J. Hoberman

An enjoyably overwrought meditation on the consequences of celebrity and the vicissitudes of fandom, Backstage stars Le Besco as the schoolgirl acolyte of Emmanuelle Seigner's pop diva, a singer-songwriter and high priestess of cheese.

A masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality.

Anatomy of Hell gives a feminist twist to a French literary tradition that goes back to the Marquis de Sade. It's also svelte, assured filmmaking.

Although largely devoid of dramatic interest, Journeys With George does convincingly document the horror of life within the campaign "bubble."

Has marked affinities to "Ghost World" and "Donnie Darko." It's more amorphous and less sharply drawn than either but has an acute sense of guilty secrets and secret places.

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.

Corny as that is, the film's nadir comes when Zuckerberg's pretty young lawyer comforts him (or us) with the mealy-mouthed observation, "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be one."

A welcome exercise in anime weirdness.

Less a tale of desperado lovers than a cruel story of youth, Tout de Suite is framed largely in close-up, with few transitional shots and a narrative that grows increasingly fragmented.

One may not realize how truly sad this movie is until the forlorn final moments, when Payne resists an inspirational closer, and, with exquisite tact, averts his eyes.

Natalie Wood is on hand as a cheroot-smoking suffragist (with a phenomenal wardrobe), but the movie is largely powered by Lemmon’s energy, roaring like Jackie Gleason as the bombastic Professor Fate and later appearing as his double, the klutzy crown prince of a Ruritanian kingdom.

Where Judgment Day exhibited the profligate sprawl of a military operation, the leaner, less grandiose Rise of the Machines has the feel of a single Hummer careening through an earthquake in downtown Burbank.

However glitzy, clever, and luridly philosophical, Demonlover is still mainly an old-fashioned thriller.

Frost/Nixon's main attraction is neither its topicality nor its historical value, but Langella's re-creation of his Tony-winning performance.

His (Nelson) timing is off and his bullshit detector nonexistent. I don't much care for the Coens, but the sad truth is that their cynical nihilism is a lot less spurious than Nelson's earnest sentimentality.

The Fallen Idol has been overshadowed by the noir comedy, giddy style, and Cold War thematics of Reed and Greene's subsequent sensation "The Third Man," but (in similarly dealing with the nature of betrayal) The Fallen Idol is actually a superior psychological drama.

Restrained, precise, and unobtrusively wry.

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.

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.

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."

Broad but thin and more bleak than uproarious--a humorously downsized homage to foundational '70s classics like "Dirty Harry" and, especially, "Taxi Driver."

As consistently funny as it is smartly tooled.

That this mime show works better than it should is, in a sense, the ultimate dis.

Nelson has fashioned a compelling movie around an unfathomable mystery. To see Jones's face, eyes hidden behind trademark aviator shades, is to experience the last shock in Psycho. His is the blank stare of living death.

Jack Black is consistently hilarious--and not just in his dreams of moshpit glory.

Doesn't coddle the audience. But neither does it play fair. The narrative takes several fast turns and stops short with the sudden introduction of new material; the exposition is hurried and lazily predicated on characters' thinking aloud.

Filled with vivid cameos and set to an infectious soul beat that effectively covers the underlying hum of calculated precision.

Paradise Now suffers from some odd continuity glitches and takes a few too many narrative curves en route to an overly convoluted ending, but the heart of the movie is as tense as the bus ride in Hitchcock's "Sabotage."

The absurdity floods the banks of the filmmaker's intentions.

One of the most oppressive accounts of life in a military detention since Jonas Mekas's "documentary" version of The Brig or Peter Watkins's Punishment Park.

This lusty, heartfelt movie has a near Brueghelian visual energy and a humanist passion as contagious as its music.

Perhaps because Herzog is approaching old-master status, Encounters at the End of the World skews toward the observational. As in "Grizzly Man," his 2005 portrait of a deranged bear lover, Herzog seems at least as fascinated with other people's obsessions as his own.

