J. Hoberman

As crass as it is visionary, Godzilla belongs with--and might well trump--the art films "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Dr. Strangelove" as a daring attempt to fashion a terrible poetry from the mind-melting horror of atomic warfare.

Steamboy doesn't have the deep melancholia or the visionary élan of last year's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Consistent in its graphic invention from first to last, however, it's a sensationally designed piece of work. (The retro stylistics are comparable to Brazil, David Lynch's Dune, and The Iron Giant.)

Persona is at once tactile and elusive, splintered and seamless, systematic and free-associative. Essentially a movie of fragments and vignettes, it is held together by the power of the artist’s craft and the centripetal force of his unconscious.

Our Brand Is Crisis manages to be remarkably suspenseful.

A funny, relationship-driven ensemble piece that takes the chill out of the Danish winter with a snuggly blanket of humanism.

A fascinatingly mean-spirited erotic comedy.

Soberly entertaining documentary.

A deft, old-school psychological thriller (or perhaps horror film) that relies mainly on the power of suggestion and memories of hippie cult crazies.

Not the least remarkable thing about this deadpan, deceptively haphazard ensemble comedy, a movie as much choreographed as directed, is the way that--at the final moment--the mist simply evaporates.

At once shockingly vivid and overwhelmingly antiheroic.

Dazzling dance to the music of time.

Visionaries' heedless montage brought back the sense of crazy possibility that excited me when, as a teenage kid from Queens, I first encountered Mekas's world.

At the heart of the movie are the prolonged, increasingly violent, self-criticism sessions - an escalating, claustrophobic, paranoid reign of terror, staged in near-darkness and shown in close-up.

Made with considerable wit and style, Horn's thoughtful celebration of the era and its most uncanny diva could function as the show's ("East Village USA") supplement.

The unnecessarily emphatic ending suggests that Secretary's makers are a bit anxious to demonstrate they've whipped a potentially grotesque, spanks-for-the-memories scenario into the season's most romantic love story -- which is, in fact, what they've done.

More fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It's also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring.

Gatlif's latest celebration of gypsy soul, sets a modest sliver of narrative in a fabulous widescreen landscape and surrounds it with a permanent party.

More impressionistic than analytical, A Grin Without a Cat is a grand immersion.

In the course of this clanging, spectral memoir, all of the artist's previous movies--from his underground mock epic "Tales from the Gimli Hospital" through his faux–Soviet silent "The Heart of the World" to his period spectacular "The Saddest Music in the World"--come to mind.

Milk is so immediate that it's impossible to separate the movie's moment from this one.

it may be the director's quintessential movie. It's an exercise in urban paranoia and mental disintegration that echoes or anticipates everything from "Repulsion" and "Rosemary's Baby" to "Bitter Moon" and "The Pianist."

S21 is understated and unforgettable; in its modest way, this movie is as horrific an exposure to evil as Lanzmann's "Shoah."

Manages to be not only consistently droll but cumulatively poignant and even scary.

To have been in junior high school when rhapsodic fugues of yearning like "Spanish Harlem," "Uptown," or "Be My Baby" first poured from the radio is to have a sensibility, if not a fantasy life, in some way molded by this monster of self-absorption; to see The Agony and the Ecstasy is to be discomfitingly haunted by the specter of that long-ago innocence.

Given the large cast, the international hopscotch, and the tantalizing illusion of depth, the movie's tone is "Frontline" meets John le Carré. Compared to the complacence of something like "The Interpreter," it's a regular brain tickler.

A mysterious, fabulously sad fable.

If Hollywood were truly devoted to telling it like it is, Baker would win a special Oscar. To add to the creepiness, Solondz is (as he made clear in Dollhouse) an extremely sensitive director of kids.

Room at the Top is quite conservative in its morality — although its sledgehammer ending still packs an emotional wallop.

Greenberg is a movie of throwaway one-liners and evocatively nondescript locations. The style is observational, the drama is understated, and, when the time comes, it knocks you out with the subtlest of badda-booms.

Bana, who appears in nearly every shot, talking all the while, gives a remarkably mercurial performance.

This corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like "Mean Streets" cubed.

A big-bang demolition derby, J.J. Abrams's much-anticipated, greatly enjoyable Super 8 seems bound for box-office glory.

Above all, this is an action film--or, better, a transaction film. It's not just that the Dardennes orchestrate an exciting motor scooter purse-snatching and a prolonged hot pursuit. L'Enfant is an action film because every act that happens is shown to have a consequence.

A work of bravura filmmaking.

Chow manages to have his cake and eat it too: Kung Fu Hustle is a kung fu parody that's also a terrific kung fu movie.

