Jessica Winter

Begs the question: Did the lads from Squatney trail the zeitgeist at every turn, or were cobandleaders David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel simply in touch with their past and ahead of their time?

Unfortunately, the delicious snatches of reflexive wit function as mere intermissions between the distended action sequences and Michael Bay–style megatonnage, which have earned Pixar its first ever PG rating.

The movie has the addictive episodic intimacy of great TV.

Niccol's fatal error is in making the protagonist at once amoral and insipid, an admixture thickened by Cage's loquacious yet stoned voice-over and Moynahan's moist-eyed tremblings as the trophy wife.

The wonderful-terrible dervish of Umbrellas reaches peak abandon, worthy of Vincente Minnelli, when Geneviève sobs out a plaint for Guy as a carnival whirls outside the shop.

A frat-boy remake of "Pink Flamingos" which isn't all bad.

In a remarkably subtle, assured debut performance, Compston evokes Billy in Loach's "Kes" and, in the heartbreaking final seaside shot, Antoine in Truffaut's "400 Blows."

Amid the muddy scrubbery of the camp and its hinterland surroundings, Ghobadi catches some striking compositions.

Director Joe Wright coordinates a delightfully cohesive acting ensemble.

Endearing and well-acted.

Often seems less a British new wave front-runner than a charming nouvelle vague tagalong,

Unexpectedly bridges genres -- it's a buddy movie, a horror story, a boy's-own adventure, and a near metaphysical meditation on the limits of human endurance.

A happy ending is never at issue here -- it's clear where she's going, but there's little clue where she's been.

Karine Vanasse, as the protagonist Hanna, is perfectly cast because she has the body of a woman and the sweet, sexless face of a child.

Most frustrating, Stage Beauty fumbles XX/XY politics at every turn.

The photographer's show-don't-tell stance is admirable, but it can make him a problematic documentary subject. War Photographer infers the psychological and physical toll of his peripatetic existence, but provides scant insight into his technique.

With elegant restraint the film subtly intimates the wintry dead end-twilight years bereft of love, partner, or vocation-that may be in store for its aged lover man. (Payne's "About Schmidt" did too, when not gorging snidely on idiot Americana.)

This film is solidly built, faithful to its material, and utterly lacking in pretense, but its maker is still running in place.

Almost inevitably for a documentary of this stripe, it risks aestheticizing poverty--but here it's usually the kids themselves who compose the most arresting images.

Slick and sober, fiercely contemporary, and rigged by a fail-safe three-act structure, Dirty Pretty Things nimbly straddles the line between realism and popcorn pop, but it knows which side its bread is buttered on.

The patient camera leans in closely on the three lead actresses -- extraordinary first-timers all.

Though there's considerable footage of hippie activity (crafting kites, sleeping) and moments of prelapsarian frisson (a cop warns that "there's talk of the Hell's Angels coming down"), the film is resolutely performance-driven.

Jeff Feuerzeig's tremendous documentary runs on the motive force of intelligent fandom and radiates an ineffable grace.

Spheeris gives every indication of having gotten too close to her material, but her film's overall air of discombobulation is poignant in itself.

Unstintingly funny -- far more so than the wince-worthy trailer -- owing to Chan's pairing with droll indie eccentric Owen Wilson, as his would-be gunslinger sidekick.

Indulges something of a number obsession, amounting not exactly to a movie but rather a tallying of atrocities.

Like a kid playing make-believe, In America is blithely confident of its own contrivances; it only benefits from a certain unselfconscious naïveté. And as with a misjudged Christmas gift or a mawkish sympathy card from a kindly relative, one can hardly doubt its uplifting intentions.

Boldly aspirational. It's Jeunet's stab at "Paths of Glory," dipped in a sepia bath and halfway wrenched into a women's picture.

July's witty ode to only-connecting sustains a delicate tone of pensive whimsy.

State and Main is a Hollywood satire as cynical and thickheaded as its supposed targets.

Collapses in a heap of affirmational outbursts and metaphysical goop. The fond chemistry between the leads deserves a better movie.

