Jonathan Rosenbaum

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.

Leftist propaganda of a very high order, powerful and intelligent even when the film registers in spots as naive or dated.

One of the better Bob Hope vehicles.

Led me to second thoughts about whether the feel-good tactics of "Schindler's List" were any worse than the feel-bad tactics on display here.

A film about freedom as well as death, this won't suit every taste, but it rewards close attention and has moments of saving humor.

But the material is still powerful, and the offbeat story of the patients remains both engrossing and moving even after all this abridgment.

A rambling but ultimately rather affecting comedy-drama by a talented filmmaker who's almost completely unknown here, this has a deft feel for lower-middle-class life in rural France that registered strongly on its home front.

This 1996 cartoon feature, based on Hugo's 1831 Notre Dame de Paris, is surely one of Disney's ugliest and least imaginative efforts. It's especially unattractive in its fast editing and zooms.

The characters' behavior isn't always believable, and the jerky rhythm takes some getting used to (there may be more attitude here than observation). But the defiant absence of any conventional plot has a cumulative charm.

Experimental films are frequently criticized for being boring because they say and do too little, but the best of them put us in exhilarating overdrive because they offer too much.

Too full of its own heavy breathing to work as the primordial storytelling it's aiming for--a so-so adventure story is closer to the mark.

The high-powered drive of both the storytelling and the music is riveting.

A movie to savor.

Director Cedric Kahn, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, and Gilles Marchand collaborated on the well-honed script, derived from a Georges Simenon novel. The film works well with quiet tensions, but becomes less convincing and interesting once it moves beyond them.

A pretty good caper comedy for 11-year-old boys -- "heist thriller" would make it sound too ambitious.

The casting of Michael Douglas against type as an over-the-hill novelist and writing professor is the sort of clever move that wins undeserved Oscars.

Throughout the film cause and effect, the mainspring of most narratives, is replaced by a sense of spiritual synchronicity.

Munich may have value as an act of expiation but not as entertainment or art.

A fleet, enjoyable Jackie Chan romp.

The film seems a bit studied, but the creepy plot still holds a certain fascination.

If you don't care about such motivations, this is a pretty good thriller, though not one you're likely to remember for very long.

By their own admission, screenwriters Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne spent only a day or so researching their assigned topic—New York junkies—and this early Jerry Schatzberg feature (1971) shows it, though Al Pacino plays one of the two romantic leads (along with Kitty Winn), and many of Schatzberg's fans have praised the mise en scene.

I'm too big a fan of director James Whale (1896-1957) to take a film about him lightly, and I'm afraid this speculative 1998 movie about his last days won't do.

Harry Kumel's stylish Belgian vampire film with a cult reputation (1971) is worth seeing for several reasons, not least of which is Delphine Seyrig's elegant lead performance as a lesbian vampire who operates a luxury hotel. The baroque mise en scene is also loads of fun.

Enhanced by Jason Staczek's superb score, this is characteristically intense and, unlike most of Maddin's silent-movie models, frenetically edited.

The movie's dreamlike spaces and characters are sometimes worthy of Lewis Carroll.

Ordinarily I don't care for this kind of thing at all, but something must be said for Jackson's endless reserves of giddy energy; perhaps because this is so clearly meant to be silly, he generally avoids the calculated mean-spiritedness of more prestigious directors like Spielberg and Renny Harlin.

Responsibility for the ensuing tragedy is so finely calibrated that neither can be comprehensively blamed or exculpated.

Engaging and lively.

As a children's movie with a fine sense of magic (without fantasy) and a great deal of feeling (without sentimentality), this beats the usual Disney junk hands down, and adults will find it an expert piece of storytelling.

An elaboration of the concept of Annie Get Your Gun—not to mention Doris Day’s tomboy image in On Moonlight Bay—this 1953 western musical is perhaps best remembered for its Oscar-winning tune “Secret Love”; otherwise there’s Howard Keel as Wild Bill Hickok, direction by David Butler, and all that kinky cross-dressing.

Each set piece is effectively executed, but the characters and their motivations become progressively dimmer and more confused.

I expected to emerge depressed by how long these stories have gone untold, but the speakers' courage and humanity are a shot in the arm.

May have some of the trappings of an exotic thriller, but it's basically a character study.

The Spielbergian attempt at sweetness--heralded by references in Danny Elfman's score to the Nutcracker Suite--never fully convinces.

Masterfully charted and adeptly played, but also rather minimalist.

This is hilarious, deadly stuff, sparked by the cynical gusto of the two leads as well as the fascinating technical display of how TV "documentary evidence" can be digitally manufactured inside a studio.

Writers Liu Fen Dou and Cai Xiang Jun and director Zhang Yang move freely and gracefully between fantasy and reality in this sentimental film, which never becomes as trite or calculated as you might fear.

The best American movie about returning soldiers I've ever seen—the most moving and the most deeply felt. It bears witness to its times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features, and Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography is one of the best things he ever did.

A first-rate police thriller (1948) directed by Jules Dassin when he was still in his prime and before he was blacklisted, shot memorably in New York locations.

The young heroine is rather humorless, but Gavras's intelligence and skillful touch are evident throughout.

Robert Wise's 1963 black-and-white 'Scope translation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House was pretty effective when it came out, aided by Wise's skill as an editor.

Even as a simple genre picture it works only in fits and starts.

Fresh and edgy; the images of a wasted London and the details of a paramilitary organization in the countryside are both creepy and persuasive.

In contrast to the clueless media cliches about suicide bombers, this offers a comprehensive and comprehending portrait of what helps to produce them.

