Directed by: David Mamet Released: 1987 Country: USA This movie is awake. I have seen so many films that were sleepwalking through the debris of old plots and second-hand ideas that it was a constant pleasure to watch “House of Games,” a movie about con men that succeeds not only...

Directed by: Gaspar Noé Released: 2009 Country: France A very, very loose and highly symbolic adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void unfolds in four major parts. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is a young, drug-dealing American in Tokyo with an unusually...

Directed by: Jonathan Demme Released: 2006 Country: USA “Old man, take a look at my life/I’m a lot like you were . . . ” The young hippie who wrote those lines turned 60 last November. Few popular singers have been as mindful of their legacy as Neil Young, nor as...

Directed by: Amir Bar-Lev Released: 2007 Country: USA An irresistible subject for a documentary: The charming celebrity of Marla Olmstead, an artist from upstate New York whose talent for impossibly confident abstractions triggered a media frenzy and five-figure price tags. Unveiled at a...

Directed by: Jeffrey Blitz Released: 2002 Country: USA It is useful to be a good speller, up to a point. After that point, you’re just showing off. The eight contestants in “Spellbound,” who have come from all over the country to compete in the 1999 National Spelling Bee,...

Directed by: Cristian Mungiu Released: 2007 Country: Romania Gabita is perhaps the most clueless young woman ever to have the lead in a movie about her own pregnancy. Even if you think “Juno” was way too clever, two hours with Gabita will have you buying a ticket to Bucharest for...

Directed by: Andrew Jarecki Released: 2003 Country: USA After the Sundance screenings of “Capturing the Friedmans,” its director, Andrew Jarecki, was asked point-blank if he thought Arnold Friedman was guilty of child molestation. He said he didn’t know. Neither does the...

Directed by: Kevin Macdonald Released: 2003 Country: United Kingdom For someone who fervently believes he will never climb a mountain, I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about mountain-climbing. In my dreams my rope has come lose and I am falling, falling, and all the way down I...

Directed by: Chris Smith Released: 1999 Country: USA If you’ve ever wanted to make a movie, see “American Movie,” a documentary about someone who wants to make a movie more than you do. Mark Borchardt may want to make a movie more than anyone else in the world. He is a...

Directed by: Marcel Ophüls Released: 1969 Country: Germany “Was there anything other than courage in the Resistance?” a young girl in 1969 asks her father, a pharmacist in the French town of Clermont-Ferrand. “Of course,” he replies. “The two emotions I...

Directed by: Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini Released: 2003 Country: USA One of the closing shots of “American Splendor” shows a retirement party for Harvey Pekar, who is ending his career as a file clerk at a V.A. hospital in Cleveland. This is a real party, and it is...

Directed by: Jacques Rivette Released: 1991 Country: France Frenhofer, the great artist, has painted nothing for ten years. He threw down his brush in the middle of painting what was intended as his masterpiece, to be titled “Le Belle Noiseuse,” or “the beautiful...