J. Hoberman

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

A voracious vacuum cleaner of a movie --hoovering up a hundred years' worth of junk with the same monotonously unmodulated hum.

It's a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.

Has the grace to send the audience out with a piece of Waters-written rap.

A tale of absolute self-absorption and unconscious revelation.

Panahi is a maestro of anxiety. Whatever its political significance, this is a dark, sustained, and wrenching film.

Very Bad Things is a guy film, and, as such, it's a dog. The gross-out humor lacks edge, the guilt never kicks in, and the outrages are predictable. It's one flat brewski.

Deft, affectionate, and unexpectedly enjoyable.

What's truly extraordinary about this movie--which strikes me on two viewings as Maddin's masterpiece--is that it not only plays like a dream but feels like one.

Infectious city symphony.

Murray's performance is successfully skewed, but in the De Niro oeuvre, Mad Dog is one more doughy characterization flecked with raisins. [16 Mar 1993]

A movie of cutting humor, near-constant talk, and one show-stopping dance routine.

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.

A slick, shameless job that takes way too long to make its point.

If nothing else, Brother confirms Kitano's stature as the most original purveyor of on-screen mayhem since Sam Peckinpah.

An explicit ode to mortality, not without a certain grim humor.

A soap opera as convoluted as it is overdetermined. [20 Jan 1998]

As directed by John Lee Hancock, it's dull, talky, and sometimes maudlin.

This deliriously downbeat vehicle for the postpunk diva Björk has generated the controversy the Danish dogmatist has relentlessly court.

All of this plays out as flat, didactic, and lazy.

When it comes to stoopid fun, X-Men could be the summer movie to beat.

The movie is slick and studiously cool -- with plenty of visual flourishes but not too much soul.

Renaldo & Clara is almost petulant in its demand to be taken seriously as film, and as such a good deal of it is dreadful. [30 Jan 1978, p.26]

Both resonant and skillfully devious.

Although dense with incident and motif, the movie has an effortless flow.

Home Room is badly acted and, running well over two hours, often mind-numbingly ponderous. Depressed rather than hysterical, it's in every way less clever and more literal-minded than "Zero Day."

Blind Mountain forces its way through numerous illogicalities and several plot lapses to a violently abrupt ending.

The neophyte director has a tendency to pose his actors and musically overscore each new dramatic development. The combination can border on the ludicrous.

There's basically only one reason to see Olivier Assayas's self-consciously hypermodern, meta-sleazy, English-French-Chinese-language globo-thriller Boarding Gate, and her name is Asia Argento.

More mystical than mysterious, Seabiscuit is a proudly cornball sentimental epic -- a reverential paean to a vanished America that's steeped in inspirational uplift and played for world-historical pathos.

This extravagant family melodrama, one of the highlights of last year's New York Film Festival, runs two and a half hours and never lags, so moment-to-moment enthralling are Desplechin's narrative gambits, as well as his reckless eccentricity.

This showbiz Rashomon has continuity, as well as credibility, problems.

Filled with bird sounds, Vertical Ray is almost surreal in its paradise imagery -- the movie is a sultry, harmoniously expressionistic riot of pale greens and deep yellows.

A kindred exercise in ensemble cheer and cozy humanism -- not as sentimental as it might be but cheerfully affirmative in dispelling the darkness of its premise.

The performances are uneven, but the spirit never flags.

DiCaprio is far more successfully cast here than in Gangs of New York: His performance is all about acting; it's a mild kick to see how he'll manage to talk his way out of nearly every scrape.

The “intellectual banalities” that bored Crowther are so insistently contemporary that “Alphaville” could have been made in 2023. If by some time-traveling Borgesian twist of fate it were, Godard’s film would have been my candidate for the year’s best.

Often thrilling almost-feelie.

Tender and funny.

Wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and silently beseeching, she's (Johansson) even more a screen for projection here than in "Lost in Translation"; surrounded by a gaggle of over-actors, she glows with understatement.

This may or may not be the greatest instance of college football ever played, but "Brian's Song," J"erry Maguire," and "The Longest Yard" notwithstanding, Rafferty's no-frills annotated replay is the best football movie I've ever seen: A particular day in history becomes a moment out of time.

I got a charge out of Going Upriver, but as more than one person has noted, the movie's ideal spectator would be Kerry himself.

Initial strangeness inexorably gives way to rote sentimentality and mystical tenderness becomes narrative expedience.

