J. Hoberman

Remarkably unassuming, genuinely playful, and superbly executed, The Iron Giant towers over the cartoon landscape.

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.

The vision of America as a vast, ratings-driven amateur hour is not without promise, but Weitz's movie, named for the most popular TV program in its parallel universe, is disappointingly soft in its individual characterizations.

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.

The most authentic thing about Redacted is the rage with which it was made.

This is a movie about the nature of acting -- or, more specifically, the nature that creates an actress -- centered on what appears to be a spectacularly unconvincing title-role performance.

Inoffensively glib and innocuously arty.

The movie may not be a single-bound building-leaper but Bryan Singer reconfigures the daddy of all comic-book sagas into something knowing, witty, and even sensitive.

Though he successfully humanizes Hirohito, who is shown happily shedding his divinity, Sokurov doesn't entirely exonerate him. He contrives a shock ending that, as measured as everything else in this engrossing, supremely assured movie, acknowledges one last blood sacrifice on the emperor's altar.

Filled with all manner of tawdry tricks.

A ghost story that's shot as though it were a documentary -- and a documentary that feels like a dream. Almost too fashionable for its own good.

A movie more to be prescribed than recommended.

An art film without the NYFF imprimatur, Heaven is a peculiar amalgam -- a Miramax package (without the hype), directed by German hotshot Tom Tykwer under the eye of Anthony Minghella, from a script with which the late Krzysztof Kieslowski had planned to inaugurate a new trilogy named for the Divine Comedy.

Vera Drake puts the passion in compassion. Building up to a shattering conclusion, Leigh's movie is both outrageously schematic and powerfully humanist.

The Pillow Book's pretentions are boundless, for all its desperate fashion and layered imagery, it's a staggering bore-as vacantly petulant as Kate Moss's stare. [10 Jun 1997]

This ponderous, didactic weepie aspires to "Titanic" stature even if the only ship it sinks is itself.

The filmmaker uncovers a foul, lurid, corrupt, and perversely compelling conspiracy--which is to say, he successfully turns The Night Watch into a Peter Greenaway film.

For King Kong is an accountant's movie at heart. Given the excessive length and bombastic F/X, there's too much action and precious little poetry.

An enjoyably overwrought meditation on the consequences of celebrity and the vicissitudes of fandom, Backstage stars Le Besco as the schoolgirl acolyte of Emmanuelle Seigner's pop diva, a singer-songwriter and high priestess of cheese.

A masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality.

Anatomy of Hell gives a feminist twist to a French literary tradition that goes back to the Marquis de Sade. It's also svelte, assured filmmaking.

Although largely devoid of dramatic interest, Journeys With George does convincingly document the horror of life within the campaign "bubble."

Has marked affinities to "Ghost World" and "Donnie Darko." It's more amorphous and less sharply drawn than either but has an acute sense of guilty secrets and secret places.

Set off by sprightly graphics and shimmering with over-bright colors, Full Battle Rattle has a fake transparency. The movie arouses, without gratifying, a desire to see the camera.

Corny as that is, the film's nadir comes when Zuckerberg's pretty young lawyer comforts him (or us) with the mealy-mouthed observation, "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be one."

A welcome exercise in anime weirdness.