J. Hoberman

Mr. Assayas succeeded in making a young person’s film when he was on the cusp of turning 40. He has said that he wanted Cold Water to feel like a movie from 1972. It doesn’t really, but, perhaps more remarkably, it’s so fresh it could have been made now.

Transparently a movie about a group of filmmakers who attempt to possess a particular location, Our Beloved Month relaxes into a meditation on the mysteries of place, personality, and process.

This withholding actor's (Affleck) impish smile and mild, pale-eyed stare--not to mention the Clintonesque hoarseness with which he spins his convoluted lies--are sufficiently convincing to keep The Killer Inside Me from being just a steamy, stylish, punishing bloodbath.

A 157-minute police procedural at once sensuous and cerebral, profane and metaphysical, "empty" and abundant, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is closer to the Antonioni of "L'Avventura," and it elevates the 52-year-old director to a new level of achievement.

What's fascinating is how the various issues - religious or practical - are played out in these two quite different families, yet always come down to irreconcilable differences between rebellious women and their stiff-necked, controlling men.

Since he's (Spielberg) a director largely incapable of understatement, War Horse is served up with a self-aggrandizing, distracting surplus of Norman Rockwell backlighting, aerial landscape shots designed to out-swoop David Lean's, and an aggravated sense of doggone wonderment amplified by the director's dependence on John Williams's bombastic score.

The remake is an altogether leaner, meaner, more high-powered, stylish, and deftly directed affair, though similarly hampered by a too-long narrative fuse.

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.

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."

Another creature of need, if the temperamental opposite of self-contained Brandon, Sissy is equally prepared to push her way into his life or push herself in front of a subway. She's also a performer - and Mulligan's blowsy desperation makes for the movie's best turn.

The filmmaker gives full vent to his romanticism by staging an End of the Epoch party, with tearful sex workers dancing to "Nights in White Satin," then steps on the mood with yet another farewell fête, commemorating Bastille Day. The prisoners are free - to walk the streets. Ironic, no?

Cronenberg's film is at once a lucid movie of ideas, a compelling narrative, and a splendidly acted love story.

It left me cold. The pathos is as unearned as the protagonist's privilege.

Although hardly flawless, Eastwood's biopic is his richest, most ambitious movie since the "Letters From Iwo Jima" – "Flags of Our Fathers" duo, if not "Unforgiven."

The Rum Diary could use a shot of the mania that fueled Terry Gilliam's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." As deadpan as he is, Depp could use a crazed Benicio Del Toro to complement his cool.

Plenty of moments in Melancholia are painfully funny. Some moments are even painful to watch, but there was never a moment when I thought about the time or my next movie or did not care about the characters or had anything less than complete interest in what was happening on the screen.

Le Havre is utopian precisely because it shows everything as it is not.

A deft, old-school psychological thriller (or perhaps horror film) that relies mainly on the power of suggestion and memories of hippie cult crazies.

Dour yet affirmative, this laconic, deliberately paced, beautifully shot movie seeks the archaic in the ordinary - and, though somewhat off-putting in its diffidence, largely succeeds.

Basically, Drive is a song of courtly love and devotion among the automatons. It's a machine, but it works.

The sorry spectacle of the ranting codger never effaces the image of the boy concentrating his entire being over a chessboard. You have to love that kid and pity him.

Black nationalism lives and breathes in this remarkably fresh documentary - a standout in last spring's New Directors/New Films - assembled by Göran Hugo Olsson.

Magnificent and cheesy, the latest and most proudly absurd of Chinese historical spectaculars, Detective Dee is a cinematic comic book for people who are sick of the mode.

The movie turns terminally wearisome and even anti-climactic with the triumph of the brain-lodging "Je T'aime" (which, alone among the movie's numbers, is heard in its original version) and Gainsbourg's descent into alcoholic dissolution.

Sardonic as it may be, Tales From the Golden Age is basically affirmative - its true subject is resilience. Romania suffered under a regime of dangerous stupidity. Drawing on popular memory, Mungiu has orchestrated a contribution to local folklore, a suite of stories in which those rendered witless by oppression were compelled by circumstance to live off their wits.

