J. Hoberman

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.

From first shot to last, Dworkin's movie is a continuously absorbing, sometimes revelatory, frequently moving experience; as documentary filmmaking it's not only amazingly intimate but also characterized by an unexpected lyricism.

A compelling thriller but an unsatisfying character drama.

A lackluster screwball comedy.

The digital animation is far more evident here than in "The Phantom Menace."

One leaves with barely a clue as to how this group was able to orchestrate a successful string of terror bombings.

Solaris achieves an almost perfect balance of poetry and pulp. This is as elegant, moody, intelligent, sensuous, and sustained a studio movie as we are likely to see this season -- and in its intrinsic nuttiness, perhaps the least compromised.

Aggressively grim and gory.

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.

A brilliant appreciation of the last great Soviet director, Andrei Tarkovsky.

Determined to twist every character into an ideogram for vulgar humanity.

Conceptually rigorous, splendidly economical, and radically Bazinian.

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

For all its quasi-documentary materialism, The Son is ultimately a Christian allegory of one man's inchoate desire to return good for evil. The movie requires a measure of faith, and like a job well done, it repays that trust.

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.

A superbly balanced piece of work, addressing the passion of Irish Republican martyr Bobby Sands.

As over-emphatic as one might expect from the ham-fisted Guy Ritchie, this resurrection of the world's most famous detective is a dank, noisy affair.

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.

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.

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.

A graceful, charming, and sometimes witty confection -- at least for its first hour.

However authentically chaotic, Chicago 10 is insufficiently frenzied.

An unusually rich music doc.

Lunacy is dark, scary, and yucky--even by the Czech animator's own standards.

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

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

It's far too soggy a confection for my taste.