Andrew O'Hehir

Chow depends way too much on jokey computer graphics that make the whole thing feel like a superhero comic, instead of athleticism or charisma or good storytelling, and that Kung Fu Hustle wears itself out long before it's over.

Old Joy is only 76 minutes long, but it has the contemplative power of Buddhist meditation. Reichardt gives us long, stoned takes of rural roads; shots of birds, insects and slugs in the spectacular Oregon rain forest; interludes with Mark's dog, Lucy. Some viewers may well be bored, or monumentally irritated, by this. I found it masterly, riveting.

It's a carefully and almost classically balanced combination of ingredients, blending dirty-faced realism (so much more damning because it judges and condemns no one) with mystical fable of quest and homecoming.

Offers an intriguing, and profoundly frustrating, view of the New York underground hero whose 1962 erotic fantasy "Flaming Creatures" paved the way for Andy Warhol, John Waters, the "queer cinema" explosion and pretty much anybody who's ever made a movie starring his friends in weird Salvation Army outfits.

Stephen King reportedly loathed the liberties Kubrick and co-writer Diane Johnson took with his story, but King's ur-villain, the emasculated husband from hell, has never been more clearly presented on-screen.

Nothing is surprising, that is, except the fact that the film has a big heart, a core of sweetness and tremendous cinematic ambition.

The result is giddy, exciting and hilarious, not quite like any artistic experience you've ever had.

You can't watch this exciting movie without rooting for little Dieter, but decoding the lessons of his ambiguous story will take a lot longer.

Reichardt is a tremendously conscientious filmmaker, and not out to torture the audience. Yes, this is a fraught and agonizing story, but the way it ends, although heartbreaking, is absolutely right.

Of course the films and the books each have to stand on their own, but Grisoni's stripped-down narrative definitely offers advantages, throwing some of the story's archetypal themes into sharper relief.

It isn't a masterpiece; there are occasional clunkers in Jelski's dialogue (adapted from a play by Wolfgang Bauer) and the acting, although superior to maybe 85 percent of Hollywood movies, is a little uneven.

Isn't the worst film in the world, but its vision of reality seems so stylized, so fake, that I came out of it wondering whether it has the slightest idea what it's talking about.

It gets much more watchable in the last half-hour.

Tyson does succeed in humanizing a deeply troubled individual who has been depicted as an almost animalistic stereotype of African-American manhood.

Varda's photography is a pure joy, but rereleasing this film four decades later, absent any commentary on the ironic distance between then and now, is a typically challenging gesture.

A prickly, twisted, mean-spirited, borderline crazy and highly seductive picture.

This well-crafted example just piles imaginary atrocities on top of real ones, and then halfheartedly claim that it means something. Well, it doesn't.

Disposable crap.

A fantastical sex farce, and a highly amusing one at that, without being the least bit momentous or memorable.

It's a complex and defiant fable of American life run just slightly off the rails, delivering all the impact of "Crash" without the phony-baloney paradoxes or brick-in-the-face message delivery.

What makes it so disappointing is that the movie is just another sub-Farrelly-brothers collection of miscellaneous gags.

It might well be the most important film you see this year, and the most important documentary of this young century.

Undeniably clever.

The whole thing is handsomely mounted, with plenty of Goya paintings and supposed observations about the ironies of history and the cyclical nature of life, etc. Forman's always been a huckster, but I never thought I'd see him waste this many good actors on a movie this bad.

Wood's film works, first and foremost, as a powerful character drama; it's not trying to teach historical or ideological lessons.

I'd rate Bubble at no better than a C-plus for artistic achievement and a D-minus for audience appeal. In one sense, it accomplishes its goals efficiently by making you feel, in less than 80 minutes, as if you've gotten permanently trapped in the dead-end, trailer-park lives of its working-class characters. I've never been so grateful to get out of a theater, turn my cellphone back on and plug myself into a $4 Starbucks latte.

Of course, the very existence of someone like Willmott -- a black university professor who can make an angry, ruthless satire about American racism with impunity -- suggests that we're still a long way from living in the CSA.

Pusher III is also, far more clearly than the earlier films, a chronicle of life in the rapidly changing ethnic mix of western Europe.

This is going to be a notorious film that young audiences will be daring themselves to see, but it's actually funnier, darker and more troubling before it turns into a carnival of repeated dismemberment.

What has perhaps been lost over the years, however, is the cultural freshness and vitality of Reed’s masterpiece...The Third Man is important not just because of its technique but because of its theme.

