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Sometimes a single movie can elucidate and illuminate a country's or region's national character better than a dozen history courses.

At the same time, the viewer must have the humility to realize they will never understand. Not really.

Elem Klimov's World War II horror phantasmagoria COME AND SEE stuns and shocks. It pummels and provokes. It speaks the truth in the blasphemous tongue of experience.

It follows naive if well meaning young Belarusian teen Flyora (a towering performance by Aleksei Kravchenko) as he leaves his mother and sisters to join the partisan resistance movement against the invading Nazis. 

He wants to be part of the war effort. He is. But mostly as a horrified witness to the depravity and unconscionable primal horror of man at war.

The movie is a kind of picaresque tale in hell. Florya …

Just when you thought the air might be going out of the balloon of cinema, a moviemaker like Japan's Junta Yamaguchi reminds you it's all about the idea.

Shot on smart phones, Sean Baker TANGERINE-style, BEYOND THE INFINITE TWO MINUTES is a sci-fi comedy about a single cafe owner who discovers the desktop computer in his apartment above his cafe has somehow become able to show the future via the desktop computer downstairs in his cafe. . .two minutes from now.

When his Friends realize what's going on, they extend the loop by having the computers face each other. The entire movie takes place in one location with the characters shuttling upstairs and downstairs and struggling with whether this is a great gift or a pair of handcuffs robbing them of any free will decision.

This is another of the great high concept-low budget sci-fi movies we've been seeing for the last 20 years or so. A genre that now includes amazing movies like …

The miracle of Mike Leigh movies is how he and his team of collaborators refuse to lean into the expected.

Every time you worry that a scene will go a certain way, the Leigh ensemble manages a way to unpredictability. They create a bridge of empathy and openness in this rigor and we, the audience, cross it.

ANOTHER YEAR follows a stable, happy older couple (Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent) across four seasons as they open their home to their son, family, and friends and the associated problems they bring in; Mary (an otherworldly brilliant Lesley Manville) is such a hot mess she soon becomes the …

Italian master Francesco Rosi, along with German master Rainer Werner Fassbinder, may be one of the most astute minds ever to tackle political cinema.

A former journalist, Rosi makes hard-nosed, unsentimental, brutal pictures (SALVATORE GIULIANO, HANDS OVER THE CITY, THE MATTEI AFFAIR) about how power and politics really work. His movies are textbooks for anyone who wants to tackle political subjects in their art.

ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES follows Inspector Rogas (a wonderfully grim and determined Lino Ventura, famous tough guy French movie star who actually was an Italian so this movie is a kind of homecoming) as he investigates the murders of noted Italian judges.

At first, Rogas comes to believe the murders are…

t's a piercing realization to see a neorealist Brazilian movie like the classic PIXOTE and realize that movies like IT, not movies like SALO or THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, are the movies that are truly hard to watch.

Movies made, at least in part, to provoke, shock, scandalize because of their outre subject matter, are still often aestheticized enough to give us distance. A middle school edgelord can watch them and boast.

Movies like PIXOTE are existential confrontations with no answers. They shake us to our core. They break our feet of clay.

PIXOTE based on the novel "A Infância dos Mortos" by José Louzeiro follows our titular 10 year old from corrupt abusive reform school to the mean streets of Sao Paolo and Rio De Janeiro. Things only get worse. Pixote does his best to …

Sam Peckinpah has a soft and familial side. And it's on full display in this 1972 modern cowboy movie as a family reunites in Prescott, Arizona during a rodeo.

It always seems to be the case that some of the directors of our most violent movies turn out to long or yearn for a kind of familial peace. Just as our funniest comedians often suffer from deep depression. Or our darkest moviemakers turn out to be some of our biggest optimists.

The Yin Yang. The cosmic balance.

What's so funny about watching JUNIOR BONNER is watching how unabashed Peckinpah is in …

Fede Alvarez's DON'T BREATHE is a nifty trick of a movie.

Three young thieves-Rocky, a young woman from a dysfunctional family, Alex, the conflicted boy who adores her, and Money, Rocky's careless and callous boyfriend-find themselves trapped in the decaying Detroit home of the Blind War Veteran they're trying to rob.

They've heard he has half a million insurance money from the manslaughter death of his daughter stashed somewhere. Why not rob him and start a new life?

This begs the question-who are we supposed to be rooting for here? 

Before the night is over, there will be some twists and turns that will make that question …

This writer is getting a second chance to catch up on some of the great animated and children's movies of the last twenty years through movie nights with his kids.

Because movie selection rotates, this writer got to pick and convinced his children to watch 2014's THE LEGO MOVIE.

Co-writers/directors Phil Lord & Christopher Miller have been carving out a pop culture comic slice of the pie since their breakout animated adaptation of CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS in 2009.

Since then they've made two great live-action comedies …

President Richard M. Nixon and the Watergate scandal that lead to Nixon's resignation are fifty years behind us. 

Yet their echoes and rhymes bounce around American political hallways to this day.

Robert Altman's deep cut 1984 movie imagines a disgraced, resigned Nixon getting drunk in his study, half-recording, half-ranting a memoir/apology of his tortured life into a microphone to an unseen Cuban assistant named "Roberto".

All the while a gun sits on Nixon's desk.

Nixon is played by Philip Baker Hall (who many of us know better from his work with Paul Thomas Anderson and on TV) with a theatrical ferocity.

The "bigness" of the performance is…

THAT WAS A LOT: Ryan Coogler's SINNERS (wri & dir by Ryan Coogler, w/ Michael B. Jordan, Warner Brothers, 137mns, USA)

Ryan Coogler's SINNERS is a movie made by someone ready to shoot their shot.

Not that FRUITVALE STATION, CREED, or BLACK PANTHER 1 & 2 weren't movies made by a moviemaker giving it their all but SINNERS is made by a moviemaker who has the power to make exactly the movie they want to make. And makes it. 

It works. Bottom line. And it's audacious. Which is always inspiring in this age of a lot of major studio productions that are underwhelming.

It also feels like a mess. And it may…

It is sometimes (wrongly) accepted wisdom that Kurosawa's true auteur career didn't begin until DRUNKEN ANGEL, his 1948 movie which he himself said was the first one in which he had total control. Before that, it is true that Kurosawa had to answer to war time censors and studio heads. Many describe this as an apprenticeship period where Kurosawa bided his time and sharpened his craft. 

And while DRUNKEN ANGEL certainly is his strongest movie up to that time, there are several movies Kurosawa made between 1943-1948 that feel every fiber a Kurosawa movie. If there's interference or tampering, it's hard to see it now eighty years later. 

THE MEN WHO TREAD ON THE TIGER'S TALE feels like a brilliant rough draft for …

Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA, Robert Altman's 3 WOMEN, and David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE may be three of the best examples of the "female driven psychological character study" sub-genre.

Bergman's PERSONA feels like it strongly influenced the other two. And Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE feels indebted to the two that came before.

Altman, the 70's inconoclast director of NASHVILLE, THE LONG GOODBYE, MCCABE & MRS. MILLER, who would later have a 90's resurgence with THE PLAYER, SHORT CUTS, etc, tried his hand at this type of movie before.

His 1972 IMAGES (a movie this writer quite likes for all its self-seriousness) is a kind of REPULSION by way of PERSONA and doesn't fully land despite consistent flashes of cleverness throughout.

3 WOMEN doesn't fully land either. . .until it does. It's one of those movies where …