Jonathan Rosenbaum

Inevitably it's a mixed bag, though the film's assurance in keeping it all coherent is at times exhilarating.

Half-funny mockumentary.

Quirky and nuanced, this movie has a lot to say about sibling rivalry and the current music scene.

Poised somewhere between a movie-familiar (i.e., semiscurrilous) look at inner-city life as trench warfare and a farfetched Hollywood revenge fantasy, this is kept alive largely through its first-rate performances, beginning with Sean Nelson's as the boy; Giancarlo Esposito is also a standout.

A singular and essential figure of the Argentinean new wave; [Alonso] is not quite the minimalist some claim, but he can make the simple act of filming feel so monumental that storytelling seems secondary.

An entertaining comedy-thriller directed with bounce (if not much nuance) by Barry Sonnenfeld.

The episodic flow tends to set up an occasional self-consciousness and air of portent about the film’s apparent lack of pretension.

The script dawdles, and in spite of a good cast--Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton (who's especially resourceful), Bridget Fonda, and Brent Briscoe--the movie tends to amble around its points rather than drive straight toward the heart of the matter.

The three actors manage to get a lot of mileage out of the material: although one never quite believes that Tandy's character is Jewish, she is remarkable in every other respect, and Freeman and Aykroyd are wonderful throughout.

Results are classy entertainment with little to interest women viewers but very shrewdly and cleverly put together, and probably more rewarding in long-range terms if you invest in Fox or Dreamworks than if you actually see the movie.

One of Jean Harlow's best pictures, this 1933 feature is a merciless satire of Hollywood, with Harlow as a movie star and Lee Tracy as her publicity agent.

One reason Bamako feels like a blast of sanity is that the theoretical debates about the state of the world, particularly Africa and more particularly Mali, are only half of its agenda. The other half, broadly speaking, is the life of everyday Africans.

The last and best of his "Tales of the Four Seasons."

Like Wenders's other road movies, this is largely about the spaces between people and the words they speak—Antonioni updated and infused with German romanticism; the various means of indirection through which the hero communicates with his son (Hunter Carson) and wife (Nastassja Kinski) constitute a striking motif.

Everyone who likes this movie calls it "disturbing," but what disturbs me most is the self-loathing laughter it provokes, similar to what one often hears at Woody Allen and Michael Moore comedies.

What emerges is a powerhouse thriller full of surprises, original touches, and rare political lucidity, including an impressive performance by Jeff Goldblum as a Jewish yuppie gangster.

Maybe you'll enjoy it, but don't expect to remember it ten minutes later, or even to believe in the characters while you're watching them.

A very adroit and entertaining social comedy.

A smashing piece of entertainment.

This 2006 drama may seem to be worlds apart from the surreal theme-park setting of Jia's previous film, "The World," but there are similarities of theme, style, scale, and tone: social and romantic alienation in a monumental setting, a daring poetic mix of realism and lyrical fantasy, and an uncanny sense of where our planet is drifting.

It's unclear whether this macho thriller does anything to improve the state of the world or our understanding of it, but it certainly sets off enough rockets to hold us and shake us for every one of its 99 minutes.

The film brims over with various eccentrics (the barber's ufologist neighbor and a former prison mate who harasses the hero and delivers drunken tirades), and Imamura views them all with mixed amusement and curiosity; he also does striking things with dream sequences and visual and aural flashbacks.

The film is made up chiefly of found footage and therefore lacks the mise en scene of its predecessors, but it has the added benefit of Davies's voice-over narration, which, thanks to his training and experience as an actor, is enormously powerful.

The main focus is on everyday household chores and sensual discoveries, all made mesmerizing by elaborately choreographed camera movements that link interiors and exteriors in the same fluid itineraries.

It's extremely competent, shot in 'Scope (Boorman's best screen format), and though it kept me absorbed it failed to win me over.

The film's warmth and sympathy are underlined by some intelligence.

The banal score seems more appropriate for a western, and there's a certain self-conscious theatricality in the mise en scene, yet this is both handsome and affecting.

It's hard to think of many more galvanizing definitions of what it means to be an American than Cho's volcanic self-assessments.

It clocks in at over three hours, but Peter Jackson's remake of the 1933 classic is gripping. The film rethinks the characters, turning the original's stark Jungian fantasy into a soulless but skillful set of kinetic and emotional effects.

I seem to be in a distinct minority in finding the satire toothless, obvious, and insufferably glib -- Still, I found genuine pleasure in watching Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renee Zellweger, Richard Gere, and John C. Reilly try their hands at singing and dancing.

