J. Hoberman

An abundance of dull exposition building up to the son's attempt to cap his father's whoppers climaxes with a tedious flurry of Fellini-esque endings and Spielbergian fillips. The magic doesn't work twice -- or even once.

The results are extraordinary. As understated as it is, the movie is both deeply absurd and powerfully affecting.

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.

I'd have welcomed more archival footage (Pennebaker did, after all, document Otis Redding's epochal performance at the Monterey Pop Festival), but that would be asking for another movie.

Bland and nasty, American Beauty has the slightly stale feel of a family sitcom conceived under the spell of "Married . . . With Children."

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.

Loevy, who made this documentary with an Israeli and Palestinian crew, supplies a self-conscious voice-over.

As ambitious as it is anachronistic, Duck, You Sucker demands to be read through the prism of World War II as well as 1968. Could this be the last movie in the great Italian tradition that began in 1945?

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

In every respect, this unclassifiable movie is an amazing accomplishment.

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

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

It's Rambo with a split hero -- Morse absorbing punishment and Crowe wreaking vengeance.

Like any self-respecting Ferrara film, 'R Xmas has its intimations of hellfire, yet it's a weirdly benign Christmas fable -- something like "Miracle on 134th Street."

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.

As straightforward and plot-driven as any movie about life imitating art imitating life could possibly be.

Demme's documentary portrait, Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains, has no surfeit of good intentions. In fact, running over two hours, they're nearly suffocating.

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.

The film is sluggish and repetitive, yet it exerts a certain clinical fascination.

Satisfying as it is to at last have Nixon as a Disney character, Hopkins's overheated, self-consciously self-conscious performance doesn't get the overall nuttiness of Nixon's unctuous rage, his iron-butt single-mindedness. [26 Dec 1995]

Miscast, misguided, and often nonsensical, Minority Report is nevertheless the most entertaining, least pretentious genre movie Steven Spielberg has made in the decade since "Jurassic Park."

For passion, originality, and sustained chutzpah, this austere allegory of failed Christian charity and Old Testament payback is von Trier's strongest movie--a masterpiece, in fact.

Intermittently appealing, fundamentally dysfunctional action-comedy.

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.

Watts, who has the most difficult scenes, is splendidly mercurial; what's surprising is that those professional storm clouds Penn and Del Toro are here as powerfully restrained as she is electrifying.

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