J. Hoberman

Although frequently funny, Be Kind doesn't have the same pathos as "The Science of Sleep." (Nothing approaches the loneliness projected by Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg.)

The year's most ingenious and original animated feature.

Everything about this berserk, essentially static procedural is just crazy enough to be true. In any case, Herzog has gone beyond Good and Evil to reinvent himself as a candidate for the wiggiest director of comedy in America today.

It’s the tension between Sellers’s inane tact and the general tastelessness of his surroundings that gives the movie its zing.

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.

The filmmaker might be accused of preaching to the choir were the story not so compelling and the performances so strong.

Betty sustains her character, the movie fails to maintain its own.

Neither comedy nor tragedy, the movie is closest to genteel soap opera.

As cliché-rich as it is compelling.

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.

Warmhearted but unsentimental, touching but not mawkish, clever but never cute, Divan is almost miraculously modest.

In Jackson's hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling. Part Disney's "Alice in Wonderland," part Fritz Lang's "M," the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous.

Costa-Gavras provides a post-war postscript to make clear that honesty is punished; cynicism survives.

Intermittently, in attempts to articulate a coherent argument, Collateral Damage shifts from pulse-pounding mode to something more migraine-conducive.

A ridiculous deus-ex-machina "wrong man" story.

Filled with flashy sight gags, overwrought performances, and madly overlapping dialogue.

The Magnificent Ambersons is a pretty sensational movie. The film language is more fluid and adept than Kane‘s, the expressionist lighting is more rigorously modulated.

Albeit not as textured as Hong's past few films, Woman on the Beach is no less engrossing--a rueful tale of karmic irony, self-deceived desire, squandered second chances, and unforeseen abandonment.

The movie is ultimately about the philosopher's personality -- if you loved "Lingua Franca" (and what lumpen academoid did not?), you'll certainly dig Derrida.

As a movie, King of Hearts is more pageant than story. As a cultural artifact, however, the movie is less a relic than a symptom.

Treeless Mountain is skillfully unsentimental--because of, but also despite, the presence of two irresistible, unself-conscious performers in virtually every scene.

The movie is as eloquently uninflected and filled with quirks as its star.

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.

Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment--rich in fantasy and blithely amoral.

Trash Humpers projects a cranky resignation to the world as it is; still, it's picturesque.

A creepily effective button-pusher that owes a bit to the original "Cape Fear" both in Sam Raimi's ruthless direction and Keanu Reeves's unexpectedly robust performance as the most violent redneck peckerwood in a steamy Georgia town.

A near-irresistible button-pusher that's agile enough to hold a mirror to its own aspirations: The Sundance prize-winning filmmaker and her prize discovery, Michelle Rodriguez, merge in the image of a self-invented amateur boxer.

The Power of Nightmares is essentially polemical. As partisan filmmaking it is often brilliant and sometimes hilarious-a superior version of "Syriana" (which also prudently subtracts Israel and the Palestinians from the Middle East equation).

Downey, who, having grasped that he's playing a cartoon character, delivers the most animated performance. (Midway through 2006, this supporting turn is the performance to beat in what seems the year's American movie to beat.)

To my mind, the greatest film by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami.

Pegged to the 10th anniversary of the Gulf War victory celebration, a fiesta that lasted nearly three times longer than the fighting itself.

This is not so much a love story (and even less a story about love) than it is a movie of passionate loveliness.

Raking over the same clichés as "Almost Famous," Rock Star is far less reverential -- it isn't burdened by generational nostalgia and doesn't take itself too seriously.

A cut above last season's best studio offerings. The performances are well turned out. The morality is stylishly gray. The attitude is almost fashionable.

Larry Clark's latest finds the grizzled shock-meister in a thoughtful mode and a mellow mood.

An unappealing, conventional, and somnolent piece of work in which, as glumly directed from David Levien and Brian Koppelman's corny script, every scene feels like it's being played for the second time.

Leisurely yet streamlined film, brilliantly adapted by British filmmaker Terence Davies from Edith Wharton's most powerful novel.

