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Directed with a fine eye for spatial detail by John Crowley and featuring a heartrending performance by newcomer Andrew Garfield, the film captures the minute fluctuations in intimacy and temperament, the hope and hesitancy, which define the opening pages of a new life chapter. If the possibility of exposure and rejection for bygone transgressions hums queasily under even the most blissful moments, such danger only intensifies Boy A.

A catch-22: Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight demands, in a mean, raspy voice, to be taken more seriously than your average comic book movie. But when one endeavors to do just that, one is reprimanded for bullying a defenseless Pop object. Hey, guys, why so serious?

As is usually the case with such things, the critical response is more interesting (and infuriating) than the movie itself. Yet HB2 does have its share of autonomous annoyances, enough to shame those who declare it “pure cinema” into penitent silence if they even knew what they were talking about when they used the term.

The only film experience, to which I can compare The Human Condition is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15-and-a-half-hour adaptation of Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. At first the correspondences between the two films, except for those of epic length, seem to be wanting . . . and yet strangely, surprisingly, both projects share a haunted fascination with national and historical trauma that is almost entirely unique and unparalleled in cinema.

The irony of Reed's early solo career is that although his sleaze-hungry listeners liked the idea of taking a walk on the wild side they weren't prepared to face the natural consequences. And following the fall of Berlin, neither was Lou, who then released the now-unlistenable live album, Rock & Roll Animal, which reduces Reed to camp cliché.

Felon is a confused movie hobbled by its unwillingness to either fully engage its fundamental conflict or pick a side and stay there. If the results can prove unwieldy at best and disingenuous at worst, the film’s frantic vacillations between clear-eyed docudrama and potboiler thrills at least provide moments where unstable isotopes of visual and ideological information collide and spark in intriguing configurations.

Hancock is an astute title for a vehicle whose star ostensibly “owns” the Fourth of July weekend at the box office. But while the Founding Father’s surname alone speaks to the superhero’s deep-seated feeling of alienation and his noble intentions, the rest of the film is not so carefully considered.

As much as I would love to equivocate about the film’s reification of gender or its satirical barbs at the overstimulated, grotesquely obese humans who lazily populate the spaceship Axiom, a Guy Debord hell of flashing screens and corporate fascism, I find it hard to do so. Its successes are simply too overwhelming.

By her own account, The Last Mistress is Catherine Breillat’s most accessible film, the only one that doesn’t set out to break any taboos. But I have to respectfully disagree with her assertion, even though it comes from the queen of on-screen female sexuality herself.

Kino Delirium, indeed—as with all Maddin (excluding, perhaps, the blessedly brief The Heart of the World), all declarations of extremity are cozily couched in quotation marks. Is the enthusiastic embrace of each new offering partially due to the fact that one need never risk being moved? Maddin might be or might have been a wild man in his much publicized private life, but any grand passion in his films is pitched solely in the key of twee.

The "film versus digital" hand-wringing, of the object (the tangible, analog, 35mm filmstrip) opposed to the algorithmic concept (the data file, an intangible string of digits) is a monster indigenous to Southern California. The apparent contest between them is an ahistoric myth. In the grand scheme, the romance of photochemistry in moving images ended long ago.