John Sayles's Amigo aspires more to educate than entertain, but it's no less engrossing for that.

What it lacks, perhaps unavoidably, is a sense of the cosmic Now; the movie recovers, without exactly illuminating, a "long, strange trip" that seems all the stranger as it recedes into the past.

Leisurely and digressive, this generally exhilarating saga ("a storm of misadventures" per Ruiz) variously suggests Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and (thanks in part to the unnatural, emphatic yet uninflected, acting) Mexican telenovelas. The score is richly romantic; the period locations are impeccable.

No good deed goes unpunished in former fashion photographer Fred Cavayé's cunningly contrived, energetically directed, thoroughly economical second feature.

Sophie's (or is it July's?) coy narcissism becomes a criticism of itself, and her "sadness" turns into something truly sad. In short, I have seen The Future and it's heartbreaking.

Absurd as it sounds, Joyce's conviction is not only convincing but contagious. So, too, is her elastic sense of reality - a 90-minute immersion in her world is enough to make you question your own.

Annenberg's attitudinous Shakespeare riff is a unique blend of psychodrama, ethnographic experimentation, and high-concept hustle.

Additional substance comes from Dorman's ongoing use of period photos and newsreel footage. In the spirit of the Sholem Aleichem oeuvre, Laughing in the Darkness is a collective family album.

Call it a mental workout that (although considerably less arduous than reading Sartre) some might find exhausting and others exhilarating. Aurora is not a movie to make you glad that you exist; it's a movie that makes you aware that you do.

Opens with a montage of the press in full operational mode, spewing out newspapers all but automatically for a fleet of waiting delivery trucks. It's a system at once efficient and cumbersome, ultra-modern yet quaint, that suggests nothing so much as a herd of dinosaurs, oblivious to the threat of impending extinction.

The verbal jousts are droll and the countryside is splendid, although the food - an endless succession of fussy little presentations - may be an acquired taste.

A big-bang demolition derby, J.J. Abrams's much-anticipated, greatly enjoyable Super 8 seems bound for box-office glory.

Film Socialisme deflects interpretation but, so long as one subscribes to the William Carlos Williams injunction "No ideas but in things," it's filled with sensuous pleasures.

At the heart of the movie are the prolonged, increasingly violent, self-criticism sessions - an escalating, claustrophobic, paranoid reign of terror, staged in near-darkness and shown in close-up.

Everything Must Go, which is ostensibly set in Scottsdale, Arizona, has a generic resemblance to broken-heartland movies like "Up in the Air" and "Cedar Rapids," although this suburban meltdown is more depressed than either.

City of Life and Death is far more convincing as a spectacle of mass atrocity than a drama of individual conscience.

There's a message here regarding loneliness and emotional isolation, but the movie's real miracle is that, however precious its premise, this slow-burning not-quite heart-warmer-never succumbs to cuteness.

Perhaps that's the problem. Mel's character isn't on Prozac, but the movie is-a succession of bland camera setups, cued to a highly conventional score. Would that the direction were half as nutty as the script or as wacked-out as its star!

For better or worse, the movie does for Chauvet what Baudrillard complained an on-site replica did for Lascaux-render the real thing false.

Barnard makes the psychological mayhem Dunbar endured and inflicted tangible.

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.

A mysterious, fabulously sad fable.

Cinematic as it is, Meek's Cutoff has an uncanny theatricality. The scenes alternating between windswept emptiness and the dark void could be played on a barren stage. For all its detailed authenticity, this minimalist "Wagon Train" is less naturalistic than existential.

Grave, beautiful, austerely comic, and casually metempsychotic, Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is one of the wiggiest nature documentaries-or almost-documentaries-ever made.

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.

Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is exactly that: The Iranian modernist's first feature to be shot in the West is a flawless riff on our indigenous art cinema.

The so-called Plan is derailed!

