J. Hoberman

A tricksy meta-thriller that, replete with the requisite homage to "Vertigo," sustains its dreamlike glide through a succession of cheesy coincidences and voluptuous cheap effects.

Long before it ends, its leisurely immersion in the Mississippi Delta has turned downright lukewarm and even chilly.

Auto Focus doesn't really go anywhere, but then neither does any form of obsessive-compulsive behavior -- which may be Schrader's point.

This malevolently gleeful satire...is extremely funny, surprisingly well- acted, and boldly designed...at least until its steel-and-chrome soufflé falls apart.

The movie rises to another level whenever its star has a chance to cut loose -- leading the ensemble in a conga line, winning a sack race in slow motion, torching the Whos' Christmas tree while screaming, "Burn baby burn."

Tightly framed and tightly wound, Mary is a claustrophobic, incandescent, nutty 83 minutes with everyone in the cast teetering on the ledge of madness.

Moll's style is low-key and straightforward.

Ace in the Hole is a movie about the fascination of disaster that is itself a fascinating disaster.

The movie turns terminally wearisome and even anti-climactic with the triumph of the brain-lodging "Je T'aime" (which, alone among the movie's numbers, is heard in its original version) and Gainsbourg's descent into alcoholic dissolution.

A bit precious, ultimately wearisome.

Yes, there's something terribly familiar about this historical fantasy. As we now know, and Willmott is well aware, the South actually did win the Civil War.

Touching in its absurdity, the movie is what the French, if they didn't love Gray so much, might term agréablement ridicule.

Rains on its own parade.

Lookin' for sin, American-style? Try Hell House, which documents the cautionary Christian spook-a-rama of the same name.

Another creature of need, if the temperamental opposite of self-contained Brandon, Sissy is equally prepared to push her way into his life or push herself in front of a subway. She's also a performer - and Mulligan's blowsy desperation makes for the movie's best turn.

Less monster than monstrosity—albeit, as superfluous sequels go, not on par with the memorably idiotic "Godfather III."

An affable action hero in search of the planet's arch supervillain, Spurlock is less irritating than his obvious model, Michael Moore, but also less politically astute; assuming the role of a faux-naïf stranger in a strange land, he's more benign and not nearly as funny as unacknowledged analogue Sacha Baron Cohen.

This is the first movie I've ever seen -- porn included -- in which a guy gets coldcocked with a dildo.

Circumspect documentary.

A sweet, dumb pup of a movie, not unlike its eponymous hero, The Wendell Baker Story frisks along sniffing the sidewalk.

To call this story unbelievable is to say the very least. If it's a hoax, Bruce is a fantastic actor (but then, the movie suggests, so are we all). If not, you may wonder less about Bruce's personality than his condition.

Team America is at once grandiose and tacky, elaborate and deflationary.

Lacking any equivalent to the Sadean excess of Ellis's prose, it is also further evacuated of purpose.

The campaign's latest scare doc takes its title, Bush's Brain, and much of its argument from the portrait of political operative and bogeyman Karl Rove published last year by a pair of Dallas newsmen.

As this movie knows what it is, Scooby-Doo's a relatively painless 85 minutes.

Downfall may be grimly self-important and inescapably trivializing. But we should be grateful that German cinema is more inclined to normalize the nation's history than rewrite it.

Gleefully confrontational in its ludicrous, pulpy tawdriness.

Shot in a style that might be termed Americana gravitas, September Dawn has the ham-fisted lyricism of political ads and pharmaceutical commercials. The schematic script is further burdened with heavy ironies and hackneyed dialogue.

A philosophical gross-out comedy rudely presented from the perspective of a sullen, sexually curious 14-year-old.

X-ploitative though it may be, the spectacle of a man beaten and tortured to death seeks to be an object of contemplation. Serious questions are raised.

Blown opportunity.

Halfway through, De Palma literally explodes his narrative to orchestrate a superb deep-space float-opera replete with runaway modules, high-tech lassos, dramatic self-sacrifice, and, in the most surprising maneuver, a montage-driven modicum of actual suspense.

Openly gay and overwhelmingly glum.

Ultimately more amusing than hilarious, and sometimes less than that.

