J. Hoberman

Kaufman's earnestly overblown celebration of the Marquis de Sade.

Cure has a generic resemblance to "Seven," but it's far more oblique, and that much more troubling.

The screen is saturated with Gallic whimsy and the romance of Montmartre in the person of Amélie.

Meta-documentary to the end, Empathy takes its leave by pretending to spy on one patient with his ear to the closed door, eavesdropping on another patient. How did watching the movie make me feel? Interested, amused, and um, empathetic.

Since "The Thin Blue Line's" remarkable intervention, Morris's work has grown more public and more problematic--lofty yet snide, a form of know-it-all epistemological inquiry.

As directed by Gidi Dar, Ushpizin has a disarming folk quality.

The lovability quotient is as high as the altitude.

Despite an absurdly melodramatic premise, Lost Embrace is an essentially plotless series of riffs and jokes. It's 20 minutes too long--forgivable in view of Burman's affection for his material.

Owning Mahowny shares the earlier ("Love and Death on Long Island") film's crisp precision, but it's a far more rigorously sublimated and abstract account of l'amour fou.

A near-irresistible button-pusher that's agile enough to hold a mirror to its own aspirations: The Sundance prize-winning filmmaker and her prize discovery, Michelle Rodriguez, merge in the image of a self-invented amateur boxer.

Beautiful but withholding, The Forsaken Land doesn't offer much in the way of explanation -- the soundtrack features more birdcalls than dialogue -- but the 27-year-old filmmaker's command of film language is evident and his evocation of postwar trauma is haunting.

A fascinating and painful account of an entertainer trapped not only by his Jewishness but by his overwhelming need to make theater.

Single-dad sitcom is not Sir Ridley's forte but, anachronistically evoking the ring-a-ding-ding ambience of "Auto Focus" and "Catch Me If You Can," his mise-en-scène is as impeccable as Roy's pad.

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

Almost buoyant in its creepiness and positively bejeweled in its disgust -- the movie can be enjoyably considered as a self-conscious fiction in the convoluted tradition of Raul Ruiz or Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain."

Floating on the surface of confusion, Gunner Palace has a raw home video quality that's often quite beautiful. Much of the movie is hardly more than an immersion in sights and sounds. Vivid as it is, Gunner Palace is dominated by what isn't shown. It's the human face of Abu Ghraib.

Sweet, crazy, and tinged with sadness, Michel Gondry's new feature The Science of Sleep is a wondrous concoction.

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

The Syrian Bride has no particular visual style, but it exudes affection, for its characters and their culture as well as the unprepossessing beauty of the scrubby terrain that holds them in thrall. Like all wedding films, it's essentially a comedy, albeit a sad one.

Acerbic, moody, and provocatively slight, it's a movie of apparent non sequiturs and privileged moments. [21 Oct 1997]

I got a charge out of Going Upriver, but as more than one person has noted, the movie's ideal spectator would be Kerry himself.

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.

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

A fascinatingly mean-spirited erotic comedy.

Stirring documentary.

A Town Called Panic, which has more strident colors and less synopsizable action than a year's worth of comic-book adventures, embodies a sensibility that might be termed "extreme quirk."

Predicated as it is on Huppert's pensive, provocative blankness, the action moves a bit slowly, although, as is often the case with Jacquot, events make more sense after the movie is over.

A first-person doc assembled largely from footage taken in the course of the five features they made, being madmen together.