Songs of Innocence and of Experience

A History of Violence is a bizarre, challenging film dressed up as a mainstream entertainment, a subversive work bordering on parody yet also deadly earnest. The movie confirms that David Cronenberg has grown into one of cinema’s most sophisticated, rigorous, and probing filmmakers.

You Are Forgiven

Near the end of Nathaniel Kahn’s engaging and illuminating documentary My Architect: A Son’s Journey, one of his interview subjects suggests that some people with greatness in them must be excused for being boorish, emotionally absent, or simply insufferable as human beings. They should be forgiven because they have a higher calling: God’s work.

All Alone

In toto, Errol Morris’ First Person doesn’t feel scattershot; it comes together at the end in mysterious, alchemic, and near-miraculous ways. The television series is a composition of disparate moods, tones, and colors, touching on myriad extremities of the human condition and containing multitudes, but it also has an elusive quality of oneness.

A Suffocating Density

I rarely complain that a movie is too short, but Paul Haggis’ Crash is too short. I don’t mean that I didn’t want it to end – quite the contrary. Instead, I mean that at 113 minutes it’s overcrowded, rushed, and skeletal, all to the degree that it’s only intermittently credible.