J. Hoberman

Funny as it is, Brüno could not be as shockingly uproarious as "Borat." No matter how well retold, a joke necessarily loses explosive force the second time around. But a great gag is a thing of beauty forever--so, too, a comic performance.

Absorbing documentary portrait.

Art School Confidential is replete with humorous detail--in that respect, the student art projects are particularly fine--but it's the attitude that rules.

A vivid exercise in hokum that more or less invented the idea of French film noir...and not just for Americans.

If scandal, sleaze, and celebrity worship are our national religion, then John Waters is an American prophet.

Dutiful as it is, Jonathan Demme's Beloved doesn't succeed so much as it abides…it moves in leisurely fits and--unencumbered by style or narrative complexity--never loses its forward momentum.

Slight but sardonic, Norwegian director Bent Hamer's deadpan Kitchen Stories makes a taciturn comedy of nothingness out of color-coordinated '50s coziness and Scandinavian social planning.

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.

Carrera's filmmaking is more workmanlike than stylish, but Padre Amaro is richly character driven and, for all its insolent, grotesque humor, straightforwardly humanist in its psychology.

Trembling throughout on the verge of a tearful breakdown, but far too dignified to allow her character to choke up, Williams delivers a sensationally nuanced performance that, were it not so resolutely undramatic, would constitute an aria of stoical misery.

Naomi Watts is a tremendous movie actress. She need only sidle on camera and glance over the terrain to claim the scene. What's her secret? Like the great Isabelle Huppert, Watts doesn't radiate feelings so much as she absorbs them.

Panoramic yet cozy, enthusiastically glib.

Justman's affectionate doc provides the pleasure of hearing one classic pop hook after another performed by a still tight unit, as well as the spectacle of veteran sidemen sitting around talking music. (The movie would have benefited from more period footage and fewer restaged scenes.)

Flight of the Red Balloon is in a class by itself. In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius.

Pummeling, jagged, and extremely well-edited film.

The filmmakers don't even attempt to give Kaufman an inner life.

Disney's big-screen expansion of their hit TV show is nirvana for the pubescent crowd.

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

Both frustrating and fascinating, Yuen's documentary is something of a stray footnote. It requires not only the context of the yang ban xi but the perspective of other movies on the subject of entertainment and utopia.

No less than the rankest demagogue, The Matrix Revolutions insists on the primacy of faith over knowledge. Once it locks and loads, however, the triumphant visuals short-circuit anything resembling abstract thought.

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

A tense and engrossing political thriller.

Casually racist and inordinately sexist, Pépé le Moko is best enjoyed for its offhand surrealism.

Since "The Thin Blue Line's" remarkable intervention, Morris's work has grown more public and more problematic--lofty yet snide, a form of know-it-all epistemological inquiry.

Rich in detail, vivid in characterization, leisurely in exposition, this 207-minute epic is bravura filmmaking -- a brilliant yet facile synthesis of Hollywood pictorialism, Soviet montage, and Japanese theatricality that could be a B western transposed to Mars.

In its post-Vietnam cynicism, Buffalo Soldiers feels almost avant-garde.

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

A bit precious, ultimately wearisome.

Keep your "Lara Croft" and your "Shrek": For me, the summer's reigning icons are Enid, Thora Birch's geek goddess in Ghost World, and her action-movie analogue.

At 71 minutes, the movie is scarcely more than an anecdote. But vivid as it is in establishing a specific milieu, its economy is its strength.

In the bell jar that is Capote, Hoffman bogarts the oxygen; everyone else asphyxiates.

At once distanced and heedless, Lies manages to be lighter and less pretentious than any description suggests. The movie's playful aspect can't be denied.

An overemphatic, would-be wacky, ultimately tedious sex farce.

Entertaining if cornball, lacking the cold-eyed nastiness of something like Mike Nichols's "Closer," The Dying Gaul is tricked out with strident montage sequences and tremulous Steve Reich music. It's already drowning in an icky sea of language when Lucas makes a stretch for Greek tragedy and sends the whole Malibu playhouse abruptly crashing down.

That unexpected rage is the movie's most powerful emotional truth.

Gets better as it goes along, building up to a prolonged shipboard finale.

Yes, there's something terribly familiar about this historical fantasy. As we now know, and Willmott is well aware, the South actually did win the Civil War.

