J. Hoberman

With very few strong characters and a great many middle shots, Pulse sometimes plods--it's the price of Kurosawa's restraint and his indifference to structure.

As elegantly crafted as it often is, Anderson's movie is essentially a one-trick pony that, hampered by an undeveloped script, ultimately pulls up lame.

Despite an absurdly melodramatic premise, Lost Embrace is an essentially plotless series of riffs and jokes. It's 20 minutes too long--forgivable in view of Burman's affection for his material.

A combination of "Barnyard Follies" and "Schindler's List."

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

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."

Initial strangeness inexorably gives way to rote sentimentality and mystical tenderness becomes narrative expedience.

Waking Life doesn't leave you in a dream, specifically the dream of Linklater's previous films, so much as it traps you in an endless bull session.

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.

Bland and nasty, American Beauty has the slightly stale feel of a family sitcom conceived under the spell of "Married . . . With Children."

Elaborate exercise in frustration.

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

Best appreciated as hilarious pulp metaphor, which, not coincidentally, happens to be one of the screenwriter's specialties.

Undeniably high-powered. At 153 minutes, it's also punishingly overlong.

As "Henry Fool's" belated sequel, Fay Grim seems nearly an act of desperation.

As much as I enjoy Spidey's high-flying Cheez-Doodle swoops through the skyscraper canyons of a digitally rearranged midtown Manhattan, I get no kick from his angst, especially since in this incarnation, as opposed to the '60s comic book version, he's more innocuously depressed than defensively paranoid.

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

Downfall may be grimly self-important and inescapably trivializing. But we should be grateful that German cinema is more inclined to normalize the nation's history than rewrite it.

Increasingly muddled, cumulatively monotonous, would-be heartwarming, Three Kings becomes its own entertainment allegory -- searching, Hollywood style, for the point at which blatant self-interest can turn humanitarian, while still remaining profitable.

Too bland and fustily tasteful to be truly prurient, Sade moves along at a reasonable clip, goosed by claps of gothic lighting, solemn chords, and amplified sound effects.

This is an exercise in civility -- a tasteful "Boy's Life" adventure with plenty of boys aboard to express their appreciation.

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.

This is Oliver Stone country, but Broomfield's self-effacing affect is more Woody Allen,

Terence Davies revisits his youth to decidedly mixed effect.

For King Kong is an accountant's movie at heart. Given the excessive length and bombastic F/X, there's too much action and precious little poetry.

What exactly is JCVD? Comedy? Confession? Confusion? No one will ever mistake these backstage shenanigans for "Irma Vep." But as a self-regarding expression of masculine angst, it's a Damme sight more fun than "Synecdoche."

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

A sweet, dumb pup of a movie, not unlike its eponymous hero, The Wendell Baker Story frisks along sniffing the sidewalk.

Miscast, misguided, and often nonsensical, Minority Report is nevertheless the most entertaining, least pretentious genre movie Steven Spielberg has made in the decade since "Jurassic Park."

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

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.

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

An enjoyably glib and refreshingly terse exercise in big beat and constant motion.

A pleasant time-passer.

Single-minded, sometimes harrowing.

Morris, who more or less invented the ironic documentary, seems to struggle here for an appropriate tone even as he allows Leuchter more than enough rope to hang himself.

Certainly a testament to Fuller's tenacity, but recent raves notwithstanding, it's no masterpiece...The Big Red One isn't even Fuller's greatest war film. Of those, I'd rank it fourth -- but that's not half bad.

Foreigners often comment on the peculiar American combination of superficial friendliness and profound indifference. Stevie epitomizes a related national trait -- the belief in the curative powers of publicity.

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

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

Fond, funny documentary.

Despite some deadpan, Jacques Tati-like orchestration and occasional sight gags, there's no real pleasure in the game -- Songs From the Second Floor is more absurd than funny.

Austere, underlit, uncompromisingly lackadaisical at three hours, and anachronistic in a half dozen ways.

Dramatically inert but a minor techno-miracle, Range's movie is a faux documentary with fake talking heads and seamless digital effects.

A ghost story that's shot as though it were a documentary -- and a documentary that feels like a dream. Almost too fashionable for its own good.

In the absence of any greater cultural context, the ritual reiteration of Greenberg's greatness grows wearisome.

Painless -- not particularly funny and not even remotely moving.

Moll's style is low-key and straightforward.

