J. Hoberman

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A humorously death-haunted psychodrama.

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.

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.