Moving from cafés to poolrooms to movie theaters, it's the prototypical male ensemble film.

Mumford is good for a few chuckles and not nearly as egregious or cloying as it might have been.

Peaks with its opening scene.

More engrossing than convincing.

A wondrously perverse movie that not only evokes a lost moment in time but circles around an unrepresentable subject. Mood is the operative word. A love story far more cerebral than it is emotional.

A quietly ambitious, well-wrought, and tastefully poignant treatment of two local literary legends.

Owning Mahowny shares the earlier ("Love and Death on Long Island") film's crisp precision, but it's a far more rigorously sublimated and abstract account of l'amour fou.

Never quite becomes unwatchable.

Less awful than inert, Claire Dolan comes across as a willfully bad movie.

Consistently wacky and sometimes nearly surreal.

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

As bittersweet a brief encounter as any in American movies since Richard Linklater's equally romantic "Before Sunrise."

This simple, sinuous fable may not be among Imamura’s greatest films–it lacks the crazy libidinal energy of The Pornographers or Eijanaika–but it could hardly have been made by anyone else.

A surprisingly credible action flick.

Life Is Beautiful is funny (kinda) and even tasteful (sorta). But in its fantasy of divine grace, it is also nonsense.

Making Viktor a Middle Eastern, a South Asian, or even a Bosnian tourist would have given this trite exercise an edge--and a measure of human pathos.

Waters's far-from-phallocratic sexual democracy is not so much hilarious as goofy and more rousing than arousing.

The daring of the conception is matched only by the brilliance of the execution.

The chaos is convincing, but, less ruthless than Steven Spielberg, Bay eschews D-day panic and mutilation.

A deceptively modest fable of innocence abroad that resonates with the situation within Israel and without.

Becalmed or bobbing along, they remain balseros -- but then, as this engrossing documentary suggests, so are we all.

The Phantom Menace is simply a billboard for itself. Anyone who sees it will be experiencing it for the second time. The hype was not about the movie, the hype was the movie.

Fun and smart, but undeniably thin, the first installment of Tarantino's action epic is a fanboy fever dream. The clichés are out in maximum force, tempting any critic fool enough to go one-on-one with the master. (The prize: a Ph.D. in Tarantinology.)

In a sense, Varda has done for herself what she did for Demy--creating a work, as charming as it is touching, that serves to explicate and enrich an entire oeuvre.

So elemental in its means yet so cosmic in its drama, it could herald a rebirth of cinema.

An intelligent movie, not so much salacious as affecting but ultimately less analytical than overwrought, Heading South makes its points in the first 20 minutes.

Extremely clever in its use of self-deprecation, it's guaranteed to bring down the house at any remotely sympathetic venue.

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

Impressively pulled together on a modest budget, Moon has a strong lead and a valid philosophical premise but, despite Bell's fissured psyche, the drama is inert.

But the ickiest thing about Fever Pitch is its reverential Field of Dreams music.

In the absence of any greater cultural context, the ritual reiteration of Greenberg's greatness grows wearisome.

This fastidiously hyperreal neo-noir suggests a sadder but wiser remake of the Coens' rambunctious debut, "Blood Simple."

At once strongly metaphoric and shamelessly visceral, Peckinpah’s saga of outlaws on the lam is arguably the strongest Hollywood movie of the 1960s—a western that galvanizes the clichés of its dying genre with a shocking jolt of delirious carnage.

Funny, reasonably crazy, and unpretentiously faithful to its source.

With his 10th feature--an entertaining tale of high-stakes martial arts--Mamet has infused the sleight of hand with a measure of two-fisted action.

If Moore is formidable, it's not because he is a great filmmaker (far from it), but because he infuses his sense of ridicule with the fury of moral indignation. Fahrenheit 9/11 is strongest when that wrath is vented on Bush and his cohorts.

Doesn't dawdle and, despite some eye-rolling dialogue, is a generally amiable time-trip.

A nonstop carnival of murder, rape, and mutilation .

The cheesy disco action scenes are topped only by the movie's ripe double entendres and continual cheesecake.

Banal big-budget adaptation of Robert Ludlum's 1980 espionage thriller.

The Sarsgaard slow burn is only marginally more compelling than the Christensen simper; like its subject, the movie is self-important yet insipid.