Le Havre is utopian precisely because it shows everything as it is not.

A work of great charm and bold aesthetic impurity, Agnès Varda's Cinévardaphoto is a suite of documentary shorts.

If Old Joy is more laid-back and contemplative than "Mutual Appreciation," it's because the characters are more weathered. Open-ended as it may appear, it has a crushing finality. For all the wool-gathering and guitar-noodling, this road movie is at least as tender as it is ironic.

Funny as it is, Brüno could not be as shockingly uproarious as "Borat." No matter how well retold, a joke necessarily loses explosive force the second time around. But a great gag is a thing of beauty forever--so, too, a comic performance.

Absorbing documentary portrait.

Panoramic yet cozy, enthusiastically glib.

Casually racist and inordinately sexist, Pépé le Moko is best enjoyed for its offhand surrealism.

Gets better as it goes along, building up to a prolonged shipboard finale.

Although hardly flawless, Eastwood's biopic is his richest, most ambitious movie since the "Letters From Iwo Jima" – "Flags of Our Fathers" duo, if not "Unforgiven."

A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp-at the very least, it's the most risible and riotous backstage movie since "Showgirls."

I've never seen a movie that paid more heartfelt tribute to the power of artistic invention.

More analytical than contemplative, never less than straightforward, Dream of Light makes no showy bid for the sublime.

The Soft Skin is a movie about the agony and ecstasy of an extramarital affair. Truffaut treats it like a crime film-low-key yet tense, filled with carefully planted potential "clues" and an undercurrent of anxiety.

The movie is an expert, sunlit chiller audaciously predicated on an unquiet historical memory: "What is a ghost?"

A deadpan, self-consciously prehistoric version of Jean Renoir's rueful idyll A Day in the Country, Blissfully Yours is unconscionably happy.

Confidently absurd.

Not for nothing did this movie open the International Critics' Week (and win its grand prize) last year at Cannes; Poison Friends may be all talk, but it's cut like an action flick.

Rudo y Cursi is as fatalistic as any film noir, but it's played for cartoonish screwball comedy. At once smooth and frantic, filled with cozy clutter and vulgar jive, the movie subsumes its moralizing in frat-house entertainment.

Allen's funniest, least sour outing in nearly a decade is a small movie with a tidy payoff. The movie gives vulgarity a good name.

Bean has built a bonfire of contradictions and the ensuing conflagration illuminates a bit of the world.

What's fascinating is how the various issues - religious or practical - are played out in these two quite different families, yet always come down to irreconcilable differences between rebellious women and their stiff-necked, controlling men.

Skillfully directed and adroitly acted.

The verbal jousts are droll and the countryside is splendid, although the food - an endless succession of fussy little presentations - may be an acquired taste.

A superbly crafted science-fiction fairy tale that's both Grimm and grim.

The Last Bolshevik, considered by some to be Marker's masterpiece.

Alberto Lattuada's tricky-to-parse Mafioso dates from 1962 but, with its abrupt tonal shifts and disturbing existential premise, this nearly forgotten dark comedy could be the most modern (or at least modernist) movie in town.

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."

Because everything is funny and nothing provides a punchline, audiences may be too shell-shocked to laugh--you know you're in Maddinville when individual cackles detonate at unexpected intervals.

The most offbeat studio comedy since "Rushmore."

Household Saints, a warmhearted fable spiced with magic realism and zesty performances, may be the most endearing of multigenerational Italian American family sagas and is likely the most mystical.

In addition to reporting a scoop, Bartley and O'Briain do an excellent job in deconstructing the Venezuelan TV news footage of blood, chaos, and rival crowds.

This absorbing, significant, and shamelessly entertaining movie not only goes through the looking glass but, no less significantly, turns the mirror back on us.

Elizabeth's most triumphant aspect is Blanchett's transformation from saucy, spirited toe-tapper to iconic Virgin Queen.

A master of smash-mash montage and choreographed chaos, Greengrass is the best action director working today, adroit at producing the sense of everyone converging and everything happening simultaneously.

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

Basically an experimental psychodrama, Epidemic has a pleasingly slapdash, underground quality that recalls early Fassbinder and Wenders -- although, with its cynical premise and frequent infusions of Wagner, it exudes the prankster snarkiness characteristic of von Trier.

Magnificent and cheesy, the latest and most proudly absurd of Chinese historical spectaculars, Detective Dee is a cinematic comic book for people who are sick of the mode.

