J. Hoberman

The greatest of all pulp fantasies.

Hollywood Homicide knows it's a dog, and it ain't too proud to beg.

It's genuinely elemental, embarrassingly sincere. You can't accuse Gallo of pandering to anyone but himself. Not just a one-man band, he is his own entourage -- and likely to remain so. And that anguished solipsism seems to be, at least in part, the movie's subject.

The movie has its share of logical inconsistencies, although to dwell on them is to ignore its deliberate ambiguities and considerable panache.

Flawed but engrossing thriller. Highly atmospheric, it gets its charge by dramatizing religious millennialism in a region that is the world epicenter of irrationality.

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.

More wacky than wack.

Increasingly unconvincing, In the Bedroom turns genteel rabble-rouser. Field's leisurely buildup forestalls but doesn't prevent his movie's mutation into a granola "Death Wish."

A work of leisurely development and tragic inevitability.

Inexplicable as it is, the Joan of Arc story encourages contemplation of ourselves as a species. The Messenger is more apt to prompt meditation on the nature of show business.

The Leopard is the greatest film of its kind made since World War II—its only rivals are Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" and Visconti's own "Senso."

A sort of parody "Apocalypse Now," complete with listless coochie dancers entertaining the Burmese troops, the movie finds its own heart of darkness once Rambo drops the doctors in Burma.

Like more than one recent movie, Alice seems a trailer for a Wonderland computer game--and it is. The final battle is clearly designed for gaming. So, it would seem, is the character of actualized as well as action Alice.

"Every work of art is an uncommitted crime," Theodor Adorno once wrote. This one is more of a botched misdemeanor.

Ghosts of Cité Soleil is a prismatic, jagged, none too coherent travelogue.

This broadly acted first feature is exceedingly direct, appropriately sordid, and at times, almost delicate.

A heady plum pudding of a movie--studded with outsized performances and drenched in cinematic brio. The concoction is over-rich, yet irresistible.

The headiest, head-scratching-est, damnedest, most demanding movie opening this week in New York, The Ister could be simply described as a philosophical travelogue.

There isn't a bankable Hollywood director with a flintier sense of aesthetic integrity.

Pale by comparison to an action thriller like "Children of Men" or gross out eco-catastrophe like "Land of the Dead," squandering its ready-made zombie scenario.

There's more than a bit of Charlie Kaufman to the heady premise, although the scenario doesn't double back on itself--except perhaps in the joke of having Schwartzman's actual mother, Talia Shire, play his mother on-screen.

In its costumes, line readings, and structure, the movie faithfully preserves the stage production -- a provocative, if meretricious, evening of theater that ends in a paroxysm of LaButality with a bear swipe to the spectator's head. It is, however, more difficult to rattle a movie audience -- at least with words -- and, despite its streamlined presentation, The Shape of Things is not nearly as effective on-screen.

The script is worse than slack, and despite its lurid premise, Bully doesn't have "Kids" tabloid immediacy.

A movie of long, expressive silences, Divine Intervention articulates things that have never been articulated, at least on the screen.

Terror's Advocate is largely a mix of talking heads and archival footage, but as Vergés's connections to Swiss neo-Nazis and Congo secessionists are explored, the movie becomes a fantastic international thriller.

Flapping like a scarecrow in the wind, Battle in Seattle is too frantic to make more than a transitory impression, yet too responsibly hackneyed in its characterizations to achieve pure tabloid hysteria.

Certainly not as incredulous or mocking as it might have been. If anything, the mood is apprehensive. But it's depressing that--Carter aside--the filmmakers failed to find even one liberal believer.