J. Hoberman

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.

Annenberg's attitudinous Shakespeare riff is a unique blend of psychodrama, ethnographic experimentation, and high-concept hustle.

Additional substance comes from Dorman's ongoing use of period photos and newsreel footage. In the spirit of the Sholem Aleichem oeuvre, Laughing in the Darkness is a collective family album.

Call it a mental workout that (although considerably less arduous than reading Sartre) some might find exhausting and others exhilarating. Aurora is not a movie to make you glad that you exist; it's a movie that makes you aware that you do.

Opens with a montage of the press in full operational mode, spewing out newspapers all but automatically for a fleet of waiting delivery trucks. It's a system at once efficient and cumbersome, ultra-modern yet quaint, that suggests nothing so much as a herd of dinosaurs, oblivious to the threat of impending extinction.

The verbal jousts are droll and the countryside is splendid, although the food - an endless succession of fussy little presentations - may be an acquired taste.

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

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.

At the heart of the movie are the prolonged, increasingly violent, self-criticism sessions - an escalating, claustrophobic, paranoid reign of terror, staged in near-darkness and shown in close-up.

Everything Must Go, which is ostensibly set in Scottsdale, Arizona, has a generic resemblance to broken-heartland movies like "Up in the Air" and "Cedar Rapids," although this suburban meltdown is more depressed than either.

City of Life and Death is far more convincing as a spectacle of mass atrocity than a drama of individual conscience.

There's a message here regarding loneliness and emotional isolation, but the movie's real miracle is that, however precious its premise, this slow-burning not-quite heart-warmer-never succumbs to cuteness.

Perhaps that's the problem. Mel's character isn't on Prozac, but the movie is-a succession of bland camera setups, cued to a highly conventional score. Would that the direction were half as nutty as the script or as wacked-out as its star!

For better or worse, the movie does for Chauvet what Baudrillard complained an on-site replica did for Lascaux-render the real thing false.

Barnard makes the psychological mayhem Dunbar endured and inflicted tangible.

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.

A mysterious, fabulously sad fable.

Cinematic as it is, Meek's Cutoff has an uncanny theatricality. The scenes alternating between windswept emptiness and the dark void could be played on a barren stage. For all its detailed authenticity, this minimalist "Wagon Train" is less naturalistic than existential.

Grave, beautiful, austerely comic, and casually metempsychotic, Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is one of the wiggiest nature documentaries-or almost-documentaries-ever made.

The Soft Skin is a movie about the agony and ecstasy of an extramarital affair. Truffaut treats it like a crime film-low-key yet tense, filled with carefully planted potential "clues" and an undercurrent of anxiety.

Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is exactly that: The Iranian modernist's first feature to be shot in the West is a flawless riff on our indigenous art cinema.

The so-called Plan is derailed!

A work of unostentatious beauty and uncloying sweetness, at once sophisticated and artless, mysterious and matter-of-fact, cosmic and humble, it asks only a measure of Boonmeevian acceptance: The movie doesn't mean anything-it simply is.

Beauvois's film is cool while Denis's is hot-but the main difference is that where "White Material" is knowingly postcolonial, Of Gods and Men aspires to the timeless.

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.

A mild comedy of embarrassment.

The Eagle is full of action and fleet of foot-it's a movie of smoky, lowering battlefields and trippy, space-bending flashbacks, pausing only for admiring location shots of Scotland's wild, craggy vistas.

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