From the cast and location to the attitude and premise, many things in The Ice Harvest are inescapably reminiscent of the Coen brothers. But as a director, Ramis is far less flashy and not nearly as pleased with himself. This is one of the most sustained movies of the year, as classic in its structure as "Double Indemnity" or "No Exit."

Maddin has created a fascinating hybrid--this enraptured composition in mist, gauze, and Vaseline is more rhapsody than narrative, less motion picture than shadow play.

The filmmaker gives full vent to his romanticism by staging an End of the Epoch party, with tearful sex workers dancing to "Nights in White Satin," then steps on the mood with yet another farewell fête, commemorating Bastille Day. The prisoners are free - to walk the streets. Ironic, no?

Trust never seems dated and, as a youth film, it may even be usefully pedagogic. [30 July 1991]

A 1943 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger collaboration so unambiguously satirizing the military mind-set that Prime Minister Winston Churchill tried to have it banned.

A considerably more unsettling tale of one-sided amour fou, reportedly inspired by an actual case of teenage prostitution, Jean-Pierre Améris's Bad Company puts the coy prurience of American high school films in brutal perspective.

While "Robinson Crusoe" was a paean to the practical middle-class virtues that allowed its industrious hero (and the nation he represents) to re-create civilization out of nothingness, Cast Away is a far less triumphalist peek into the nothingness at the heart of civilization.

It's an ostensive crime film at once symmetrical, surprising, and knowingly cinephilic.

Approaching 85, cine-essayist Chris Marker remains as lively, engaged, and provocative as ever--and no less fond of indirection.

Additional substance comes from Dorman's ongoing use of period photos and newsreel footage. In the spirit of the Sholem Aleichem oeuvre, Laughing in the Darkness is a collective family album.

Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist.

While never less than fascinating, Katyn alternates between scenes of tremendous power and sequences most kindly described as dutiful. It's as if the artist is never certain whether he is making this movie for himself, his father, or the entire nation.

Absurd as it sounds, Joyce's conviction is not only convincing but contagious. So, too, is her elastic sense of reality - a 90-minute immersion in her world is enough to make you question your own.

Jagged and jokey, filled with glam young people, lyrical Canto-Pop, and narrative non sequiturs, Time and Tide is Tsui's version of neo-new wave.

Avatar is a technological wonder, 15 years percolating in King Cameron's imagination and inarguably the greatest 3-D cavalry western ever made. Too bad that western is "Dances With Wolves."

Methodical, measured, and gently tedious in its comedy, Secret Ballot is a purposefully reductive movie—which may be why it's so successful at lodging itself in the brain.

The mood is less angst-ridden than hypercaffeinated, as Scorsese keeps cranking the velocity-bloodbath in the reggae inferno, exploding skyline pietà, climactic white light of redemption.

For orchestrating lurid goonishness, Hopper can't be beat.

Initially engrossing, The Dancer Upstairs slackens in its second half.

A film in which many things seem to happen twice and others not at all.

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 better-than-competent period evocation that allows the director to flaunt his knowledge (and perhaps vent some of his own bitterness) regarding Hollywood.

This moody, rapturous adaptation of Pierre, Herman Melville's gothic follow-up to "Moby Dick," is never less than seriously romantic.

Structured to suggest an extended psychoanalytic session or an episode of "The Twilight Zone."

In its willful, self-involved eccentricity, Southland Tales is really something else. Kelly's movie may not be entirely coherent, but that's because there's so much it wants to say.

Suffers from over-explanation. The movie maintains tremendous momentum through the Szpilman family's deportation. The second half is another story.

Present in every scene, if not each shot, Rourke gives a tremendously physical performance that The Wrestler essentially exists to document.

A mordant battlefield allegory with an absurdist edge.

Like its oxymoronic title, Good Morning, Night is sober yet filled with fancy. There's a wistful aspect to the movie.

A compelling thriller but an unsatisfying character drama.

At the very least, the spectacle of Poppy's devotion and desire, not to mention her all-around sunny disposish, left this viewer feeling unaccountably happy--at least for the moment.

For all its jarring sound design and herky-jerky pacing, founded on sudden incidents or shocking accidents, Mother is deftly plotted, applying Hitchcockian suspense with a Hitchcockian sense of fair play.

The Coens return to familiar territory with the parody thriller Burn After Reading, a characteristically supercilious and crisply shot clown show filled with cartoon perfs and predicated on extravagant stupidity.

Nossiter has an eye for stray details and a knack for relaxing his subjects- although the scene with the naked guy trampling his own grapes may make you sorry that you ever gave up drinking Ripple.

Swank and splashy as it is, Frida leaves the lurking suspicion that Taymor might have preferred to stage her pageant as a puppet show.