Perhaps understandably, these artifacts of a vastly different ideological and economic era -- have become kitsch objects, the focus of a half-horrified nostalgia, in the midst of the feverish Chinese boom.

Dark Matter has neither the technical command of an art-house film nor the manufactured intensity of a grade-B thriller, yet it's also too cheap and dirty to feel like a Hollywood-scale drama.

Tense, hilarious and totally serendipitous.

Loud, trashy, implausible and exciting, The Fast and the Furious may not have much of a brain, but it's definitely got a pulse.

An uneven but surprising movie, often outrageously funny and just as often completely flat.

The second movie by "Being John Malkovich" writer Charlie Kaufman is even weirder than his first.

Much of Devil's Rejects is absolutely hilarious, especially the brief appearance by a Gene Shalit-like film critic who explicates all the Groucho Marx references. Zombie's eye for the faux-'70s detail is perfect.

Like any classic work of children's entertainment, this best-loved of all Hollywood films almost has more to offer adult viewers; it's still easy to see why it amazed us as kids, but many of us have also grown to appreciate the wonders of its construction and its immense significance as a cultural touchstone.

There were half a dozen occasions, maybe more, when I roared out loud with laughter. This just may be a filmmaker with great things in him; this one's pretty damn good.

It's an ambitious, uneven, surprisingly talky melodrama.

The most powerful documentary I've seen all year, and one of the two or three best films ever made about an artist or musician.

Gray's peculiar accomplishment here is to turn this story into an intense emotional drama, beautifully photographed and profoundly ambiguous, suspended somewhere between realism and psychosexual allegory.

Frozen River isn't cinematically ambitious or formally adventurous, but it's built around powerful and nuanced performances by Leo, Upham and Charlie McDermott.

It's a profoundly moving story of -- yes! -- the human spirit rising above horrible circumstances, and simultaneously a work of nostalgia for the gentlemen's war that marked the end, or the beginning of the end, of Christian Europe's world domination.

While this does not strike me as the most urgent element of Standard Operating Procedure, Morris makes a persuasive case that many of the Abu Ghraib photos don't show us what we think they do, and that some of the episodes depicted were staged specifically to be photographed (and might not otherwise have occurred).

Isn't a terrible movie, but it is a tremendous disappointment.

Features an astonishing pair of lead performances and one of this year's most impressive directing debuts. If this movie isn't quite the contempo-Greek tragedy it wants to be, it's still a powerful, unforgettable meditation on fate, cultural collision and the morality of renovating a house that isn't really yours.

Unsurprisingly, the camerawork in Lila Says is spectacular.

The sharpest, most authentic portrait of Hollywood life made in the last several years. (As a movie about contemporary Los Angeles, it's approximately 617 percent better than the monumentally bogus "Shopgirl.")

Classic Rudolph: a tone of sweet-edged, slightly kooky melancholy, a terrific cast mostly left to its own devices and a few intriguing moments. Not, I'm sorry to say, a movie.

An exhaustive, exciting and ultimately exhausting history of how that white powder, and the Colombian crime lords who imported it by the hundreds of kilos, transformed the culture and economy of Miami, for good and for ill.

It sometimes produces moments of unexpected power. It also produces a bizarre and fatally uneven movie, veering from black comedy to utter stupidity to maudlin religiosity, which seems to have been made in total defiance of both narrative conventions and emotional logic.

It's a fine example of the excellence of French genre film right now: A dark tale of revenge with an inscrutable heart, ice in its veins and an electric undercurrent of eroticism, it also might be the best-photographed picture I've seen so far this year.

Bourdieu's cast is terrific throughout. Any fellow academic brats out there will especially appreciate Jacques Bonnaffé, one of the greatest French comic actors, in an imperious turn as the severe, guru-like professor.

Carell's performance as Barry, is nothing short of magnificent.

Morally ambiguous, subtly crafted, resolutely free of cliché and made with almost no money, The Great World of Sound is under-the-radar independent filmmaking in the Jarmusch-Cassavetes mode, both noble and ruthless in spirit.

I'm always grateful to practice a little affirmative action on behalf of grade-C sleaze movies with a budget you could probably locate in your sofa cushions or your dryer, and Tim McCann's digital-video opus Nowhere Man is a fine example of the species.

A very mixed bag. Despite some faint gestures in the direction of journalistic balance, it plays a lot like a two-hour infomercial for the Playboy publisher's historical importance, philosophical depth and personal greatness.

