It’s no Excalibur, but there’s still plenty to enjoy from this less romanticised spin on the Arthurian legend. The film presents an interesting revisionist theory that Arthur may have been a celebrated Roman soldier based in the British Isles who successfully thwarted a Saxon invasion. The plot expunges almost every supernatural element from the myth, so don’t expect any quest for the Holy Grail. There’s no Morgan le Fay or Lady of the Lake—though there’s still a Merlin but he’s…

Shane Carruth’s alluring Upstream Color is Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the art house crowd, with hogs replacing pods and identity crisis substituting for McCarthyism. That may be an awfully crude comparison but it’s the overall gist I got as I watched this beguiling, beautiful film. One thing’s for sure, the plot’s mind-control science fiction aspect plays only second fiddle to the transcendent yet universal overarching theme of emotional resonance in people in the vein of Henry David Thoreau’s…

Contemplative cinema can be a bitch. This most elusive of art house varieties has repeatedly rendered me awestruck, but at the same time hopelessly nonplussed all at once. With that said, the sensory experience waiting in store for viewers in Post Tenebras Lux, perhaps the most idiosyncratic and abstract work to date from Mexican, transcendental filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, can be quite overwhelming and intimidating. If one is unfamiliar with the director’s influences—namely Robert Bresson, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Roberto Rossellini, and…