In this case, familiarity will not necessarily breed contempt so much as pleasure, and a lot of that has to do with, yup, casting. Pierce Brosnan plays the Biloxi-based mob operative Charlie Swift, and he puts on a Southern accent broader than the Mississippi River at its widest, and he makes you love it. At

“Perpetrator” “Perpetrator” is a singular work from an utterly singular filmmaker. Jennifer Reeder’s visionary films take place in a deadpan dimension populated with monstrous femmes and vibrate on a frequency that’s unlike anything else. Either you can tune into it, or you can’t. (To paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in that one movie, though, it’d be a

Sometimes the movie’s tendency of favoring movie clips and bombastic soundbites doesn’t really matter since the juxtaposition of so many clashing personalities still creates its own lunatic harmony. In the movie’s most disarming and logic-frying transition, we jump from fellow New German Cinema filmmaker Wim Wenders, who seems to be on to something when he

Nobody speaks a full word of written dialogue. Characters grunt when they crash against a wall, get punched in the gut, or are struck by a car. They gasp or scream when they’re shot or tortured. You hear sound effects and soundscape noises throughout, such as wind, rain, footsteps, and traffic. There are pop songs with lyrics on the soundtrack, interspersed with

The Chopin Competition takes place over 21 grueling days, and Piatek effectively compresses the stress and stamina of those hours into about 90 minutes of runtime. The pacing of “Pianoforte” hops and skips between quick cutting montages of the pianists in performance, their fingers expertly and vigorously striking keys, music thunderously occupying the sequences, and

And here’s where things get tricky. The launch maps rule. Certainly more than the launch maps for the last two releases. They’re classics for a reason, and the biggest problem with the multiplayer offerings in recent “CoD” editions has been map design. So, yes, it’s all overly familiar and over-priced, but it’s also a better

Lenny’s relationship with Felicia was complicated, yet “Maestro” rarely digs far beyond the surface. The two share a bubbly, infectious chemistry as they meet and fall in love—and Cooper the director wisely lets these scenes, and later the couple’s arguments, play out in long, single takes. The affection between them feels genuine, and Mulligan is

“Against the Tide,” a documentary directed by Sarvnik Kaur, depicts environmental disaster with an intimate lens. It begins with a beginning: a ritual for a newborn child, in which the baby is oiled and instructed that he is a Koli and that he fears nothing. Kaur shoots and edits this movie like a fiction film;

Isolated and out of place, Benny finds companionship in the form of his cousin Dawn (Charley Hogan), whom everyone calls Frybread Face because “it’s round and greasy.” At first, their relationship is combative: “Fry” rolls her eyes at the useless Benny, who doesn’t know anything about herding sheep and doesn’t speak a word of Navajo.

You shouldn’t focus on the plot or its preposterous details when watching “Cypher.” Watch it on your Roku or tablet at home, where you’re not as likely to care about the obvious stylistic clash between the movie’s collage of motion-sickness-inducing handheld camera footage and its hyper-stylized title cards, which divide the movie into chapters with