Although I have mixed feelings about The Eye, there's no question the Pangs have a natural talent for cinema. They create bright, unfussy images and work terrifically with actors.

A moving, surprising and provocative baseball flick that rises immediately to No. 1 with a bullet on my personal list.

Absolute dynamite.

It's an electrifying, suspenseful film, full of street-level political drama.

This is a conventional political documentary with a conventional view of what happened in the Buckeye State and why, but it's no less fascinating for all that.

You'll either find The Extra Man utterly charming or thoroughly mystifying, but either way Kevin Kline, playing a community-theater version of himself, with all the foppishness and Shakespearean pretension but half the talent and none of the luck, inhabits its peculiar soul.

It's a highly original film made in a familiar context, and an exciting moviegoing experience you shouldn't miss.

Pretty much everything in this high-space war yarn has been swiped from other, better movies.

It's literally difficult to believe that the person who made this picturesque, clueless, oddly misanthropic picture also made "Annie Hall" and "Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Sheds some unexpected light on the uneven and still undigested career of one of the most paradoxical artists pop culture has yet produced.

I suspect this guy can make a good movie if he learns the right lessons; he's made about half of one here. But the praise heaped upon A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is way too much, way too soon.

A barrel of laughs, this ain't. But it's a fearless high-wire act, grim and witty, confrontational and self-mocking. Its message may be dire, but Bamako is a feat of intellectual and cinematic daring that will leave your brain buzzing.

This movie may not have the highest production values you've ever seen, but it's the work of an artist, one whose view of America, history and the awkwardness of human life is generous and deep.

Trumbo is a terrific picture, a blend of interviews and archival footage and readings of Trumbo's letters and speeches.

I'm not sure Mean Machine is any worse than "The Longest Yard," but it lacks the nihilistic '70s background that lent the latter's combination of humor and brutality an air of (arguably bogus) social commentary.

A limp and dreary experience, at least after you get past its intriguing premise. It's poorly written and woodenly acted, completely formulaic and hopelessly imprisoned by both its genre and finally its form.

Utterly predictable, thoroughly sentimental and -- worse -- not all that funny. It makes your average episode of "Third Rock From the Sun" look like the edgy mutant offspring of John Waters and Ingmar Bergman.

I felt like dropping to my knees in the theater and praying for this smug, irritating fake-reality-TV show to go away, leaving these three terrific actors (and characters) in something resembling a real movie.

Maybe Joan Rivers is a high-powered engine of self-debasement who will go lower than anyone else for a laugh and a dollar, and maybe she's a skilled actress who has spent her whole life playing one. Either way, yes, she's quite something. And I'd rather appreciate her from a distance.

Operation Homecoming at first seems like a modest enterprise, a document of a few guys' paths to personal catharsis. But the sense of damaged intensity found in all these men's writing -- and found in war lit since the classical age -- builds to a powerful crescendo, and the haunting poem that ends the film, in which the ghosts of American and Iraqi dead confront each other on the banks of the Tigris, is a showstopper.

The good news is that Duchovny has an undeniable feel for this medium, and a fine rapport with actors.

Wild Side is sometimes maddening to watch, but will haunt you for days afterward.

The best thing I can say about it is that the costumes and the hambone acting keep it from being a deadly bore.

This version of the Potter saga is fun and harmless rather than memorable or imaginative. That's certainly no crime.

You get the feeling that everyone was in a good mood and the margaritas were pouring, but neither Gallo nor anybody else ever found a bottom line for this movie or its characters.

As crafty and compelling as Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's Until the Light Takes Us is, it may go too far in its understandable desire to correct the bias and prejudice of mainstream journalism.

Its characters and its nowheresville setting are uncannily realized... It's not a cartoon in any sense, but an honest-to-God movie with some fine, understated acting and a human heart.

Lake and Epstein are not in fact trying to stigmatize other women's choices about how and where to give birth. Instead, they're trying to introduce an entire universe of history and information that should inform those choices, and that the medical establishment has virtually erased from American memory.

A keenly constructed and tragic film, probably the best documentary so far to depict the Iraqi side of the current conflict.

It's an intensely crafted and genuinely memorable horror film from a striking new talent.

A dumb and sloppy movie.

The film has moments of goofy delight, some pseudo-David Lynch spookery and a couple of comic supporting turns.

Given that "Chorus Line" is almost the paradigmatic backstage story, I guess Every Little Step is a meta-backstage story, capturing the "American Idol"-scale audition process.

