J. Hoberman

A heady plum pudding of a movie--studded with outsized performances and drenched in cinematic brio. The concoction is over-rich, yet irresistible.

May not be the movie of the year, but it is a seasonal gift to us all. Sweet and funny, doggedly oddball if bordering precious.

A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence.

Enriches a deceptively anecdotal plot with a combination of observational camerawork, strong narrative rhythms, and deft characterization.

Transparently a movie about a group of filmmakers who attempt to possess a particular location, Our Beloved Month relaxes into a meditation on the mysteries of place, personality, and process.

Robust, engrossing, and surprisingly restrained in saving most of its effects for the grand finale, the first Chronicles of Narnia installment eschews Harry Potter's satanic subtext and "The Lord of the Rings'" Wagnerian cosmology. It may be as close to adult-friendly kid fare as Hollywood will ever get.

Adaptation's success in engaging the audience in the travails of creating a screenplay is extraordinary.

Mr. Assayas succeeded in making a young person’s film when he was on the cusp of turning 40. He has said that he wanted Cold Water to feel like a movie from 1972. It doesn’t really, but, perhaps more remarkably, it’s so fresh it could have been made now.

Plenty of moments in Melancholia are painfully funny. Some moments are even painful to watch, but there was never a moment when I thought about the time or my next movie or did not care about the characters or had anything less than complete interest in what was happening on the screen.

A fierce dance of destruction. Its flame-like, roiling black-and-white inspires trembling and gratitude.

Wong is sensationally expressive and projects a modern, coolly appraising sexuality. Visually eloquent and often dazzling, the movie is no less terrific. Piccadilly is both evidence of silent cinema at its rudely aborted peak and Wong's frustrated potential to have been among its greatest stars.

A veteran of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, the deadpan Harper puts her training to good use, gracefully eluding the attacking furniture and skillfully dodging the imploding set, as she flees—arms protectively crossed before her face—out into the night.

The movie with which Hitchcock became Hitchcock.

A work of unostentatious beauty and uncloying sweetness, at once sophisticated and artless, mysterious and matter-of-fact, cosmic and humble, it asks only a measure of Boonmeevian acceptance: The movie doesn't mean anything-it simply is.

The Magnificent Ambersons is a pretty sensational movie. The film language is more fluid and adept than Kane‘s, the expressionist lighting is more rigorously modulated.

Treeless Mountain is skillfully unsentimental--because of, but also despite, the presence of two irresistible, unself-conscious performers in virtually every scene.

The movie is as eloquently uninflected and filled with quirks as its star.

Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment--rich in fantasy and blithely amoral.

Leisurely yet streamlined film, brilliantly adapted by British filmmaker Terence Davies from Edith Wharton's most powerful novel.

Terror is existential in this highly intelligent, somewhat sadistic, totally fascinating movie.

The results are extraordinary. As understated as it is, the movie is both deeply absurd and powerfully affecting.

As straightforward and plot-driven as any movie about life imitating art imitating life could possibly be.

Excavated from the deep '50s, Michelangelo Antonioni's Le amiche (known in English as "The Girlfriends") is an unexpected treasure.

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.

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.

A masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality.

The Fallen Idol has been overshadowed by the noir comedy, giddy style, and Cold War thematics of Reed and Greene's subsequent sensation "The Third Man," but (in similarly dealing with the nature of betrayal) The Fallen Idol is actually a superior psychological drama.

This lusty, heartfelt movie has a near Brueghelian visual energy and a humanist passion as contagious as its music.