Whimsical yearning is the prevailing mood of this feature debut from writer-director-actress Miranda July, a fanciful yet sincere tale of interconnected narratives that hopes to be about, well, Me and You and Everyone We Know. July plays a mousy video artist who pines after a department-store clerk (John Hawkes) who has shared custody of his

The campaign for Ben Affleck as a genre auteur (think Clint Eastwood) started with Gone Baby Gone and got louder with this bank-heist drama. But The Town didn’t convince me that the actor has anything particularly special to offer behind the camera. Engaging enough, with raw performances by Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner and Blake Lively,

An insider exercise, Cold Weather plays with genre conventions and audience expectations as they relate to both the mumblecore movement and detective yarns. Director Aaron Katz (Dance Party, USA) takes a handful of typical indie characters – a stuck-in-a-rut sister and her aimless, live-in brother – and throws them into a mystery plot when the

There isn’t a character, location or situation in The Station Agent that could exist anywhere other than in a screenplay. Excruciatingly earnest and hopelessly contrived, this is the story of Finbar McBride, a reclusive, train-obsessed man with dwarfism (Peter Dinklage) who inherits an abandoned, small-town depot. Surrounded by batch of quirky characters, Finbar eventually learns

The scope managed by The Lives of Others, winner of the 2007 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, is especially impressive given that the movie is about a society obsessively focused on the tiniest of details. Set in 1984 East Berlin, Lives takes us into the operations of the state security service, or Stasi, as

You can feel Terrence Malick drifting away in this follow-up to Badlands, his acclaimed debut. Narrative begins to tack a back seat to imagery and specificity is shunned in favor of vagueness. It’s an early sign of a unique sensibility devolving into mannerisms. Despite its amorphousness, Days of Heaven is built upon a simple, elemental