Jonathan Rosenbaum

Compulsively mainstream as only 50s Hollywood could be, and never very funny.

Tsai's obvious disgust at the sex is part of what makes the film so unpleasant; he remains a brilliant original, but this is a parody of his gifts.

For all its minimalism, Tsai Ming-liang's 81-minute masterpiece manages to be many things at once.

Overall this is an intelligent and thoughtful reading of the play, marred only by the implausibility of Portia.

In this landscape everyone is a tourist, but Tati suggests that once we can find one another, we all belong.

A few of the set pieces are fussy or overly extended, but the rest is tolerable bone-crunching diversion.

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

The character and plot contrivances are dumber than ever, but this is basically vaudeville, not narrative, and the thrills keep coming.

Alas, the plot eventually takes over, and it's exceptionally ugly and unpleasant.

At first I thought this was a Michael Haneke knockoff, but it's more depressing and less edifying than most of those narrative experiments, which is why I eventually tuned it out.

What ultimately prevents it from being something more is the fact that Annaud isn't a better director. Even the film's virtuosity as a technical feat is frequently undercut by the fact that one is too much aware of it as a stunt to accept it as a story on its own terms.

Remains mired in a smart-alecky film-school sensibility.

It's full of pain and quirky characters standing at oblique angles to one another, and while it doesn't add up it held me throughout.

Without being any sort of miracle, this is an engaging and lively exploitation fantasy-thriller about computer hackers, anarchistic in spirit, that succeeds at just about everything "The Net" failed to--especially in representing computer operations with some visual flair.

Ryan's abrasive and rather creepy character is something of a departure for her.

Sensitive, intelligent, enlightening, and sometimes surprising.

The comedy is extremely broad (with Curtis eliciting almost as many laughs as Schwarzenegger), the action sequences are as well crafted as one can expect from Cameron, and the meaning is as root basic as anyone would wish.

Under the circumstances, MacLaine, Costner, and Ruffalo acquit themselves well.

I couldn't always keep up with what was happening, but I was never bored, and the questions raised reflect the mysteries of everyday life.

This deconstructive, minimalist comedy, like his 1990 "A Little Stiff" and 1994 "I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore," re-creates events with the vain self-deprecation of one of his role models, Woody Allen.

If not all the gags work, the overall irreverence and all-American anomie are fairly contagious.

It's certainly a provocation, with a few funny moments, and for my money it's less phony and offensive than "Finding Forrester."

Francis Coppola's ambitious 1992 version brings back the novel's multiple narrators, leading to a somewhat dispersed and overcrowded story line that remains fascinating and often affecting thanks to all its visual and conceptual energy.

Tarantino puts together a fairly intricate and relatively uninvolving money-smuggling plot, but his cast is so good that you probably won’t feel cheated unless you’re hoping for something as show-offy as "Reservoir Dogs" or "Pulp Fiction."

Unfocused, condescending, and corny.

The film itself regresses, starting in the present and winding up with a cautionary ending that evokes the hokiest SF movies of the 50s.

The depiction of her risky voyage and what happens afterward is highly suspenseful and entirely believable.

A quirky, lyrical independent feature by writer-director Michael Almereyda. It's shot in luscious, shimmering black and white.

Peter Hyams, a pretty good cinematographer but a mediocre director, goes to work on a script by Andrew W. Marlowe that's designed to carry us from one bit of hyperbole to the next.

The fictional story here, set between 1984 and 1991, focuses on the investigation of a popular and patriotic playwright (Sebastian Koch); that the captain assigned to his case (touchingly played by Ulrich Mühe) is mainly sympathetic and working surreptitiously on the playwright's behalf only makes this more disturbing.

Although I have no facts to support my impression, this erotic courtroom thriller looks as if it grew out of Madonna seeing Basic Instinct and saying, “I wanna do one of those."

80 minutes of formulaic unpleasantness isn't even close to my idea of a good time, and I doubt that Hitchcock himself could have done very much with Mark L. Smith's script.

More of the same, though a lot coarser than its immediate predecessor, and the characters and situations have now calcified to the point where they're simply sitcom staples.

This isn't as snappily directed or as caustically conceived as the subsequent Risky Business, which has a similar theme, but it's arguably just as sexy and almost as funny.

