J. Hoberman

Blackboards is both shrill and soporific, and because everything is repeated five or six times, it can seem tiresomely simpleminded.

Gross-out horror is never far from comedy and The Host, Bong Joon-ho's giddy creature feature, has an anarchic mess factor worthy of a pile of old "Mad" magazines.

Not nearly as uproarious as it should be.

Todd Solondz is back. Life During Wartime shows the misanthropic moralizer as confounding and trigger-happy as ever, his big clown thumb poised over a garish assortment of hot buttons--race, suicide, autism, sexual misery, self-hatred, Israel, and, his old favorite, pedophilia.

A mishmash of life-insurance commercials and Ronald Reagan campaign spots, this sexless orgy of self-congratulation is designed to make you feel good about Hollywood, America, and Jim Carrey -- not to mention the nation's motion picture exhibitors, who are praised at one point as the antithesis of Soviet Communism.

After a most promising beginning, Velvet Goldmine's progress grows increasingly labored, stumbling around the structural roadblocks Haynes has erected in its path.

Like a visual concussion.

As entertainment goes, however, this desert spectacle is no "Aladdin"-- despite the impressively strong graphics of the vast urban spaces.

An action film at once baroque and austere, hypnotic and opaque.

Paranoid, hysterical, and programmatically subjective, the movie is in every sense a psychological thriller. Although the payoff is ambiguous, the experience remains in the mind. It's an absolutely restrained and truly frightening movie.

Although frequently funny, Be Kind doesn't have the same pathos as "The Science of Sleep." (Nothing approaches the loneliness projected by Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg.)

The year's most ingenious and original animated feature.

Everything about this berserk, essentially static procedural is just crazy enough to be true. In any case, Herzog has gone beyond Good and Evil to reinvent himself as a candidate for the wiggiest director of comedy in America today.

It’s the tension between Sellers’s inane tact and the general tastelessness of his surroundings that gives the movie its zing.

In no way obsessive, Walk the Line is more sincerely--which is to say, more boringly--sincere. It doesn't leave you with much to think about, except maybe the empty vibrato of effective ventriloquism.

The filmmaker might be accused of preaching to the choir were the story not so compelling and the performances so strong.

Betty sustains her character, the movie fails to maintain its own.

Neither comedy nor tragedy, the movie is closest to genteel soap opera.

As cliché-rich as it is compelling.

Like a Hollywood fairy tale, Lola is always threatening to turn into a musical. Its edge as a film comes from the fact that it never quite does.

Warmhearted but unsentimental, touching but not mawkish, clever but never cute, Divan is almost miraculously modest.

In Jackson's hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling. Part Disney's "Alice in Wonderland," part Fritz Lang's "M," the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous.

Costa-Gavras provides a post-war postscript to make clear that honesty is punished; cynicism survives.

Intermittently, in attempts to articulate a coherent argument, Collateral Damage shifts from pulse-pounding mode to something more migraine-conducive.

A ridiculous deus-ex-machina "wrong man" story.

Filled with flashy sight gags, overwrought performances, and madly overlapping dialogue.

The Magnificent Ambersons is a pretty sensational movie. The film language is more fluid and adept than Kane‘s, the expressionist lighting is more rigorously modulated.

Albeit not as textured as Hong's past few films, Woman on the Beach is no less engrossing--a rueful tale of karmic irony, self-deceived desire, squandered second chances, and unforeseen abandonment.