Alternately grandiose and abject, Bandini is a sort of underground man, and if no more miscast than usual, heartthrob Colin Farrell miserably fails to convincingly render Bandini's neurosis.

Exercise in existential tedium that it is, Gerry isn't without devotees.

Like more than one recent movie, Alice seems a trailer for a Wonderland computer game--and it is. The final battle is clearly designed for gaming. So, it would seem, is the character of actualized as well as action Alice.

Possession suffers from insufficient nastiness.

Playing the young Coleman with the requisite intelligence and ambiguity, Wentworth Miller contributes the sole viable characterization.

The Dreamers is bad, but unlike the similarly camped-up "Little Buddha" or "Stealing Beauty," it's not exactly boring.

High-powered and gory.

Much of the movie is dull, and as it has been dubbed into English, the blah-blah is impossible to ignore.

Lovingly detailed but unaccountably clumsy, obviously ambitious, and unfortunately chintzy. It's also genuinely anachronistic.

The last-minute combination of Greek tragedy and Janis Joplin is so genuinely startling that, had the movie been shorted by a third, it might have turned everything around.

Waking Life doesn't leave you in a dream, specifically the dream of Linklater's previous films, so much as it traps you in an endless bull session.

Despite a backbeat of perky music and the sarcastic voiceover meant to lubricate the action, The Men Who Stare at Goats lacks pizzazz. The movie isn't funny enough to work as farce, but it's far too dippy to take seriously.

As entertainment goes, however, this desert spectacle is no "Aladdin"-- despite the impressively strong graphics of the vast urban spaces.

A ridiculous deus-ex-machina "wrong man" story.

Since he's (Spielberg) a director largely incapable of understatement, War Horse is served up with a self-aggrandizing, distracting surplus of Norman Rockwell backlighting, aerial landscape shots designed to out-swoop David Lean's, and an aggravated sense of doggone wonderment amplified by the director's dependence on John Williams's bombastic score.

The result is explicit, if less than hilarious. The Hebrew Hammer lacks the edge of Adam Sandler's "Chanukah Song," although as anti-seasonal fare, it would make a suitably unbearable double bill with Terry Zwigoff's "Bad Santa."

An abundance of dull exposition building up to the son's attempt to cap his father's whoppers climaxes with a tedious flurry of Fellini-esque endings and Spielbergian fillips. The magic doesn't work twice -- or even once.

Bland and nasty, American Beauty has the slightly stale feel of a family sitcom conceived under the spell of "Married . . . With Children."

Demme's documentary portrait, Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains, has no surfeit of good intentions. In fact, running over two hours, they're nearly suffocating.

The Green Hornet provides a half-hour's worth of mildly entertaining travesty before collapsing in a clamor of bombastic action sequences and lame wisecracks.

Although largely devoid of dramatic interest, Journeys With George does convincingly document the horror of life within the campaign "bubble."

Antichrist, which, above all, wants to make pain visceral, is less successful at projecting authentic experience--the shock tactics are ultimately numbing.

The response for anyone familiar with the original Psycho is likely to be restricted to a narrow range between briefly enjoyable déjà vu and mild disappointment. The movie lacks the chutzpah to even be a travesty.

Like the shelter for which it is named, Panic Room is an efficiently tooled construction (albeit one whose success is overly predicated on its villains' single-minded idiocy). But unlike the eponymous treasure trove, there's nothing inside.

A voracious vacuum cleaner of a movie --hoovering up a hundred years' worth of junk with the same monotonously unmodulated hum.

As directed by John Lee Hancock, it's dull, talky, and sometimes maudlin.

Renaldo & Clara is almost petulant in its demand to be taken seriously as film, and as such a good deal of it is dreadful. [30 Jan 1978, p.26]

Blind Mountain forces its way through numerous illogicalities and several plot lapses to a violently abrupt ending.

There's basically only one reason to see Olivier Assayas's self-consciously hypermodern, meta-sleazy, English-French-Chinese-language globo-thriller Boarding Gate, and her name is Asia Argento.

This showbiz Rashomon has continuity, as well as credibility, problems.

Initial strangeness inexorably gives way to rote sentimentality and mystical tenderness becomes narrative expedience.