In all, the most pleasure-filled Hollywood movie of 1994.

A witty, canny meditation on the power of pop culture in general and the rationalizations of cinephilia and film criticism in particular.

The title of Jia Zhang-ke's 2004 masterpiece, The World -- a film that's hilarious and upsetting, epic and dystopian -- is an ironic pun and a metaphor.

The players and their stories are as wonderful as the music, and the filmmaking is uncommonly sensitive and alert.

The efforts to plant this story in a contemporary vernacular are not always successful but the performances are uniformly fine in their adherence to the material, and consistently avoid any vulgarity or showboating.

Strongly recommended.

The result is somewhat better than a Masterpiece Theatre gloss job, but it's far from the essence of Woolf.

Hou's best film since "The Puppetmaster" (1993). It's also his most minimalist effort to date, slow to reveal its depths and beauties, and it marks a rejuvenation of his art.

It isn't very good, but it doesn’t seem to care, which turns out to be rather refreshing.

Haggis's dialogue is worthy of Hemingway, and the three leads border on perfection.

This movie swims freely in the moral ambiguities Lumet seems to thrive on.

This 1998 film held my interest for two hours, even taking on an epic feel when it turns into a road movie. It's not bad by any means, but it also happens to resemble a lot of other movies.

Superior in every respect to the PBS documentary "The Murder of Emmett Till."

The film is both wise and tender in its treatment of relationships -- between birds, between people, and between birds and people.

Reputed to be sentimental crowd pleaser, for better and for worse.

Crichton keeps the laughs coming with infectious energy.

Originally a two-part film running about three hours, this treacle has been reduced by almost a third, though it still seems to run on forever -- a bit like life but much less interesting.

The performances are perfectly distilled, but the traits I dislike in Bergman are all here -- self-pity, brutality, spiritual constipation, and an unwillingness to try to overcome these difficulties.

It's virtually guaranteed to make us squirm.

Despite some sentimentality and occasional directorial missteps, this is a respectable piece of work--evocative, very funny in spots, and obviously keenly felt. With Francis Capra, Taral Hicks, and Katherine Narducci.

A melancholy character study of romantic delirium and Napoleonic ambition with a nice sense of nuance, this is much more coherent than the general run of blockbusters.

It's entertaining and stylish, though maybe not quite as serious as it wants to be.

A pretty impressive horror film.

The story is so black-and-white that one feels like hissing the villain (Kenneth Branagh) and cheering the heroines at every stage, but it's so amazing that the simplicity of the telling seems warranted.

Not terribly funny, but the intimations of an older, saltier America in the picaresque plot make this watchable.

Nicely acted and inflected, this is a very fresh piece of work.

Certainly one of the director's most personal and obsessive works—even comparable in some respects to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano in its bottomless despair and bombastic self-hatred, as well as its rather ghoulish lyricism.

This has much of the warmth and feeling for adolescence that Crowe displayed in his first feature ("Say Anything"), though the slick showboating of "Jerry Maguire" isn't entirely absent either.

A masterful 168-minute piece of storytelling that never ceases to be gripping in spite of its measured pace.

This unexpected masterpiece was assembled so quickly that it has an improvisational feel and a surrealist capacity to access its own unconscious—traits it shares with Feuillade's work.

Kolirin has a fine sense of where to place the camera and when to cut between shots for maximum comic effect, and his two lead actors--Sasson Gabai as the band's conductor and Ronit Elkabetz (Or) as one of the locals--are terrific.

Has its awkward and square moments directorially, but it's also uncommonly honest and serious.

This 2002 German documentary (in English) by Marta Kudlacek is the best portrait of an experimental filmmaker that I know.

In its own quiet way this is an astonishing film, both as a medical detective story that sustains taut interest over an extended running time and as a piece of cinema combining unusually resourceful acting and direction. If any movie of recent years deserves to be called inspirational--a much-abused term that one hesitates to revive apart from exceptional circumstances--this one certainly does.

Critics turned up their noses at this tear-jerking ‘Scope blockbuster of 1957, based on Grace Metalious’s lurid best-selling novel. But people came out in droves for it, and it’s not at all hard to see why—it’s corn in the grand style, much of it delivered with sweep and conviction, and the intrigues come thick and fast.

This farce eventually runs out of steam, devolving into a protracted docudrama about actor Steve Coogan (who plays the title hero as well as his father), but until then this is a pretty clever piece of jive.