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

It is, for the most part, witty and engrossing.

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

A handheld and grainy exercise in cine-stupefaction...too spastic to connect...the movie just flails the air.

May be as gimmicky as Ozon's other features, but it's also more resonant and even haunting.

Every Bolivian sequence has its Cuban parallel, which is why Che's two parts are best seen together. Guerrilla may be the more realized of the two--and could certainly stand on its own--but it is only comprehensible in the light of The Argentine. Elevating Guerrilla to tragedy, The Argentine puts some hope in hopelessness--and even in history.

Closer to Sturges than Capra, the movie means to satirize the TV-fueled carnivalesque nature of American electoral politics but only demonstrates the TV-fueled debasement of American commercial comedy.

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.

My first impression of Three Times was that it was high middling Hou--conceptually bold but unevenly executed. The movie's implicit themes of time travel, eternal recurrence, and the transmigration of souls seemed as muddied by the director's devotion to Shu as they were dissipated in the confusion of the final present-day section. But Three Times improves on a second viewing.

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

A terrific movie in the Antonioni tradition, Climates confirms 47-year-old Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan as one of the world's most accomplished filmmakers--handling the end of a relationship and the cloud of human confusion rising from its wreckage as if the subject had never before been attempted.

A Town Called Panic, which has more strident colors and less synopsizable action than a year's worth of comic-book adventures, embodies a sensibility that might be termed "extreme quirk."

Grim going.

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.

The simulation of shaky camera amateur DV is a narrative ploy that often taxes the filmmakers' ingenuity. Still, the movie has a creepy authenticity.

The movie's mode is brutal and excremental.

Alternately grueling and soporific, Quitting is a movie about addiction that demands the viewer also give something up.

Everything is edged with desperation. However arduous Last Train Home may have been to shoot, it was infinitely more arduous to live.

Antichrist, which, above all, wants to make pain visceral, is less successful at projecting authentic experience--the shock tactics are ultimately numbing.

Thanks to Egoyan's trademark mix of detachment and prurience, the fun is more cheesy than queasy.

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.

Absorbing even in its incoherence,V for Vendetta manages to make an old popular mythology new. Impossible not to break into a grin: It's the thought that counts.

It's a measure of Cuarón's directorial chops that Children of Men functions equally well as fantasy and thriller. Like Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the Wachowski Brothers' "V for Vendetta" (and more consistently than either), the movie attempts to fuse contemporary life with pulp mythology.

As mystical as it is gritty, as despairing as it is detached.

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

The response for anyone familiar with the original Psycho is likely to be restricted to a narrow range between briefly enjoyable déjà vu and mild disappointment. The movie lacks the chutzpah to even be a travesty.

Mad conspiracy rules in Korean writer-director Jang Jun-hwan's snazzy, playful, some-what gory, often hilarious, and generally unpredictable first feature.

As archetypal as its title, Ridley Scott's would-be epic aspires to enshrine Harlem dope king Frank Lucas in Hollywood heaven, heir to Scarface and the Godfather. Or, as suggested by the Mark Jacobson article on Lucas that inspired the movie, a real-life Superfly.

Burdened by a convoluted script and an ensemble-proof leading lady, the director fails to illuminate a particular corrupt system.

Impressionistic and lyrical, as well as somber and gripping, The Betrayal conveys a ceaseless flow. It's as if the filmmaker has opened a window onto a parallel world traveling beside our own.

A fabulously fond and entertaining tribute to the quick-witted Lower East Side kid.

Like the shelter for which it is named, Panic Room is an efficiently tooled construction (albeit one whose success is overly predicated on its villains' single-minded idiocy). But unlike the eponymous treasure trove, there's nothing inside.

This has to be the most richly entertaining movie anyone has ever made on the subject of female genital mutilation.

For all Potemkin’s rabble-rousing propaganda, Eisenstein’s aestheticism is everywhere apparent.

It's unpretentiously low-tech and humorously offbeat. And against all odds, the filmmaker emerges as a star.