Slight but sardonic, Norwegian director Bent Hamer's deadpan Kitchen Stories makes a taciturn comedy of nothingness out of color-coordinated '50s coziness and Scandinavian social planning.

DiCaprio is far more successfully cast here than in Gangs of New York: His performance is all about acting; it's a mild kick to see how he'll manage to talk his way out of nearly every scrape.

It's a Jerry Bruckheimer art film, perhaps the most extravagantly aestheticized combat movie ever made.

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

The film is sluggish and repetitive, yet it exerts a certain clinical fascination.

A bit precious, ultimately wearisome.

A kindred exercise in ensemble cheer and cozy humanism -- not as sentimental as it might be but cheerfully affirmative in dispelling the darkness of its premise.

This comic horror story rivals A.I. as the year's creepiest representation of maternal love -- partly because it naturalizes the Frankenstein story in terms of human procreation.

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.

Touching in its absurdity, the movie is what the French, if they didn't love Gray so much, might term agréablement ridicule.

Sin City lacks the human interest, not to be confused with humanism, that "Pulp Fiction" had in abundance. As if to underscore the fact, Tarantino guest-directed a scene. It's readily recognizable as the only one in which the dialogue has the slightest conviction.

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

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

A jaggedly impressionistic reverie.

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.

A movie more to be prescribed than recommended.

Like a Hollywood fairy tale, Lola is always threatening to turn into a musical. Its edge as a film comes from the fact that it never quite does.

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

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

The sort of movie that believes coolness is next to godliness, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang trades heavily and successfully on Downey's unflappable likability.

Never hits a note of high hilarity.

Malick's long, moody, diaphanous account of love and loss in 17th-century Jamestown--shot, more or less, on location--rarely achieves the symphonic grandeur it seeks. As an epic, it's monumentally slight.

The Sarsgaard slow burn is only marginally more compelling than the Christensen simper; like its subject, the movie is self-important yet insipid.

Circumspect documentary.

Though more cathartic than redemptive, this sob-racked confession is the payoff for two hours of low-grade misery.

It's poorly structured, a half-hour too long, and devotedly fixated on the filmmaker's persona.

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?

Ace in the Hole is a movie about the fascination of disaster that is itself a fascinating disaster.

As directed by John Lee Hancock, it's dull, talky, and sometimes maudlin.

Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain's alarming Tony Manero--named not for its protagonist, but rather his ego-ideal, John Travolta's character in "Saturday Night Fever"--is another study of a cinema-struck, solitary daydreamer, albeit a particularly stunted member of the genus.

Set off by sprightly graphics and shimmering with over-bright colors, Full Battle Rattle has a fake transparency. The movie arouses, without gratifying, a desire to see the camera.

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.

Cost well over $100 million, and the money is up there for the gawking. Illuminated by the orange flames of hell, the vast New York City set looks great. The least engaging aspect of the movie is its script -- which passed through the hands of three separate writers and perhaps even producer Harvey Weinstein.

An unusually rich music doc.

Filled with bird sounds, Vertical Ray is almost surreal in its paradise imagery -- the movie is a sultry, harmoniously expressionistic riot of pale greens and deep yellows.

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.

In no way obsessive, Walk the Line is more sincerely--which is to say, more boringly--sincere. It doesn't leave you with much to think about, except maybe the empty vibrato of effective ventriloquism.

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

Short, sweet, and hardly ever cloying, The Treatment is largely dependent for its success on the quality of its performances--most surprisingly, Eigeman's.

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

Long before it ends, its leisurely immersion in the Mississippi Delta has turned downright lukewarm and even chilly.

Murray's performance is successfully skewed, but in the De Niro oeuvre, Mad Dog is one more doughy characterization flecked with raisins. [16 Mar 1993]

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

Syndromes and a Century, which was commissioned by the New Crowned Hope festival to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, is a movie of long serene takes and gentle absurdities.

Funny for about half an hour, Pleasantville thereafter becomes an increasingly lugubrious, ultimately exasperating mix of technological wonder and ideological idiocy.

Persian Cats is likeable but undistinguished filmmaking.

Wild Things isn't overlong, but it is underwhelming.

Engaging, if ultimately wearisome.

Since "The Thin Blue Line's" remarkable intervention, Morris's work has grown more public and more problematic--lofty yet snide, a form of know-it-all epistemological inquiry.

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.