J. Hoberman

Thoughtfully orchestrated and filled with visual wit.

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.

Opens cute and poignant, turns wildly visceral, and ends in a burst of magical realism.

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.

An urban crime thriller of considerable gravitas.

Gently persistent in its ironies, "Funny Ha Ha" managed to be both charmingly lackadaisical and annoyingly smug; Mutual Appreciation, which Bujalski shot in grainy black-and-white in hipster Brooklyn (and is self-distributing), is even more so.

The actors, mainly newcomers, have an improvisational freshness well matched to the freewheeling camera work.

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.

Boxing Gym is a companion piece of sorts to "La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet," Wiseman's previous doc that played Film Forum last fall. It's not simply that boxing and ballet are understood as kindred activities. Boxing Gym is itself a dance movie-which is to say, a highly formalized exercise in choreographed activity.

Guy and Madeline is at once self-conscious and breezy, clumsy and deft, diffident and sweet, annoying and ecstatic. It's amateurish in the best sense, and it radiates cinephilia. No movie I've seen this year has given me more joy.

Best appreciated as hilarious pulp metaphor, which, not coincidentally, happens to be one of the screenwriter's specialties.

A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence.

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

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

Costa-Gavras provides a post-war postscript to make clear that honesty is punished; cynicism survives.

Tense, engrossing, and superbly structured, Bus 174 is not just unforgettable drama but a skillfully developed argument.

Undeniably high-powered. At 153 minutes, it's also punishingly overlong.

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

Tender and funny.

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.

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."

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

Spider lasts in the mind and it's built to last -- this is a movie that invites and repays repeated viewings.

Self-contained, enigmatic, illuminated from within, Huppert banks a performance that pays dividends throughout the film.

Up in the Air goes down like a sedative. This is a movie that's easy to like--and to dislike as well.

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

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

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