As straightforward in narrative as it is gut-wrenching in effect, A Simple Plan is a sort of slow-motion skid down an icy blacktop— it's a movie you watch with a mounting sense of dread...[It's] an extremely credible thriller and an affecting brother-story.

Clever, engaging, and cannily faux populist.

Touching in its absurdity, the movie is what the French, if they didn't love Gray so much, might term agréablement ridicule.

Cronenberg's movie manages to have its cake and eat it--impersonating an action flick in its staccato mayhem while questioning these violent attractions every step of the way.

Broderick is a genuine trouper, hoofing his way through his big numbers, while Lane's antics are difficult to resist.

Rains on its own parade.

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

Enjoyable if light, until it becomes apparent that Breillat is not simply waxing narcissistic but fashioning a simultaneous critique, explication, and demystification of the lengthy, near-single-take defloration that is Fat Girl's centerpiece.

One of the best titles in movie history and a cast to match.

More analytical than contemplative, never less than straightforward, Dream of Light makes no showy bid for the sublime.

Hamming shamelessly as Berowne, Branagh is overseasoned for his part ... he's as desperate as a veteran social director at a Catskills hotel about to fold.

More concentrated and svelte than its precursor, Once Upon a Time II also has the benefit of fights staged by Master Yuen Wo-Ping that show Jet Li -- another camera-age hero -- to even greater advantage.

For all the frenzied activity, Joan Rivers is less informative dish than infomercializing cliché.

Aspires to be both stylish and coarse, camp and vulgar -- which is pretty much how Bette Midler plays it.

The art direction is impeccable, but this is a pop-up book that I was impatient to slam.

Watkins restages history in its own ruins, uses the media as a frame, and even so, manages to imbue his narrative with amazing presence. No less than the event it chronicles, La Commune is a triumph of spontaneous action.

This is truly a work of symphonic aspirations and masterful execution.

The film seems dimly aware of its own ridiculousness, but it lacks the constitution for self-mockery.

The movie is an expert, sunlit chiller audaciously predicated on an unquiet historical memory: "What is a ghost?"

As its title jokingly implies, this is a more grown-up version of Aniston's long- running TV vehicle--complete with the star herself as eternal ingenue.

The grim finality of the ensuing pietà suggests the last act of Hamlet or, rather, Hamlet 2--so embarrassing that, for the first time, I wanted to avert my eyes from the screen, although that might have also been because Repo! appears to have been shot with a cell phone.

None of the principals is remotely likable--although Kingsley does appear to enjoy swanning around the great Southwest like a low-rent Anthony Hopkins.

A deadpan, self-consciously prehistoric version of Jean Renoir's rueful idyll A Day in the Country, Blissfully Yours is unconscionably happy.

As overlong and undermotivated as it is absentmindedly incoherent.

Confidently absurd.

There's a palpable avoidance of risk as this new mythology is wheeled gingerly into the marketplace and carefully positioned to zap your pre-sold brain...Solid but uninspired, Harry lacks brio. It's respectable and a bit dull.

Not for nothing did this movie open the International Critics' Week (and win its grand prize) last year at Cannes; Poison Friends may be all talk, but it's cut like an action flick.

Lookin' for sin, American-style? Try Hell House, which documents the cautionary Christian spook-a-rama of the same name.

Rudo y Cursi is as fatalistic as any film noir, but it's played for cartoonish screwball comedy. At once smooth and frantic, filled with cozy clutter and vulgar jive, the movie subsumes its moralizing in frat-house entertainment.

Snazzy, mawkish, and practically Pavlovian in recycling all requisite late-'60s images. Given its subject, though, this David Leaf–John Scheinfeld production is not only poignant but even topical.

The self-conscious acting and use of direct address bespeak an aesthetic less orthodox Dogme than MTV's Real World, with a nod to Jerry Springer.

Henry Fool, which runs a leisurely and ultimately tiresome 138 minutes, is so self-conscious it feels uncomfortable in its own skin. [23 Jun 1998]

Allen's funniest, least sour outing in nearly a decade is a small movie with a tidy payoff. The movie gives vulgarity a good name.

Bean has built a bonfire of contradictions and the ensuing conflagration illuminates a bit of the world.

Graceless writing and shameless plot contrivance.

Were it not so soporific, Off the Map could easily drive you off your nut.

Gaudier than a Hindu-temple roof, louder than the Las Vegas night, Speed Racer is a cathedral of glitz.

The Man Who Cried is like a Yiddish generational tearjerker told from the perspective of the lost child rather than that of the bereaved parent.

