Search for Eden

Lamb, the feature debut of Valdimar Johannsson, is the latest export from Iceland to indicate that movies from that corner of the world may not be the most palatable to mainstream American audiences. Johannson has had plenty of experience with...

Note: There are minor spoilers throughout and final paragraph contains a somewhat more substantive, but oblique, spoiler. The "danger area" for the latter is marked. As Let the Right One In opens in a suburb of Stockholm during the 1980s, 12-ye...

Lilya 4-Ever is the third film from Swedish filmmaker Lukas Moodysson, but, in terms of both tone and content, this effort is so different from the director's other work that it's difficult to credit that all three are the product of one man. (Thi...

Let me start with a few brief editorial comments about Lars von Trier. Key to understanding my views about Manderlay is my disclosure of a belief that in order to be able to criticize something, you have to have first-hand familiarity with it. Vo...

No one could ever accuse Lars von Trier of being uninteresting. Even his most maddening, inaccessible films are compulsively watchable, if only to see what will happen next. Melancholia represents von Trier at his best and worst. Visually and thema...

It's refreshing to see a movie in which there are no special effects, no camera tricks, and no incidental music to strum on a viewer's emotional strings. These are some (but certainly not all) of the tenets of Dogma 95, the much-ballyhooed "cinema...

In the community of elite critics, there are those who would claim that Persona is the best film ever made, placing it in the rarified atmosphere of such classics as Citizen Kane, City Lights, and Tokyo Story. Although I would agree that Perso...

Hollywood films about teenage girls invariably focus on two things: boyfriends and popularity. It's not surprising, since those two aspects of high school life comprise a significant portion of the average teenager's existence. With hormones rag...

Apparently, someone turned up the heat because The Snowman is a sloppy mess.One of the most shockingly awful wastes of talent imaginable, this adaptation of Jo Nesbo’s thriller is mostly incoherent and, just when it starts to make sense, it i...

The Square is an indicator that not only Hollywood blockbusters can be afflicted with bloat. At nearly 2 1/2 hours in length, this production takes what could have been a lean, incisive satire of art, commerce, and altruism and turns it into a...