J. Hoberman

Since he's (Spielberg) a director largely incapable of understatement, War Horse is served up with a self-aggrandizing, distracting surplus of Norman Rockwell backlighting, aerial landscape shots designed to out-swoop David Lean's, and an aggravated sense of doggone wonderment amplified by the director's dependence on John Williams's bombastic score.

The remake is an altogether leaner, meaner, more high-powered, stylish, and deftly directed affair, though similarly hampered by a too-long narrative fuse.

Another creature of need, if the temperamental opposite of self-contained Brandon, Sissy is equally prepared to push her way into his life or push herself in front of a subway. She's also a performer - and Mulligan's blowsy desperation makes for the movie's best turn.

It left me cold. The pathos is as unearned as the protagonist's privilege.

The Rum Diary could use a shot of the mania that fueled Terry Gilliam's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." As deadpan as he is, Depp could use a crazed Benicio Del Toro to complement his cool.

The movie turns terminally wearisome and even anti-climactic with the triumph of the brain-lodging "Je T'aime" (which, alone among the movie's numbers, is heard in its original version) and Gainsbourg's descent into alcoholic dissolution.

What it lacks, perhaps unavoidably, is a sense of the cosmic Now; the movie recovers, without exactly illuminating, a "long, strange trip" that seems all the stranger as it recedes into the past.

Sophie's (or is it July's?) coy narcissism becomes a criticism of itself, and her "sadness" turns into something truly sad. In short, I have seen The Future and it's heartbreaking.

Everything Must Go, which is ostensibly set in Scottsdale, Arizona, has a generic resemblance to broken-heartland movies like "Up in the Air" and "Cedar Rapids," although this suburban meltdown is more depressed than either.

Perhaps that's the problem. Mel's character isn't on Prozac, but the movie is-a succession of bland camera setups, cued to a highly conventional score. Would that the direction were half as nutty as the script or as wacked-out as its star!

For better or worse, the movie does for Chauvet what Baudrillard complained an on-site replica did for Lascaux-render the real thing false.

The so-called Plan is derailed!

A mild comedy of embarrassment.

Steadily building in intensity from sluggish interest to mild excitement, Cold Weather is a slight movie with a long, circuitous fuse-and that's the point.

His (Weir) hardship drama is stolidly old-fashioned, more extreme travelogue than exercise in visceral horror.

The Green Hornet provides a half-hour's worth of mildly entertaining travesty before collapsing in a clamor of bombastic action sequences and lame wisecracks.

In the grand finale, Abramoff fantasizes about using a Senate hearing to blow the whistle on the entire corrupt establishment. His rant offers a clue to how this otherwise pointlessly manic movie might have honed its political edge.

It plays as a "Rocky"-fied fairy tale for our time: Consigned to Palookaville, a sweet, unassuming boxer with more heart than brains steps up-all the way to the top of the world.

The movie's bold visual and psychological patterns, as well as its heavy immersion in the natural world, imbue Malli's journey with a folktale quality.

Not for nothing is this movie opening on Good Friday. It can be as boring as church. There's no snake in Bettie's Eden and no narrative to Harron's movie. It's more of an altar piece: Our Lady of the Garter Belt, the Fastidious Bettie Page.

The movie is a drama of faith, a Tibetan monk's search for the reincarnation of his beloved master Lama Konchog.

That Reconstruction is even remotely involving is due to the quality of its acting.

Shot in a style that might be termed Americana gravitas, September Dawn has the ham-fisted lyricism of political ads and pharmaceutical commercials. The schematic script is further burdened with heavy ironies and hackneyed dialogue.

A jaggedly impressionistic reverie.

Although a marked improvement over Algrant's nightmarishly whimsical debut, "Naked in New York," People I Know is perfumed less by the sweet smell of success than the musty aroma of the Miramax vault.

Angelina Jolie is the major alienation effect in A Mighty Heart, although she's not the only one. The hectic pizzazz with which hired gun Michael Winterbottom directs this tale of terrifying terrorism is another distraction.

