J. Hoberman

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

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.

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

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

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

The action is largely psychological, but it's accelerated by Audiard's nervous camera, chiaroscuro lighting, and jangling montage.

Given the movie's graphic pizzazz, the best hippie wisdom Bridges might offer the viewer is: Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.

Deft, affectionate, and unexpectedly enjoyable.

This deliriously downbeat vehicle for the postpunk diva Björk has generated the controversy the Danish dogmatist has relentlessly court.

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

It is meant to boggle the mind and inspire awe-and it does.

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.

The performances are uneven, but the spirit never flags.

Often thrilling almost-feelie.

Tender and funny.

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.

I got a charge out of Going Upriver, but as more than one person has noted, the movie's ideal spectator would be Kerry himself.

Moving from cafés to poolrooms to movie theaters, it's the prototypical male ensemble film.

More engrossing than convincing.

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

Owning Mahowny shares the earlier ("Love and Death on Long Island") film's crisp precision, but it's a far more rigorously sublimated and abstract account of l'amour fou.

This simple, sinuous fable may not be among Imamura’s greatest films–it lacks the crazy libidinal energy of The Pornographers or Eijanaika–but it could hardly have been made by anyone else.

A surprisingly credible action flick.

A deceptively modest fable of innocence abroad that resonates with the situation within Israel and without.

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.

Extremely clever in its use of self-deprecation, it's guaranteed to bring down the house at any remotely sympathetic venue.

Primordial and laconic, this remarkably assured debut feature has the elegant simplicity of its title.

With his 10th feature--an entertaining tale of high-stakes martial arts--Mamet has infused the sleight of hand with a measure of two-fisted action.

If Moore is formidable, it's not because he is a great filmmaker (far from it), but because he infuses his sense of ridicule with the fury of moral indignation. Fahrenheit 9/11 is strongest when that wrath is vented on Bush and his cohorts.

Doesn't dawdle and, despite some eye-rolling dialogue, is a generally amiable time-trip.

Steeped in metaphor as it is, Panic offers a more naturalistic analysis of male midlife crisis than the grotesquely overpraised "American Beauty."

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

Romanek's movie is a bit too pat and pleased with its undeniable ambitions, but the setup resonates with quiet desperation. There's not a single vicarious glorch.

This promising first feature is nearly as apt to use the power of suggestion as to ladle up the gore, triumphantly creepy, and just arty enough to have secured a slot in last year's New York Film Festival.

The Kidman character is an exotic--and even unlikely--creature, usefully fueling Penn's annoyed but fascinated incredulity.

Escalates into visceral allegory with an abandon and cruelty that seem positively Romanian. The last 30 minutes more than redeem the preceding two hours.

Grey isn't the first porn actress to go straight, but she may be the first to allegorize her own situation--projecting an on-screen self-confidence that’s indistinguishable from pathos.

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

Kaboom does have an excellent punchline, although even at 86 minutes it feels too long-mainly because Araki can't help letting his camera linger over his performers. Hard to blame him-he's assembled the best-looking cast in town and it's largely his gaga appreciation that makes the movie so much fun.

A loud and frequently funny clown show, Full Throttle is less a grim demolition derby than a day at Coney Island, punctuated by the clatter and screams of the Cyclone.

Paris Blues is a small movie with large ambitions.

Thoughtfully orchestrated and filled with visual wit.

Not only very civilized--this cool, deliberate film suggests that Bach's music is the quintessence of European civilization.

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

Opening too late for the election but still one the year's most politically relevant movies, Condon's earnestly middlebrow biopic is an argument for tolerance and diversity.

A world-beat city symphony.

Has plenty of problems. But most stem from a young filmmaker overswinging on his first time up to the plate and hitting a deep fly out rather than a home run.

It has the charm of the original American road movies, feasting on the gorgeous, ramshackle landscape of the filmmaker's motherland.

A compelling if not altogether convincing tale of mad love and divine redemption, adapted from the prize-winning novel by Castellitto's wife, Margaret Mazzantini.

This redux is a rare device: a TV remake for the big screen that works on its own terms.

The movie's best performance belongs to Peter Fonda. Tough, terrific, and totally unrecognizable as a bounty hunter, this cantankerous old hippie is so leathery he deserves his own line of rawhide apparel.

For all the on-set antics, appropriated Fellini music, and throwaway gags, the movie is most successful when Coogan is pulling faces for the mirror, aimlessly trading Pacino imitations with his sidekick Brydon, or riffing on the color of the latter's teeth.

A tour de force for Streep, who gives her character an unexpected measure of depth.

The leanest and meanest of Solondz's misanthropic comedies, feasts on the anguish of adolescence and confusion of college -- white suburban-style.

Sardonic as it may be, Tales From the Golden Age is basically affirmative - its true subject is resilience. Romania suffered under a regime of dangerous stupidity. Drawing on popular memory, Mungiu has orchestrated a contribution to local folklore, a suite of stories in which those rendered witless by oppression were compelled by circumstance to live off their wits.

Death to Smoochy is often very funny, but what's even more remarkable is the integrity of DeVito's misanthropic vision.

John Turturro, who, given the most romantic role of his career, fully inhabits the ungainly Luzhin.

However cloying, the movie creates a powerful vortex. It's surprisingly visceral-at times almost thrilling.

The movie feels truncated, but it communicates a certain urgency and at times a powerful sense of the absurd.

Film Socialisme deflects interpretation but, so long as one subscribes to the William Carlos Williams injunction "No ideas but in things," it's filled with sensuous pleasures.

A timely--if tepid--fantasy of American vengeance on the Qutbian extremists of Saudi Arabia.

A movie of cartoon-like mass formations, singing urchins, and operatic outbursts.

This may not be Kaurismäki's masterpiece, but it is a movie of sustained stylistic integrity -- and it has the power to make you laugh.

Flagrantly artistic and transfixed by its own enigma, Elephant is strongest on evoking a succession of specific, "empty" moments and weakest on motivation.

Monty Python's Life of Brian, re-released on its 25th anniversary as an antidote to "The Passion of the Christ," is a single-joke satire of organized religion, including Hollywood's.

The actors, mainly newcomers, have an improvisational freshness well matched to the freewheeling camera work.

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

This absorbing essay amply demonstrates that, as with any sort of racial-nationalist paranoia, anti-Semitism has very little to do with actual Jews and everything to do with imagined ones.