Brand Upon the Brain, Guy Maddin, 2006

Maddin, again exhibiting the formidable aesthetic voice that is most singularly his, here crafts a bewitching bio-horror-fantasy of zombie orphans, mad scientists, and adolescent sexual ambiguity.

In Bruges, Martin McDonagh, 2008

McDonagh's exceedingly dark hit man genre exercise traffics in odd, stuttering rhythms. As such, the film's success derives from its counter-intuitive strangeness.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen, 2008

The tangled, cynical fatalism of Woody Allen's recent oeuvre is again present in this effortless tale of amour fou, but is here shot through with the director's signature wit and comedic machinations.

Transsiberian, Brad Anderson, 2008

Anderson's Eastern Bloc yarn is a classic thriller, leanly scripted and remarkably taut. If the characters are somewhat thin and underwritten, such a choice only serves to underscore the film's conscious reverence for plainly engineered thrillers past.

Frozen River, Courtney Hunt, 2008

Hunt's blue collar smuggler's yarn is sturdily constructed and suitably tense, if somewhat simpleton and telegraphed.

Brideshead Revisited, Julian Jarrold, 2008

Jarrold's telling of Evelyn Waugh's upstairs/downstairs saga of forbidden love(s) is at once sumptuous and vacuous, its many narrative strands flatly failing to stand up to the grandness of their collective scope.

In Search of a Midnight Kiss, Alex Holdridge, 2008

Following closely the blueprint of Richard Linklater's far superior films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Holdridge is adept at engineering scenarios for his sad sack protagonists to pontificate and, ultimately, canoodle. Unfortunately, his characters are hardly as watchable or endearing as such a film demands them be.