As an action flick, Shaft is clumsy out of the gate and overfond of hurtling stuntmen through windows.

Ravenous loses resonance as it proceeds.

Single-dad sitcom is not Sir Ridley's forte but, anachronistically evoking the ring-a-ding-ding ambience of "Auto Focus" and "Catch Me If You Can," his mise-en-scène is as impeccable as Roy's pad.

An effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer.

A movie of cornball sentiment, humorously anachronistic dialogue, and expensive Colonial Williamsburg sets.

A philosophical gross-out comedy rudely presented from the perspective of a sullen, sexually curious 14-year-old.

A movie of many stupid pet tricks and one basic joke: As in the original, Elle's intelligence is consistently -- if understandably -- underestimated.

X-ploitative though it may be, the spectacle of a man beaten and tortured to death seeks to be an object of contemplation. Serious questions are raised.

Never hits a note of high hilarity.

Despite its cheesy blood and thunder and ludicrous "Sunshine Makers" metaphysics, this is the funniest apocalypse I've seen since George Romero's "Land of the Dead."

However cool, Smith's lovable braggadocio and Lee's practiced deadpan don't exactly make them Laurel and Hardy.

About halfway through I began to imagine it as it might have been directed by Douglas Sirk as a vehicle for Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson.

A movie as laconic as its hero, Ghost Dog is nonetheless diminished by its most un-Zen-like attachment to this underlying sentimentality.

Blown opportunity.

Halfway through, De Palma literally explodes his narrative to orchestrate a superb deep-space float-opera replete with runaway modules, high-tech lassos, dramatic self-sacrifice, and, in the most surprising maneuver, a montage-driven modicum of actual suspense.

Evocative but ahistorical.

Totally convincing in a physically demanding role, Collette carries the movie on her shoulders -- and that weight is what it's all about.

Visually more coherent than "American Beauty," but despite the burnished mahogany of Conrad Hall's cinematography, Mendes still doesn't quite know how to fill a frame. Like the Hanks character, he's a slow study: The action is stilted and the tabloid energy embalmed.

Openly gay and overwhelmingly glum.

Although not as radically defamiliarizing as Jim Jarmusch's avant-western "Dead Man," Jesse James has the feel of an attic ransacked for abandoned knickknacks.

A film of considerable ambition and period piquance.

Hopefully ambitious yet hopelessly lightweight.

The first half has a nifty B-movie feel--it's a canny little movie with a big, big theme.

A big fat war movie and a tender love story. Indeed, Cold Mountain is something of an uneasy struggle between the two modes.

A fable for our reality-TV reality, Nina Davenport's Operation Filmmaker is as much virus as video documentary. This essentially comic tale maps a contagion of mutual exploitation that seems to have burnished the careers of everyone involved.

Ultimately more amusing than hilarious, and sometimes less than that.

Bulcsú never surfaces from the underworld. Neither does the movie-literally or figuratively.

Alternately grandiose and abject, Bandini is a sort of underground man, and if no more miscast than usual, heartthrob Colin Farrell miserably fails to convincingly render Bandini's neurosis.

The digital animation is far more evident here than in "The Phantom Menace."

One leaves with barely a clue as to how this group was able to orchestrate a successful string of terror bombings.

Aggressively grim and gory.

Determined to twist every character into an ideogram for vulgar humanity.

As over-emphatic as one might expect from the ham-fisted Guy Ritchie, this resurrection of the world's most famous detective is a dank, noisy affair.

A graceful, charming, and sometimes witty confection -- at least for its first hour.

However authentically chaotic, Chicago 10 is insufficiently frenzied.

An unusually rich music doc.

Lunacy is dark, scary, and yucky--even by the Czech animator's own standards.

It's far too soggy a confection for my taste.

Exercise in existential tedium that it is, Gerry isn't without devotees.

Flawed but engrossing thriller. Highly atmospheric, it gets its charge by dramatizing religious millennialism in a region that is the world epicenter of irrationality.

More wacky than wack.

Increasingly unconvincing, In the Bedroom turns genteel rabble-rouser. Field's leisurely buildup forestalls but doesn't prevent his movie's mutation into a granola "Death Wish."