Certainly a testament to Fuller's tenacity, but recent raves notwithstanding, it's no masterpiece...The Big Red One isn't even Fuller's greatest war film. Of those, I'd rank it fourth -- but that's not half bad.

Steeped in metaphor as it is, Panic offers a more naturalistic analysis of male midlife crisis than the grotesquely overpraised "American Beauty."

The Passenger is a relic of that moment in international co-production when famous European auteurs hitched their wagons to hip and eager Hollywood stars.

To his credit, del Toro does not flinch from the ridiculous. But he is equally sensitive to Hellboy's pulp poetry.

Mainly, Fix the World is about the beauty of the riff. The Yes Men are funniest when addressing a straight audience, making outlandish claims in favor of the free market and the benefits of unregulated catastrophe--the Black Plague gave us capitalism!

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

Exceedingly slow setup and even more tediously static sequence that effectively terminates the movie well before its official running time.

Romanek's movie is a bit too pat and pleased with its undeniable ambitions, but the setup resonates with quiet desperation. There's not a single vicarious glorch.

A supremely intelligent pastiche.

The hyperbole can be predictable and the clichés earnest, but by and large, Charlie is a serious, often illuminating, and unavoidably entertaining account of the creature Downey calls "the most endearing superhero you might ever want to watch."

As crass as it is visionary, Godzilla belongs with--and might well trump--the art films "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Dr. Strangelove" as a daring attempt to fashion a terrible poetry from the mind-melting horror of atomic warfare.

Despite an absurdly melodramatic premise, Lost Embrace is an essentially plotless series of riffs and jokes. It's 20 minutes too long--forgivable in view of Burman's affection for his material.

Steamboy doesn't have the deep melancholia or the visionary élan of last year's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Consistent in its graphic invention from first to last, however, it's a sensationally designed piece of work. (The retro stylistics are comparable to Brazil, David Lynch's Dune, and The Iron Giant.)

A largely mind-numbing experience.

Persona is at once tactile and elusive, splintered and seamless, systematic and free-associative. Essentially a movie of fragments and vignettes, it is held together by the power of the artist’s craft and the centripetal force of his unconscious.

Enjoyable but slight— an intermittently funny, one-joke vaudeville.

The Kidman character is an exotic--and even unlikely--creature, usefully fueling Penn's annoyed but fascinated incredulity.

Our Brand Is Crisis manages to be remarkably suspenseful.

Escalates into visceral allegory with an abandon and cruelty that seem positively Romanian. The last 30 minutes more than redeem the preceding two hours.

Blind Shaft means to leave the viewer dazed, and it does.

Grey isn't the first porn actress to go straight, but she may be the first to allegorize her own situation--projecting an on-screen self-confidence that’s indistinguishable from pathos.

One of the few Hollywood movies to ever acknowledge the Desert Storm "experience," Sam Mendes's Jarhead is both fastidiously grueling and perversely withholding.

Has little to offer beyond muzzy kismet and generalized amnesia, a bit of National Geographic and a lot of cocktail jazz.

A funny, relationship-driven ensemble piece that takes the chill out of the Danish winter with a snuggly blanket of humanism.

For all its flaws, Max does propose a credible young Hitler, played by Noah Taylor as an unpleasantly opinionated, arrogantly ascetic, defensively vain autodidact with a diffident sneer and a bottomless well of grievance to draw upon.

A fascinatingly mean-spirited erotic comedy.

Soberly entertaining documentary.

Costner himself is the doggedly humorless heart and soul (and brains?) of this monumentally maudlin picture.

Undeniably high-powered. At 153 minutes, it's also punishingly overlong.

Cost well over $100 million, and the money is up there for the gawking. Illuminated by the orange flames of hell, the vast New York City set looks great. The least engaging aspect of the movie is its script -- which passed through the hands of three separate writers and perhaps even producer Harvey Weinstein.

Does attest to the once-upon-a-time existence of a Hollywood counterculture, but it's so reverentially heavy-handed in evoking the era that it can't help playing like "Forrest Gump" without Tom Hanks.

A pleasant time-passer.

Elaborate exercise in frustration.

Short, sweet, and hardly ever cloying, The Treatment is largely dependent for its success on the quality of its performances--most surprisingly, Eigeman's.

It’s as a rhetorician that Moore is most original and effectively demagogic.

A fairy tale that presents love as a case of mutual enchantment, Two Family House is not only uniformly well acted, superbly designed, lovingly lit, and sensitively scored, it's as romantic as it is funny.