The resulting film directed by Scott Hicks is afflicted by terminal nostalgic drift. You come out of the theater with nothing more specific than half-pleasant memories of baseball gloves, Ferris wheels and vintage automobiles. I've had naps that were more exciting.

It's a gleeful, nitrous-oxide high.

I appreciated and admired the craftsmanship of Jellyfish more than I loved it, and I found its whimsical, magic-realist touches a bit cloying. Just as I began to appreciate that it had depths I hadn't perceived, it was over.

Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore bring dignity and Oscar-worthy performances to The Hours, a lovingly crafted meditation on death, loss and literature.

I'm sure some people will be driven mad by the deliberate ambiguities of Somersault, and by its characters' near-total inability to understand themselves or express themselves. But to me, that makes it uncannily true to life.

A tantalizing and beautiful picture made with tremendous integrity, and anchored by two marvelous performances, Isabel Coixet's The Secret Life of Words still, somehow, doesn't quite work.

This is a solid, spellbinding drama based closely on real history, which along the way offers a not-so-subtle commentary on the diverse, immigrant-rich society of contemporary France.

Grade-B blockbuster.

This is a dense and sophisticated work about mortality, materialism, madness, jealousy and pity.

The morbid and gripping war film Blessed by Fire, from the Argentine filmmaker Tristán Bauer, is well worth a look.

The Kids Are All Right ranks with the most compelling portraits of an American marriage, regardless of sexuality, in film history.

So some good acting and decent scares get entombed within too many dull postmodern iterations.

Although Josh Olson's script was originally based on a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, it has now unmistakably become a Cronenberg movie, and one of his finest.

I don't think any of it really hangs together as anything resembling drama, or that Michael is ever a remotely likable character, before or after his day of reckoning. But Adam Sandler didn't get where he is today by making movies for me and Roger Ebert to like.

You may find yourself spellbound or colossally irritated; it's a close call either way.

Only viewers with some appreciation for the odd, bloodless character of moneyed family life in New York will really understand how hilarious and deadly accurate this movie is. But then again, New York parents are the last people who will want to see it.

Unless you like boob jokes and preachy sentimentalism, this comedy isn't funny at all.

Centurion has its moments of manly cornpone camaraderie and certainly isn't blazingly original, but it offers riveting storytelling, gorgeous cinematography and scenery, loads of gore, and a politically complicated history lesson.

Lovett's film is a finely balanced and loving work of history, which never tries to sugarcoat elements of the explosion of gay sexuality three decades ago that may seem excessive or disturbing to some contemporary viewers.

This film's dithering, handsome, morally ambivalent Hamlet, is a profoundly unsatisfactory character.

The misanthropic nadir of the director's crash-and-burn career.

Ultimately Gordon's movie becomes both a hilarious story about an unbelievable collection of arrested-teenage morons and, yes, an inspiring fable of persistence and redemption. I haven't mentioned this movie's fabulous addition to the English language yet, so here it is: the verb "to chumpatize."

Appreciate it instead as an exceedingly well-crafted fairy tale, alive with eccentric, overdrawn Dickensian characters and irresistibly wholehearted sentiment, and you'll enjoy perhaps the most accomplished and satisfying work of Brooks' career as a middlebrow entertainer.

This warm, graceful and fundamentally optimistic movie snuck up on me, in the best possible way.

There is a balancing act at work here that sometimes makes the film seem too careful, but I found it a lovely and supremely moving experience, a haunting symphony in a minor key if not a knock-your-socks-off masterpiece.

The movie of the season for sci-fi and horror fans.

No one who sees it will confuse it with anything else. Fans of Gondry's DIY low-tech aesthetic, which he blends, as always, with exceptionally sophisticated animation techniques, will adore it.

Pontypool is something like a claustrophobic, locked-in-the-barn zombie movie, only almost without zombies.

Absolute Wilson changed my views of Wilson as a person tremendously, and at least gave me some useful context for his art.

An uneven but impressively ambitious picture.

Polley captures the brisk, cheerful fascism of nursing-home existence with merciless clarity; if you've visited a parent or grandparent in one of those places, you may want to laugh and cry in the same moment.

May well be the most exciting documentary of the year so far. I guess it took a British director, David Sington, to capture the story of the dozen American men who walked on the moon -- the only human beings in our species history yet to visit another celestial body.