Making Viktor a Middle Eastern, a South Asian, or even a Bosnian tourist would have given this trite exercise an edge--and a measure of human pathos.

The chaos is convincing, but, less ruthless than Steven Spielberg, Bay eschews D-day panic and mutilation.

In the grand finale, Abramoff fantasizes about using a Senate hearing to blow the whistle on the entire corrupt establishment. His rant offers a clue to how this otherwise pointlessly manic movie might have honed its political edge.

A nonstop carnival of murder, rape, and mutilation .

Banal big-budget adaptation of Robert Ludlum's 1980 espionage thriller.

Does attest to the once-upon-a-time existence of a Hollywood counterculture, but it's so reverentially heavy-handed in evoking the era that it can't help playing like "Forrest Gump" without Tom Hanks.

From mid-movie on, confusion escalates (along with one's incredulity).

The irrepressible Walken smiles benignly down on his colleagues, secure in the knowledge that his antics have capsized sturdier vessels than this. Playing a supposed health-food nut, he enters the movie chewing and doesn't stop until he's devoured every scene down to the props.

It's a Jerry Bruckheimer art film, perhaps the most extravagantly aestheticized combat movie ever made.

If the point of "A Dirty Shame" was that nothing human is foreign to John Waters, Palindromes seems to suggest that, for Todd Solondz, everything human is.

As "Henry Fool's" belated sequel, Fay Grim seems nearly an act of desperation.

Not just a walk in the park with Mel and the guys (in this case a large cast of mainly Mexican Indians speaking present- day Yucatec), this lavishly punishing picture is the third panel in Gibson's "Ordeal" triptych. The Martyrdom of the Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ have nothing on The Misadventures of the Jaguar Paw.

A combination of "Barnyard Follies" and "Schindler's List."

Shows Rock suffering from premature Robin Williams syndrome. He's yet to express the full ferocity of his comic talent on the screen and he's already doing penance by going for the warm and fuzzy.

Though more cathartic than redemptive, this sob-racked confession is the payoff for two hours of low-grade misery.

Given its boundless sarcasm, running-jumping- standing-still ambience and hyperbolic Guignol violence, Lock, Stock aspires to be something like the Beatles meet the "Wild Bunch." Too bad it doesn't have even a rubber soul.

Dull, if not devoid of wit, this shaggy dog longs to frisk through the back alleys of history, but scarcely manages more than a modest, snoozy charm.

Dutiful as it is, Jonathan Demme's Beloved doesn't succeed so much as it abides…it moves in leisurely fits and--unencumbered by style or narrative complexity--never loses its forward momentum.

Sin City lacks the human interest, not to be confused with humanism, that "Pulp Fiction" had in abundance. As if to underscore the fact, Tarantino guest-directed a scene. It's readily recognizable as the only one in which the dialogue has the slightest conviction.

The filmmakers don't even attempt to give Kaufman an inner life.

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.

An overemphatic, would-be wacky, ultimately tedious sex farce.

Aspires to be both stylish and coarse, camp and vulgar -- which is pretty much how Bette Midler plays it.

Henry Fool, which runs a leisurely and ultimately tiresome 138 minutes, is so self-conscious it feels uncomfortable in its own skin. [23 Jun 1998]

Graceless writing and shameless plot contrivance.

The Man Who Cried is like a Yiddish generational tearjerker told from the perspective of the lost child rather than that of the bereaved parent.

At once chintzy and grandiose, awash in battlefield sentimentality and platoon clichés.

A painful movie to endure.

Gilliam has suffered more than his share of butchered projects, but with this exercise in kamikaze auteurism, he appears to have made exactly the mess he wanted.

As much as I enjoy Spidey's high-flying Cheez-Doodle swoops through the skyscraper canyons of a digitally rearranged midtown Manhattan, I get no kick from his angst, especially since in this incarnation, as opposed to the '60s comic book version, he's more innocuously depressed than defensively paranoid.

Wit is in short supply -- although this journey to the end of the night derives a certain amount of punkish energy from its crude editing, cruddy-looking close-ups, strident soundtrack, and overall volatility.

