Andrew Crump

Union County makes no judgments about what kinds of addicts Cody and Jack are. All addicts, in the eyes of the movie, its filmmaker, and its contributors, are deserving of compassion. Meeks offers a vision of what it might look like if, rather than holding addicts in contempt and resigning them to their suffering, society gave a damn about them.

Cavalli has a terrific sense of humor and a droll aesthetic, seemingly drawing from an influential well filled by drops of Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Sofia Coppola, and the Coen brothers. The Kidnapping Of Arabella also sets a high bar for road trip films: the journey is worthier than the destination, as it should be, but specifically because the film’s journey lives up to every definition of the word on philosophical, comical, and emotional levels.

Happily, the narrative moves ahead quickly, the better to demonstrate new, inventive methods of reducing murder-happy billionaires to sloppy carcasses in between beats where Weaving and Newton get to play off of one another.

That Cold Storage hews closer to comedy doesn’t lessen the unnerving sensation of watching its horror unfold. Funny as the film is, the speed with which a biological agent can spread—when the powers that be find the very notion laughable—still makes one squirm in their seat.

This is Van Sant’s Dog Day Afternoon moment. Judged solely by Skarsgård’s scenes, Dead Man’s Wire makes for an insightful and tense portrait of its subject. But judged by the limits of its perspective, the film is narrow to the story’s detriment.

It speaks to Anderson’s skill as an architect of distended narratives that One Battle After Another’s parenting motif functions as a concrete pylon for action and political intrigue and rank human cruelty; it’s the beacon the film comes back to time and again.

As sobering as the film gets, it remains, as a work of art and expression of Victor’s thoughtful voice, a real joy.

It’s more that the specific combination of jidaigeki period piece, highland character study, and frontier justice that’s new, making Tornado a harrowing, blustery, violent amalgamation of an idiosyncratic spirit.

Pulling focus from what is essential to The Legend of Ochi, from acting to artifice, throws the experience into haze–and not the fantasy kind, either, but the distended, stumbling kind that lets the pace go limp as the themes go slack. It’s to Saxon’s great credit as a visionary that The Legend of Ochi justifies the experience anyway, on the strength of its rare craftsmanship alone.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl details the ways tradition is exploited and warped, and to whom’s favor, gently at times, and with a steely edge at others.