A work of unostentatious beauty and uncloying sweetness, at once sophisticated and artless, mysterious and matter-of-fact, cosmic and humble, it asks only a measure of Boonmeevian acceptance: The movie doesn't mean anything-it simply is.

Beauvois's film is cool while Denis's is hot-but the main difference is that where "White Material" is knowingly postcolonial, Of Gods and Men aspires to the timeless.

This promising first feature is nearly as apt to use the power of suggestion as to ladle up the gore, triumphantly creepy, and just arty enough to have secured a slot in last year's New York Film Festival.

A mild comedy of embarrassment.

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.

It is meant to boggle the mind and inspire awe-and it does.

Steadily building in intensity from sluggish interest to mild excitement, Cold Weather is a slight movie with a long, circuitous fuse-and that's the point.

Kaboom does have an excellent punchline, although even at 86 minutes it feels too long-mainly because Araki can't help letting his camera linger over his performers. Hard to blame him-he's assembled the best-looking cast in town and it's largely his gaga appreciation that makes the movie so much fun.

Ultimately, The Woodmans is a haunting study in family dynamics.

His (Weir) hardship drama is stolidly old-fashioned, more extreme travelogue than exercise in visceral horror.

The Green Hornet provides a half-hour's worth of mildly entertaining travesty before collapsing in a clamor of bombastic action sequences and lame wisecracks.

A highly personal movie, Go Go Tales finds Ferrara in a frenzied yet pensive mode.

It's a measure of the movie's success that one oscillates between two despairs-noting the abject failure of the system and the utter futility of revolt.

For its 80 minutes, the movie creates the illusion that not just Tati but his form of cerebral slapstick lives.

For the most part, the Coens' is a highly enjoyable yarn, stocked with pungent bushwa and a full panoply of frontier bozos.

In the grand finale, Abramoff fantasizes about using a Senate hearing to blow the whistle on the entire corrupt establishment. His rant offers a clue to how this otherwise pointlessly manic movie might have honed its political edge.

Given the movie's graphic pizzazz, the best hippie wisdom Bridges might offer the viewer is: Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.

Claire Denis's strongest movie in the decade since "Beau Travail," her tense, convulsive White Material is a portrait of change and a thing of terrible beauty.

Guy and Madeline is at once self-conscious and breezy, clumsy and deft, diffident and sweet, annoying and ecstatic. It's amateurish in the best sense, and it radiates cinephilia. No movie I've seen this year has given me more joy.

A comedy of youthful confusion that gets its kick not only for evoking a world of unromantic hookups, casual BJs, and iPhone porn, but for satirizing New York's bourgeois bohemia.

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

It plays as a "Rocky"-fied fairy tale for our time: Consigned to Palookaville, a sweet, unassuming boxer with more heart than brains steps up-all the way to the top of the world.

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 wildest thing about this movie is its faith that what kids (and parents) really want for Christmas is a Nutcracker version of the Final Solution.

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.

It's an ostensive crime film at once symmetrical, surprising, and knowingly cinephilic.

Boxing Gym is a companion piece of sorts to "La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet," Wiseman's previous doc that played Film Forum last fall. It's not simply that boxing and ballet are understood as kindred activities. Boxing Gym is itself a dance movie-which is to say, a highly formalized exercise in choreographed activity.

Hereafter is not just a stretch for Eastwood, it's a contortion. The irrationality of the premise is exceeded only by the strategic irrationalities of the plot.

Frears might have accelerated the comic pacing, but the story is a good one and events come nicely to a boil.

The movie's bold visual and psychological patterns, as well as its heavy immersion in the natural world, imbue Malli's journey with a folktale quality.

Not for nothing is this movie opening on Good Friday. It can be as boring as church. There's no snake in Bettie's Eden and no narrative to Harron's movie. It's more of an altar piece: Our Lady of the Garter Belt, the Fastidious Bettie Page.

A considerably more unsettling tale of one-sided amour fou, reportedly inspired by an actual case of teenage prostitution, Jean-Pierre Améris's Bad Company puts the coy prurience of American high school films in brutal perspective.