Almost desperate to show it gets its own point. What's funny is that the joke--"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" reconfigured as anti-feminist backlash--was scarcely fresh when Bryan Forbes shot the first movie version nearly 30 years ago.

Feels like a rough draft at best.

Despite some deadpan, Jacques Tati-like orchestration and occasional sight gags, there's no real pleasure in the game -- Songs From the Second Floor is more absurd than funny.

However flavorsome though, The Good German is seriously deficient in the stars' star power and narrative excitement. The movie is lovingly framed, carefully lit, and fatally insipid. The direction is slack; the pacing is perfunctory.

Solemn, flashy, and flabbergasting, The Fountain--adapted by Darren Aronofsky from his own graphic novel--should really be called The Shpritz. The premise is lachrymose, the sets are clammy, and the metaphysics all wet.

Performance seems more like eye candy than castor oil in the brave new world of "Freddy Got Fingered."

10 on Ten is less illuminating than pedantic, as well as tediously self-absorbed.

The best one can say for Christopher Hampton's dispirited adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent is that this weirdly sentimental movie might direct new attention to Conrad's corrosive novela satire. [12 Nov 1996]

A lackluster screwball comedy.

Director Lee throws cold water on his own overheated fantasy scenario by having Mackie mope through every scene. What's fascinating is how She Hate Me perversely trumps its own perversity.

Hollywood Homicide knows it's a dog, and it ain't too proud to beg.

Pale by comparison to an action thriller like "Children of Men" or gross out eco-catastrophe like "Land of the Dead," squandering its ready-made zombie scenario.

Mesmerizingly bad filmmaking.

The Coens are uncharacteristically restrained. Indeed, given that the crime comedy is their preferred genre, The Ladykillers is remarkable mainly for its timidity.

Like a visual concussion.

Intermittently, in attempts to articulate a coherent argument, Collateral Damage shifts from pulse-pounding mode to something more migraine-conducive.

An unappealing, conventional, and somnolent piece of work in which, as glumly directed from David Levien and Brian Koppelman's corny script, every scene feels like it's being played for the second time.

It's Rambo with a split hero -- Morse absorbing punishment and Crowe wreaking vengeance.

Intermittently appealing, fundamentally dysfunctional action-comedy.

This is a movie about the nature of acting -- or, more specifically, the nature that creates an actress -- centered on what appears to be a spectacularly unconvincing title-role performance.

This ponderous, didactic weepie aspires to "Titanic" stature even if the only ship it sinks is itself.

That this mime show works better than it should is, in a sense, the ultimate dis.

The absurdity floods the banks of the filmmaker's intentions.

A handheld and grainy exercise in cine-stupefaction...too spastic to connect...the movie just flails the air.

Closer to Sturges than Capra, the movie means to satirize the TV-fueled carnivalesque nature of American electoral politics but only demonstrates the TV-fueled debasement of American commercial comedy.

All of this plays out as flat, didactic, and lazy.

Home Room is badly acted and, running well over two hours, often mind-numbingly ponderous. Depressed rather than hysterical, it's in every way less clever and more literal-minded than "Zero Day."

The neophyte director has a tendency to pose his actors and musically overscore each new dramatic development. The combination can border on the ludicrous.

Never quite becomes unwatchable.

Exceedingly slow setup and even more tediously static sequence that effectively terminates the movie well before its official running time.

A largely mind-numbing experience.

Has little to offer beyond muzzy kismet and generalized amnesia, a bit of National Geographic and a lot of cocktail jazz.

Costner himself is the doggedly humorless heart and soul (and brains?) of this monumentally maudlin picture.

Hereafter is not just a stretch for Eastwood, it's a contortion. The irrationality of the premise is exceeded only by the strategic irrationalities of the plot.

Niccol has no gift for comedy. His ongoing exploration of modern celebrity results in an industry satire that's less funny than half-empty and hyper-designed.

Bronson is essentially a faux-operatic, music hall turn--a larky, lumpen version of "Lola Montès."

Overwrought and often hysterical, filled with distracting montages and portentous drumbeats, the documentary feels as cheesy as its subject.

A vaguely absurd epidemiological thriller filled with elaborately superfluous setups and shamelessly stale James Bond riffs.

