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This review contains oblique spoilers in the way it references other movies.Putting aside concerns about logic, since they obviously don’t apply in a fantasy-tinged movie like this, All of Us Strangers nevertheless suffers from some structural f...

The Ballad of Narayama, a 1958 Japanese film from director Keisuke Kinoshita, is revered in some critical circles because of its extreme stylization – using the art of kabuki theater to form a template for the exploration of Shichiro Fukazaw...

Cookie's Fortune deserves to be appreciated on its own terms. A less-ambitious outing from veteran director Robert Altman (at least when compared to movies like Nashville, The Player, and Short Cuts), this movie delivers agreeable performances and...

Dark Water is the latest in the gaggle of Japanese ghost stories turned into major American motion pictures. The obvious virtue of this effort is that, unlike its predecessors The Ring and The Grudge, it makes sense. The problem is that director ...

Downfall is the third major filmed account of Hitler's final ten days, following in the distant wake of 1973's Hitler: The Last Ten Days and 1981's The Bunker. A superior production to both of the earlier movies, Downfall is a windfall for anyone w...

Movies like Fist Fight remind us that, no matter how topsy-turvy things are in the realms of politics, international relations, and government, some constants remain. One of those is that February will bring to theaters its share of godawful, nails-o...

Grave of the Fireflies, a 1988 production from the famed Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, is perhaps the saddest animated movie ever made. As emotionally wrenching as any live-action film, Grave of the Fireflies resets expectations of ...

The Hidden Fortress is the third-most influential of Akira Kurosawa's films (behind Rashomon and The Seven Samurai). Unlike many of the great Japanese director's best-known efforts, The Hidden Fortress has not been remade in another language, but ...

Although director Alain Resnais was never a card-carrying member of the French New Wave, his films influenced those who were (in particular, Godard, Truffaut, and Rohmer). Stylistically and thematically, Hiroshima Mon Amour remains one of the ...

With a running length of 30 or 40 minutes, Isle of Dogs might have been brilliant. Unfortunately, this concept, although suitable for a short, is too thin for a full animated feature. Wes Anderson’s sly humor, like the film, wears out its we...