It's genuinely elemental, embarrassingly sincere. You can't accuse Gallo of pandering to anyone but himself. Not just a one-man band, he is his own entourage -- and likely to remain so. And that anguished solipsism seems to be, at least in part, the movie's subject.

The movie has its share of logical inconsistencies, although to dwell on them is to ignore its deliberate ambiguities and considerable panache.

Inexplicable as it is, the Joan of Arc story encourages contemplation of ourselves as a species. The Messenger is more apt to prompt meditation on the nature of show business.

A sort of parody "Apocalypse Now," complete with listless coochie dancers entertaining the Burmese troops, the movie finds its own heart of darkness once Rambo drops the doctors in Burma.

This broadly acted first feature is exceedingly direct, appropriately sordid, and at times, almost delicate.

The headiest, head-scratching-est, damnedest, most demanding movie opening this week in New York, The Ister could be simply described as a philosophical travelogue.

There's more than a bit of Charlie Kaufman to the heady premise, although the scenario doesn't double back on itself--except perhaps in the joke of having Schwartzman's actual mother, Talia Shire, play his mother on-screen.

Although the action set pieces are impressive, the exposition is sluggish. For all the posh dollies, high angles, and Venetian-blind crisscross patterns, The Black Dahlia rarely achieves the rhapsodic (let alone the delirious).

Up and Down is not exactly the toughest movie on the block, but especially compared to most American comedies, it conveys a sense of scrofulous rue.

A showy exercise in nervous grit, Go never strays too far from a sense of itself as stunt.

Any investigation into Hollywood inevitably mutates into a noir.

Hand it to Lawrence and Christian. Jindabyne is a soberly, if sluggishly, crafted movie in which the bitterness never stops.

An intelligent, viscerally intellectual exercise in ensemble acting and associative montage, enlivened with some terrific visual and dramatic ideas.

There's a message here regarding loneliness and emotional isolation, but the movie's real miracle is that, however precious its premise, this slow-burning not-quite heart-warmer-never succumbs to cuteness.

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

The Decay of Fiction is less a narrative than a monument. In its abstract movie-ness, this 74-minute carnival of souls exudes a wistful longing to connect, not so much with Hollywood history as with the history of that history.

More affecting than affected.

Inside Man certainly functions as a genre film, but the backbeat of inane banter and schoolyard trash-talking serves to promote an infectious sense of levity.

A more materialist (and successful) ensemble film than the mystical "Babel," in that everyone is connected through the same economic system, Fast Food Nation is exotic for being a movie about work.

Basically, Drive is a song of courtly love and devotion among the automatons. It's a machine, but it works.

Agently attitudinous, generally zippy urban fairy tale about pop stars and the hangers-on who coddle (or prey upon) them, Tom DiCillo's Delirious is a mild "Midnight Cowboy," a minor "King of Comedy," and mainly a vehicle for Steve Buscemi as a lower Manhattan–based paparazzo.

Way of the Gun is a self-consciously American odyssey.

The most pop film the great Russian filmmaker ever made.

Opens with a montage of the press in full operational mode, spewing out newspapers all but automatically for a fleet of waiting delivery trucks. It's a system at once efficient and cumbersome, ultra-modern yet quaint, that suggests nothing so much as a herd of dinosaurs, oblivious to the threat of impending extinction.

Dour yet affirmative, this laconic, deliberately paced, beautifully shot movie seeks the archaic in the ordinary - and, though somewhat off-putting in its diffidence, largely succeeds.

Afterschool, the almost frighteningly accomplished first feature made by Antonio Campos when he was 24, is high school as horror show.

Daniel Karslake's movie is more human interest than agitprop.

The movie is an absorbing series of one-on-ones. Local courtroom protocol is based on the British system; the law itself appears to be a complicated combination of tribal tradition, Muslim sharia, and government statutes.

For writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de coeur, one more from the heart.

Zhang Yimou's impeccably crafted, all-star martial arts extravaganza, is the essence of shallow gravitas.

World Trade Center is Stone's rehabilitation. It's not just courage that's honored, it's God's Will. It isn't only men who are saved, it's their families -- and their family values.

A bit of a slog at 205 minutes, World on a Wire builds up to a satisfyingly nutty finale.

Delicatessen may be junk food, but it's served with the discretion of nouvelle cuisine. [07 Apr 1992]

What's surprising is the atmosphere of sweet reason--elatively speaking--that distinguishes Kill Bill Vol. 2 from its bloody precursor.

Stylish, funny, and smart...but only up to a point.

