Reviewer: Jeffrey M Anderson
Rating (out of 5): *****

The essayist Phillip Lopate came up with a perfect phrase for Luchino Visconti's style: operatic realism. Like his contemporaries Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, Visconti experimented with a realistic style, though it can be argued that he made only one genuine "Italian Neo-Realist" film, La Terra Trema (1948). Visconti was interested in adding personal flourishes to his films in addition to the realism and the social commentary, and his films eventually grew bigger and showier through the decades, while focusing on more personal themes.

It can be argued that 1954's Senso (1954) is the culmination of Visconti's work, the perfect collision of style, themes and look --and perhaps his greatest film.

Reviewer: Steve Dollar
Rating (out of 5): ****

One of 2010's most notable releases, and a critic's favorite at Cannes (where it won the 2009 Jury Prize), Fish Tank is a must-see for anyone addicted to what might be called "visceral realism" in cinema. Those words are suggested by the late Argentine novelist Robert Bolano, writing in an utterly different context in The Savage Detectives, but they are usefully reappropriated as a coinage for director Andrea Arnold's aesthetic. You can read Ian Christie's thoughtful essay in the booklet that accompanies the new Criterion Collection DVD, which lays out Arnold's connections with the long tradition of British kitchen-sinkism (from The Lonliness of the Long-Distance Runner through Ken Loach and Mike Leigh).

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Filmmaker Lixin Fan served as a producer on the remarkable documentary Up the Yangtze, and he continues with much that same style with his directorial debut Last Train Home. It's a fascinating, heartbreaking attempt to capture both the overwhelming hugeness and harsh growing pains of China's exploding economy, by focusing on one family.

For over a decade, the Zhangs have worked in a big city factory and returned to their rural home only once a year, for Chinese New Year. According to the film, about 130 million Chinese in the same situation make a similar journey at the same time, making it the largest human migration in history. This, of course, makes for a nightmarish journey, including hard-to-get train tickets, cramped quarters and flared tempers.

Reviewer: Glenn Heath Jr.
Rating (out of 5): ***

As far as remakes go, A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop, Zhang Yimou's colorful and ultimately punishing period piece riff on Blood Simple, might be one of the strangest in recent memory. Jumping from the dark, beguiling, and smoky Texas landscape of the original to a textured, barren mountain region of China, Zhang situates an oddly static locale where his patented surrealist color scheme can intertwine with American genre conventions. Isolated by a sea of soot-covered mountain sides and an endless teal sky, the titular noodle shop feels like its own doomed city-state, with owner Wang (Ni Dahong) as the fascist dictator, his abused wife (Yan Ni) and the three workers a citizenry of angry imbeciles waiting for chance to free them of suffering. But we get the sense that even if these messy peons were granted individualism, they'd let it blow away in the harsh winds.