“Death to organization” cries Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in The Science of Sleep, and while it would be going too far to say that Michel Gondry’s whimsical film wholeheartedly echoes its character’s celebration of creative chaos, it definitely makes few concessions to logic and tidiness. Boasting a collage aesthetic whereby dream sequences, stop-motion animation, paper-maché constructions,…

Thanks to its metaphysical, life-as-art narrative conceit, Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction has been dubbed, in some disparaging circles, Charlie Kaufman Lite. One might add that it’s also Drama Lite, Comedy Lite, and Will Ferrell Lite, the entire production such a featherweight nothing that it engenders only indifference. In screenwriter Zach Helm’s oh-so-cute tale, IRS…

Familiarity often breeds not only contempt but also boredom. That’s certainly the case with regards to the work of Christopher Guest, who continues to mine the multi-character mockumentary for ever-diminishing returns. True, the director’s latest, For Your Consideration – which takes aim at the movie biz and the infotainment culture that surrounds it – doesn’t…

Now out on DVD, it’s easy to see why Takashi Miike’s Masters of Horror episode Imprint was never aired – it’s about as brutally graphic as anything I’ve ever seen produced for television. The story of a forlorn American (creepy Bill Drago) who, in searching for the beloved prostitute he dreams of spiriting away to…

Riveting even when it borders on the hagiographic, Jeff Feuerzig’s The Devil and Daniel Johnston details the troubled life of the titular singer-songwriter, a West Virginia native born into a devout Christian family whose idiosyncratic and profuse artistic gifts (which also included drawing, painting and amateur moviemaking) were inextricably colored by mental illness. Feuerzig’s documentary…

On any list of unnecessary remakes, The Omen – that cheesy 1976 horror goof designed to shamelessly piggyback on the success of The Exorcist – has to be somewhere relatively close to the top. And yet here’s John Moore’s faithful retry anyway, simply confirming its pointlessness at every available turn. Slavishly adhering to its source…

Blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction, Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni’s The Story of the Weeping Camel documents a nomadic Mongolian sheepherder family’s efforts to compel a female camel to allow her rejected newborn to suckle. Where those lines are located, however, ultimately matter very little, as the directors’ majestic, clear-eyed depiction of the…