Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In transports vampire legend to the realm of tween romance, melding genres with a haunting poignancy that’s mildly undercut by a script that, during its last act, bounces around like a jeep on a dirt road. Alfredson doesn’t shy away from supernatural lore (sunlight and stakes to the heart…

Oliver Stone has both Brezhnev and Kissinger state, on separate occasions, that Richard Nixon’s tale is a tragedy, and his Nixon certainly assumes an empathetic position on its disgraced presidential subject. This does not, however, mean that it’s a particularly kind portrait, as Stone’s epic – charting the 40th commander-in-chief’s childhood, early career, and Oval…

Modern China’s gradual shift from collectivism to free-market economics forms the backbone of Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, a beguiling documentary/fiction hybrid in which the Still Life director examines the transition of munitions manufacturing plant 420, located in Southwest China’s Chengdu city, into a futuristic complex for commercial and residential businesses as well as apartment high-rises.…

Synecdoche, New York may commence with the drab realism of an Arthur Miller play – such as, say, Death of a Salesman, the production being staged by perpetually glum regional-theater playwright Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) – but since this is the directorial debut of mad genius screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, the film soon reveals its…

There’s exactly one brilliant scene in Smiley Face, in which Ana Farris’ insanely stoned Jane ruminates, with hilariously authentic scattered-train-of-thought, on her fondness for lasagna. The rest of Greg Araki’s film, however, is not only a limp, unfunny time-waster, but it seems barely familiar with the actual experience of being high, indulging in one sequence…

There are three or four movies competing for attention within Changeling, and unfortunately for Clint Eastwood, they’re all equally dreadful melodramatic drivel. In his worst directorial outing since 1999’s True Crime, Eastwood delivers something close to a parody of an Oscar-baiting period picture, establishing a faux-prestigious tone for this “true story” about a 1920s single…

Che, Steven Soderbergh’s epic (or, at least, epically long) biopic of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s victorious revolutionary exploits in Cuba and later, fatal failure to replicate that triumph in Bolivia, is akin to a lovely butterfly trapped under glass. In effect two complementary 131-minute features wedded together, Soderbergh’s latest is a strikingly constructed, handsomely digitally-filmed museum…