In a Kafkaesque turn of events, Reems was the fall guy--facing prison, he became a Hollywood cause célèbre. Inside Deep Throat includes footage of him partying with Jack and Warren and debating Roy Cohn on TV.

Rebney's good-natured calm and apparent indifference to his Internet notoriety initially foils the filmmaker. Hoping to re-create the original clip reel, Steinbauer is nonplussed and abashed. Was it all an act--or is this? Pay your money and find out.

Skillfully directed and adroitly acted.

A bargain-basement musical extravaganza.

Genuinely unnerving movie.

Unlike those in the not dissimilar “American Beauty,” Dentists' characters are needier than the actors who play them -- and therein lies the problem.

Less monster than monstrosity—albeit, as superfluous sequels go, not on par with the memorably idiotic "Godfather III."

A superbly crafted science-fiction fairy tale that's both Grimm and grim.

The Last Bolshevik, considered by some to be Marker's masterpiece.

Literally and figuratively marvelous, a rich, daring mix of fantasy and politics.

Less a movie than a seething psychological bonanza.

An Israeli movie with neither politics nor religion--and only one casual, if fraught, mention of the Holocaust--bespeaks an underlying desire for normality that's as poignant and fantastic as Keret and Geffen's modest, shabby Tel Aviv settings.

An affable action hero in search of the planet's arch supervillain, Spurlock is less irritating than his obvious model, Michael Moore, but also less politically astute; assuming the role of a faux-naïf stranger in a strange land, he's more benign and not nearly as funny as unacknowledged analogue Sacha Baron Cohen.

To cut to the chase, Robert Bresson's heart-breaking and magnificent Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) -- the story of a donkey's life and death in rural France -- is the supreme masterpiece by one of the greatest of 20th-century filmmakers.

This is the first movie I've ever seen -- porn included -- in which a guy gets coldcocked with a dildo.

Jackson's movie is one portentous happening after another -- not unreasonable in that his source, J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, is basically the fantasyland equivalent of a world war against absolute evil.

Alberto Lattuada's tricky-to-parse Mafioso dates from 1962 but, with its abrupt tonal shifts and disturbing existential premise, this nearly forgotten dark comedy could be the most modern (or at least modernist) movie in town.

Barry Lyndon could be considered Kubrick’s masterpiece. At the very least, this cerebral action film represents the height of his craft.

Almost buoyant in its creepiness and positively bejeweled in its disgust -- the movie can be enjoyably considered as a self-conscious fiction in the convoluted tradition of Raul Ruiz or Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain."

Circumspect documentary.

Deranging a venerable Hungarian tradition of "village sociology," Pálfi employs a bizarrely associative montage to fashion a portrait of a traditional peasant community -- just a midsummer Sunday on Mars.

Immersed in popular culture, War and Peace makes it clear that India's nuclear mania appeals not only to religious chauvinism, primitive nationalism, and a desire for modernity but, even more dangerously, to a festering sense of inferiority.

Not just the year's most impressive first feature but also the strongest new movie of any kind I've seen in 2010.

This is an exercise in civility -- a tasteful "Boy's Life" adventure with plenty of boys aboard to express their appreciation.

Because everything is funny and nothing provides a punchline, audiences may be too shell-shocked to laugh--you know you're in Maddinville when individual cackles detonate at unexpected intervals.

The most offbeat studio comedy since "Rushmore."

An unclassifiable film-school exercise--one part documentary, one part psychodrama, and one part mock manifesto--The Five Obstructions mainly serves to illuminate the game-like nature of Lars von Trier's aesthetic project.

Sarah Silverman's cartoon bunny rabbit smile could make her the poster child for orthodontia, but it's her timing that's the real thing of beauty.

At once chintzy and grandiose, awash in battlefield sentimentality and platoon clichés.

Historical forces and famous ghosts jostle past each other in this evocation of mid-1930s New York like harried commuters at Grand Central Station.

The Fog is more spooky yarn than streamlined scream machine; it’s the sort of crowd pleaser best enjoyed with an audience.

The screen is saturated with Gallic whimsy and the romance of Montmartre in the person of Amélie.

A sweet, dumb pup of a movie, not unlike its eponymous hero, The Wendell Baker Story frisks along sniffing the sidewalk.

A painful movie to endure.

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.

The result is contrived, but compelling--as is the movie's high-powered humanism.

