J. Hoberman

Initially engrossing, The Dancer Upstairs slackens in its second half.

A film in which many things seem to happen twice and others not at all.

Predicated as it is on Huppert's pensive, provocative blankness, the action moves a bit slowly, although, as is often the case with Jacquot, events make more sense after the movie is over.

A better-than-competent period evocation that allows the director to flaunt his knowledge (and perhaps vent some of his own bitterness) regarding Hollywood.

This moody, rapturous adaptation of Pierre, Herman Melville's gothic follow-up to "Moby Dick," is never less than seriously romantic.

Structured to suggest an extended psychoanalytic session or an episode of "The Twilight Zone."

In its willful, self-involved eccentricity, Southland Tales is really something else. Kelly's movie may not be entirely coherent, but that's because there's so much it wants to say.

Suffers from over-explanation. The movie maintains tremendous momentum through the Szpilman family's deportation. The second half is another story.

Present in every scene, if not each shot, Rourke gives a tremendously physical performance that The Wrestler essentially exists to document.

A mordant battlefield allegory with an absurdist edge.

Like its oxymoronic title, Good Morning, Night is sober yet filled with fancy. There's a wistful aspect to the movie.

A compelling thriller but an unsatisfying character drama.

At the very least, the spectacle of Poppy's devotion and desire, not to mention her all-around sunny disposish, left this viewer feeling unaccountably happy--at least for the moment.

For all its jarring sound design and herky-jerky pacing, founded on sudden incidents or shocking accidents, Mother is deftly plotted, applying Hitchcockian suspense with a Hitchcockian sense of fair play.

The Coens return to familiar territory with the parody thriller Burn After Reading, a characteristically supercilious and crisply shot clown show filled with cartoon perfs and predicated on extravagant stupidity.

Nossiter has an eye for stray details and a knack for relaxing his subjects- although the scene with the naked guy trampling his own grapes may make you sorry that you ever gave up drinking Ripple.

Swank and splashy as it is, Frida leaves the lurking suspicion that Taymor might have preferred to stage her pageant as a puppet show.

It's genuinely elemental, embarrassingly sincere. You can't accuse Gallo of pandering to anyone but himself. Not just a one-man band, he is his own entourage -- and likely to remain so. And that anguished solipsism seems to be, at least in part, the movie's subject.

The movie has its share of logical inconsistencies, although to dwell on them is to ignore its deliberate ambiguities and considerable panache.

Inexplicable as it is, the Joan of Arc story encourages contemplation of ourselves as a species. The Messenger is more apt to prompt meditation on the nature of show business.

A sort of parody "Apocalypse Now," complete with listless coochie dancers entertaining the Burmese troops, the movie finds its own heart of darkness once Rambo drops the doctors in Burma.

This broadly acted first feature is exceedingly direct, appropriately sordid, and at times, almost delicate.

The headiest, head-scratching-est, damnedest, most demanding movie opening this week in New York, The Ister could be simply described as a philosophical travelogue.

There's more than a bit of Charlie Kaufman to the heady premise, although the scenario doesn't double back on itself--except perhaps in the joke of having Schwartzman's actual mother, Talia Shire, play his mother on-screen.

Although the action set pieces are impressive, the exposition is sluggish. For all the posh dollies, high angles, and Venetian-blind crisscross patterns, The Black Dahlia rarely achieves the rhapsodic (let alone the delirious).

Up and Down is not exactly the toughest movie on the block, but especially compared to most American comedies, it conveys a sense of scrofulous rue.

A showy exercise in nervous grit, Go never strays too far from a sense of itself as stunt.

Any investigation into Hollywood inevitably mutates into a noir.