Traffic is not just an ultra-procedural--it's the Big Picture, the Whole Enchilada, complete with a complicated war between two Mexican drug cartels.

The movie is a drama of faith, a Tibetan monk's search for the reincarnation of his beloved master Lama Konchog.

That Reconstruction is even remotely involving is due to the quality of its acting.

While "Robinson Crusoe" was a paean to the practical middle-class virtues that allowed its industrious hero (and the nation he represents) to re-create civilization out of nothingness, Cast Away is a far less triumphalist peek into the nothingness at the heart of civilization.

Shot in a style that might be termed Americana gravitas, September Dawn has the ham-fisted lyricism of political ads and pharmaceutical commercials. The schematic script is further burdened with heavy ironies and hackneyed dialogue.

Meta-documentary to the end, Empathy takes its leave by pretending to spy on one patient with his ear to the closed door, eavesdropping on another patient. How did watching the movie make me feel? Interested, amused, and um, empathetic.

A jaggedly impressionistic reverie.

Although a marked improvement over Algrant's nightmarishly whimsical debut, "Naked in New York," People I Know is perfumed less by the sweet smell of success than the musty aroma of the Miramax vault.

Bloody Sunday doesn't surrender its grip on the viewer even after the action shifts from the streets of Bogside to a local hospital where the weeping masses are still under the guns of the war-painted British soldiers.

Filled with purposeful, if absurd, activity rendered gravely hilarious through Tsai's deadpan, distanced representation of extreme behavior.

Gently persistent in its ironies, "Funny Ha Ha" managed to be both charmingly lackadaisical and annoyingly smug; Mutual Appreciation, which Bujalski shot in grainy black-and-white in hipster Brooklyn (and is self-distributing), is even more so.

If the carefully planted romantic intrigue is serenely slow to ripen, the process is never less than intriguing.

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

Directed by anyone else, Masculine Feminine--one of three movies that Godard made in his peak year, 1966--would be a masterpiece. For the young JLG it's business as usual.

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

Angelina Jolie is the major alienation effect in A Mighty Heart, although she's not the only one. The hectic pizzazz with which hired gun Michael Winterbottom directs this tale of terrifying terrorism is another distraction.

Unpretentiously poetic and casually stylish, yet perversely precise. Reconstructing the past, Carri seems to suggest, is akin to grabbing the water in a flowing stream.

As an action flick, Shaft is clumsy out of the gate and overfond of hurtling stuntmen through windows.

Ravenous loses resonance as it proceeds.

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

Unknown Pleasures suggests a coolly formalist reinvention of neorealism. The film is both distanced and immediate -- a fiction with the force of documentary.

Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist.

While never less than fascinating, Katyn alternates between scenes of tremendous power and sequences most kindly described as dutiful. It's as if the artist is never certain whether he is making this movie for himself, his father, or the entire nation.

Don Siegel’s remake was hardly so well received, although it is in many respects a more vivid, streamlined, callous film.

Jagged and jokey, filled with glam young people, lyrical Canto-Pop, and narrative non sequiturs, Time and Tide is Tsui's version of neo-new wave.

Single-dad sitcom is not Sir Ridley's forte but, anachronistically evoking the ring-a-ding-ding ambience of "Auto Focus" and "Catch Me If You Can," his mise-en-scène is as impeccable as Roy's pad.

An effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer.

Avatar is a technological wonder, 15 years percolating in King Cameron's imagination and inarguably the greatest 3-D cavalry western ever made. Too bad that western is "Dances With Wolves."

A movie of cornball sentiment, humorously anachronistic dialogue, and expensive Colonial Williamsburg sets.

A small-screen aesthetic is evident in the abundant close-ups and tight framing, but Holland makes it work for her.

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

A philosophical gross-out comedy rudely presented from the perspective of a sullen, sexually curious 14-year-old.

A movie of many stupid pet tricks and one basic joke: As in the original, Elle's intelligence is consistently -- if understandably -- underestimated.

X-ploitative though it may be, the spectacle of a man beaten and tortured to death seeks to be an object of contemplation. Serious questions are raised.

