Mammoth, Lukas Moodysson, 2009

As if taking faulty cues from the overly calibrated plotting of Guillermo Arriaga, the typically sure-handed Moodysson here draws too many neat, simplistic lines between his myriad narrative strands. Complicating matters further are the lifeless, precious characters charged with navigating the director's dead-eyed scenarios.

Antichrist, Lars von Trier, 2009

Antichrist is a veritable black hole of psychological tumult and visceral eruption oddly married with cabin-in-the-wood slasher film conventions. Lars von Trier's characters, however, are too narrowly drawn to bear the weight of such ravenous activity. The director's own staging of Euripides' Medea is a far more fully realized portrait of unfettered, vindictive angst.

Trash Humpers, Harmony Korine, 2009

Korine's is a baldly experimental, near-confrontational primal scream of a film. The director commits wholly to a primitivist film-as-found-object conceptualization, relentlessly suppressing the notion of artifice throughout, and, in turn, producing a highly artful and expressive work.

Das weisse Band (The White Ribbon), Michael Haneke, 2009

Haneke turns a sharply critical (and sumptuous) eye on pre-War Germany in this deliberately paced cultural indictment. The director's austere relation of severe, near-Calvinist village life is exacting, but at times undermines his film's narrative tension in its coldness.

The Roost (with Prey), Ti West, 2005

West's first feature length foray into horror, The Roost has an undernourished narrative and is noticeably hamstrung budgetarily, but nonetheless showcases the director's deft handling of real-world thrills. Likewise, West's student film Prey (included in The Roost's DVD issue) is a more than capable execution of a single, terror-filled sequence.