J. Hoberman

Remains Chaplin's most sustained burlesque of authority.

It is an essay in film form with near-universal interest and a remarkable degree of synthesis.

It's at once brilliant and inept.

Kosashvili's camera is restrained, the better to render Late Marriage superbly brash, raunchy, and confrontational.

Accurate enough as history to provide a potent reminder that black independent cinema did not end with Oscar Micheaux or begin with Spike Lee.

Like many cult films, it is also less than the sum of its parts.

A 157-minute police procedural at once sensuous and cerebral, profane and metaphysical, "empty" and abundant, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is closer to the Antonioni of "L'Avventura," and it elevates the 52-year-old director to a new level of achievement.

Jia Zhangke is one of the world's preeminent filmmakers, an essentially contemplative director whose considerable talent is further amplified by the significance of his material--namely, everyday life in the most dynamic economy on earth.

Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in general and the Russian occupation of Chechnya in particular, this is a movie in which combat is never shown.

Increasingly violent (although always distanced), The Outskirts is at once appalling and bleakly humorous.

Exquisitely understated.

Made nearly half a century ago and long hiding in plain sight, Martha Coolidge’s “Not a Pretty Picture” is at once an autobiographical documentary, a Pirandellian psychodrama, an acting exercise, a personal exorcism and a powerful political tract.

An austere and fascinating documentary.

Not only a nifty late noir but a model of economical filmmaking--well-sketched atmosphere, deft characterizations, and a 78-minute running time.

Forget "Irreversible," this is the season's most piercingly feel-bad movie.

This poignant, acutely observed movie is eloquent and suggestive in dramatizing a particular trauma in the context of an ordinary Haifa family.

Like everything Jarmusch, The Limits of Control is calibrated for cool.

Contemporary audiences may not see why, even in its toned-down simplification of the novel, From Here to Eternity was the most daring movie of 1953, but it remains an acting bonanza.

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

Revived (with vastly improved subtitles) some 14 years after it first stunned Hong Kong critics, Days of Being Wild is a sort of meta-reverie populated by a cast of beautiful young pop icons.

Highly audacious, hugely enjoyable, exceptionally well-written, brilliantly edited, and exuberantly actor-driven extravaganza.

Like Taxi Driver, The American Friend was a new sort of movie-movie — sleekly brooding, voluptuously alienated and saturated with cinephilia.

At once monumental and ghostly.

For the most part, the Coens' is a highly enjoyable yarn, stocked with pungent bushwa and a full panoply of frontier bozos.

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

The movie's best moments evoke the thrill of doing something new. Pollock convincingly retails the beauty and originality of the painter's best work -- it may not be an intellectual adventure, but it does represent one.

For its 80 minutes, the movie creates the illusion that not just Tati but his form of cerebral slapstick lives.

A work of leisurely development and tragic inevitability.