This affecting eulogy underscores not only Demme's own tribute to Dominique but also the film's homage to radio. This is a motion picture that's in love with the magic of airborne speech.

Never hits a note of high hilarity.

Despite its cheesy blood and thunder and ludicrous "Sunshine Makers" metaphysics, this is the funniest apocalypse I've seen since George Romero's "Land of the Dead."

Black Book, which takes its title from a secret list of Dutch collaborators, is an impressively old-fashioned yet fashionably embittered movie.

Methodical, measured, and gently tedious in its comedy, Secret Ballot is a purposefully reductive movie—which may be why it's so successful at lodging itself in the brain.

However cool, Smith's lovable braggadocio and Lee's practiced deadpan don't exactly make them Laurel and Hardy.

The mood is less angst-ridden than hypercaffeinated, as Scorsese keeps cranking the velocity-bloodbath in the reggae inferno, exploding skyline pietà, climactic white light of redemption.

Remains Chaplin's most sustained burlesque of authority.

It is an essay in film form with near-universal interest and a remarkable degree of synthesis.

It's at once brilliant and inept.

About halfway through I began to imagine it as it might have been directed by Douglas Sirk as a vehicle for Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson.

Kosashvili's camera is restrained, the better to render Late Marriage superbly brash, raunchy, and confrontational.

A movie as laconic as its hero, Ghost Dog is nonetheless diminished by its most un-Zen-like attachment to this underlying sentimentality.

Accurate enough as history to provide a potent reminder that black independent cinema did not end with Oscar Micheaux or begin with Spike Lee.

Like many cult films, it is also less than the sum of its parts.

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

Initially engrossing, The Dancer Upstairs slackens in its second half.

A film in which many things seem to happen twice and others not at all.

Blown opportunity.

Halfway through, De Palma literally explodes his narrative to orchestrate a superb deep-space float-opera replete with runaway modules, high-tech lassos, dramatic self-sacrifice, and, in the most surprising maneuver, a montage-driven modicum of actual suspense.

Performance seems more like eye candy than castor oil in the brave new world of "Freddy Got Fingered."

Self-contained, enigmatic, illuminated from within, Huppert banks a performance that pays dividends throughout the film.

Evocative but ahistorical.

Predicated as it is on Huppert's pensive, provocative blankness, the action moves a bit slowly, although, as is often the case with Jacquot, events make more sense after the movie is over.

A better-than-competent period evocation that allows the director to flaunt his knowledge (and perhaps vent some of his own bitterness) regarding Hollywood.

Totally convincing in a physically demanding role, Collette carries the movie on her shoulders -- and that weight is what it's all about.

This moody, rapturous adaptation of Pierre, Herman Melville's gothic follow-up to "Moby Dick," is never less than seriously romantic.

Visually more coherent than "American Beauty," but despite the burnished mahogany of Conrad Hall's cinematography, Mendes still doesn't quite know how to fill a frame. Like the Hanks character, he's a slow study: The action is stilted and the tabloid energy embalmed.

Jia Zhangke is one of the world's preeminent filmmakers, an essentially contemplative director whose considerable talent is further amplified by the significance of his material--namely, everyday life in the most dynamic economy on earth.

Openly gay and overwhelmingly glum.

Structured to suggest an extended psychoanalytic session or an episode of "The Twilight Zone."

Although not as radically defamiliarizing as Jim Jarmusch's avant-western "Dead Man," Jesse James has the feel of an attic ransacked for abandoned knickknacks.

The movie grabs hold and runs you through the wringer.

In its willful, self-involved eccentricity, Southland Tales is really something else. Kelly's movie may not be entirely coherent, but that's because there's so much it wants to say.

Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in general and the Russian occupation of Chechnya in particular, this is a movie in which combat is never shown.

Increasingly violent (although always distanced), The Outskirts is at once appalling and bleakly humorous.

Suffers from over-explanation. The movie maintains tremendous momentum through the Szpilman family's deportation. The second half is another story.