Redoubtably hilarious as always, Zahn also lends his character unpredictable flashes of anger, pathos, and faint psychosis, even when the movie jumps the median from ticklishly discomfiting black comedy into by-the-numbers horror jolts.

One of the refreshing aspects of the slight, flawed Tumbleweeds is that it creates a world inhabited by recognizable people.

Like grieving itself, the film is awkward, messily honest, and sometimes darkly funny.

Lovely to look at but insipid.

She (Dunst) provides the only major element of Bring It On that plays as tweaking parody rather than slick, strident, body-slam churlishness.

Since the central odd couple have no rapport, their bond never seems to progress past mutual usury.

Code Unknown is Haneke's most expansive and, oddly, hopeful work -- not a gaze into the void, but a fierce attempt to scramble out of it.

Aspiring to evoke an unreal city stranded in the autumn of the soul, the film succeeds only when it peers up from the intro-philosophy book for the occasional glimpse of everyday beauty.

The uncertain plot somehow concerns ginseng and stolen objets d'art; the main thrust is acrobatic slapstick with a decided antipatriarchal twist.

The movie's subject is brotherly love in all its extremes; the trajectory is grimly inevitable, and yet its final descent still manages to startle.

Easily the best teen movie of the year.

Watching Ben get the girl or be seriously injured trying always has its dry, keening pleasures.

Cheeky and elusive, Last Life in the Universe inhabits a high-lonesome world unto itself, a bright daydream that dissipates in the aching gap of a missed connection.

Preposterous enough to entertain.

The performances can be stiff, but a kinetic mix of anxiety, dread, and numbed resignation is always palpable.

The Virgin script occasionally resets a gold standard for refined crudery.

An engrossing study of a protagonist who variously inspires pity, clinical interest, fondness, and revulsion-sometimes all at once.

A scrupulous and impeccably acted account of the fallout from a family secret.

As sweet and unassuming a film as they come, embraces both perspectives -- it's sympathetic to the batty throes of a first infatuation, but affably demurs at indulging them.

The entire unwieldy contraption rests on the shoulders of erstwhile "Queer as Folk" jailbait Hunnam: Bleached and bland, earnest and wooden, he's exactly what the film asks him to be.

Broomfield's investigatory technique remains a frustrating pileup of unfocused Q&As and misplaced credulity. But when Broomfield travels to her Michigan hometown, he pieces together a life blighted at breech-birth: a grotesque of abandonment, incest, physical and sexual abuse, pregnancy at 13, and homelessness.

The Road Home is foremost enthralled, however, with its lead actress -- wide-eyed and pigtailed, revered in close-up after stunned close-up.

Mehta feels compelled to twist the screw, shamelessly plying her audience with mawkish tropes wearing the garb of "innocence."

Carandiru's every scene is cut from factory-issue prison-genre cloth to fit jailhouse stock characters.

Godard light, but not lite: Its breezy postures front for melancholia.

The visual subtleties don't come to bear on the storytelling, unfortunately -- the dialogue is cumbersome, the simpering soundtrack and editing more so.

Can any American filmmaker other than the Farrellys make a rom-com in which the principals engage in activities apart from the tiresomely tireless dissection of rom?

The narrative is unexpectedly sleepy, excepting the occasional flashy set piece.

A widescreen wallow in socially enforced slum nihilism brought to you by Miramax, Tsotsi could be pegged as "City of God" relocated to the Soweto shanties, but it eschews the ironic swagger and strobe-speed action of Fernando Meirelles's lurid jigsaw for a more conventional arc.

One of Gitaï's greatest assets in Kadosh is such stillness, which leaves facile outsiders' judgment out of the frame and thereby deepens our immersion in the narrative.

Utterly necessary film.

Carion is no Jean Renoir, but he does strike an appealingly low key of tender, faintly goofy affinity between the combatants.

Cédric Klapisch has been compared to Truffaut, but the new-waver's weakness for glib sentimentalism seems to have left the biggest impression on L'Auberge Espagnole.

Occasionally smirky.

