J. Hoberman

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.

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.

Less a tale of desperado lovers than a cruel story of youth, Tout de Suite is framed largely in close-up, with few transitional shots and a narrative that grows increasingly fragmented.

Natalie Wood is on hand as a cheroot-smoking suffragist (with a phenomenal wardrobe), but the movie is largely powered by Lemmon’s energy, roaring like Jackie Gleason as the bombastic Professor Fate and later appearing as his double, the klutzy crown prince of a Ruritanian kingdom.

However glitzy, clever, and luridly philosophical, Demonlover is still mainly an old-fashioned thriller.

Frears might have accelerated the comic pacing, but the story is a good one and events come nicely to a boil.

Restrained, precise, and unobtrusively wry.

A Girl Cut in Two is a spry piece of work. Chabrol uses this sinister clown show as a means to puncture the media world's hot-air balloons--as well as to highlight the hypocrisies of his favorite target, the haute bourgeoisie.

A highly personal movie, Go Go Tales finds Ferrara in a frenzied yet pensive mode.

Doesn't coddle the audience. But neither does it play fair. The narrative takes several fast turns and stops short with the sudden introduction of new material; the exposition is hurried and lazily predicated on characters' thinking aloud.

Filled with vivid cameos and set to an infectious soul beat that effectively covers the underlying hum of calculated precision.

Paradise Now suffers from some odd continuity glitches and takes a few too many narrative curves en route to an overly convoluted ending, but the heart of the movie is as tense as the bus ride in Hitchcock's "Sabotage."

One of the most oppressive accounts of life in a military detention since Jonas Mekas's "documentary" version of The Brig or Peter Watkins's Punishment Park.

Perhaps because Herzog is approaching old-master status, Encounters at the End of the World skews toward the observational. As in "Grizzly Man," his 2005 portrait of a deranged bear lover, Herzog seems at least as fascinated with other people's obsessions as his own.

It is, for the most part, witty and engrossing.

The emphasis in this surprisingly cheerful film is on the resilience of the living.

May be as gimmicky as Ozon's other features, but it's also more resonant and even haunting.

My first impression of Three Times was that it was high middling Hou--conceptually bold but unevenly executed. The movie's implicit themes of time travel, eternal recurrence, and the transmigration of souls seemed as muddied by the director's devotion to Shu as they were dissipated in the confusion of the final present-day section. But Three Times improves on a second viewing.

The simulation of shaky camera amateur DV is a narrative ploy that often taxes the filmmakers' ingenuity. Still, the movie has a creepy authenticity.

Everything is edged with desperation. However arduous Last Train Home may have been to shoot, it was infinitely more arduous to live.

Winn pretty much plays it as it lays—her obvious acting works with her character’s weak sense of self. Pacino, however, is a force of nature.

It's more conventionally romantic than wildly Romantic--but no less touching for that.

Mad conspiracy rules in Korean writer-director Jang Jun-hwan's snazzy, playful, some-what gory, often hilarious, and generally unpredictable first feature.

It's unpretentiously low-tech and humorously offbeat. And against all odds, the filmmaker emerges as a star.

The action is largely psychological, but it's accelerated by Audiard's nervous camera, chiaroscuro lighting, and jangling montage.

Given the movie's graphic pizzazz, the best hippie wisdom Bridges might offer the viewer is: Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.

Deft, affectionate, and unexpectedly enjoyable.