Not only light on laughs but discomfitingly didactic in its disgust.

A loud and frequently funny clown show, Full Throttle is less a grim demolition derby than a day at Coney Island, punctuated by the clatter and screams of the Cyclone.

Not the least remarkable thing about this deadpan, deceptively haphazard ensemble comedy, a movie as much choreographed as directed, is the way that--at the final moment--the mist simply evaporates.

From mid-movie on, confusion escalates (along with one's incredulity).

At once shockingly vivid and overwhelmingly antiheroic.

Fateless has a remarkable absence of sentimentality. The movie is obviously artistic, but there are no cheap or superfluous effects. It's almost mystically translucent.

Paris Blues is a small movie with large ambitions.

The irrepressible Walken smiles benignly down on his colleagues, secure in the knowledge that his antics have capsized sturdier vessels than this. Playing a supposed health-food nut, he enters the movie chewing and doesn't stop until he's devoured every scene down to the props.

Feels both tiresomely old-fashioned and disturbingly topical.

Spider lasts in the mind and it's built to last -- this is a movie that invites and repays repeated viewings.

Entertaining as it is, Imelda seems all too willing to take her at her word.

Dazzling dance to the music of time.

Acerbic, moody, and provocatively slight, it's a movie of apparent non sequiturs and privileged moments. [21 Oct 1997]

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

It's a Jerry Bruckheimer art film, perhaps the most extravagantly aestheticized combat movie ever made.

Visionaries' heedless montage brought back the sense of crazy possibility that excited me when, as a teenage kid from Queens, I first encountered Mekas's world.

Watchmen is neither desecratory disaster nor total triumph. In filming David Hayter and Alex Tse's adaptation of the most ambitious superhero comic book ever written, director Zack Snyder has managed to address the cult while pandering to the masses.

Thoughtfully orchestrated and filled with visual wit.

Taxi Driver was a powerfully summarizing work. It synthesized noir, neorealist, and New Wave stylistics; it assimilated Hollywood’s recent vigilante cycle, drafting then-déclassé blaxploitation in the service of a presumed tell-it-like-it-is naturalism that, predicated on a frank, unrelenting representation of racism, violence, and misogyny, was even more racist, violent, and misogynist than it allowed. [35th Anniversary Release]

It's here that Melville fully achieved his notion of the sublime, applying "Le Samouraï's" "empty" compositions and near theatrical blocking, as well as its methodical suspense, cosmic fatalism, and sense of grim solitude, to a subject far closer to his heart, namely his own World War II experiences.

I'm Not There is the movie of the year.

Not only very civilized--this cool, deliberate film suggests that Bach's music is the quintessence of European civilization.

Engaging, if ultimately wearisome.

Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should.

A grimly suggestive and unexpectedly tender bedroom farce, Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid is a true film maudit.

Celebrating the desire to immerse oneself in a collective, world-changing enterprise, Commune is unavoidably nostalgic.

A first-person doc assembled largely from footage taken in the course of the five features they made, being madmen together.

Opening too late for the election but still one the year's most politically relevant movies, Condon's earnestly middlebrow biopic is an argument for tolerance and diversity.

If the point of "A Dirty Shame" was that nothing human is foreign to John Waters, Palindromes seems to suggest that, for Todd Solondz, everything human is.

As fascinating as it is discomfiting and as intelligent as it is primal. From first shot to last, France's foremost bad girl has made an extremely good movie -- and maybe even a great one.

A world-beat city symphony.

No matter what your opinion of McNamara, The Fog of War is a chastening experience.

Not only Mike Leigh's strongest film since "Naked" but a true show-making epic.

Has plenty of problems. But most stem from a young filmmaker overswinging on his first time up to the plate and hitting a deep fly out rather than a home run.

Overlong and a bit tiresome but it's actually about something.

It has the charm of the original American road movies, feasting on the gorgeous, ramshackle landscape of the filmmaker's motherland.

The only conceivable reason to immerse oneself in this inexplicable release is, of course, Huppert. Gravely, she accepts the challenge of delivering a coherent performance in a wildly incoherent role.

This smoothly odious piece of work, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Michael Winterbottom, posits the self-consciously repellent Plummer as a sort of Valerie Solanas-inflected version of the Florida serial killer Aileen Wournos. [7 May 1996]

A tale of sadness and hysteria so raw that it bleeds.

