CINEPHILIA, MEANING “love of cinema,” has been well served by the extraordinary range of good films released so far this year. As usual, it’s not the big hits or consensus favorites that make a film-lover want to go back to the movies; it’s the films most critics ignore first time around (but that you might catch belatedly on DVD) that confirm why movies matter. Read more Read it in print

Michael Jackson made the best cinema of 1991 with the music video “Black or White,” which was easily superior to any short or feature-length film released to the public that year. To find a comparable example of visual montage, you have to go back to one of Alain Resnais’ time-shifting études, the marriage scherzo in Citizen Kane or the chase-trial fugue in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. I combine musical and filmic values because “Black or White” ’s visionary approach to egalitarianism—ending with a still-miraculous sequence of genetic morphing and counter-balanced by a solo dance of frustration and rage—was a singular feat: Its constant rhythm was accompanied by a stacking-up of thrilling, provocative ideas. Read more

ALTHOUGH BRIAN DE PALMA lost his artistic bearings on the anti–Iraq War bandwagon, director Kathryn Bigelow found her perfect subject.That’s the difference between De Palma’s confused, preachy Redacted and Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Bigelow (working from a script by Mark Boal) stays focused on the personalities of soldiers during Bravo company’s last 39 days of rotation in 2004 Baghdad. Read more

WHY WASTE SPLEEN on Michael Bay? He’s a real visionary—perhaps mindless in some ways (he’s never bothered filming a good script), but Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is more proof he has a great eye for scale and a gift for visceral amazement. Bay’s ability to shoot spectacle makes the Ridley-Tony-Jake Scott family look like cavemen. Read more Read it in print

Judd Apatow’s raunchiness may go too far but it never goes deep. That’s the problem with Year One, which starts out spoofing prehistory but quickly veers into ridiculing religion. Its prehistoric and Biblical jokes don’t necessarily go together, but the mash-up assumes a derisive attitude toward religious historical belief no different than Apatow’s childish, self-serving, unprincipled approach to sex. Read more

Ten years after his great expectoration of bile in Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen comes up with Whatever Works—the most shameless, cynically titled Hollywood con job since the days of Billy Wilder. Having lost his originality, Allen here reboots the acerbic Deconstructing Harry by mixing in the rancid, misogynistic Mighty Aphrodite. It’s another of his old-goat/younggirl fantasies, but with TV’s Larry David in the know-it-all lecher role and Evan Rachel Wood as the bimbo sexpot. Only this time, Allen’s wet dream is primarily bile, adding little wit and then an avalanche of sentimentality. Read more Read it in print

The U.S. premiere of Alain Cavalier’s 1962 Le Combat dans L’ile at Film Forum (screening through June 18) resurrects the captivating images of Romy Schneider and Jean-Louis Trintignant, both young, vibrant and emotionally complex in ways actors rarely are anymore.Their classic glamour came back to mind while I watched The Proposal and The Hangover—contemporary movies that use actors in ways that disrespect the audience’s need for big- screen identification. Read more

TONY SCOTT’S FILMS start from the premise that Americans are bored—and secretly resentful—of their lives. He specializes in violent, fragmented spectacle that feeds this boredom by drowning out subtlety and complexity. Yet, he’s the good Scott; brother Ridley is merely a pretentious windowdresser of big themes. Tony’s best movies (Spy Games, Domino) match hyperactive style to intricate storytelling, which suggests he could probably make a good film if he shook the super-cynical hucksterism out of his system. Read more Read it in print

SOMETHING’S WRONG WHEN a Francis Coppola movie inspires equal dread and anticipation. Coppola doesn’t just defy popular appeal, he snubs it. His Tetro is not about the discovery of Tetracycline antibiotics—and that’s the problem. Coppola creeps around his true subject: masculine camaraderie as learned through psychic and genetic history (c.f. his best films, The Godfather Trilogy,Gardens of Stone,The Rainmaker and the “boy movies” The Outsiders and Rumble Fish). Instead, Tetro is a meandering family saga where young Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich) finds estranged brother (Vincent Gallo) hiding out in Argentina, shortening the family name Tetrocini. Read more

THIS YEAR’S EDITION of NewFest offers its diverse LGBT selection in the aftermath of Gus Van Sant’s Milk—the gay-themed mainstream movie that has done nothing to change popular understanding of gay cinema.The proof? NewFest is presenting the U.S. premiere of Raging Sun,Raging Sky, the latest film by Julián Hernández on June 11.It should be the summer’s major film culture event. Milk was about mainstream culture congratulating itself. NewFest’s Raging Sun, Raging Sky showing is about gay cinema’s ongoing struggle for acceptance. Read more