The video stores are filled with examples of retro-noir and neo-noir, but Christopher Nolan's audacious timebender is something else. Call it meta-noir.

Present in every scene, if not each shot, Rourke gives a tremendously physical performance that The Wrestler essentially exists to document.

Exquisitely understated.

Made nearly half a century ago and long hiding in plain sight, Martha Coolidge’s “Not a Pretty Picture” is at once an autobiographical documentary, a Pirandellian psychodrama, an acting exercise, a personal exorcism and a powerful political tract.

A film of considerable ambition and period piquance.

Hopefully ambitious yet hopelessly lightweight.

Jack and Miles are male archetypes, as well as the two most fully realized comic creations in recent American movies.

10 on Ten is less illuminating than pedantic, as well as tediously self-absorbed.

An austere and fascinating documentary.

Police, Adjective is a deadly serious as well as dryly humorous analysis of bureaucratic procedure and, particularly, the tyranny of language. Images may record reality, but words define it.

You can call me fanboy, but this is the best anime I've ever seen.

Not only a nifty late noir but a model of economical filmmaking--well-sketched atmosphere, deft characterizations, and a 78-minute running time.

The first half has a nifty B-movie feel--it's a canny little movie with a big, big theme.

A mordant battlefield allegory with an absurdist edge.

Forget "Irreversible," this is the season's most piercingly feel-bad movie.

A big fat war movie and a tender love story. Indeed, Cold Mountain is something of an uneasy struggle between the two modes.

This poignant, acutely observed movie is eloquent and suggestive in dramatizing a particular trauma in the context of an ordinary Haifa family.

A fable for our reality-TV reality, Nina Davenport's Operation Filmmaker is as much virus as video documentary. This essentially comic tale maps a contagion of mutual exploitation that seems to have burnished the careers of everyone involved.

Like everything Jarmusch, The Limits of Control is calibrated for cool.

Contemporary audiences may not see why, even in its toned-down simplification of the novel, From Here to Eternity was the most daring movie of 1953, but it remains an acting bonanza.

Ultimately more amusing than hilarious, and sometimes less than that.

Like its oxymoronic title, Good Morning, Night is sober yet filled with fancy. There's a wistful aspect to the movie.

The best one can say for Christopher Hampton's dispirited adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent is that this weirdly sentimental movie might direct new attention to Conrad's corrosive novela satire. [12 Nov 1996]

Bulcsú never surfaces from the underworld. Neither does the movie-literally or figuratively.

Kaufman's earnestly overblown celebration of the Marquis de Sade.

Alternately grandiose and abject, Bandini is a sort of underground man, and if no more miscast than usual, heartthrob Colin Farrell miserably fails to convincingly render Bandini's neurosis.

From first shot to last, Dworkin's movie is a continuously absorbing, sometimes revelatory, frequently moving experience; as documentary filmmaking it's not only amazingly intimate but also characterized by an unexpected lyricism.

A compelling thriller but an unsatisfying character drama.

A lackluster screwball comedy.

The digital animation is far more evident here than in "The Phantom Menace."

One leaves with barely a clue as to how this group was able to orchestrate a successful string of terror bombings.

Solaris achieves an almost perfect balance of poetry and pulp. This is as elegant, moody, intelligent, sensuous, and sustained a studio movie as we are likely to see this season -- and in its intrinsic nuttiness, perhaps the least compromised.

Aggressively grim and gory.

Revived (with vastly improved subtitles) some 14 years after it first stunned Hong Kong critics, Days of Being Wild is a sort of meta-reverie populated by a cast of beautiful young pop icons.

A brilliant appreciation of the last great Soviet director, Andrei Tarkovsky.

Determined to twist every character into an ideogram for vulgar humanity.

Conceptually rigorous, splendidly economical, and radically Bazinian.

Highly audacious, hugely enjoyable, exceptionally well-written, brilliantly edited, and exuberantly actor-driven extravaganza.

For all its quasi-documentary materialism, The Son is ultimately a Christian allegory of one man's inchoate desire to return good for evil. The movie requires a measure of faith, and like a job well done, it repays that trust.

