J. Hoberman

This corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like "Mean Streets" cubed.

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

Above all, this is an action film--or, better, a transaction film. It's not just that the Dardennes orchestrate an exciting motor scooter purse-snatching and a prolonged hot pursuit. L'Enfant is an action film because every act that happens is shown to have a consequence.

A work of bravura filmmaking.

Chow manages to have his cake and eat it too: Kung Fu Hustle is a kung fu parody that's also a terrific kung fu movie.

Le Havre is utopian precisely because it shows everything as it is not.

A work of great charm and bold aesthetic impurity, Agnès Varda's Cinévardaphoto is a suite of documentary shorts.

If Old Joy is more laid-back and contemplative than "Mutual Appreciation," it's because the characters are more weathered. Open-ended as it may appear, it has a crushing finality. For all the wool-gathering and guitar-noodling, this road movie is at least as tender as it is ironic.

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.

Panoramic yet cozy, enthusiastically glib.

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

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

Although hardly flawless, Eastwood's biopic is his richest, most ambitious movie since the "Letters From Iwo Jima" – "Flags of Our Fathers" duo, if not "Unforgiven."

A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp-at the very least, it's the most risible and riotous backstage movie since "Showgirls."

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

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

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.

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

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

Confidently absurd.

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.

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.

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.

What's fascinating is how the various issues - religious or practical - are played out in these two quite different families, yet always come down to irreconcilable differences between rebellious women and their stiff-necked, controlling men.

Skillfully directed and adroitly acted.

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.