J. Hoberman

Paris Blues is a small movie with large ambitions.

Thoughtfully orchestrated and filled with visual wit.

Not only very civilized--this cool, deliberate film suggests that Bach's music is the quintessence of European civilization.

Celebrating the desire to immerse oneself in a collective, world-changing enterprise, Commune is unavoidably nostalgic.

Opening too late for the election but still one the year's most politically relevant movies, Condon's earnestly middlebrow biopic is an argument for tolerance and diversity.

A world-beat city symphony.

Has plenty of problems. But most stem from a young filmmaker overswinging on his first time up to the plate and hitting a deep fly out rather than a home run.

It has the charm of the original American road movies, feasting on the gorgeous, ramshackle landscape of the filmmaker's motherland.

A compelling if not altogether convincing tale of mad love and divine redemption, adapted from the prize-winning novel by Castellitto's wife, Margaret Mazzantini.

This redux is a rare device: a TV remake for the big screen that works on its own terms.

The movie's best performance belongs to Peter Fonda. Tough, terrific, and totally unrecognizable as a bounty hunter, this cantankerous old hippie is so leathery he deserves his own line of rawhide apparel.

For all the on-set antics, appropriated Fellini music, and throwaway gags, the movie is most successful when Coogan is pulling faces for the mirror, aimlessly trading Pacino imitations with his sidekick Brydon, or riffing on the color of the latter's teeth.

A tour de force for Streep, who gives her character an unexpected measure of depth.

The leanest and meanest of Solondz's misanthropic comedies, feasts on the anguish of adolescence and confusion of college -- white suburban-style.

Sardonic as it may be, Tales From the Golden Age is basically affirmative - its true subject is resilience. Romania suffered under a regime of dangerous stupidity. Drawing on popular memory, Mungiu has orchestrated a contribution to local folklore, a suite of stories in which those rendered witless by oppression were compelled by circumstance to live off their wits.

Death to Smoochy is often very funny, but what's even more remarkable is the integrity of DeVito's misanthropic vision.

John Turturro, who, given the most romantic role of his career, fully inhabits the ungainly Luzhin.

However cloying, the movie creates a powerful vortex. It's surprisingly visceral-at times almost thrilling.

The movie feels truncated, but it communicates a certain urgency and at times a powerful sense of the absurd.

Film Socialisme deflects interpretation but, so long as one subscribes to the William Carlos Williams injunction "No ideas but in things," it's filled with sensuous pleasures.

A timely--if tepid--fantasy of American vengeance on the Qutbian extremists of Saudi Arabia.

A movie of cartoon-like mass formations, singing urchins, and operatic outbursts.

This may not be Kaurismäki's masterpiece, but it is a movie of sustained stylistic integrity -- and it has the power to make you laugh.

Flagrantly artistic and transfixed by its own enigma, Elephant is strongest on evoking a succession of specific, "empty" moments and weakest on motivation.

Monty Python's Life of Brian, re-released on its 25th anniversary as an antidote to "The Passion of the Christ," is a single-joke satire of organized religion, including Hollywood's.

The actors, mainly newcomers, have an improvisational freshness well matched to the freewheeling camera work.

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

This absorbing essay amply demonstrates that, as with any sort of racial-nationalist paranoia, anti-Semitism has very little to do with actual Jews and everything to do with imagined ones.