Mildly cheesy but not overwrought, this long-awaited future franchise is a competent seat-warmer at the box-office table for the two weekends preceding George Lucas's "Attack of the Clones."

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.

Although Khrzhanovsky has several tricks up his sleeve, 4's most provocative quality is its ironic surplus of beauty.

Props then to Affleck. Coulter contrived a neat behavioral trick by inducing his star to play a comparably big-jawed bad actor. Surrounded as he is by canny professionals--Lane, Hoskins, Smith, and Jeffrey DeMunn as an unctuous glad-handing agent--it's an unexpectedly touching performance.

In short, this new Quiet American is not only true to Greene's novel -- it has the effect of making the novel itself seem truer than it has ever been.

Too chatty to be ascetic, Summer Hours is nevertheless almost Ozu-like in its evocation of a parent's death and the dissolving bond between the surviving children. It's also an essay on the nature of sentimental and real value--as well as the need to protect French culture in a homogenizing world.

Richer in metaphor than narrative drive.

Sunny as The Straight Story appears, Lynch is still defamiliarizing the normal.

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.

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.

It's a measure of the movie's success that one oscillates between two despairs-noting the abject failure of the system and the utter futility of revolt.

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.

This deliriously downbeat vehicle for the postpunk diva Björk has generated the controversy the Danish dogmatist has relentlessly court.

The movie is slick and studiously cool -- with plenty of visual flourishes but not too much soul.

It is meant to boggle the mind and inspire awe-and it does.

More mystical than mysterious, Seabiscuit is a proudly cornball sentimental epic -- a reverential paean to a vanished America that's steeped in inspirational uplift and played for world-historical pathos.

The performances are uneven, but the spirit never flags.

Often thrilling almost-feelie.

Tender and funny.

Wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and silently beseeching, she's (Johansson) even more a screen for projection here than in "Lost in Translation"; surrounded by a gaggle of over-actors, she glows with understatement.

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.

Moving from cafés to poolrooms to movie theaters, it's the prototypical male ensemble film.

More engrossing than convincing.

A quietly ambitious, well-wrought, and tastefully poignant treatment of two local literary legends.

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.

This simple, sinuous fable may not be among Imamura’s greatest films–it lacks the crazy libidinal energy of The Pornographers or Eijanaika–but it could hardly have been made by anyone else.

A surprisingly credible action flick.

A deceptively modest fable of innocence abroad that resonates with the situation within Israel and without.

An intelligent movie, not so much salacious as affecting but ultimately less analytical than overwrought, Heading South makes its points in the first 20 minutes.

Extremely clever in its use of self-deprecation, it's guaranteed to bring down the house at any remotely sympathetic venue.

Primordial and laconic, this remarkably assured debut feature has the elegant simplicity of its title.

With his 10th feature--an entertaining tale of high-stakes martial arts--Mamet has infused the sleight of hand with a measure of two-fisted action.

If Moore is formidable, it's not because he is a great filmmaker (far from it), but because he infuses his sense of ridicule with the fury of moral indignation. Fahrenheit 9/11 is strongest when that wrath is vented on Bush and his cohorts.

Doesn't dawdle and, despite some eye-rolling dialogue, is a generally amiable time-trip.

Steeped in metaphor as it is, Panic offers a more naturalistic analysis of male midlife crisis than the grotesquely overpraised "American Beauty."

To his credit, del Toro does not flinch from the ridiculous. But he is equally sensitive to Hellboy's pulp poetry.

Romanek's movie is a bit too pat and pleased with its undeniable ambitions, but the setup resonates with quiet desperation. There's not a single vicarious glorch.

This promising first feature is nearly as apt to use the power of suggestion as to ladle up the gore, triumphantly creepy, and just arty enough to have secured a slot in last year's New York Film Festival.

The Kidman character is an exotic--and even unlikely--creature, usefully fueling Penn's annoyed but fascinated incredulity.

Escalates into visceral allegory with an abandon and cruelty that seem positively Romanian. The last 30 minutes more than redeem the preceding two hours.

Grey isn't the first porn actress to go straight, but she may be the first to allegorize her own situation--projecting an on-screen self-confidence that’s indistinguishable from pathos.

It’s as a rhetorician that Moore is most original and effectively demagogic.

Kaboom does have an excellent punchline, although even at 86 minutes it feels too long-mainly because Araki can't help letting his camera linger over his performers. Hard to blame him-he's assembled the best-looking cast in town and it's largely his gaga appreciation that makes the movie so much fun.

A loud and frequently funny clown show, Full Throttle is less a grim demolition derby than a day at Coney Island, punctuated by the clatter and screams of the Cyclone.

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.