Like more than one recent movie, Alice seems a trailer for a Wonderland computer game--and it is. The final battle is clearly designed for gaming. So, it would seem, is the character of actualized as well as action Alice.

Ghosts of Cité Soleil is a prismatic, jagged, none too coherent travelogue.

In its costumes, line readings, and structure, the movie faithfully preserves the stage production -- a provocative, if meretricious, evening of theater that ends in a paroxysm of LaButality with a bear swipe to the spectator's head. It is, however, more difficult to rattle a movie audience -- at least with words -- and, despite its streamlined presentation, The Shape of Things is not nearly as effective on-screen.

Flapping like a scarecrow in the wind, Battle in Seattle is too frantic to make more than a transitory impression, yet too responsibly hackneyed in its characterizations to achieve pure tabloid hysteria.

Certainly not as incredulous or mocking as it might have been. If anything, the mood is apprehensive. But it's depressing that--Carter aside--the filmmakers failed to find even one liberal believer.

This earnest love story is borderline insufferable, and yet there are moments that, in their bold incoherence, have a startling emotional truth.

Possession suffers from insufficient nastiness.

A humorously death-haunted psychodrama.

Depending on one's mood, the movie might seem boldly simplified and poetic--or boringly simpleminded and prosaic.

Mildly tasteless (natürlich), if not exactly uproarious.

Neither a debacle nor a bore, The Departed works but only up to a point, and never emotionally--even if the director does contrive to supply his version of a happy ending.

Playing the young Coleman with the requisite intelligence and ambiguity, Wentworth Miller contributes the sole viable characterization.

In a sense, Millennium Mambo is a mildly prurient portrait of Shu moving, drinking, smoking, and changing clothes -- it's analogous to one of Andy Warhol's Edie Sedgwick films, but without the existential drama. Who really cares what costume this poor girl will wear to all tomorrow's parties?

Enigmatic from the get-go, The Fall of Otrar builds to a series of spectacular battle scenes, but the mood is never less than sardonic.

Fond, funny documentary.

The Dreamers is bad, but unlike the similarly camped-up "Little Buddha" or "Stealing Beauty," it's not exactly boring.

Single-minded, sometimes harrowing.

High-powered and gory.

The spectacle of pretty people floating languidly across the screen notwithstanding, Laurel Canyon is short on conviction and long on contrivance. McDormand, however, has a ball.

Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller's fond portrait, less documentary than infomercial, is unrelentingly and in the end self-defeatingly positive--albeit effective in showcasing Zinn's charismatic personality.

DiCillo overburdens When You're Strange, which is narrated by Johnny Depp, with a cliché barrage of achronological news events, including an unconscionable use of Robert Kennedy's death agony, but the archival Doors footage he has assembled is anything but banal.

Much of the movie is dull, and as it has been dubbed into English, the blah-blah is impossible to ignore.

Dern and Macy give doughty performances in schematic roles, but glasses or no, these have to be two of the least Semitic-looking actors in American movies.

Up in the Air goes down like a sedative. This is a movie that's easy to like--and to dislike as well.

Instead of plumbing the depths of spiritual degradation, Herzog's movie is--largely due to Cage's performance--almost fun.

Lovingly detailed but unaccountably clumsy, obviously ambitious, and unfortunately chintzy. It's also genuinely anachronistic.

Inland Empire is Lynch's most experimental film since "Eraserhead." But unlike that brilliant debut (or its two masterful successors, "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Dr."), it lacks concentration. It's a miasma. Cheap DV technology has opened Lynch's mental floodgates.

Almost despite itself, this is a deeply pessimistic movie.

In its compassionate absurdism and underlying dark humor, the movie seeks to reestablish contact with the Czech new wave.

Basically, Epstein and Friedman are feel-good filmmakers-their Ginsberg has one of the shortest, most successful bouts of psychotherapy in history. But is it really necessary to affirm the poem's ecstatic footnote ("Holy! Holy! Holy!") with a montage of smiling reaction shots?