At the very least, the spectacle of Poppy's devotion and desire, not to mention her all-around sunny disposish, left this viewer feeling unaccountably happy--at least for the moment.

A superbly balanced piece of work, addressing the passion of Irish Republican martyr Bobby Sands.

As over-emphatic as one might expect from the ham-fisted Guy Ritchie, this resurrection of the world's most famous detective is a dank, noisy affair.

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.

Director Lee throws cold water on his own overheated fantasy scenario by having Mackie mope through every scene. What's fascinating is how She Hate Me perversely trumps its own perversity.

The Coens return to familiar territory with the parody thriller Burn After Reading, a characteristically supercilious and crisply shot clown show filled with cartoon perfs and predicated on extravagant stupidity.

Nossiter has an eye for stray details and a knack for relaxing his subjects- although the scene with the naked guy trampling his own grapes may make you sorry that you ever gave up drinking Ripple.

A graceful, charming, and sometimes witty confection -- at least for its first hour.

However authentically chaotic, Chicago 10 is insufficiently frenzied.

An unusually rich music doc.

Lunacy is dark, scary, and yucky--even by the Czech animator's own standards.

Swank and splashy as it is, Frida leaves the lurking suspicion that Taymor might have preferred to stage her pageant as a puppet show.

Like Taxi Driver, The American Friend was a new sort of movie-movie — sleekly brooding, voluptuously alienated and saturated with cinephilia.

It's far too soggy a confection for my taste.

At once monumental and ghostly.

Exercise in existential tedium that it is, Gerry isn't without devotees.

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.

This earnest love story is borderline insufferable, and yet there are moments that, in their bold incoherence, have a startling emotional truth.

Possession suffers from insufficient nastiness.

A humorously death-haunted psychodrama.

Although the action set pieces are impressive, the exposition is sluggish. For all the posh dollies, high angles, and Venetian-blind crisscross patterns, The Black Dahlia rarely achieves the rhapsodic (let alone the delirious).

Depending on one's mood, the movie might seem boldly simplified and poetic--or boringly simpleminded and prosaic.

Boldly facetious and monstrously clever.

Mildly tasteless (natürlich), if not exactly uproarious.

May not be the movie of the year, but it is a seasonal gift to us all. Sweet and funny, doggedly oddball if bordering precious.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold is an anti-blockbuster--a deceptively modest undertaking that brilliantly combines unpretentious humanism and impeccable formal values.

Up and Down is not exactly the toughest movie on the block, but especially compared to most American comedies, it conveys a sense of scrofulous rue.

Neither a debacle nor a bore, The Departed works but only up to a point, and never emotionally--even if the director does contrive to supply his version of a happy ending.

A showy exercise in nervous grit, Go never strays too far from a sense of itself as stunt.

Any investigation into Hollywood inevitably mutates into a noir.

A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence.

Hand it to Lawrence and Christian. Jindabyne is a soberly, if sluggishly, crafted movie in which the bitterness never stops.

Playing the young Coleman with the requisite intelligence and ambiguity, Wentworth Miller contributes the sole viable characterization.

In a sense, Millennium Mambo is a mildly prurient portrait of Shu moving, drinking, smoking, and changing clothes -- it's analogous to one of Andy Warhol's Edie Sedgwick films, but without the existential drama. Who really cares what costume this poor girl will wear to all tomorrow's parties?

An intelligent, viscerally intellectual exercise in ensemble acting and associative montage, enlivened with some terrific visual and dramatic ideas.

As directed by Gidi Dar, Ushpizin has a disarming folk quality.

Enigmatic from the get-go, The Fall of Otrar builds to a series of spectacular battle scenes, but the mood is never less than sardonic.

Fond, funny documentary.

A notably confident and achieved debut.

The Decay of Fiction is less a narrative than a monument. In its abstract movie-ness, this 74-minute carnival of souls exudes a wistful longing to connect, not so much with Hollywood history as with the history of that history.