Jeff Nichols is the sort of low-stakes American filmmaker with admirable indie roots and a strong enough gift for capturing lived-in locale and regional dialect to critically buoy his painfully pedestrian scripts and sense of storytelling. All of the impressive acting he can assemble matters little when Nichols is continually a screenwriter who spends little time fleshing characters from the inside out and lots of time pulling their intentions out of external oven-ready dramatics that you could set a watch…

Beyond expected moments of dippy humor, John Ford’s final black-and-white film and first “B-picture” (it played undeservedly second on a double-bill) bears little resemblance to a traditional Ford. Pervaded by pessimism, paced languidly, and operating within a morally gray area matching its muted photography and deliberate avoidance of bright Monument Valley location shooting, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance plays like an Otto Preminger Western. It's not just because of the ruptures in Jimmy Stewart’s character's professional composure, but how…

Andrea Arnold’s preoccupations with violent obsession and British class conflict have a lot in common with literature's infamous romance between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Brontë’s oft-adapted and enduring (un)classical novel is audaciously re-imagined in Arnold’s hands to become entirely her own and fully consistent with her minimal and raw style. Her cinematography has always used academy ratio, this time forcing a radical reorientation of classic literary adaptation from the nostalgic and pastoral to the contemporary and proximate. Nothing is ornate…

On its captivating, pastel-hued surface, Summer Hours is a film deceptively about fine art as mere inherited asset. But just underneath, it’s more about the generational, sentimental worth embellishing such objects with their true beauty. Olivier Assayas gently oscillates between these two notions within the context of a French family gone global whose matriarch has reached the end of her contented life. Her self-intuited yet sudden passing forces her once cherished estate of priceless 19th/20th century European art into the…