An exercise in voyeurism, Maren Ade’s provocatively titled, superbly performed, emotionally graphic Everyone Else is more fascinating than enjoyable. Placing a youngish, newly formed couple under relentless observation, Ade’s two-hour squirmathon gets a bit more intimate on the subject of intimacy than the viewer might wish. The 34-year-old German director’s…

Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist, in part by creating a romantic triangle between a longstanding, devoutly bourgeois lesbian couple, Nic and Jules (Annette Bening…

Implicit in its title, the premise of The Killer Inside Me — directed by Michael Winterbottom from Jim Thompson’s 1952 crime novel — could be summed up in a classified ad: Texas cop with pleasant boyish demeanor seeks compliant dames for sadistic sex games culminating in murder. What complicates this tale is…

Opening with a close-up of the crow’s feet around its subject’s eyes and expanding to reveal her Botox-frozen upper lip, the documentary-portrait Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work celebrates Saint Joan the Resilient, Showbiz Survivor. Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg dogged the indomitable standup comic throughout the course of her…

Nicole Holofcener’s fourth feature, Please Give, is a notable rebound from the insufficiently examined self-absorption of her last, Friends With Money. Please Give is not quite Lovely & Amazing — Holofcener’s mordant, quasi-autobiographical “three sisters” spin — but it is, for the most part, witty and engrossing. Kate (Catherine Keener)…

Mother, Bong Joon-ho’s followup to his killer killer-tadpole allegory The Host, is a more subtle yet no less visceral horror-comedy. Opening as tumultuous slapstick, this tale of a 27-year-old village idiot, Do-joon (Won Bin), and the local madwoman who is his single parent, Hye-Ja (Kim Hye-ja), quickly darkens once someone…

Sad, funny, and acutely self-conscious, Noah Baumbach’s new movie is the sort of mordant character study that people imagine were common in the ’70s. Greenberg is unafraid to project a downbeat worldview or feature an impossible protagonist — I’d be hard put to name one as maddening as the eponymous…

Better late than never — a bang-bang pulse-pounder predicated on the Bush administration’s deliberate fabrication of WMDs in Iraq. Paul Greengrass’s expertly assembled Green Zone has evidently been parked for some time on Universal’s shelf. Had the movie been released during the 2008 election season, it might have been something…

Detective stories imply that mysteries can be solved, or at least rationally explained. Even the most debased example confirms a universe in which guilt is determined and the guilty accorded just deserts. Such are the underpinnings of Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu’s remarkably self-effacing and highly intelligent comedy Police, Adjective —…

History Repeats The White Ribbon is Michael Haneke’s first German-language film since the original Funny Games (1997) and it’s his best ever. A period piece set on the eve of World War I in an echt Protestant, still-feudal village somewhere in the uptight depths of northern Germany, The White Ribbon…

Animals and people are all jumbled up in the hyperactive Belgian puppet animation that is A Town Called Panic — most notably in its central ménage of Cowboy, Indian and Horse. The filmmakers, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, show little regard for scale and less for convention. Cowboy (Aubier) is…

Cults collide as Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson tackles Alice Sebold’s best-selling new-age gothic, the story of a rape-murder-dismemberment and its aftermath, narrated by its fourteen-year-old victim from heaven. The movie, starring Saoirse Ronan as the teenage Susie, is horrific yet cloying, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous. Published in…

The joke’s on someone in Werner Herzog’s awkwardly titled Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Possibly Abel Ferrara who, exploding in fury when he learned that the German conquistador was planning to remake his 1992 career movie, opined that Herzog and his accomplices (among them, an original Bad Lieutenant…

The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron’s mega-3-D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and, like the Hope Diamond waved in front of your nose, the bling is almost blinding. For the first 45 minutes, I’m thinking: Metropolis! — and wondering how to amend ballots already cast in polls of…

Standing O The most significant American artist before Andy Warhol to take “the media” as his medium, Orson Welles lives on not only in posthumously restored director’s cuts of his re-released movies, but as a character in other people’s novels, plays, and movies — notably, Richard Linklater’s deft, affectionate and…

The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Oprah-endorsed post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem — in which a father and his ten-year-old son traverse a despoiled landscape of unspeakable horror — was a quick, lacerating read. John Hillcoat’s literal adaptation, which arrives one Thanksgiving past its original release date is, by contrast, a long,…

Historical cataclysm produces conspiratorial thinking: Germany’s loss in World War I, the JFK assassination and 9/11 are all naturally understood as the stuff of unimaginable plots, unspeakable coverups and unseen forces. The guys who made The Men Who Stare at Goats can’t quite decide whether this syndrome is risible or…

Lars von Trier’s doggedly outrageous, fearsomely ambitious two-hander is so desperate to make you feel something — if only a terrible sensation of nothingness — that it’s almost poignant. Most simply put, Antichrist revels in the gruesome ordeal of a bereaved couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who lose their…