SIDEBAR: See our red-carpet interviews with cast of “Birdman” here! “And what did you want?” “To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on this earth.” Iñárritu quotes Raymond Carver at the beginning of his new film Birdman, and these words prov …Read more

Most documentaries on politics and science don’t open with scenes from a magic show, but Merchants of Doubt uses intermittent interviews with a magician as an ingenious framing device to show how a new breed of PR mercenary is using the same tricks h …Read more

Foxcatcher is only Bennett Miller’s third feature film, but he should already be considered in the highest tier of American directors. Despite working with vastly different source material, Foxcatcher shows some of the same traits that allowed Capote …Read more

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman closed the New York Film Festival over the weekend (read our festival coverage here and our coverage of Birdman here). Our Meg Maley was on the red carpet and talked to Michael Keaton, Edward Norton and the rest …Read more

You don’t need to know a single thing about hockey to find Red Army fascinating, and that is a wondrous achievement on its own. Directed by Gabe Polsky, the documentary chronicles the story of the Soviet Union’s hockey team, which achieved internatio …Read more

Debra Granik has become known for her interest in making films about a parallel America, one where people aren’t falling in love after meet-cutes in coffee shops, or running amok as their cities are destroyed by intergalactic monsters and tidal waves …Read more

In the most astonishing scene in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, we see Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) accidentally kill the fisherman Amadou, who in an earlier scene speared Kidane’s most precious cow. The aftermath of the killing is shown in the widest sh …Read more

In The Act of Killing, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer chronicled the brutal Indonesian genocide of 1965, during which almost one million so-called “communists” were murdered by Suharto’s army. While that film focused on the film-loving gangsters who le …Read more

The year is 2044; the vast majority of the earth has turned into a radioactive dessert wasteland. What remains is dark and wet—skylines overrun by neon and holographic billboards. As mankind begins to degrade, the development of the Automata Pilgrim …Read more

How do you make a film about Yves Saint Laurent completely lacking in style? That seems to be the raison d’être behind Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent, a film that eschews “typical” biopic conventions to explore the life of a very troubled man. As p …Read more