Images, Robert Altman, 1972

Much as his Three Women anticipated Lynch's Mulholland Dr, this largely forgotten mid career head scratcher rather clumsily does the legwork for Moll's With a Friend Like Harry and a host of other Freudian psychosexual workouts.

PocketCinephile on Film Comment.com

Mutual Appreciation, Andrew Bujalski, 2005

Bujalski's supremely uneven tale of slacker/artist NYC twenty-somethings, themselves by turns witty or insufferable, at once recalls the refreshing candor of Cassavettes or the early Nouvelle Vague and the worst of American indie pretension.

Whit Stillman: An Appreciation

Zui hao de shi guang (Three Times), Hou Hsiao Hsien, 2005

Hou's experiment, in which three period-specific domestic tales are related as vingnettes, is an ambitious and intruiging one. Unfortunately, and despite the austere grace of Hou's delicate compositions, each segment feels slight and ultimately inconsequential, investing far too much in the dead-eyed stares of its principles.

Babel, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, 2006.

Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, teaming here for a third fatalistic triptych, craft a fragmented narrative that, while consistently enagaing and occasionally remarkable, fails to gather the requisite emotional traction to render any of its sub-narratives genuinely affecting.

Black Snake Moan, Craig Brewer, 2007

Brewer's scattershot Southern fable about a syphilitic nymphomaniac and her would be savior is laudable not for succeeding as a narrative (which it struggles to do), but rather for its bold faced, unflagging ambition. The film takes serious chances at every turn, straining credulity on more than a couple of occasions, but ultimately plays as a highly watchable, essentially applaudable mess.