Drumroll, please: critics Bilge Ebiri and Amy Taubin join for a real-time countdown of the films topping our year-end critics ...

This article appeared in the November 26, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

It’s a sign of how quickly things change in the movie business, but there was no such thing conceptually as a “reboot.” That idea didn’t exist when I came to look at Batman. That’s new terminology.

An example: a brilliant Brazilian director and friend, João Jardim, made a beautiful documentary in 2001 called Window of the Soul that he brought to me for the mix. The first scene is a close-up of a ...

(Darren Aronofsky, U.S., 2010)Early in Black Swan, artistic director Thomas Leroy concludes his personal synopsis of Swan Lake with the declaration that only in death does its troubled heroine find ...

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(Denis Villeneuve, Canada/Spain, 2013)The Portuguese title of The Double, the José Saramago novel upon which Enemy is loosely based, is O Homem Duplicado, or “The Duplicated Man.” I like “Enemy” for ...

(Yojiro Takita, Japan, 2008)The members of the Academy who gave Departures its Oscar must be feeling their mortality. The movie tells the story of a second-rate cellist who loses his job when an ...

By Grady Hendrix in the March-April 2020 Issue P erpetually out of step, Shinya Tsukamoto goes where his gut leads him, handcrafting freaked-out sci-fi nightmares from 8mm, 16mm, 35mm, digital video, ...

Ranked according to the time of their last feature film release ...

(Bruce McDonald, Canada, 2008)Early on a frigid Valentine’s morning in some desolate village within the Ontario hinterland, talk radio DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) is assailed by an unidentified ...

(Takashi Miike, Japan, 2010)Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins is bound to be regarded by some as its director’s most mature film to date—mistakenly so. It’s true that particularly in its truncated, ...