A compelling if not altogether convincing tale of mad love and divine redemption, adapted from the prize-winning novel by Castellitto's wife, Margaret Mazzantini.

Killer of Sheep is an urban pastoral--an episodic series of scenes that are sweet, sardonic, deeply sad, and very funny.

This redux is a rare device: a TV remake for the big screen that works on its own terms.

Made with considerable wit and style, Horn's thoughtful celebration of the era and its most uncanny diva could function as the show's ("East Village USA") supplement.

The unnecessarily emphatic ending suggests that Secretary's makers are a bit anxious to demonstrate they've whipped a potentially grotesque, spanks-for-the-memories scenario into the season's most romantic love story -- which is, in fact, what they've done.

This comic horror story rivals A.I. as the year's creepiest representation of maternal love -- partly because it naturalizes the Frankenstein story in terms of human procreation.

Niccol has no gift for comedy. His ongoing exploration of modern celebrity results in an industry satire that's less funny than half-empty and hyper-designed.

The Syrian Bride has no particular visual style, but it exudes affection, for its characters and their culture as well as the unprepossessing beauty of the scrubby terrain that holds them in thrall. Like all wedding films, it's essentially a comedy, albeit a sad one.

More fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It's also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring.

The movie's best performance belongs to Peter Fonda. Tough, terrific, and totally unrecognizable as a bounty hunter, this cantankerous old hippie is so leathery he deserves his own line of rawhide apparel.

Gatlif's latest celebration of gypsy soul, sets a modest sliver of narrative in a fabulous widescreen landscape and surrounds it with a permanent party.

Drawing on interviews with SLA co-founder Russ Little and amazing TV news footage, Robert Stone illuminates this fantastic narrative as vividly as it has ever been.

More impressionistic than analytical, A Grin Without a Cat is a grand immersion.

For all the on-set antics, appropriated Fellini music, and throwaway gags, the movie is most successful when Coogan is pulling faces for the mirror, aimlessly trading Pacino imitations with his sidekick Brydon, or riffing on the color of the latter's teeth.

A tour de force for Streep, who gives her character an unexpected measure of depth.

As "Henry Fool's" belated sequel, Fay Grim seems nearly an act of desperation.

The leanest and meanest of Solondz's misanthropic comedies, feasts on the anguish of adolescence and confusion of college -- white suburban-style.

The lovability quotient is as high as the altitude.

The movie is not unintelligent but it is insipid

Not just a walk in the park with Mel and the guys (in this case a large cast of mainly Mexican Indians speaking present- day Yucatec), this lavishly punishing picture is the third panel in Gibson's "Ordeal" triptych. The Martyrdom of the Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ have nothing on The Misadventures of the Jaguar Paw.

Sodden mess, a mutation-invasion movie that passes "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!" going south.

In the course of this clanging, spectral memoir, all of the artist's previous movies--from his underground mock epic "Tales from the Gimli Hospital" through his faux–Soviet silent "The Heart of the World" to his period spectacular "The Saddest Music in the World"--come to mind.

Milk is so immediate that it's impossible to separate the movie's moment from this one.

it may be the director's quintessential movie. It's an exercise in urban paranoia and mental disintegration that echoes or anticipates everything from "Repulsion" and "Rosemary's Baby" to "Bitter Moon" and "The Pianist."

Bronson is essentially a faux-operatic, music hall turn--a larky, lumpen version of "Lola Montès."

S21 is understated and unforgettable; in its modest way, this movie is as horrific an exposure to evil as Lanzmann's "Shoah."

An insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault.

Manages to be not only consistently droll but cumulatively poignant and even scary.

Death to Smoochy is often very funny, but what's even more remarkable is the integrity of DeVito's misanthropic vision.

A very nutty fruitcake, Spirited Away is characterized by wonderfully detailed animation, packed with incident and populated by all manner of comic creatures.

Bill Maher's one-man stand-up attack on religious fundamentalism is a dog that has more bark than bite--a skeptical, secular-humanist hounding of the hypocrites, amusingly annotated with sarcastic subtitles and clips from cheesy biblical spectacles.

One of the funniest social comedies of its period.

A combination of "Barnyard Follies" and "Schindler's List."

Thrilling and ludicrous. The movie feels entirely instinctual. The rest is silencio.

Grounded in Fessenden's handheld camera, stuttering montage rhythms, and time-lapse photography, the engagingly primitive animated special effects contribute to a mood that's sustained through the surprisingly somber conclusion.