Household Saints, a warmhearted fable spiced with magic realism and zesty performances, may be the most endearing of multigenerational Italian American family sagas and is likely the most mystical.

Shot on city streets but unfolds in the world of the movies--in a Godardian touch that anticipates Godard, the Ventura character is identified by the cops as "an old pal of Pierrot le Fou." The new titles are flavorsome, and the restoration is up to Rialto's previous high standards.

To call this story unbelievable is to say the very least. If it's a hoax, Bruce is a fantastic actor (but then, the movie suggests, so are we all). If not, you may wonder less about Bruce's personality than his condition.

Team America is at once grandiose and tacky, elaborate and deflationary.

Operation Babylift itself was an attempt to provide some semblance of an American happy ending to the Vietnam debacle. But as Daughter From Danang demonstrates, the war's scars may take another generation to heal.

Gilliam has suffered more than his share of butchered projects, but with this exercise in kamikaze auteurism, he appears to have made exactly the mess he wanted.

A nifty psychological thriller--part "Bad Seed," part "Rosemary's Baby"--that deals in a manner both comic and creepy with the parental anxieties of a Manhattan haute yuppie family.

For all its fussy lighting, upside-down camera angles, and overwrought impressionism, Youth Without Youth is essentially playful. It's also pleasantly meandering in its largely faked locations, and drolly matter-of-fact about its mystic visions.

The least one can say for this costume action flick is that it hits bottom immediately.

A sustained immersion in gorgeously austere street photography and casual portraiture, the images punctuated by bits of black leader and gnomic intertitles, the action propelled by sweetly pulverized music and an effortlessly layered soundtrack of enigmatic conversations. Poetry is really the only word for it.

An elegantly constructed if misleadingly titled class lecture.

In addition to reporting a scoop, Bartley and O'Briain do an excellent job in deconstructing the Venezuelan TV news footage of blood, chaos, and rival crowds.

It's a pleasingly Hollywood notion that plays well with Rubbo's interpolated quotes from "Shakespeare in Love."

This absorbing, significant, and shamelessly entertaining movie not only goes through the looking glass but, no less significantly, turns the mirror back on us.

As much as I enjoy Spidey's high-flying Cheez-Doodle swoops through the skyscraper canyons of a digitally rearranged midtown Manhattan, I get no kick from his angst, especially since in this incarnation, as opposed to the '60s comic book version, he's more innocuously depressed than defensively paranoid.

A modernist travelogue, at once impressionistic and precise.

The most straightforward love story--and in some ways the straightest--to come out of Hollywood, at least since "Titanic."

Elizabeth's most triumphant aspect is Blanchett's transformation from saucy, spirited toe-tapper to iconic Virgin Queen.

Lacking any equivalent to the Sadean excess of Ellis's prose, it is also further evacuated of purpose.

Often feels like a mediocre time-waster, and yet it sticks in the mind.

Beeswax exemplifies post-mumble maturity. The movie is not only semi-documentary, but also casually thoughtful (or at least self-reflexive)--working with friends is what Bujalski does in creating his own particular Storyville.

A master of smash-mash montage and choreographed chaos, Greengrass is the best action director working today, adroit at producing the sense of everyone converging and everything happening simultaneously.

Head-On loses its merry mojo once events turn irrevocable and the action switches from Hamburg to Istanbul.

Sweet, crazy, and tinged with sadness, Michel Gondry's new feature The Science of Sleep is a wondrous concoction.

Wit is in short supply -- although this journey to the end of the night derives a certain amount of punkish energy from its crude editing, cruddy-looking close-ups, strident soundtrack, and overall volatility.

A powerful account of living in isolation and constant terror.

The Situation, Philip Haas's deftly paced, well-written, and brilliantly infuriating Iraq War thriller is not only the strongest of recent geopolitical hotspot flicks but one that has been designed for maximal agitation.

Basically an experimental psychodrama, Epidemic has a pleasingly slapdash, underground quality that recalls early Fassbinder and Wenders -- although, with its cynical premise and frequent infusions of Wagner, it exudes the prankster snarkiness characteristic of von Trier.

Manages to have its cake and eat it too -- debunking the Berlin image even while reveling in it.

At once simple-mindedly didactic and utterly chaotic, Steal This Movie! is interspersed with fake headlines and botched history.

The new Richard Kelly movie is basically a sock of coal for Christmas.

