J. Hoberman

Summer sequelitis is upon us, but the season is unlikely to bring anything more remarkable than Richard Linklater's sweet, smart, and deeply romantic Before Sunset.

Single-minded, sometimes harrowing.

The climactic Christmas Day dinner of dreadful retribution is a terrifying prospect, but for anyone with a yen for our great lost genre, it's also some sort of gift.

Complex, superbly rendered, and wildly eccentric anime-even by Miyazaki's own standards.

Enriches a deceptively anecdotal plot with a combination of observational camerawork, strong narrative rhythms, and deft characterization.

Inside Man certainly functions as a genre film, but the backbeat of inane banter and schoolyard trash-talking serves to promote an infectious sense of levity.

High-powered and gory.

A more materialist (and successful) ensemble film than the mystical "Babel," in that everyone is connected through the same economic system, Fast Food Nation is exotic for being a movie about work.

From the end to the beginning--or is it from the inadvertently ridiculous to the would-be sublime?--Noé's stunt is an exploitation movie with a gimmick, not to mention a vacuous philosophy.

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.

Robust, engrossing, and surprisingly restrained in saving most of its effects for the grand finale, the first Chronicles of Narnia installment eschews Harry Potter's satanic subtext and "The Lord of the Rings'" Wagnerian cosmology. It may be as close to adult-friendly kid fare as Hollywood will ever get.

An entertainingly raffish action-comedy.

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.

Agently attitudinous, generally zippy urban fairy tale about pop stars and the hangers-on who coddle (or prey upon) them, Tom DiCillo's Delirious is a mild "Midnight Cowboy," a minor "King of Comedy," and mainly a vehicle for Steve Buscemi as a lower Manhattan–based paparazzo.

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.

Jackson's adaptation is certainly successful on its own terms.

Adaptation's success in engaging the audience in the travails of creating a screenplay is extraordinary.

Way of the Gun is a self-consciously American odyssey.

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.

The most pop film the great Russian filmmaker ever made.

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?

An unrelentingly crass and confrontational barf bomb that makes Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" look like the philosophical experiment that it is.

Ostensibly a conventional tale of triad loyalty, As Tears Go By announced the presence of a genuine Hong Kong new wave—as well as an ambitious cineaste.

Mesmerizingly bad filmmaking.

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

Neil LaBute on his worst day couldn't devise a scenario so primitive in its psychology and predictable in its sense of sin.

It's obvious that Amer and Usman labor under the burden of making humor at once insider-cool and outsider-friendly. And it's hard to finesse "offensive" from a defensive crouch.

Afterschool, the almost frighteningly accomplished first feature made by Antonio Campos when he was 24, is high school as horror show.

Daniel Karslake's movie is more human interest than agitprop.

The movie is an absorbing series of one-on-ones. Local courtroom protocol is based on the British system; the law itself appears to be a complicated combination of tribal tradition, Muslim sharia, and government statutes.

Ari Folman's broodingly original Waltz With Bashir -- one of the highlights of the last New York Film Festival -- is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature.

For writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de coeur, one more from the heart.

Zhang Yimou's impeccably crafted, all-star martial arts extravaganza, is the essence of shallow gravitas.

World Trade Center is Stone's rehabilitation. It's not just courage that's honored, it's God's Will. It isn't only men who are saved, it's their families -- and their family values.

Like "Chuck & Buck," The Good Girl is a droll, well-acted, character-driven comedy with unexpected deposits of feeling.

Even sillier than it is cynical, Drop Dead Gorgeous is a tiresome tale.

A bit of a slog at 205 minutes, World on a Wire builds up to a satisfyingly nutty finale.

Girl 6, the goofy phone-sex comedy that he directed from Suzan-Lori Parks's script, may be incoherent, but it's never boring. Juggling a dozen or more subplots and letting them drop wherever they fall, the movie gives the impression of having been invented as Lee went along. [26 Mar 1996]

Delicatessen may be junk food, but it's served with the discretion of nouvelle cuisine. [07 Apr 1992]

A fierce dance of destruction. Its flame-like, roiling black-and-white inspires trembling and gratitude.

It can feel a bit slight and, given the epic sweep of its subject's life, somewhat underplotted. But there's no denying the incendiary power of Ramos's performance -- he's present in nearly every scene. The movie is as much the story of his transformation into Madame Satã as it is João Francisco's.

Wong is sensationally expressive and projects a modern, coolly appraising sexuality. Visually eloquent and often dazzling, the movie is no less terrific. Piccadilly is both evidence of silent cinema at its rudely aborted peak and Wong's frustrated potential to have been among its greatest stars.

What's surprising is the atmosphere of sweet reason--elatively speaking--that distinguishes Kill Bill Vol. 2 from its bloody precursor.

Psychologically rich, unobtrusively minimalist, at once admirably straightforward and slyly comic, Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard is a lucid retelling and simultaneous explanation of Charles Perrault's nastiest, most un-Disneyfiable nursery story.

Opens cute and poignant, turns wildly visceral, and ends in a burst of magical realism.

A veteran of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, the deadpan Harper puts her training to good use, gracefully eluding the attacking furniture and skillfully dodging the imploding set, as she flees—arms protectively crossed before her face—out into the night.

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

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 movie is a superb riff with a boffo finale, a terrific, cynical punch line, and a crazy closing image of Bob's Plymouth on an empty beach.

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

Stylish, funny, and smart...but only up to a point.

