J. Hoberman

This shocker is often shameless, not least in the climactic confrontation with Sister Bridget, but it's impossible not to be moved by the ending -- if only because the torture is finally over.

A rhapsodic movie directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power from an original screenplay by Steve Knight, Eastern Promises is very much a companion to "A History of Violence."

No Greek tragedy, this Hollywood Sweeney is a FUN creepy-crawly. If nothing else, Burton has learned that the successfully gruesome is its own reward.

The video stores are filled with examples of retro-noir and neo-noir, but Christopher Nolan's audacious timebender is something else. Call it meta-noir.

My first impression of Three Times was that it was high middling Hou--conceptually bold but unevenly executed. The movie's implicit themes of time travel, eternal recurrence, and the transmigration of souls seemed as muddied by the director's devotion to Shu as they were dissipated in the confusion of the final present-day section. But Three Times improves on a second viewing.

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

Soberly entertaining documentary.

Cronenberg's movie manages to have its cake and eat it--impersonating an action flick in its staccato mayhem while questioning these violent attractions every step of the way.

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.

Tender, cruel, and very funny, Baumbach's fourth feature turns family history into a sort of urban myth.

Jack Black is consistently hilarious--and not just in his dreams of moshpit glory.

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

Iranian director Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold is an anti-blockbuster--a deceptively modest undertaking that brilliantly combines unpretentious humanism and impeccable formal values.

The verbal jousts are droll and the countryside is splendid, although the food - an endless succession of fussy little presentations - may be an acquired taste.

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.

Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is exactly that: The Iranian modernist's first feature to be shot in the West is a flawless riff on our indigenous art cinema.

This affecting eulogy underscores not only Demme's own tribute to Dominique but also the film's homage to radio. This is a motion picture that's in love with the magic of airborne speech.

Le Havre is utopian precisely because it shows everything as it is not.

Trust never seems dated and, as a youth film, it may even be usefully pedagogic. [30 July 1991]

A deadpan, self-consciously prehistoric version of Jean Renoir's rueful idyll A Day in the Country, Blissfully Yours is unconscionably happy.

The action is largely psychological, but it's accelerated by Audiard's nervous camera, chiaroscuro lighting, and jangling montage.

Primordial and laconic, this remarkably assured debut feature has the elegant simplicity of its title.

Leisurely and digressive, this generally exhilarating saga ("a storm of misadventures" per Ruiz) variously suggests Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and (thanks in part to the unnatural, emphatic yet uninflected, acting) Mexican telenovelas. The score is richly romantic; the period locations are impeccable.

A prize ‘60s artifact, Michelangelo Antonioni’s what-is-truth? meditation on Swinging London is a movie to appreciate—if not ponder.

More analytical than contemplative, never less than straightforward, Dream of Light makes no showy bid for the sublime.

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

Increasingly muddled, cumulatively monotonous, would-be heartwarming, Three Kings becomes its own entertainment allegory -- searching, Hollywood style, for the point at which blatant self-interest can turn humanitarian, while still remaining profitable.

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.