Clean and graceful. A portrait of an artist giving everything he has to his medium. Beautiful, humanist and even, in a sly way, tragic as Jiro’s art has not just eclipsed his family but also comes off as a kind of sublimation for dealing with early childhood trauma, all about making and eating raw fish… and living an all consuming creative life. But enough with the Phil Glass. He's a documentary cliché at this point.

Terrible script, amazing Flick.It feels like the second coming of a young John Carpenter, complete with minmal synth soundtrack, ramping tension and close quarters combat. The martial arts work is inventive, fast, edgy as hell, totally driving and absolutely astounding. This is the kind of film Gina Carano needs to showcase her talent.

It constantly flirts with the kind of plot set-ups that could have fueled a dozen vapid crowd pleasers, but instead the film chooses not to bring a single thing to any conclusion. Even the ending is another open story left hanging. This creates an intentional existential malaise, but never at the cost of its sweet humanist center. It's not a satire, it's not even that funny, but there is a delightful truth here.

What is good about Ferrara's cinema is in here. I love how bare it all is, mostly stripped down to two lovers in an apartment. I love the fact that you can still get takeout in NY even hours before the end of the world. But something about it felt false to me. Shanyn Leigh is boring and there's not enough of a spark at the film's center to hold a charge. I just didn't feel the weight of the end of all things here.

Despite a wholly unbelievable romance at its core the film is saved by some fantastic character actors, amazing set pieces and an early flexing of Hitchcock's awesome cinematic muscle. The assassination sequence alone is a masterpiece of medium.

Serious script problems abound, but its visual imagination and pulp sensibility almost saves it. When it's not horrible it's very,very fun.

The most beautifully incomprehensible thing I have ever seen. An act of wuxia meditation. The inaction of action in martial arts. Melodrama painted large. I loved it... I think.

I love Kelly Reichardt's other films, but I just wasn't feeling this one. It's supposed to come off as poised and sparse, but instead it felt oblique and average to me. It doesn't help knowing the history of the actual journey. Still, it's not the choice to re-write an epic into a small existential comment that bothers me. It's the fact that it feels formally forced, anemic to a fault and ultimately untrue.

As a doc it's a little scattered. But as a testament to what can be achieved with passion, or as a love letter to Jim Henson, or even just as a treatise on the power of how total parental acceptance and encouragement can wildly, positively affect the future of a child... this is fantastic. It made me cry. And to think, I used to find Elmo annoying. Le Sigh...

There is more said about humanity, creativity, love and loss through these dance pieces than I've seen in any dialog-packed movie in a long, long time. The language of motion that Pina "spoke" is transcendental.

Ugh... exactly like spending 80 min. in a room with four horrible human beings.

Van Zandt's music has been in my life from as early as I can remember. As a child to young parents in south Texas in the 70's, the alt-/hippie-country scene was my soundtrack. The music van Zandt's heart made sculpted my idea of home forever. This film is fantastic. It feels as true as his songs.

Vérité exploration of racism and immigration in Buenos Aires during their economic crises in the early oughts. Working class down to its very form and scope. Beautifully simple and resonating with truthful performances. A morally and aesthetically ambitious act of art.

Complete apologist piece for Vikernes. No mention of his role in the Heathen Front. No confrontation about his earlier writings in neo-nazi zines. It's as if his Odinism somehow exists outside his racist, pure-blood nationalism and eugenicism. Vikernes' real extremism goes completely unexplored. I'm not looking for demonization, I'm looking for basic, fully realized journalism. It's not here.

A movie that gives total preference to the emotion of imagery. An exercise in feeling & seeing so successful it elevated Terrence Malick into the ranks of visual storytellers like Tarkovski and Kurosawa. Had this, Malick's second feature, been his last, he'd still be known as one of the most important American Directors of all time.

All and all I'm a huge fan of real world spy thrillers and a student of the Cold War, and this is, of course a fictional retelling of the Cambridge Five traitors incident, so there's a lot here for people like me to enjoy and I do recommend it for that reason. But when it's all said and done, I prefer the BBC mini-series staring Alec Guinness by a long shot, it simply seems to have more life in its bones.

The narrative is contrived and the story wandering, but the art direction, photography, editing, sound mixing and overall directorial vision are astounding. No other film that I've ever seen captures the power of jazz and its role in the African American fight for equality like this film does. A spectacular artistic document of a movement, a people and a music.

As usual, Herzog is a master of putting the most visually striking and physically demanding events together and then filming them.

This is like slipping into a pastoral dream. The wind. The constant braying of sheep. The idle bits of conversation between the mostly stoic herders. The crack of guns at hungry bears in the middle of the night. That’s all the soundtrack offers. In its execution and honesty it’s literally on a par with the Maysles Grey Gardens. A true document, artfully done yet completely free of artifice.

Completely ridiculous, but super endearing and a lot of fun.

Hepburn falls in love for no discernible reason whatsoever and then continues to adore and believe in a man who lies to her over and over again. With each new explanation Grant gives regarding his identity, she swoons, seemingly incapable of self-respect, and stares with the vacant doe-eyes of a teenager. Regina is one of Hepburn’s least interesting creations, the character’s sole trait is that she’s funny.

A film is so desperate to sex up the life of a code-nerd with Asperger syndrome and ram home its banal theme (“the man who created Facebook has no friends”) that the truth, complexity, and fascinating aspects of the real story gets thrown under the bus of one dimensional fiction. It’s a hit job on a pack of real human beings and their motivations. Tonally, thematically and factually dishonest to the last frame.

I love the idea of a quiet character study that just happens to have monsters in it… now will someone please go out and do it well?

Costa Gavras’ daughter makes her directorial feature film debut. It’s a nice flick. Sometimes honest, sometimes hokey and obvious. It does come dangerously close to equating conservativism with childishness and liberalism with emotional maturity, which even for a leftist like me comes off a little trite.

There was another movie out last year that claimed it was about dreams… an American film. It made a lot of money but felt false and boisterous. Nothing about it felt like dreaming to me at all. This movie IS a dream. Everything about it feels like a dream. The difference between the two is the difference between spectacle and ritual.

Incredibly meditative and full of grace. A cinematic prayer.

Suck Suck

Nothing short of a cinematic aristotelian call-and-response dialog with the phenomena of existence. Malick has taken his fragmented memories of growing up in Texas in the ’50’s and placed them into the largest context humanly imaginable.

Everyone who defends this (needlessly) controversial film likes to say that it’s absolutely, definitely not porn. But it totally is. It gleefully fetishisizes rape, drug use, cock-vomiting, sodomy, blow jobs, punk-music, menstruation, patriarchal oppression and good old fashioned non-simulated sex. It’s porn because it shows all of those things in detailed close ups… but it has nothing to say about any of them.

Virtually every single frame of this flick is whacked out and gorgeous. The whole thing is tarted up in a very pre-punk DIY sort of way… from the fashion to the message.