Jarecki's film forcefully argues that the much abused word FREEDOM cannot paper over the conflicts between capitalism and democracy.

Terror is existential in this highly intelligent, somewhat sadistic, totally fascinating movie.

The result is explicit, if less than hilarious. The Hebrew Hammer lacks the edge of Adam Sandler's "Chanukah Song," although as anti-seasonal fare, it would make a suitably unbearable double bill with Terry Zwigoff's "Bad Santa."

Terence Davies revisits his youth to decidedly mixed effect.

Ideas beam out from Astra Taylor's engaging new philoso-doc Examined Life; the viewer basks in the intelligence on-screen and, occasionally, soaks up the rays.

The movie is a sweeping, hectic docudrama that would have been immeasurably helped by the use of informational intertitles.

A bracingly no-nonsense, highly professional policier—as proudly old-fashioned as its curmudgeon hero.

A casually bleak and neatly structured ensemble comedy--at once deadpan and bemused.

This is a serious movie and, gliding around the center of power, a stylish one. But, like its protagonist, The Walker is unable to close the deal.

Grass's relentless hard sell ultimately grows wearisome. Although only 80 minutes, it ends, and not a moment too soon, with a pot legalization rally that might well be reproduced outside the theater.

It's not the least of Afghan tragedies that this noble warlord would be consigned to the dustbin of history.

The Anchorage uses a narrative structure introduced to more powerful effect 35 years ago in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman.

In every way a sunny film. Supremely affirmative, it ends with the funniest, sexiest close-up of the year.

An abundance of dull exposition building up to the son's attempt to cap his father's whoppers climaxes with a tedious flurry of Fellini-esque endings and Spielbergian fillips. The magic doesn't work twice -- or even once.

The results are extraordinary. As understated as it is, the movie is both deeply absurd and powerfully affecting.

Demme, who works a clever permutation on the original ending, is more than capable of doing the thriller thing--even with material that will strike a good percentage of his audience as familiar. As an intelligent genre flick, the movie plays to his strengths. His direction of actors has never been better.

I'd have welcomed more archival footage (Pennebaker did, after all, document Otis Redding's epochal performance at the Monterey Pop Festival), but that would be asking for another movie.

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

In short, this Krakatoa is at once exhausting and riveting. It's a technological marvel, and for those not with the program, a bit of a bore.

Loevy, who made this documentary with an Israeli and Palestinian crew, supplies a self-conscious voice-over.

As ambitious as it is anachronistic, Duck, You Sucker demands to be read through the prism of World War II as well as 1968. Could this be the last movie in the great Italian tradition that began in 1945?

A prize ‘60s artifact, Michelangelo Antonioni’s what-is-truth? meditation on Swinging London is a movie to appreciate—if not ponder.

In every respect, this unclassifiable movie is an amazing accomplishment.

Too touchy-feely for some hardcore Godardians, Notre Musique is the most lucid of the master's recent films.

Tender, cruel, and very funny, Baumbach's fourth feature turns family history into a sort of urban myth.

It's Rambo with a split hero -- Morse absorbing punishment and Crowe wreaking vengeance.

Like any self-respecting Ferrara film, 'R Xmas has its intimations of hellfire, yet it's a weirdly benign Christmas fable -- something like "Miracle on 134th Street."

Nothing can redeem the movie's final 40 minutes. That may not be an ultimate horror, but it is a real one.

The most compelling Wiseman epic of recent years -- reminiscent of his hellish 1975 masterpiece, "Welfare," in its open-ended articulation of chaotic, violent, luckless lives.

As straightforward and plot-driven as any movie about life imitating art imitating life could possibly be.

Demme's documentary portrait, Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains, has no surfeit of good intentions. In fact, running over two hours, they're nearly suffocating.

There's not much sense that the system can be voted out-not least because Barack Obama, shown campaigning on the crisis and elected in part to change the game, recruited his economic advisers from those who enabled the disaster.

