Michael Atkinson

It’s a buffet of psychosexual delicacies, borrowed and otherwise, all staged with hot-blooded, straight-faced vigor.

We like cows and crows and snow, but it’s Kiarostami’s phenomenological presence that somehow turns every image or camera posture into a question about living, seeing, empathy, and essence.

Just as in the best old-school, Cain-style noir, Fukada’s film is eloquent about the fragile privileges of modern urban life and the hidden lies it can be built upon.

It’s an orgy for film geeks and history jonesers, to be sure, and the revelation of how exactly the prints got waylaid and then buried in the permafrost, saved by virtue of Dawson City’s fading away in the twentieth century, proves a sweet narrative reward.

It's a film, a rather gorgeous one, of glances and ephemera and delicate metaphors.

Yang keeps all of the balls in the air, resisting definitive answers and conjuring a lean-in sense of intimate dread. Practically every sneaky, off-center image seems to hold a clue, but the takeaway is failed connections and disastrous modern discontent.

Ogalla makes it happen: Bedroom-eyed and shaggy, looking every inch like a reincarnation of dead-too-soon ‘70s French star Patrick Dewaere but without the haywire intensity, he's an amiable spectacle.

In effect, [Guerín] seems to be making Pinto's case — the intellectual necessity of passion and Muse-force, in order to compel men toward Art — while utterly enjoying the messy, unpredictable, real-world tumult the women make of it.

It's not a riot, though the Midwest textures are sharp (especially for an Irish filmmaker in an entirely Irish production), and the idea of witnessing a killing spree from the p.o.v. of a town's funeral home is full of rich discomfort.

Kate Plays Christine is a documentary, but often a totally fake one, cheekily defining itself as its own making-of DVD supplement and documenting its own evaporation into near-nothingness. Every scene cries — or whines — about the entire project's inherent impossibility.