Gespenster (Ghosts), Christian Petzold, 2005

Petzold's hushed mystery, not unlike Lucretcia Martel's work, has a drifter's pace, unhurried yet unsettled, uneasy and untethered. While spare in its execution and lean in scope, the film is nonetheless engaging and provoking for nearly all of its 85 minutes.

The Eclipse, Conor McPherson, 2009

The Eclipse is a small, beautiful, and promising, if ultimately flawed, film. Despite a near-endless series of achingly beautiful and haunting compositions, director McPherson never quite reconciles his film's solid dramatic framework with its sudden and oddly pitched horror conceits.

Pocket Cinephile @ Film Comment Online

The folks over at Film Comment have once again included PC in the reader's poll excerpts, this time for our take on Public Enemies.

The Crazies, Breck Eisner, 2010

The unlikely Romero renaissance continues with this ably mounted tale of local apocalypse, executive produced by the legendary director and based on his 1973 film of the same name. Following in relatively close succession from Zack Snyder's solid Dawn of the Dead remake and Romero's continued (and increasingly pointed) series of zombie films, the present climate seems particularly tuned to political allegory of the undead variety.

Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese, 2010

While it moves along serviceably as a Hitchcockian mystery for its first hour plus, Scorsese's ill-formed ghost story devolves into a messy, juvenile fantasia reminiscent of M. Knight Shyamalan's most simpleton work.

Extract, Mike Judge, 2009

Judge's latest, alternately a stoner comedy or an undernourished dramedy, is the director's least interesting work, lacking both the zeitgeist tapping slacker wit of Office Space and the bald (if flawed) ambition of Idiocracy.