Thanks to his mastery of montage, Buñuel naturalizes Dalí's images into a duplicitous rhythm of normality and outrage. The film suggests instances of sex and violence far more extreme than any actually represented while contriving effronteries so offhanded you can't believe you've actually seen them.

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

Satisfying as it is to at last have Nixon as a Disney character, Hopkins's overheated, self-consciously self-conscious performance doesn't get the overall nuttiness of Nixon's unctuous rage, his iron-butt single-mindedness. [26 Dec 1995]

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."

For passion, originality, and sustained chutzpah, this austere allegory of failed Christian charity and Old Testament payback is von Trier's strongest movie--a masterpiece, in fact.

Intermittently appealing, fundamentally dysfunctional action-comedy.

Superbly shot around Prague -- From Hell is even more stylish than gruesome -- it has the lush decrepitude of an autumn compost heap or an old Hammer werewolf flick.

Watts, who has the most difficult scenes, is splendidly mercurial; what's surprising is that those professional storm clouds Penn and Del Toro are here as powerfully restrained as she is electrifying.

A satisfyingly well-wrought, old-school thriller: Character drives the plot, literally.

Excavated from the deep '50s, Michelangelo Antonioni's Le amiche (known in English as "The Girlfriends") is an unexpected treasure.

Martin Rejtman's 1999 "Silvia Prieto" fashioned a deadpan farce from the aimless circulation of objects and identities around its unsmiling title character. The Magic Gloves, the Argentine writer-director's 2003 follow-up, is a similarly absurdist smart-com featuring another depressed protag navigating a yuppie Buenos Aires milieu.

Remarkably unassuming, genuinely playful, and superbly executed, The Iron Giant towers over the cartoon landscape.

The movie is characterized by its crisp, cutting, classical framing, and comic timing. The style and approach recall classic Albert Brooks. Indeed, the beleaguered, cuckolded Joel would have been a great role for the young Brooks--adding a certain self-aggrandizing je ne sais quoi or a neurotic zetz that the appealing, but bland, Bateman lacks.

An exercise in voyeurism, Maren Ade's provocatively titled, superbly performed, emotionally graphic Everyone Else is more fascinating than enjoyable.

The vision of America as a vast, ratings-driven amateur hour is not without promise, but Weitz's movie, named for the most popular TV program in its parallel universe, is disappointingly soft in its individual characterizations.

This shocker is often shameless, not least in the climactic confrontation with Sister Bridget, but it's impossible not to be moved by the ending -- if only because the torture is finally over.

The Piano Teacher's study in lurid sexual pathology occasions a tour de force by Isabelle Huppert as the title character.

The most authentic thing about Redacted is the rage with which it was made.

This is a movie about the nature of acting -- or, more specifically, the nature that creates an actress -- centered on what appears to be a spectacularly unconvincing title-role performance.

Inoffensively glib and innocuously arty.

The movie may not be a single-bound building-leaper but Bryan Singer reconfigures the daddy of all comic-book sagas into something knowing, witty, and even sensitive.

Though he successfully humanizes Hirohito, who is shown happily shedding his divinity, Sokurov doesn't entirely exonerate him. He contrives a shock ending that, as measured as everything else in this engrossing, supremely assured movie, acknowledges one last blood sacrifice on the emperor's altar.

Filled with all manner of tawdry tricks.

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.

A movie more to be prescribed than recommended.

An art film without the NYFF imprimatur, Heaven is a peculiar amalgam -- a Miramax package (without the hype), directed by German hotshot Tom Tykwer under the eye of Anthony Minghella, from a script with which the late Krzysztof Kieslowski had planned to inaugurate a new trilogy named for the Divine Comedy.

Vera Drake puts the passion in compassion. Building up to a shattering conclusion, Leigh's movie is both outrageously schematic and powerfully humanist.

The Pillow Book's pretentions are boundless, for all its desperate fashion and layered imagery, it's a staggering bore-as vacantly petulant as Kate Moss's stare. [10 Jun 1997]

This ponderous, didactic weepie aspires to "Titanic" stature even if the only ship it sinks is itself.