Cahiers-savvy cinephiles will recognize Fanfan as the type of handsome prestige production that the French New Wave overthrew in the early '60s, but this example of the "cinéma de qualité" is hardly a musty artifact, with its compact editing, its breezy and mischievous tone, and, in a country not yet a decade removed from the Nazi occupation, its acrid anti-militarism, clear from the ash-dry narration of the opening battle sequences onward.

The whole of Sunshine State is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often lovely, and always true.

Amiable and hollow.

Having established Josey as the focus of the entire iron range's enmity, the filmmakers panic, and North Country spectacularly self-destructs in a climactic courtroom free-for-all.

Burnt Money arranges a triumphant martyrdom for its bad boys -- a redemptive blaze of glory, dozens of faceless corpses notwithstanding.

The Edukators smiles indulgently as the kids rage belatedly against the dying of the SDS light.

The elliptical, even fragmented editing style clashes with the reiterative voice-over, which could indicate a stylistic choice or cutting under duress.

Sargent's whole enterprise doubles as a '70s archaeological dig.

With wit and empathy to spare, waydowntown acknowledges the silent screams of workaday inertia but stops short of indulging its characters' striving solipsism.

The idea isn't as odd as it might first appear, since running a salon is one of the few socially acceptable means for a woman in Afghanistan to earn an income. The execution, however, evokes a particularly outlandish Christopher Guest mockumentary.

An international cast of curious creatures in their native habitats stars in this charming Gallic duo (Animals and Ice/Sea) of featurettes.

The Business of Strangers goes too far in dramatizing Julie's primal, Paula-fied surge of female fury, and the script finally mistakes respectful ambiguity for vaporous drift.

Doesn't quite know how to take its leave; it tapers off like a curling cigarette trail, but it lingers like a ghost.

Depp and Highmore's final scene together strikes a muted blow of desolation -- bottomless but just bearable -- that Forster rather bravely lets stand as the last word on all the fanciful solace that Barrieland had to offer.

Not to imply that our Claude's gone native, but here his unabiding fascination with bourgie-style repetition compulsion bears some resemblance to sympathy.

Once Drake reaches the candlelight vigil that acts as his penultimate set piece, he sustains an impossible balance between mordant wit and articulate bewilderment.

An aura of dust and mothballs evidently leaves a capable cast feeling woozy.

The director has a fitfully deployed gift for droll humor, but Chutney Popcorn mostly provides evidence that the ins and outs of the improvised multiparent family can be as prosaic as the nuclear Eisenhower model.

Director Waters and screenwriter Tina Fey (also cast as the voice-of-reason math teacher) aim less for the usual high-gloss caricature than acutely hilarious sociology, nailing the servile malice of 15-year-old girls.

Me You Them can't find a rhythm or a consistent tone.

An endless chain reaction of cartilage-crunching, organ-pulping brawls.

Scott Elliott's palsied directorial debut, from a mine shaft-ridden script, is a sick joke, and Weaver's part in it screams of temporary insanity.

Only silent Becks himself rises unstained from this reheated ethno-niche stew.

Jones's documentary, named for the opening song on Foxtrot, is most effective as a poison-pen missive to Corporate Rock.

Chaiken ably balances real-time rhythms with propulsive incident -- she catches subtler interior strains, too.

Though angry and sorrowful, Trembling Before G-d, beginning with the title, is above all a work of reverence.

The poised Vega and pleasingly phlegmatic Sabara are resolutely uncute performers, and the reach-out-and-touch-it gadgetry carries a homey scent of proactive nostalgia. Spy Kids 2 is an island of lost Circuit Cities.

Baggy and overbroad, He Loves Me is notable only as a corrective to cinema's promiscuity with fabulous destinies.

Accomplished if lacking in urgency, this Oliver Twist (scripted by Ronald Harwood, who also wrote "The Pianist") showcases Polanski's proven gift for Dickensian caricature.

Hudson is ebullient, never cutesy, and her accent stays in tune.

Akerman's characteristically patient, pensive approach elegantly accommodates her reportorial responsibilities.

The script offers neither a sustained narrative arc nor strong characterizations.

Like a loud and intermittently charismatic drunk at a dreary dive bar, Intermission grabs your attention, but in no time you're looking for the nearest exit.