Though Hanks keeps the satirical and critical aspects of this look at show biz fairly light, there's a lot of conviction and savvy behind the steadiness of his gaze, and his economy in evoking the flavor of the period at the beginning of the picture is priceless.

O'Neill showed in his 1989 "Water and Power" a poetic feeling for human evanescence in relation to southern California locales; here he proves equally astute at showing how our sense of history becomes tainted by and entangled with Hollywood myths.

The movie remystifies as much as demystifies presidential politics, but an overall mood of sweetness may help one to forgive the archaic and childish aspects of the would-be analysis, which splits everyone between angels and devils.

I only laughed once here, at a Treat Williams reaction shot; the rest of the time I was trying to figure out why Allen made this movie.

One can certainly be amused and entertained by writer-director Michael Davis's hyperbolic action frolics--I was--but not without feeling pretty low and stupid.

I've heard it said that Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the most talented character actors currently working, can't carry a film himself, and unfortunately this indie feature isn't meaty enough to prove otherwise.

So lackluster both as an homage and as a story in its own right that I was already forgetting it before it was over.

A curiously sour movie in its amused contempt for this fatuous family laced with affectionate nostalgia for its unshakable slickness and insularity, but also an undeniably strange one in its adoption of TV formats and cliches, as if these were the only indexes of contemporary reality that we have left.

Less pretentious than Platoon and more attentive to the Vietnamese than The Deer Hunter, this picture proposes with a great deal of skill and sincerity that we honor and respect the men who suffered on our behalf without even beginning to consider why they did so, or to what effect.

Polanski honors the craft of classical storytelling and never flinches from the book's melodramatic extremes in portraying the horrors of poverty.

A stunning achievement in epic cinema.

Among the pleasures to be found here are some amusing sidelong glances at how movies get made and the singing talent of Streep as well as MacLaine. There's not much depth here, but Nichols does a fine job with the surface effects, and the wisecracks keep coming.

Before the movie collapses into the utopian nonsense that seems obligatory to this subgenre, a surprising amount of sensitivity and satirical insight emerges from Eleanor Bergstein's script and Emile Ardolino's direction.

The only other adaptations I've seen of the Alexandre Dumas novel (which I haven't read) are the Classics Illustrated comic book and the 1939 James Whale potboiler, both of which I prefer to this vulgar and overwrought 1998 free-for-all, which makes you wait interminably for the story's central narrative premise.

This meticulous but ultimately rather pedestrian drama gradually won me over as a minor if watchable example of the "victory through defeat" brand of military heroism that John Ford specialized in.

They've hit a fatal snag. The feature they selected happens to be a pretty good one -- certainly much better than Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie by just about any criterion one could think of.

The whole thing feels throwaway, but some of the gags are funny.

Combines live-action and animation with breathtaking wizardry... Alternately hilarious, frightening, and awesome.

Foley has a fine sense of shading in depicting a slightly dysfunctional family. The problem with this subgenre is the way it has to demonize and dehumanize its villains in order to produce the desired effect, which brutalizes the spectator along with the story and characters. If you can accept this limitation, this is a very efficient piece of machinery.

It's especially doomed by a strained script that recalls certain bottom-of-the-barrel Bob Hope vehicles of the 50s in its attempts to be brittle and self-mocking in its humor.

The weaknesses of the film are twofold: an inability to convey any convincing grasp of the present beyond the family's present (and ongoing) situation, and a belt-and-suspenders heavyhandedness that has always been Lumet's biggest stumbling block in driving home a dramatic climax.

There are times when this leisurely movie seems so much in love with its own virtue and nobility that there's not much room left for the spectator.

Sweet and warm as well as manic, this is full of loopy surprises, and the supporting cast (including Penelope Ann Miller, Bruno Kirby, Steve Bushak, Maximilian Schell, and Bert Parks, playing himself in his film debut) is uniformly fine.

Ridiculous enough to be hilarious, but this didn't prevent me from thoroughly enjoying Philip Kaufman's silly romp.

Its resolution reeks of phoniness and self-congratulation, even if some of the narrative strands leading up to it are fairly absorbing.

This is why movies were invented.

Some of the precise meanings of this Bill Forsyth comedy eluded me, but the vibes couldn't have been nicer.

Christophe Honoré collaborated with Anne-Sophie Birot on the script of her excellent "Girls Can't Swim," but left to his own devices, he seems like a relatively dull cousin of Arnaud Desplechin (My Sex Life . . . or How I Got Into an Argument).

