J. Hoberman

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.

Single-minded, sometimes harrowing.

The climactic Christmas Day dinner of dreadful retribution is a terrifying prospect, but for anyone with a yen for our great lost genre, it's also some sort of gift.

Complex, superbly rendered, and wildly eccentric anime-even by Miyazaki's own standards.

Enriches a deceptively anecdotal plot with a combination of observational camerawork, strong narrative rhythms, and deft characterization.

Inside Man certainly functions as a genre film, but the backbeat of inane banter and schoolyard trash-talking serves to promote an infectious sense of levity.

High-powered and gory.

A more materialist (and successful) ensemble film than the mystical "Babel," in that everyone is connected through the same economic system, Fast Food Nation is exotic for being a movie about work.

From the end to the beginning--or is it from the inadvertently ridiculous to the would-be sublime?--Noé's stunt is an exploitation movie with a gimmick, not to mention a vacuous philosophy.

The spectacle of pretty people floating languidly across the screen notwithstanding, Laurel Canyon is short on conviction and long on contrivance. McDormand, however, has a ball.

Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller's fond portrait, less documentary than infomercial, is unrelentingly and in the end self-defeatingly positive--albeit effective in showcasing Zinn's charismatic personality.

DiCillo overburdens When You're Strange, which is narrated by Johnny Depp, with a cliché barrage of achronological news events, including an unconscionable use of Robert Kennedy's death agony, but the archival Doors footage he has assembled is anything but banal.

Much of the movie is dull, and as it has been dubbed into English, the blah-blah is impossible to ignore.

Dern and Macy give doughty performances in schematic roles, but glasses or no, these have to be two of the least Semitic-looking actors in American movies.

Robust, engrossing, and surprisingly restrained in saving most of its effects for the grand finale, the first Chronicles of Narnia installment eschews Harry Potter's satanic subtext and "The Lord of the Rings'" Wagnerian cosmology. It may be as close to adult-friendly kid fare as Hollywood will ever get.

An entertainingly raffish action-comedy.

Up in the Air goes down like a sedative. This is a movie that's easy to like--and to dislike as well.

Instead of plumbing the depths of spiritual degradation, Herzog's movie is--largely due to Cage's performance--almost fun.

Lovingly detailed but unaccountably clumsy, obviously ambitious, and unfortunately chintzy. It's also genuinely anachronistic.

Agently attitudinous, generally zippy urban fairy tale about pop stars and the hangers-on who coddle (or prey upon) them, Tom DiCillo's Delirious is a mild "Midnight Cowboy," a minor "King of Comedy," and mainly a vehicle for Steve Buscemi as a lower Manhattan–based paparazzo.

Inland Empire is Lynch's most experimental film since "Eraserhead." But unlike that brilliant debut (or its two masterful successors, "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Dr."), it lacks concentration. It's a miasma. Cheap DV technology has opened Lynch's mental floodgates.

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

Adaptation's success in engaging the audience in the travails of creating a screenplay is extraordinary.

Way of the Gun is a self-consciously American odyssey.

Almost despite itself, this is a deeply pessimistic movie.

In its compassionate absurdism and underlying dark humor, the movie seeks to reestablish contact with the Czech new wave.

The most pop film the great Russian filmmaker ever made.

Basically, Epstein and Friedman are feel-good filmmakers-their Ginsberg has one of the shortest, most successful bouts of psychotherapy in history. But is it really necessary to affirm the poem's ecstatic footnote ("Holy! Holy! Holy!") with a montage of smiling reaction shots?