This article appeared in the November 26, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Ranked according to the time of their last feature film release ...

Thoughtful, original film criticism delivered straight to your inbox each week.

(Bruce McDonald, Canada, 2008)Early on a frigid Valentine’s morning in some desolate village within the Ontario hinterland, talk radio DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) is assailed by an unidentified ...

(Nikita Mikhalkov, Russia, 2007)For numerically titled Russian movies of the moment, stick with 4 instead of 12. Old soul Nikita Mikhalkov’s appropriation of the 12 Angry Men template is a bloated ...

(Warner Archive, $18.95)Which side are you on? The law-and-order-era audiences for Martin Ritt’s 1970 period drama may have wanted to be told which side to take, but this story of violent underground ...

(Warner Archive, $18.95)As John Ford said to a teenage Spielberg: “Where’s the horizon?” In Philip Kaufman’s 1974 film it rises almost to the top of the frame, an unforgiving expanse governed by harsh ...

Thoughtful, original film criticism delivered straight to your inbox each week.

(Denis Villeneuve, Canada/Spain, 2013)The Portuguese title of The Double, the José Saramago novel upon which Enemy is loosely based, is O Homem Duplicado, or “The Duplicated Man.” I like “Enemy” for ...

Thoughtful, original film criticism delivered straight to your inbox each week.

(Darren Aronofsky, U.S., 2010)Early in Black Swan, artistic director Thomas Leroy concludes his personal synopsis of Swan Lake with the declaration that only in death does its troubled heroine find ...

(Takashi Miike, Japan, 2010)Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins is bound to be regarded by some as its director’s most mature film to date—mistakenly so. It’s true that particularly in its truncated, ...