have been called Monotony of Tone. Tormented by the death of lover-betrayer Vesper Lynd (Eva…

A shot out of a moving car’s rear window, and the subsequent one of purchased goods forming a cluttered trail on the ground after falling out of the vehicle’s trunk, subtly presages the messy consequences that follow an ordinary man’s binocular-gazing in Timecrimes. Nacho Vigalondo’s swift head-spinner concerns Hector (Karra Elejalde), who while staying at…

Kurt Kuenne’s documentary Dear Zachary: A Letter To a Son About His Father is many things – a tribute to a murdered friend, a historical record for the deceased’s child, a portrait of near-unfathomable love and devotion, and an evisceration of a country’s judicial and child protective services systems. It’s also a manipulative, tearjerking thriller…

Making one long for his dreadful Saw II, III, and IV, director Darren Lynn Bousman’s Repo! The Genetic Opera rips off heavy metal and horror aesthetics to absolutely dismal effect. With junky comic book-paneled sequences, musical numbers marked by graceless, strident melodies and generic chunk-chunk guitars, and a goth style drenched in gore, Bousman’s rock-opera…

Kevin Smith blatantly invades Judd Apatow territory with Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which not only blends the bawdy with the unabashedly sentimental (a vein Smith has himself, admittedly, tapped before in the superior Chasing Amy), but also borrows Apatow’s favorite everyman in portly, scruffy Seth Rogen. It’s not an altogether unsuccessful tack to…