The story (what there is of it) doesn't make much sense, but this is a very scary horror thriller that should keep you either on the edge of your seat or halfway under it.

Shot in July 2003, this collectively made video documentary is by far the most comprehensive account I’ve seen of how Iraqis view the U.S. war and occupation.

Kiarostami's brilliantly suggestive script, which is quite unlike anything else he's written and is marred only slightly by one of his obligatory sages turning up gratuitously near the beginning.

Not always successful, but packed with energy and a lively Oscar-winning performance by Burstyn.

A few plot details strain credibility, but the characters (particularly the friend's sister and little boy) are persuasively depicted.

Even though it stars Albert Finney, this is a picture of no importance, undone mainly by its self-ingratiated cuteness.

It's full of scenic splendors with a fine sense of scale, but its narrative thrust seems relatively pro forma, and I was bored by the battle scenes.

The best (which also means the sexiest) Campion feature since "The Piano," featuring Meg Ryan's best performance to date and an impressive one by Mark Ruffalo.

Probably still watchable today, if only for the brittle dialogue and kitchen-sink realism, but undoubtedly dated as well.

The tragic and highly "symbolic" death toward the end, which is supposed to illustrate the sins of the parents being visited upon their children, barely resonates at all, because most of the insights are strictly incidental. The film elicits guilty, lascivious chuckles, not analysis.

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

Flaky, funny, and sexy.

Leigh displays a passionate affection for and commitment to his leading characters that never precludes a critical distance.

Along with Dumbo, which immediately followed it, this 1940 classic, the second of the Disney animated features, is probably the best in terms of visual detail and overall imagination as well as narrative sweep.

Fairly predictable, but the two leads' impressively nuanced performances make it less so, and Berri makes skillful use of both actors.

Slapdash plot, paper-thin characters, misogynist undertones, and mechanical crosscutting are all soft-core standbys.

Carrey's attempted self-immolation in a men's room, which weirdly recalls certain Fred Astaire routines, may be a small classic.

By placing so much emphasis on aspects of life and work that other films routinely omit, mystify, or skirt over, Akerman forges a major statement, not only in a feminist context but also in a way that tells us something about the lives we all live.

Its virtues are still genuine and durable enough to resist the blandishments of hype.

The cast is certainly impressive, and probably reason enough for seeing this.

Allen gets a chance to unload all his usual patronizing contempt for and middle-class "wisdom" about his own working-class origins.

The movie has plenty to engage one's interest but little to sustain it.

Apart from the grim forebodings of tragedy, writer-director Nick Cassavetes seems to have modeled this ambitious docudrama on Larry Clark's kiddie-porn shockers, but he doesn't know what to leave out, and the movie becomes excessively complicated with ancillary agendas.

Unbelievably pretentious and a bit of a hoot but rarely boring.

The story is both slow moving and hard to follow, but the locations and period details offer plenty to ponder.

There are no characters to care about or remember afterward - just a lot of flashy technique involving decor, some glib allegorical flourishes, and the obligatory studied film-school weirdness.

May have more heart than head, but it's also just as interesting for what it leaves out of its romantic story as for what it retains.

This video profile by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller allows his significance to register and his charisma to shine despite a pedestrian approach that's especially awkward in its use of archival footage.

On the whole, enjoyable nonsense.

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

The characters (both animal and human) are solidly conceived, and the storytelling and visuals are expertly fashioned.

This loses focus and begins to get a little soggy and moralistic toward the end, but on the whole it's a sensitive and well-observed comedy that's especially adept at handling the characters' rage.

Despite a brisk opening and some agreeable (if sloppy) choreography at the very end, I was less than tickled by the premise of David Serrano's script, that the characters lie to and betray one another as naturally as they breathe.

I enjoyed the invented trailers the directors fold into the mix, but despite the jokey "missing reels," these two full-length features are each 20 minutes longer than they need to be, and neither one makes much sense as narrative.

This 1985 film's absolute freedom from cliches is genuinely refreshing; looking at it again after Van Sant's subsequent "Drugstore Cowboy," I found it every bit as good and in some ways even more impressive than the later film. It shouldn't be missed.

The plot exposition gets laborious in spots, the period flavor is only occasional and approximate, and the direction tends to be clunky, yet the strong secondary cast helps to take up some of the slack.