The Treatment, Oren Rudavsky, 2006

Rudavsky's neo-Freudian exercise is an ambitious but ultimately clumsy one, employing many of the methods native to Woody Allen's most stylized fare but precious little of that director's skill or narrative acumen.

No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007

The Coen Brothers exhibit a restraint and precision both deceptively skillful and all too uncommon in bringing Cormac McCarthy's dark tale of destructive wills to the screen.

Hei Yan Quan (I Don't Want to Sleep Alone), Ming-liang Tsai, 2006

Tsai's supremely austere film is a stirring meditation on human companionship in its most primitive, visceral forms, employing the director's trademark long takes and static compositions to great and lasting effect.

Crazy Love, Dan Klores, 2007

Klores' documentary, a no frills relation of the facts surrounding the decades-long amour fou of Burt Pugach and Linda Riss, is exeedingly flat stylistically, drawing whatever momentum it ultimately generates entirely from its sensational subject.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Sidney Lumet, 2007

Lumet's pitch black yarn of familial tumult (which employs an abject pessimism not unlike latter Woody Allen) displays not quite enough of the director's masterly constructions to overcome the rigid, neo-Rashomon style to which the film is frustratingly bound.

Cassandra's Dream, Woody Allen, 2007

Tilling much the same psychological ground as the ultimately more successful Match Point, Allen, with the thinly constructed Cassandra's Dream, trades the darkly flippant fatalism of his earlier film for a severe emotional reckoning as resolutely hopeless as anything he's yet produced.

Jindabyne, Ray Lawrence, 2006.

Lawrence never fully develops any of his myriad plotlines, rendering this supposed outback potboiler little more than a clouded mess.