J. Hoberman

Treeless Mountain is skillfully unsentimental--because of, but also despite, the presence of two irresistible, unself-conscious performers in virtually every scene.

Beeswax exemplifies post-mumble maturity. The movie is not only semi-documentary, but also casually thoughtful (or at least self-reflexive)--working with friends is what Bujalski does in creating his own particular Storyville.

Accurate enough as history to provide a potent reminder that black independent cinema did not end with Oscar Micheaux or begin with Spike Lee.

An austere and fascinating documentary.

Methodical, measured, and gently tedious in its comedy, Secret Ballot is a purposefully reductive movie—which may be why it's so successful at lodging itself in the brain.

Bean has built a bonfire of contradictions and the ensuing conflagration illuminates a bit of the world.

Drawing on interviews with SLA co-founder Russ Little and amazing TV news footage, Robert Stone illuminates this fantastic narrative as vividly as it has ever been.

Any investigation into Hollywood inevitably mutates into a noir.

No good deed goes unpunished in former fashion photographer Fred Cavayé's cunningly contrived, energetically directed, thoroughly economical second feature.

A small-screen aesthetic is evident in the abundant close-ups and tight framing, but Holland makes it work for her.

S21 is understated and unforgettable; in its modest way, this movie is as horrific an exposure to evil as Lanzmann's "Shoah."

Ultimately, The Woodmans is a haunting study in family dynamics.

It’s as a rhetorician that Moore is most original and effectively demagogic.

If you can forget the world-historic significance of the mass revolution that overthrew Europe's oldest absolute monarchy -- or rather, subsume it in the mysteries of personality -- The Lady and the Duke is the stuff of human interest.

A funny, fantastic, genuinely alarming quasi-autobiographical cheapster by twentysomething New York brothers Josh and Benny Safdie.

Absurd as it sounds, Joyce's conviction is not only convincing but contagious. So, too, is her elastic sense of reality - a 90-minute immersion in her world is enough to make you question your own.

A movie of long, expressive silences, Divine Intervention articulates things that have never been articulated, at least on the screen.

It's a Jerry Bruckheimer art film, perhaps the most extravagantly aestheticized combat movie ever made.

The Decay of Fiction is less a narrative than a monument. In its abstract movie-ness, this 74-minute carnival of souls exudes a wistful longing to connect, not so much with Hollywood history as with the history of that history.

Depending on one's mood, the movie might seem boldly simplified and poetic--or boringly simpleminded and prosaic.

Reuniting an uptight married man with a footloose old pal, Lynn Shelton's third feature offers a (much) more extreme version of Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy," also a sort of buddy movie, also shot in Seattle.

A 157-minute police procedural at once sensuous and cerebral, profane and metaphysical, "empty" and abundant, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is closer to the Antonioni of "L'Avventura," and it elevates the 52-year-old director to a new level of achievement.

While "Robinson Crusoe" was a paean to the practical middle-class virtues that allowed its industrious hero (and the nation he represents) to re-create civilization out of nothingness, Cast Away is a far less triumphalist peek into the nothingness at the heart of civilization.

A quietly ambitious, well-wrought, and tastefully poignant treatment of two local literary legends.

A satisfyingly well-wrought, old-school thriller: Character drives the plot, literally.

The movie is slick and studiously cool -- with plenty of visual flourishes but not too much soul.

Religious fanaticism gets even scarier in this hour-long doc.

It plays out as an unsettling solipsistic love story--an account of erotic obsession with a family relation to "Of Human Bondage."