A convenience store clerk and... a panty thief join forces to form a crime-fighting vigilante group in Tokyo (with the aid of a hammer-wielding gentleman and Nana Komatsu). Not much to say here as it’s your typical anime-like nonsense. It’s occasionally amusing in a dumb way, and some of the fight scenes look nice. Early on, the film suggests a sort of Japanese version of James Gunn’s Super, albeit a lot less funny and interesting. Then it flaunts an anti-corporate…

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…