J. Hoberman

Where The Matrix was a heady cocktail of gnostic Zen Philip K. Dick cyberpunk '60s psychedelic bull, well spiked with high-octane digitally driven Hong Kong action pyrotechnics, those elements reloaded soon separate out. The refreshing draft of effervescent movie magic leaves a sludgy sediment of metaphysics.

The Decomposition of the Soul is a deliberately confining movie, but unlike "The Lives of Others," it offers no closure.

By Hong Kong standards, To's policiers have been fairly down-to-earth, but Exiled--which begins with a tribute to Sergio Leone and ends by acknowledging Sam Peckinpah--exists solely in the world of the movies.

A leisurely, never boring, grimly amusing, and not entirely hopeless disquisition on the contemporary world's "dominant institution."

The movie exudes a cheerful energy--laying out a deck of narrative cards, then reshuffling them in the final 10 minutes.

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.

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.

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.

As cliché-rich as it is compelling.

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

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

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.

City of Life and Death is far more convincing as a spectacle of mass atrocity than a drama of individual conscience.

Beauvois's film is cool while Denis's is hot-but the main difference is that where "White Material" is knowingly postcolonial, Of Gods and Men aspires to the timeless.

Raking over the same clichés as "Almost Famous," Rock Star is far less reverential -- it isn't burdened by generational nostalgia and doesn't take itself too seriously.

Jarecki's film forcefully argues that the much abused word FREEDOM cannot paper over the conflicts between capitalism and democracy.

Ideas beam out from Astra Taylor's engaging new philoso-doc Examined Life; the viewer basks in the intelligence on-screen and, occasionally, soaks up the rays.

The movie is a sweeping, hectic docudrama that would have been immeasurably helped by the use of informational intertitles.

A casually bleak and neatly structured ensemble comedy--at once deadpan and bemused.

It's not the least of Afghan tragedies that this noble warlord would be consigned to the dustbin of history.

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

As ambitious as it is anachronistic, Duck, You Sucker demands to be read through the prism of World War II as well as 1968. Could this be the last movie in the great Italian tradition that began in 1945?

Watts, who has the most difficult scenes, is splendidly mercurial; what's surprising is that those professional storm clouds Penn and Del Toro are here as powerfully restrained as she is electrifying.

The movie is characterized by its crisp, cutting, classical framing, and comic timing. The style and approach recall classic Albert Brooks. Indeed, the beleaguered, cuckolded Joel would have been a great role for the young Brooks--adding a certain self-aggrandizing je ne sais quoi or a neurotic zetz that the appealing, but bland, Bateman lacks.

An exercise in voyeurism, Maren Ade's provocatively titled, superbly performed, emotionally graphic Everyone Else is more fascinating than enjoyable.

This shocker is often shameless, not least in the climactic confrontation with Sister Bridget, but it's impossible not to be moved by the ending -- if only because the torture is finally over.

The Piano Teacher's study in lurid sexual pathology occasions a tour de force by Isabelle Huppert as the title character.