J. Hoberman

S21 is understated and unforgettable; in its modest way, this movie is as horrific an exposure to evil as Lanzmann's "Shoah."

Ultimately, The Woodmans is a haunting study in family dynamics.

It’s as a rhetorician that Moore is most original and effectively demagogic.

If you can forget the world-historic significance of the mass revolution that overthrew Europe's oldest absolute monarchy -- or rather, subsume it in the mysteries of personality -- The Lady and the Duke is the stuff of human interest.

A funny, fantastic, genuinely alarming quasi-autobiographical cheapster by twentysomething New York brothers Josh and Benny Safdie.

Absurd as it sounds, Joyce's conviction is not only convincing but contagious. So, too, is her elastic sense of reality - a 90-minute immersion in her world is enough to make you question your own.

A movie of long, expressive silences, Divine Intervention articulates things that have never been articulated, at least on the screen.

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

The Decay of Fiction is less a narrative than a monument. In its abstract movie-ness, this 74-minute carnival of souls exudes a wistful longing to connect, not so much with Hollywood history as with the history of that history.

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

Reuniting an uptight married man with a footloose old pal, Lynn Shelton's third feature offers a (much) more extreme version of Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy," also a sort of buddy movie, also shot in Seattle.

A 157-minute police procedural at once sensuous and cerebral, profane and metaphysical, "empty" and abundant, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is closer to the Antonioni of "L'Avventura," and it elevates the 52-year-old director to a new level of achievement.

While "Robinson Crusoe" was a paean to the practical middle-class virtues that allowed its industrious hero (and the nation he represents) to re-create civilization out of nothingness, Cast Away is a far less triumphalist peek into the nothingness at the heart of civilization.

A quietly ambitious, well-wrought, and tastefully poignant treatment of two local literary legends.

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

The movie is slick and studiously cool -- with plenty of visual flourishes but not too much soul.

Religious fanaticism gets even scarier in this hour-long doc.

It plays out as an unsettling solipsistic love story--an account of erotic obsession with a family relation to "Of Human Bondage."

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.

Celebrating the desire to immerse oneself in a collective, world-changing enterprise, Commune is unavoidably nostalgic.

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

Winn pretty much plays it as it lays—her obvious acting works with her character’s weak sense of self. Pacino, however, is a force of nature.

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.

A showy exercise in nervous grit, Go never strays too far from a sense of itself as stunt.

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.

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.

A powerful account of living in isolation and constant terror.

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

A world-beat city symphony.

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

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.)

A jaggedly impressionistic reverie.

Her (Gerstel's) apparent marginalization in Israeli society renders this political psychodrama all the more depressing.

An impressively coordinated enterprise that lasts three hours, manages a large cast, and covers a period of 30-odd years while successfully unfolding as a series of scenes from the life of a single character.

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.

I'm Not There is the movie of the year.

It's more conventionally romantic than wildly Romantic--but no less touching for that.

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.

A movie of cutting humor, near-constant talk, and one show-stopping dance routine.

A movie more to be prescribed than recommended.

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.

This fastidiously hyperreal neo-noir suggests a sadder but wiser remake of the Coens' rambunctious debut, "Blood Simple."

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.

The movie grabs hold and runs you through the wringer.

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.

The emphasis in this surprisingly cheerful film is on the resilience of the living.

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.

Becalmed or bobbing along, they remain balseros -- but then, as this engrossing documentary suggests, so are we all.

The Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in this exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, titled for the "central region" of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain's two hemispheres.

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

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."

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.

An intelligent movie, not so much salacious as affecting but ultimately less analytical than overwrought, Heading South makes its points in the first 20 minutes.

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.

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

Deft, affectionate, and unexpectedly enjoyable.

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

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

An entertainingly raffish action-comedy.

A Girl Cut in Two is a spry piece of work. Chabrol uses this sinister clown show as a means to puncture the media world's hot-air balloons--as well as to highlight the hypocrisies of his favorite target, the haute bourgeoisie.

The Sea Wolf is a triumph of studio filmmaking. [22 Oct 2017, p.11]

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.

A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence.

Black nationalism lives and breathes in this remarkably fresh documentary - a standout in last spring's New Directors/New Films - assembled by Göran Hugo Olsson.

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 a movie of blunt juxtapositions-death accompanied by the sound of raucous street musicians-as well as awkward flashbacks. Still, the strategy works.

Although hardly flawless, Eastwood's biopic is his richest, most ambitious movie since the "Letters From Iwo Jima" – "Flags of Our Fathers" duo, if not "Unforgiven."

The daring of the conception is matched only by the brilliance of the execution.

Circumspect documentary.

I've never seen a movie that paid more heartfelt tribute to the power of artistic invention.

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?

Wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and silently beseeching, she's (Johansson) even more a screen for projection here than in "Lost in Translation"; surrounded by a gaggle of over-actors, she glows with understatement.

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

More mystical than mysterious, Seabiscuit is a proudly cornball sentimental epic -- a reverential paean to a vanished America that's steeped in inspirational uplift and played for world-historical pathos.

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

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.

Structured to suggest an extended psychoanalytic session or an episode of "The Twilight Zone."

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.

For its 80 minutes, the movie creates the illusion that not just Tati but his form of cerebral slapstick lives.

To his credit, del Toro does not flinch from the ridiculous. But he is equally sensitive to Hellboy's pulp poetry.

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

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.

A big-bang demolition derby, J.J. Abrams's much-anticipated, greatly enjoyable Super 8 seems bound for box-office glory.

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.

Don Siegel’s remake was hardly so well received, although it is in many respects a more vivid, streamlined, callous film.

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.