An overtly saccharine fairy tale of abandonment that is subverted by its own comic brutality. It's oddly affecting...which is to say, sad in a way that its maker might not have intended.

Crudely remaking the 1932 Universal original.

A tediously childish exhibition.

None of the principals is remotely likable--although Kingsley does appear to enjoy swanning around the great Southwest like a low-rent Anthony Hopkins.

The self-conscious acting and use of direct address bespeak an aesthetic less orthodox Dogme than MTV's Real World, with a nod to Jerry Springer.

Were it not so soporific, Off the Map could easily drive you off your nut.

Gaudier than a Hindu-temple roof, louder than the Las Vegas night, Speed Racer is a cathedral of glitz.

The least one can say for this costume action flick is that it hits bottom immediately.

The new Richard Kelly movie is basically a sock of coal for Christmas.

"Every work of art is an uncommitted crime," Theodor Adorno once wrote. This one is more of a botched misdemeanor.

The script is worse than slack, and despite its lurid premise, Bully doesn't have "Kids" tabloid immediacy.

This modern-day vampire story is purposefully shocking in its eroticized gore, if unintentionally dull in its lack of poetic frissons.

Blackboards is both shrill and soporific, and because everything is repeated five or six times, it can seem tiresomely simpleminded.

A mishmash of life-insurance commercials and Ronald Reagan campaign spots, this sexless orgy of self-congratulation is designed to make you feel good about Hollywood, America, and Jim Carrey -- not to mention the nation's motion picture exhibitors, who are praised at one point as the antithesis of Soviet Communism.

In Jackson's hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling. Part Disney's "Alice in Wonderland," part Fritz Lang's "M," the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous.

Grim going.

The movie's mode is brutal and excremental.

A tale of absolute self-absorption and unconscious revelation.

Very Bad Things is a guy film, and, as such, it's a dog. The gross-out humor lacks edge, the guilt never kicks in, and the outrages are predictable. It's one flat brewski.

Peaks with its opening scene.

Less awful than inert, Claire Dolan comes across as a willfully bad movie.

The Phantom Menace is simply a billboard for itself. Anyone who sees it will be experiencing it for the second time. The hype was not about the movie, the hype was the movie.

Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should.

Sodden mess, a mutation-invasion movie that passes "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!" going south.

An insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault.

See it if you must, but don't forget to pack the Air Wick. These breezy doings are mustier than a Glitter Gulch casino at 4 a.m.

Hamming shamelessly as Berowne, Branagh is overseasoned for his part ... he's as desperate as a veteran social director at a Catskills hotel about to fold.

The Allen persona has always blurred the distinction between his art and his life. Still, one would scarcely expect Allen's attempt to satirize daily life in the National Entertainment State to be this tired, sour, and depressed.

From the end to the beginning--or is it from the inadvertently ridiculous to the would-be sublime?--Noé's stunt is an exploitation movie with a gimmick, not to mention a vacuous philosophy.

Even sillier than it is cynical, Drop Dead Gorgeous is a tiresome tale.

Filled with all manner of tawdry tricks.

The Pillow Book's pretentions are boundless, for all its desperate fashion and layered imagery, it's a staggering bore-as vacantly petulant as Kate Moss's stare. [10 Jun 1997]

This smoothly odious piece of work, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Michael Winterbottom, posits the self-consciously repellent Plummer as a sort of Valerie Solanas-inflected version of the Florida serial killer Aileen Wournos. [7 May 1996]

For all the tumultuous entrances and flouncing exits, the eight principals manage maybe three laughs among them.

The film seems dimly aware of its own ridiculousness, but it lacks the constitution for self-mockery.

The grim finality of the ensuing pietà suggests the last act of Hamlet or, rather, Hamlet 2--so embarrassing that, for the first time, I wanted to avert my eyes from the screen, although that might have also been because Repo! appears to have been shot with a cell phone.

As overlong and undermotivated as it is absentmindedly incoherent.

At once simple-mindedly didactic and utterly chaotic, Steal This Movie! is interspersed with fake headlines and botched history.

Bracingly unfunny.

An unrelentingly crass and confrontational barf bomb that makes Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" look like the philosophical experiment that it is.