If this actually were 1968, the pipe-smoking sophisticates of "Esquire" and "Playboy" would be proclaiming I Served the King of England a nettlesome masterpiece. For whatever good it does this film today, I'll stick my pipe in my mug and agree.

The satire doesn't go far enough.

If a movie can be fascinating and tedious at the same time, Inside Deep Throat -- which more or less depicts the America I have just described -- is that movie.

It's a perfectly cheerful time at the movies, without any hint of drama or surprise.

There's almost no such thing as an entertaining holiday trifle anymore -- the kind of casual, cheerful little picture that you might see on a whim and end up enjoying, even beyond the breadth of your modest expectations. The Perfect Holiday is an attempt, at least, to resurrect the idea of the trifle

A surprising, puzzling and in many ways brilliant work.

I enjoyed every moment of this densely plotted final chapter, and most other fans will too.

Lynch offers a fascinating view of Lynch's irascible personality (and insatiable appetite for coffee and cigarettes), and captures him discussing his formative years in Idaho and Philadelphia, as well as his 30-year involvement with Transcendental Meditation.

Thoroughly wonderful.

The guys abuse each other in what's meant to be fraternal affection but feels more like the discomfort of being stuck together in a terrible movie.

[Rec] 2 is a pell-mell, edge-of-your-seat, theme-park ride through hell, and I strongly advise you to ignore the aspersions cast upon it by snooty critics and random Internet fanboys alike. I am your friend, horror fans! I know what you need, and this is it.

Simultaneously dark and sweet, always a difficult combination to pull off. It views its characters with both archness and affection, and even as it lovingly recalls films of another era it insists that the painful awkwardness of youth is perennial.

The Dancer Upstairs, is a haunting and often beautiful work, part doomed romance and part political thriller, that demonstrates the adult command of the medium Malkovich has always demonstrated as an actor.

It's a compact and symmetrical picture with all its plot points in the right places, but I never found it convincing in the slightest.

A magical and supernally beautiful meditative drug-trip head-space picture (a full-fledged ZZM, q.v. above) for which all Euro-film masochists should rearrange their schedules. It'll be out on DVD soon, and that's great. But Garrel's films are almost never seen on the big screen, and this one's worth it.

An imaginative and largely intact retelling of this gory, troubling, uniquely sweet and uniquely dark vampire tale.

Wag the Dog is such a crisply delivered political satire, so packed full of wickedly amusing details and expertly modulated performances and with its heart so obviously in the right place that I really, truly wish I could tell you it was also a good movie.

It's an impressive film, beautifully photographed and marvelously acted. But is it more than a set of undeniably gorgeous affectations?

Change of Plans may not be earth-shattering cinema, but it's masterfully structured and edited (by Sylvie Landra) with a first-rate cast.

A tightly structured thriller with a brilliantly moody performance by Jeanne Moreau, and depending on your point of view, it's either one of the few genuine French noir films or an early entry in the New Wave.

Fundamentally, it's a well-executed formula movie, perfect for first-date couples or miscellaneous group outings.

This latest film from Iranian director Majid Majidi has the same combination of quiet contemplation, whimsy and tragedy that made his "Children of Heaven" an international smash a decade ago.

A remarkable accomplishment, a swirling, choral sea of humanity that forces us to confront that a man who does terrible things can also be a loving father who gives his infant daughter a bath.

In the end I respected 5x2 more than I loved it. As we move backward in time, the distance between audience and characters inevitably widens -- we know what's going to happen and they don't -- and I found the effect a little astringent.

You may feel lost or bewildered at times in 2046 (and I certainly did), and you may feel that Chow is suffering from self-inflicted wounds. But every new adventure with every new girl vibrates with possibility, and the filmmaking is so stunning that you may not care that this is less a movie with a plot and characters than a hermetically sealed universe of romantic regret.

Thankfully, this information arrives via a graceful and frequently humorous film that captures the idiosyncrasies of its characters and never hectors.

Director and co-writer Jonathan Glatzer handles his talented cast well, and the movie is dark, droll and sentimental in roughly the correct proportions. Worth a look.

This bloody celebration finally gives the American Revolution the epic it deserves.

There's so little sexual chemistry between the actors in this film that it seems like a kind of accomplishment. I've seen shows on C-SPAN that were hotter than this.

It's an engaging, sweet-yet-sad neighborhood slice of life, anchored by pretty cinematography and a couple of nice performances.

Fratricide marks Arslan as one of Europe's hottest young talents, drawing simultaneously on the film traditions of America, Western Europe and the Middle East.