The film adopts, somewhat insidiously, the myth that life was simpler back in 1953 and '54, and it offers Murrow as a lesson for today.

This sharp, convincing, and utterly contemporary political film calls to mind some of Ken Loach's work, full of passion as well as precision.

An offensive premise and a pathetic, almost pleading desire to outrage our sensibilities with it.

This rambling but beautiful feature by Theo Angelopoulos may seem like an anthology of 60s and 70s European art cinema: family nostalgia from Bergman and seaside frolics from Fellini; long, mesmerizing choreographed takes and camera movements from Jancso and Tarkovsky; haunting expressionist moods and visions from Antonioni.

A compellingly watchable, suspenseful, and often funny treatment of a grim subject--the hatred that can build up in a long-term marriage--that also becomes an indirect commentary on yuppie materialism.

Though this drifts at times as storytelling, it's mainly lightweight but personable fun.

This is in some ways my favorite Hartley picture - because it takes the most risks and gives the mind the most to do.

A somewhat adolescent if stylish antiauthoritarian romp about an irreverent U.S. medical unit during the Korean war

Bunuel remained true to his surrealist origins throughout his Mexican period, but the full command of his earliest and latest films, as well as such intermediate masterpieces as Los olvidados and The Exterminating Angel, resulted in stronger fare than this.

If you like being shaken up and don't care too much why or how, this is probably for you; Huppert gives her all to the part, and you won't be bored.

A nicely shaped script by Chicagoans Rick Shaughnessy and Brian Kalata makes this independent comedy drama a pleasure to watch.

A rather ho-hum if watchable neo-noir.

Thanks to Anthony Mann's splendid eye for landscape, composition, and spectacle—in particular his striking use of the edges of the 'Scope frame, a facet (among others) that is totally lost on TV and video—this is a rousing and often stirring show.

The script itself—credited to Ronald Bass, and adapted from Nancy Price's novel—is a tissue of so many stupid and implausible contrivances that the only possible way of enjoying it is by taking your brain out to lunch.

The humor about male neurosis doesn't try to remind you of Woody Allen at every turn.

This 1975 satire about a “Young American Miss” beauty pageant and the middle-class mentality of small-town southern California is Michael Ritchie’s best feature, though it hasn’t won anything like the reputation it deserves.

Despite some signs of muddle and uncertainty, this is a surprisingly strong picture about a convict (Hoffman) on parole in LA learning what the supposedly “normal” world is all about.

Apart from some unexaggerated notations about American puritanism in the 1940s and '50s, this is more a work of exploration than a thesis, and Condon mainly avoids sensationalism.

Has the expressionistic simplicity of Kurosawa's other late films.

Drove violence to the point of redundancy.

Jarmusch's narrative setups are often artificial and implausible, but his stories are usually charming anyway because the sense of character runs deeper than plot.

The ugly, aggressive, proliferating effects were all I could begin to contend with, and trying to keep interested in them was like trying to remain interested in a loudmouth shouting in my ear.

Whereas "Posession" was relatively light on its feet, this is so overloaded from the outset that it can only sink.

It's a noble undertaking, and Eastwood is stylistically bold enough to create a view of combat based mainly on images that are clearly manufactured. (As with "Saving Private Ryan," the movie's principal source is "The Big Red One," whose director, Samuel Fuller, actually experienced the war.) But this is underimagined and so thesis ridden that it's nearly over before it starts.

One reason Bright Leaves is McElwee's best film since "Sherman's March" is the richness of his reflections on this multifaceted material.

He doesn't lose his stylistic identity either: in addition to the very Mamet-like delivery of unfinished sentences, his command of rhythm and flow remains flawless throughout.

Richard Linklater goes Hollywood (1995) -- triumphantly and with an overall intelligence, sweetness, and romantic simplicity that reminds me of wartime weepies like The Clock.

The French title is Comme une image ("like an image"), but Tennessee Williams's phrase "the catastrophe of success" seems more appropriate.

The whole thing's so worthy that I wish I liked it more. It makes time pass agreeably, but Square John still seems about as innocent of fresh ideas (aesthetically and otherwise) as most of his characters, and for this kind of leftist multiplot I found his "City of Hope" more engaging.

In short, it's amusing only if you agree not to think very much about it.

The conceit gets a little out of hand after one of the angels falls in love with the trapeze artist and decides to become human; but prior to this, Wings of Desire is one of Wenders's most stunning achievements.

Though it comes across as labored in spots, it also yields a good many beautiful and suggestive moments, and an overall film experience of striking originality.