J. Hoberman

This absorbing, significant, and shamelessly entertaining movie not only goes through the looking glass but, no less significantly, turns the mirror back on us.

That unexpected rage is the movie's most powerful emotional truth.

As chilly a spectacle as you're likely to see. It's like watching a comeback in an empty stadium.

Projects a confessional frankness about human relationships that has the messy feel of truth.

Approaching 85, cine-essayist Chris Marker remains as lively, engaged, and provocative as ever--and no less fond of indirection.

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.

A veteran of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, the deadpan Harper puts her training to good use, gracefully eluding the attacking furniture and skillfully dodging the imploding set, as she flees—arms protectively crossed before her face—out into the night.

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

Va Savoir has its own unhurried pace and unpredictable humor. This is the sort of comedy Robert Altman could only dream about.

An enjoyably glib and refreshingly terse exercise in big beat and constant motion.

A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp-at the very least, it's the most risible and riotous backstage movie since "Showgirls."

The movie is an expert, sunlit chiller audaciously predicated on an unquiet historical memory: "What is a ghost?"

Leisurely yet streamlined film, brilliantly adapted by British filmmaker Terence Davies from Edith Wharton's most powerful novel.

Complex, superbly rendered, and wildly eccentric anime-even by Miyazaki's own standards.

For orchestrating lurid goonishness, Hopper can't be beat.

Head-On loses its merry mojo once events turn irrevocable and the action switches from Hamburg to Istanbul.

A pleasant time-passer.

The movie is as eloquently uninflected and filled with quirks as its star.

Manages to turn a highly dubious concept into a subtle and deliciously mordant comedy.

The Soft Skin is a movie about the agony and ecstasy of an extramarital affair. Truffaut treats it like a crime film-low-key yet tense, filled with carefully planted potential "clues" and an undercurrent of anxiety.

It is, for the most part, witty and engrossing.

As cliché-rich as it is compelling.

Absorbing documentary portrait.

A linguistic stew with a zesty, homemade flavor that belies its carefully researched preparation.