Control, Anton Corbijn, 2007

Corbijn's photographer's instincts serve him well in creating a stark and stunning visual work with this Ian Curtis biopic. Unfortunately, his narrative sense hews too close to biopic conventions and gives the film a flatness that undermines its aesthetic nuance.

Funny Games, Michael Haneke, 2007

Haneke's shot-for-shot Engligh language remake of his own domestic terror largely maintains the brutal intensity of the original. Its mimickry, for instance, of the older film's centerpiece 10 minute take, which radiates utter despair, is no less devastating here. The question remains, however, why Haneke would undertake such a literal translation of his own work?

Boarding Gate, Olivier Assayas, 2007

Assayas' hyper-stylish eurotrash exercise is underwritten, over performed, and, for a movie shot through with sex and violence, ultimately and utterly limp.

La Fille coupée en deux (Girl Cut in Two), Claude Chabrol, 2007

Chabrol's latest, which sharply recalls Woody Allen's recent dark explorations, loses focus in its middle act but nonetheless stands up as another satisfying entry in the French master's protean filmography.

Une vieille maîtresse (The Last Mistress), Catharine Breillat, 2007

Breillat's film, following in relatively close succession from Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterly and Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais, confirms a recent and quite specific trend in French cinema towards lavish period epics of forbidden love. Much as with those films, Breillat creates a patient work that allows for her characters' indiscretions (notably punctated by the director's trademark carnality) to unspool in an artfully and fully rendered world.

He Walked by Night, Alfred Werker / Anthony Mann (uncredited), 1948

By all reports largely helmed by Mann, this otherwise pedestrian docu-noir indeed bears the hallmarks of the great director in some inspired flourishes, particularly a breathtaking final sequence that rivals in its precision and elegance the iconic closing shootout of his Winchester '73.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Marina Zenovich, 2008

Zenovich marshalls an impressive array of archival footage and freshly staged interviews to craft a strikingly efficient relation of Polanski's notorious convicton (and subsequent flight) for unlawful sex with a minor. The tragic, and in many ways heartbreaking series of events, though, remains no less unsettling for this clarity.

La Terza Madre (The Mother of Tears) Dario Argento, 2007

With this long delayed conclusion to his Three Mothers trilogy, Argento trades the hyper-stylized flourishes that buoyed Suspiria and Inferno for a wash of stomach turning gore and effective yet commonplace suspense.

My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin, 2007

Exploring much the same hockey and hairdressers psycho-biographical territory as his 2003 film Cowards Bend the Knee, Maddin's docu-essay-fantasia is typically entrancing, if a bit more straight-laced, relatively speaking, than his usual fare.

Zwartboek (Black Book), Paul Verhoeven. 2006

Owing to his blockbuster pedigree, Verhoeven's lavish epic of WWII Resistance and espionage is at once exceeding well-mounted and decidely reductionist and simpleton.