Authentically British or not, Intimacy is squarely in the indigenous kitchen-sink style -- a far cry from the absurdly chic, sentimental pseudo-worldliness of something like "An Affair of Love."

To have been in junior high school when rhapsodic fugues of yearning like "Spanish Harlem," "Uptown," or "Be My Baby" first poured from the radio is to have a sensibility, if not a fantasy life, in some way molded by this monster of self-absorption; to see The Agony and the Ecstasy is to be discomfitingly haunted by the specter of that long-ago innocence.

John Turturro, who, given the most romantic role of his career, fully inhabits the ungainly Luzhin.

See it if you must, but don't forget to pack the Air Wick. These breezy doings are mustier than a Glitter Gulch casino at 4 a.m.

For all the tumultuous entrances and flouncing exits, the eight principals manage maybe three laughs among them.

I can't remember a teenage romance this engagingly offbeat since "Lord Love a Duck."

Arguably the founding work of the American independent cinema, John Cassavetes’s 1959 Shadows is the prototype for Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, and all their progeny.

Given the large cast, the international hopscotch, and the tantalizing illusion of depth, the movie's tone is "Frontline" meets John le Carré. Compared to the complacence of something like "The Interpreter," it's a regular brain tickler.

Overwrought and often hysterical, filled with distracting montages and portentous drumbeats, the documentary feels as cheesy as its subject.

Ultimate geezerfest and rock-doc holy grail.

Scorches the screen like a prairie fire.

However cloying, the movie creates a powerful vortex. It's surprisingly visceral-at times almost thrilling.

A vaguely absurd epidemiological thriller filled with elaborately superfluous setups and shamelessly stale James Bond riffs.

Too bland and fustily tasteful to be truly prurient, Sade moves along at a reasonable clip, goosed by claps of gothic lighting, solemn chords, and amplified sound effects.

Morris, who more or less invented the ironic documentary, seems to struggle here for an appropriate tone even as he allows Leuchter more than enough rope to hang himself.

The movie feels truncated, but it communicates a certain urgency and at times a powerful sense of the absurd.

If Hollywood were truly devoted to telling it like it is, Baker would win a special Oscar. To add to the creepiness, Solondz is (as he made clear in Dollhouse) an extremely sensitive director of kids.

Shows Rock suffering from premature Robin Williams syndrome. He's yet to express the full ferocity of his comic talent on the screen and he's already doing penance by going for the warm and fuzzy.

Room at the Top is quite conservative in its morality — although its sledgehammer ending still packs an emotional wallop.

Tian's movie seems to be among the finest expressions of the Chinese new wave.

Greenberg is a movie of throwaway one-liners and evocatively nondescript locations. The style is observational, the drama is understated, and, when the time comes, it knocks you out with the subtlest of badda-booms.

Bana, who appears in nearly every shot, talking all the while, gives a remarkably mercurial performance.

Tense, engrossing, and superbly structured, Bus 174 is not just unforgettable drama but a skillfully developed argument.

Dramatically inert but a minor techno-miracle, Range's movie is a faux documentary with fake talking heads and seamless digital effects.

This first feature is shot "first person" and is first and foremost a concept -- at least as interesting to think about as to actually watch.

Funny for about half an hour, Pleasantville thereafter becomes an increasingly lugubrious, ultimately exasperating mix of technological wonder and ideological idiocy.

This corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like "Mean Streets" cubed.

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."

A highly entertaining adaptation of French dandy Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly's mid-19th-century novel Une vieille maîtresse.

A timely--if tepid--fantasy of American vengeance on the Qutbian extremists of Saudi Arabia.

A ridiculous soft-core kung-fu porn film about a ridiculous hard-core one, Orgazmo is the kind of movie that improves according to the lateness of the hour.

A movie of cartoon-like mass formations, singing urchins, and operatic outbursts.

This may not be Kaurismäki's masterpiece, but it is a movie of sustained stylistic integrity -- and it has the power to make you laugh.

Flagrantly artistic and transfixed by its own enigma, Elephant is strongest on evoking a succession of specific, "empty" moments and weakest on motivation.

An overtly saccharine fairy tale of abandonment that is subverted by its own comic brutality. It's oddly affecting...which is to say, sad in a way that its maker might not have intended.

