J. Hoberman

Nothing can redeem the movie's final 40 minutes. That may not be an ultimate horror, but it is a real one.

Jackson's adaptation is certainly successful on its own terms.

A work of leisurely development and tragic inevitability.

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.

The “intellectual banalities” that bored Crowther are so insistently contemporary that “Alphaville” could have been made in 2023. If by some time-traveling Borgesian twist of fate it were, Godard’s film would have been my candidate for the year’s best.

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

So elemental in its means yet so cosmic in its drama, it could herald a rebirth of cinema.

As bittersweet a brief encounter as any in American movies since Richard Linklater's equally romantic "Before Sunrise."

The year's most ingenious and original animated feature.

Like many cult films, it is also less than the sum of its parts.

A movie so tactile in its cinematography, inventive in its camera placement, and sensuous in its editing that the purposefully oblique and languid narrative is all but eclipsed.

Ari Folman's broodingly original Waltz With Bashir -- one of the highlights of the last New York Film Festival -- is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature.

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.

Summer sequelitis is upon us, but the season is unlikely to bring anything more remarkable than Richard Linklater's sweet, smart, and deeply romantic Before Sunset.

More fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It's also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring.

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.

Bloody Sunday doesn't surrender its grip on the viewer even after the action shifts from the streets of Bogside to a local hospital where the weeping masses are still under the guns of the war-painted British soldiers.

Clever, engaging, and cannily faux populist.

Jaws before the world was ready, Hitch’s much misappreciated follow-up to Psycho is arguably the greatest of all disaster films—a triumph of special effects, as well as the fountainhead of what has become known as gross-out horror.

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.

Not only Mike Leigh's strongest film since "Naked" but a true show-making epic.

The most offbeat studio comedy since "Rushmore."

Panoramic yet cozy, enthusiastically glib.

Mr. Assayas succeeded in making a young person’s film when he was on the cusp of turning 40. He has said that he wanted Cold Water to feel like a movie from 1972. It doesn’t really, but, perhaps more remarkably, it’s so fresh it could have been made now.

A masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality.

The Passenger is a relic of that moment in international co-production when famous European auteurs hitched their wagons to hip and eager Hollywood stars.

It's a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.

Despite an absurdly melodramatic premise, Lost Embrace is an essentially plotless series of riffs and jokes. It's 20 minutes too long--forgivable in view of Burman's affection for his material.