The campaign's latest scare doc takes its title, Bush's Brain, and much of its argument from the portrait of political operative and bogeyman Karl Rove published last year by a pair of Dallas newsmen.

No previous rocksploitation film had ever done so splendid a job of selling its performers.

Almost desperate to show it gets its own point. What's funny is that the joke--"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" reconfigured as anti-feminist backlash--was scarcely fresh when Bryan Forbes shot the first movie version nearly 30 years ago.

Indeed, the man who invented Borat is a masterful improviser, brilliant comedian, courageous political satirist, and genuinely experimental film artist. Borat makes you laugh but Baron Cohen forces you to think.

From the cast and location to the attitude and premise, many things in The Ice Harvest are inescapably reminiscent of the Coen brothers. But as a director, Ramis is far less flashy and not nearly as pleased with himself. This is one of the most sustained movies of the year, as classic in its structure as "Double Indemnity" or "No Exit."

Maddin has created a fascinating hybrid--this enraptured composition in mist, gauze, and Vaseline is more rhapsody than narrative, less motion picture than shadow play.

Feels like a rough draft at best.

A well-wrought indie written and directed by Goran Dukic, has to be the kewpie doll of current zombie flicks: Its walking dead are a bunch of attractive slackers whose wounds are largely internal. They've got attitude.

The Allen persona has always blurred the distinction between his art and his life. Still, one would scarcely expect Allen's attempt to satirize daily life in the National Entertainment State to be this tired, sour, and depressed.

Detailed yet oblique, leisurely but compelling, perfectly cast and irreproachably acted, the movie has a seductively novelistic texture complete with a less-than-omniscient narrator.

Annotating excerpts from the movies with oral history, Kudlacek's film is a well-wrought introduction not just to Deren but an under-leveraged chunk of the art world.

Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu's brilliantly discomfiting second feature is one long premonition of disaster.

Despite some deadpan, Jacques Tati-like orchestration and occasional sight gags, there's no real pleasure in the game -- Songs From the Second Floor is more absurd than funny.

In the spirit of its title, Nothing but the Truth pivots on a plot twist that's both good and fair. And kudos to the ever-earnest Beckinsale for surviving a prison brawl as splatterific as anything Mickey Rourke had to endure in "The Wrestler."

Serbis may be a raunch-fest, but it's also a mind-trip--a raunch-fest with ideas.

A reasonably good Kurosawa pastiche. But overburdened with convoluted flashbacks and interpolated gags, and generally lacking a dynamic sense of cutting, the movie doesn't possess the master's sardonic brio.

Pawlikowski, whose background is in documentary film, has an eye for the menacingly forlorn and elegantly bleak. Last Resort, which was shot without a script and developed largely in collaboration with the actors, is a kind of verité fantasy.

Austere, underlit, uncompromisingly lackadaisical at three hours, and anachronistic in a half dozen ways.

Alternately mind-expanding and brain-numbing.

As this movie knows what it is, Scooby-Doo's a relatively painless 85 minutes.

Mutants abound as each episode trips the light fantastic.

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

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.

Downfall may be grimly self-important and inescapably trivializing. But we should be grateful that German cinema is more inclined to normalize the nation's history than rewrite it.

However flavorsome though, The Good German is seriously deficient in the stars' star power and narrative excitement. The movie is lovingly framed, carefully lit, and fatally insipid. The direction is slack; the pacing is perfunctory.

Petroni’s direction is crude but effective.

Roger Avary's crisp adaptation imbues the copious bad sex and general befuddlement of Bret Easton Ellis's solemn, echt '80s Bennington novel with a playfully obnoxious energy that is often funny and -- almost fun.

Trust never seems dated and, as a youth film, it may even be usefully pedagogic. [30 July 1991]

The performances are broad; the comedy is mainly slapstick. The politics are nationalist and vaguely left-wing.

Bracingly unfunny.

Gleefully confrontational in its ludicrous, pulpy tawdriness.

Certainly Sandler's most ambitious work. It's not just a bid for respectability but a genuine allegory.

Solemn, flashy, and flabbergasting, The Fountain--adapted by Darren Aronofsky from his own graphic novel--should really be called The Shpritz. The premise is lachrymose, the sets are clammy, and the metaphysics all wet.

A 1943 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger collaboration so unambiguously satirizing the military mind-set that Prime Minister Winston Churchill tried to have it banned.

One of the richest films of the past decade.

An urban crime thriller of considerable gravitas.