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That crudely brilliant metaphor (and, let’s face it, solid tip) comes from just one of their many nuanced exchanges. The daughter of Brando’s dentist, Peardon met the actor in 1977, and the pair felt an immediate, mutual sexual attraction, though it remained unconsummated (Brando had too much respect for her father and didn’t want to find another dentist). Throughout the years, Peardon served as his confidante, personal assistant, and accountant, going from long stretches of speaking only on the telephone to seeing each other every day at his mansion....

At the center of Errol Morris’s film about the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 is an investigation into the circumstances surrounding those fugitive images of torture and humiliation taken by a group of junior ranking U.S. soldiers that became headline news in May 2004 and triggered a worldwide outcry of rage and disgust. Through this decisive moment in the turning of world opinion against America’s intervention in Iraq, the film raises important moral questions about individual and collective culpability in times of war....

Anyone who’s followed Tsai Ming-liang since his feature debut Rebels of the Neon God in 1992 has sometimes needed to shake off the feeling that he plows one furrow a little too often. No other contemporary director has returned so compulsively to the same themes, the same images, the same actors, the same tragicomic tone. In Stray Dogs, the shots of Lee Kang-sheng struggling in driving rain and wind to hold up a signboard advertising expensive real-estate inevitably bring to mind the shots in Vive l’Amour (94) of Yang Kuei-mei trying to put up her “For Sale or Rent” posters under similarly adverse weather conditions....

It’s a signature beat for Tommy Lee Jones, who plays Briggs and who also directed, produced, and co-scripted The Homesman. Briggs has reason to be amused; just before Miss Cuddy found him, he’d been blasted with dynamite (for claim-jumping another man’s homestead) and left to die on the back of a horse, the rope around his neck tied to a tree branch above him. Mary Bee has cut him loose after he has promised to help her drive a wagon on a five-week trek back east to Iowa....

I am not the target audience for Andrew Niccol’s new film The Host, adapted from the novel by Stephenie Meyer of Twilight fame. For all its gestures towards sci-fi-as-political-allegory (shadowy government agencies, alien mind control, a dystopia that resembles a utopia), The Host is primarily concerned with a specific stage of adolescence—one in which sexual desire is very new, vaguely shameful, and above all deeply terrifying. It will probably have most to say to the teenage girls who up till now have been Meyers’s most loyal fan base, but there’s plenty there for the guys, too, if they see it, which seems unlikely....

The intro shows Sang-hyun (played by Song Kang-ho, star of the blockbuster The Host) giving himself to Jesus by volunteering to be injected with a trial vaccine for a disease that causes the skin to erupt in boils followed by internal bleeding and a grotesque death. The disease kills him, but unlike the other guinea pigs, he comes back to life. The rub, though, is that one of the transfusions he had has turned him into a vampire, and only fresh blood can stop the return of the boils....

—Director Michael Bay, June 18, 2009 Yes, it’s totally ironic that Bay started complaining about the critics before he’d even read the reviews. But a preemptive strike is very much in keeping with the man’s militaristic worldview, and anyways the bottom line is that Michael Bay just doesn’t care. As he loves to remind everyone, he doesn’t make movies for the critics. “Maybe those guys just don’t like having a good time,” Bay speculated when asked about unfavorable reviews....

Some men obsess over women, others over sports, and still others over plastic orc figurines. As far as mass appeal goes, the odds are against the latter group—but not enough to keep young directors Katie Graham and Andrew Matthew from making their first feature, Zero Charisma, about a clan of fantasy gamers whose love of make-believe sorcery did not come to its merciful end with puberty. Unfortunately for men of their age, such deep devotion is less endearing than bizarre, and the stakes are dangerously high....

So I wouldn’t want you to think, “What’s wrong with this guy? He likes everything.” But I’m surprised by how much I really have liked in 2013. I can recall many Decembers when I was just about able to scrape together a grudging Top 10, but the past year seems to have been unusually rich. Once again, reports about cinema’s demise—often based on the notion that narrative feature films have been rendered obsolete by long-form TV—were not just premature but ridiculous....

Shane Acker’s debut feature is based on his own Oscar-nominated, 11-minute short. As numerological cinephiles are well aware, the new film was released on the ninth day, of the ninth month, in the year 2009. Which is like the Mark of the Beast upside down, or backwards, or something… But don’t get too excited; it isn’t particularly satanic, although it does feature a malevolent robot whatsit that would make the boys at Survival Research Laboratory proud....

Yuval Adler’s delirious debut feature skips the opening credits and gets right down to bullet-riddled business. That’s a smart move, especially if you’re trying to pinpoint the film’s ethnicity (and political allegiances). The viewer is quickly immersed in the perennial Arab-Israeli conflict. Razi (Tsahi Halevi) works for the Israeli secret service. Over a two-year period he has established a deep emotional bond with informant Sanfur (Shadi Mar’i), a Palestinian teenager whose older brother Ibrahim (Hisham Suliman) is a key player in the resistance....

Second only to Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is the most widely read (or at least assigned) autobiographical graphic novel of all time. But as Art Spiegelman—or anyone who has been cursed with such success—can attest, generating a followup with even one-tenth of the critical and popular kudos is difficult to impossible. Satrapi’s first work translated into English after Persepolis, Chicken with Plums was widely derided by English-language critics as facile in terms of story, characterization, and drawing style....

To call this “the latest” film from Leos Carax is slightly misleading since that would imply some degree of regularity. (The director has made three features in the last 21 years.) To call it a “love letter to cinema”—which indeed it is—would also be mildly deceptive because Carax’s deepest affection here is directed toward a more specific form of art within cinema (acting) and, in particular, a specific artist’s love for that form....

It costs about $400 and you can be in and out in as little as 15 minutes. You can only get it at a secluded spot in a Tokyo subway station—and, no, it’s not illegal. It’s the price you pay for a meal at Sukiyabashi Jiro, a tiny restaurant consisting of a bar-like counter with 10 chairs. (Reservations are a nightmare.) When and if you do manage to secure a seat, you will select nothing: there’s no menu, no appetizers, no dessert....

Examining the perpetual adolescence that necessarily accompanies Following Your Dreams in Your Late Twenties, there are many painfully true moments in Sleepwalk with Me: going out of your way to do what you love, doing it for less money than you probably should, and having parents who don’t really understand what you’re so driven to do. However, there’s something ultimately unsatisfying about the experience of listening to stand-up comedian Mike Birbiglia tell the true story of his inability to marry his longtime girlfriend (played by the far-too-hot-to-be-with-him Lauren Ambrose)....

As its title signals, filmmaker-musician Rick Alverson’s third feature, an often unpleasant twist on arrested development on and off screen, is a self-conscious endeavor. Tim Heidecker, co-star and co-creator of the cult show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, plays a compulsively clowning thirty-something Williamsburg heir-in-waiting with sociopathic tendencies. Killing time until his father dies, he hangs out with deadpan-sarcastic friends, annoys people, and beds girls on the houseboat where he lives....

There’s indeed a lot of “tree” in Julie Bertuccelli’s bluntly titled film. They seem to factor somehow into practically every exquisitely composed frame, and certain segments appear as if filmed from their perspective. Even the title song features the lyrics “I’m just a tree.” Symbolism abounds, but most literally the title refers to the majestic fig tree that towers over the modest house in the Australian bush where the six-person O’Neill clan happily reside—that is, until the sudden death of the father leaves Dawn (Charlotte Gainsbourg) a heartbroken mess....