The last-minute combination of Greek tragedy and Janis Joplin is so genuinely startling that, had the movie been shorted by a third, it might have turned everything around.

Mildly cheesy but not overwrought, this long-awaited future franchise is a competent seat-warmer at the box-office table for the two weekends preceding George Lucas's "Attack of the Clones."

A fascinating and painful account of an entertainer trapped not only by his Jewishness but by his overwhelming need to make theater.

As dense and fluid as Martel's movie is, the viewer--like the protagonist--is compelled to live in the moment. And a rich moment it is.

Floating on the surface of confusion, Gunner Palace has a raw home video quality that's often quite beautiful. Much of the movie is hardly more than an immersion in sights and sounds. Vivid as it is, Gunner Palace is dominated by what isn't shown. It's the human face of Abu Ghraib.

Although Khrzhanovsky has several tricks up his sleeve, 4's most provocative quality is its ironic surplus of beauty.

Props then to Affleck. Coulter contrived a neat behavioral trick by inducing his star to play a comparably big-jawed bad actor. Surrounded as he is by canny professionals--Lane, Hoskins, Smith, and Jeffrey DeMunn as an unctuous glad-handing agent--it's an unexpectedly touching performance.

Carnahan does have an oddball sense of comic timing; what his picture lacks in hilarity it recuperates with a well-developed, albeit mumbling, sense of the absurd.

In short, this new Quiet American is not only true to Greene's novel -- it has the effect of making the novel itself seem truer than it has ever been.

Too chatty to be ascetic, Summer Hours is nevertheless almost Ozu-like in its evocation of a parent's death and the dissolving bond between the surviving children. It's also an essay on the nature of sentimental and real value--as well as the need to protect French culture in a homogenizing world.

Richer in metaphor than narrative drive.

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

A movie so tactile in its cinematography, inventive in its camera placement, and sensuous in its editing that the purposefully oblique and languid narrative is all but eclipsed.

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

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.

Sunny as The Straight Story appears, Lynch is still defamiliarizing the normal.

Where The Matrix was a heady cocktail of gnostic Zen Philip K. Dick cyberpunk '60s psychedelic bull, well spiked with high-octane digitally driven Hong Kong action pyrotechnics, those elements reloaded soon separate out. The refreshing draft of effervescent movie magic leaves a sludgy sediment of metaphysics.

Jaws before the world was ready, Hitch’s much misappreciated follow-up to Psycho is arguably the greatest of all disaster films—a triumph of special effects, as well as the fountainhead of what has become known as gross-out horror.

Despite a backbeat of perky music and the sarcastic voiceover meant to lubricate the action, The Men Who Stare at Goats lacks pizzazz. The movie isn't funny enough to work as farce, but it's far too dippy to take seriously.

Alamar provides a nearly hypnotic immersion in the brilliantly aqua, impossibly tranquil Caribbean--a Paradise Regained not just for Natan, but for everyone

A misguided tribute to the woman his (Shainberg's) film identifies among "the greatest artists of the 20th century."

The Decomposition of the Soul is a deliberately confining movie, but unlike "The Lives of Others," it offers no closure.

By Hong Kong standards, To's policiers have been fairly down-to-earth, but Exiled--which begins with a tribute to Sergio Leone and ends by acknowledging Sam Peckinpah--exists solely in the world of the movies.

The Coens are uncharacteristically restrained. Indeed, given that the crime comedy is their preferred genre, The Ladykillers is remarkable mainly for its timidity.

May be pumped-up, but it's rarely boring

The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant's masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film's narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker's career. Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor.

The surface blandness does not efface, and might even amplify, its disturbing qualities. Never Let Me Go is not a movie about death but, more painfully, about the consciousness of death.

A leisurely, never boring, grimly amusing, and not entirely hopeless disquisition on the contemporary world's "dominant institution."

This modern-day vampire story is purposefully shocking in its eroticized gore, if unintentionally dull in its lack of poetic frissons.

As usual, Jia's people tend toward the opaque--one of the movie's most enthusiastic conversations is conducted with ringtones. But his compositions have their own eloquence. Everything's despoiled and yet--as rendered in cinematographer Yu Lik-wai's rich, impossibly crisp HD images--everything is beautiful.

The movie with which Hitchcock became Hitchcock.

The movie exudes a cheerful energy--laying out a deck of narrative cards, then reshuffling them in the final 10 minutes.

Blackboards is both shrill and soporific, and because everything is repeated five or six times, it can seem tiresomely simpleminded.

Gross-out horror is never far from comedy and The Host, Bong Joon-ho's giddy creature feature, has an anarchic mess factor worthy of a pile of old "Mad" magazines.

Not nearly as uproarious as it should be.

Todd Solondz is back. Life During Wartime shows the misanthropic moralizer as confounding and trigger-happy as ever, his big clown thumb poised over a garish assortment of hot buttons--race, suicide, autism, sexual misery, self-hatred, Israel, and, his old favorite, pedophilia.

A mishmash of life-insurance commercials and Ronald Reagan campaign spots, this sexless orgy of self-congratulation is designed to make you feel good about Hollywood, America, and Jim Carrey -- not to mention the nation's motion picture exhibitors, who are praised at one point as the antithesis of Soviet Communism.

After a most promising beginning, Velvet Goldmine's progress grows increasingly labored, stumbling around the structural roadblocks Haynes has erected in its path.

Like a visual concussion.

As entertainment goes, however, this desert spectacle is no "Aladdin"-- despite the impressively strong graphics of the vast urban spaces.