Brick, Rian Johnson, 2005

Refreshing, strange, and metciulously executed, Johnson's debut filters the labryinthian double talk of Hawks' Big Sleep through the wry juvenile subversion of Heathers for a winning neo noir cocktail.

Away From Her, Sarah Polley, 2006

Polley's directorial debut is nothing if not assured, a measured and unsentimental portrayal of marriage, loss, aging, and redemption with a debt to Bergman's icy domesticty.

Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places), Alain Resnais, 2006

Like many fatalistic, connectivity-driven narratives, Resnais' six-sided story proves too fragmented to afford his characters the requisite emotional space within which to develop, ultimately selling short his substance in the service of his structure.

Gas Food Lodging, Allison Anders, 1992

Anders filters the windblown blue collar populism of 'Five Easy Pieces,' 'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore,' et al into a small triumph of character that, while closely mirroring its antecedants, still manages to be one of the more earnest films of the American indie boom of the 1990s.

Don't Come Knocking, Wim Wenders, 2005.

Wenders and playwright Sam Sheppard's post-Western collaboration is somehow at once stunning and slight, not unlike Malick's simillary luxuriant and inconsequential Days of Heaven, which, like Knocking, stars Sheppard the actor.