This tweener goddess--a virtual Batcave of handy accessories packed in her shoulder bag--may prove too annoying for general audiences, particularly as Roberts plays her comically straight.

If you can forget the world-historic significance of the mass revolution that overthrew Europe's oldest absolute monarchy -- or rather, subsume it in the mysteries of personality -- The Lady and the Duke is the stuff of human interest.

Above all, this is an action film--or, better, a transaction film. It's not just that the Dardennes orchestrate an exciting motor scooter purse-snatching and a prolonged hot pursuit. L'Enfant is an action film because every act that happens is shown to have a consequence.

Offside is blatantly metaphoric and powerfully concrete, deceptively simple and highly sophisticated in its formal intelligence.

Foreigners often comment on the peculiar American combination of superficial friendliness and profound indifference. Stevie epitomizes a related national trait -- the belief in the curative powers of publicity.

Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain's alarming Tony Manero--named not for its protagonist, but rather his ego-ideal, John Travolta's character in "Saturday Night Fever"--is another study of a cinema-struck, solitary daydreamer, albeit a particularly stunted member of the genus.

A work of bravura filmmaking.

A tricksy meta-thriller that, replete with the requisite homage to "Vertigo," sustains its dreamlike glide through a succession of cheesy coincidences and voluptuous cheap effects.

Though more cathartic than redemptive, this sob-racked confession is the payoff for two hours of low-grade misery.

Monty Python's Life of Brian, re-released on its 25th anniversary as an antidote to "The Passion of the Christ," is a single-joke satire of organized religion, including Hollywood's.

Chow manages to have his cake and eat it too: Kung Fu Hustle is a kung fu parody that's also a terrific kung fu movie.

Long before it ends, its leisurely immersion in the Mississippi Delta has turned downright lukewarm and even chilly.

A documentary to make the stones weep -- as shameful as it is scary.

Auto Focus doesn't really go anywhere, but then neither does any form of obsessive-compulsive behavior -- which may be Schrader's point.

This malevolently gleeful satire...is extremely funny, surprisingly well- acted, and boldly designed...at least until its steel-and-chrome soufflé falls apart.

The Duel is the most successful literary adaptation I've seen since Pascal Ferran's 2006 "Lady Chatterley."

The movie rises to another level whenever its star has a chance to cut loose -- leading the ensemble in a conga line, winning a sack race in slow motion, torching the Whos' Christmas tree while screaming, "Burn baby burn."

Crudely remaking the 1932 Universal original.

The actors, mainly newcomers, have an improvisational freshness well matched to the freewheeling camera work.

Religious fanaticism gets even scarier in this hour-long doc.

Given its boundless sarcasm, running-jumping- standing-still ambience and hyperbolic Guignol violence, Lock, Stock aspires to be something like the Beatles meet the "Wild Bunch." Too bad it doesn't have even a rubber soul.

Tightly framed and tightly wound, Mary is a claustrophobic, incandescent, nutty 83 minutes with everyone in the cast teetering on the ledge of madness.

Moll's style is low-key and straightforward.

This absorbing essay amply demonstrates that, as with any sort of racial-nationalist paranoia, anti-Semitism has very little to do with actual Jews and everything to do with imagined ones.

Most conveniently synopsized as Romy and Michelle's Watergate Adventure.

Dull, if not devoid of wit, this shaggy dog longs to frisk through the back alleys of history, but scarcely manages more than a modest, snoozy charm.

Rescue Dawn is the closest thing to a "real" movie that Herzog has ever made. The lone conquistador has joined the club. Rescue Dawn is a Rambo movie without the Man (who, if I remember my Rambology, was himself of German descent).

One of the sweetest, saddest stories Franz Kafka never wrote.

Borders on the risible but, because Sokurov is Sokurov, this exalted, wacky scenario--which uses Lisbon as an imaginary Russian seaport--is amazingly staged, inventively edited, and rich in audio layering, with camera placements that sometimes verge on the Brakhagian.

A work of great charm and bold aesthetic impurity, Agnès Varda's Cinévardaphoto is a suite of documentary shorts.

If Old Joy is more laid-back and contemplative than "Mutual Appreciation," it's because the characters are more weathered. Open-ended as it may appear, it has a crushing finality. For all the wool-gathering and guitar-noodling, this road movie is at least as tender as it is ironic.

Late in the day, Code 46 bursts its chemical chains to become a convincingly irrational love story.

A tediously childish exhibition.