J. Hoberman

This is not so much a love story (and even less a story about love) than it is a movie of passionate loveliness.

A cut above last season's best studio offerings. The performances are well turned out. The morality is stylishly gray. The attitude is almost fashionable.

A bracingly no-nonsense, highly professional policier—as proudly old-fashioned as its curmudgeon hero.

A well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor.

This is a movie of blunt juxtapositions-death accompanied by the sound of raucous street musicians-as well as awkward flashbacks. Still, the strategy works.

In every way a sunny film. Supremely affirmative, it ends with the funniest, sexiest close-up of the year.

Demme, who works a clever permutation on the original ending, is more than capable of doing the thriller thing--even with material that will strike a good percentage of his audience as familiar. As an intelligent genre flick, the movie plays to his strengths. His direction of actors has never been better.

In short, this Krakatoa is at once exhausting and riveting. It's a technological marvel, and for those not with the program, a bit of a bore.

The Eagle is full of action and fleet of foot-it's a movie of smoky, lowering battlefields and trippy, space-bending flashbacks, pausing only for admiring location shots of Scotland's wild, craggy vistas.

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

Too touchy-feely for some hardcore Godardians, Notre Musique is the most lucid of the master's recent films.

Barnard makes the psychological mayhem Dunbar endured and inflicted tangible.

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

Nothing can redeem the movie's final 40 minutes. That may not be an ultimate horror, but it is a real one.

The most compelling Wiseman epic of recent years -- reminiscent of his hellish 1975 masterpiece, "Welfare," in its open-ended articulation of chaotic, violent, luckless lives.

Young Adult might be brushed off as curdled rom-com were it not for two things. The first is the depth of Theron's performance...The second, less predictable aspect is the utter absence of the corny rehabilitation found in "Juno" and Reitman's glib, downsizing dramedy "Up in the Air."

There's not much sense that the system can be voted out-not least because Barack Obama, shown campaigning on the crisis and elected in part to change the game, recruited his economic advisers from those who enabled the disaster.

Thanks to his mastery of montage, Buñuel naturalizes Dalí's images into a duplicitous rhythm of normality and outrage. The film suggests instances of sex and violence far more extreme than any actually represented while contriving effronteries so offhanded you can't believe you've actually seen them.

Superbly shot around Prague -- From Hell is even more stylish than gruesome -- it has the lush decrepitude of an autumn compost heap or an old Hammer werewolf flick.

A satisfyingly well-wrought, old-school thriller: Character drives the plot, literally.

Remarkably unassuming, genuinely playful, and superbly executed, The Iron Giant towers over the cartoon landscape.

Inoffensively glib and innocuously arty.

The movie may not be a single-bound building-leaper but Bryan Singer reconfigures the daddy of all comic-book sagas into something knowing, witty, and even sensitive.

The latest Tinker Tailor is, in some ways, more explicit regarding various characters' sexual proclivities than was the miniseries. It's also more concise, but what's lost is George's pathos.

Has marked affinities to "Ghost World" and "Donnie Darko." It's more amorphous and less sharply drawn than either but has an acute sense of guilty secrets and secret places.

One may not realize how truly sad this movie is until the forlorn final moments, when Payne resists an inspirational closer, and, with exquisite tact, averts his eyes.

Frost/Nixon's main attraction is neither its topicality nor its historical value, but Langella's re-creation of his Tony-winning performance.

Call it the Passion of Jeanne: Accompanied for much of the movie by a single reverb-heavy guitar and a snare drum, Balibar demonstrates a carefully calibrated lack of affect and a voice as smoky as a carton of Gitanes.