If Sayles's bite were as lethal as his bark, he might have given this a harder edge and a stronger conclusion. But the performances are uniformly fine.

Despite the thick Scottish accents, filmmaker Andrea Arnold kept me intrigued, but beyond a certain point the movie's ambiguity fades into indifference.

Lee has tried hard to give this shapeless picture some visual patterning though the cluttered effect created by his mistrust of silence is even more harmful than in the past.

As beautifully mounted as this production is, Scorsese has a way of letting the decor take over, so that Wharton's tale of societal constraints comes through only in fits and starts. But it's a noble failure.

A highly enjoyable and offbeat thriller.

David Lynch's first digital video, almost three hours long, resists synopsizing more than anything else he's done. Some viewers have complained, understandably, that it's incomprehensible, but it's never boring, and the emotions Lynch is expressing are never in doubt.

The concept was interesting and charming in "Love Letters," up to a point, but here it quickly becomes repetitive, obvious, and dull.

This is mildly entertaining, though like the puzzles themselves, it favors diversion over wisdom.

This scary black-and-white SF effort from 1953 was shot in 3-D, and on occasion it’s shown that way.

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.

What emerges is a speculative, critical essay about the 60s, weighted down in spots by political correctness and a conflicted desire to mock Dylan's denseness while catering to his hardcore fans, but otherwise lively, fluid, and watchable.

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

If you think 85 minutes devoted to a "difficult" French philosopher is bound to be either abstruse or watered-down middlebrow stuff, think again.

Thornton seems born to play the sort of slow-witted poet of the mundane that the Coens find worthy of their condescending affection.

But these achievements and others—including an undeniable erotic charge to some of the scenes—add up to less than the sum of their parts without a strong enough overall vision to shape them. When Kaufman reaches beyond the novel to flesh things out—with the old-fashioned musical taste of Russian officials, the sexual exploits of the hero, or the expanded part of a pet pig—he usually flattens rather than enhances what's left of the material

This remarkable British silent (1929) is special in many ways.

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

Even though it's scripted by a woman (Kelly Masterson), this tale of buried family resentments rising to the surface as the brothers plot to rob their parents' jewelry store is concerned only with the guys, and it's marred by an uncharacteristically mannered performance by Albert Finney as the father.

Juicy, adroit, and likable.

If you want to waste a couple of hours, you can surely do much better looking elsewhere.

The film is only superficially superficial, and it grows in meaning and resonance as it progresses.

There's something almost wearying as well as exhilarating about the perpetual brilliance of Bosnian-born filmmaker Emir Kusturica.

The film has little to do with art, intelligence, or values (except for the kind found in department stores).

Director Erik Van Looy skillfully profiles both the assassin (Jan Decleir, suggesting a tougher, over-the-hill version of Michel Piccoli) and the Antwerp detectives investigating his crimes.

Simultaneously quite watchable and passionless.

There's not much humor to keep it all life-size, and by the final stretch it's become bloated, mechanical, and tiresome.

Insofar as one can distinguish the investigative research from the career move, this Sundance prizewinner is effective muckraking, but it lacks much of a political program apart from the message that we're poisoning ourselves.

A rare example of a successful documentary in the mode of Frederick Wiseman made outside the United States.

The film tackles more than it can master, but it's never less than fascinating, and all three leads are exceptional.

As storytelling it isn'’t always as clean as it might be, but this 1998 first feature by writer-director Lisa Cholodenko is an interesting debut for its nuanced sense of character and its terrific sex scenes--scenes that actually serve character development for a change.

A stunning achievement in epic cinema.

Director Sidney Hayes can be needlessly rhetorical at times, relying on a campus statue of an eagle to create a sense of menace (the UK title was Night of the Eagle), but this is still eerily effective.

John Frankenheimer is credited as director, but given the scrambled, multiple agendas at play here, he seems to function more like a bemused traffic cop.

Juliette Lewis plays the out-of-town girl Depp takes a shine to once he starts getting tired of the married woman (Mary Steenburgen) he's involved with, and while the picture is too absentminded to explain what it is that makes Lewis move in and out of town, she and Depp make a swell couple. There are other rough edges as far as plot is concerned, but I liked this.

Kidman and Zellweger are uncommonly good, and I especially liked the timely treatment of war as universally brutalizing: even the outcomes of battles are ignored, as are the motives behind the conflict.

This is probably Alan Parker's best film, in part because it's one of his most modest.

Griffith's talent, energy, and sexiness give it some drive and punch.

Riveting cinematic essay.

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

The special effects are beautifully handled and the reflections on death attractively peaceful.

The results are high-spirited, with nice ensemble work from Almodovar's team of regulars, but the playlike structure (originally derived from Cocteau's The Human Voice but drastically reworked) is disappointingly conventional.

Writer Petr Jarchovsky and director Jan Hrebejk collaborated on the formidable "Up and Down" (2004), and this 2006 feature, which takes its title from a Robert Graves poem, is equally impressive for its mastery, intelligence, and ambition in juggling intricate plot strands and memorable characters.

The sensibility is Southern California Witless, and the jokey intertitles that periodically take up half the 'Scope frames ("This is a comedy. Sort of.") are even more smarmy than the characters.

Standard-issue liberal feel-good fodder.

In short, I never quite believed the story, but this movie is more about feeling than thinking.

As long as Miller simply crosscuts between the machinations of the three mothers, the sociological and psychological parallels are intriguing, but when they're forced to share the same story line, the contrivances and coincidences begin to seem fussily elaborate.

I suspect an account of all the complex business transactions would be more fun than anything in the movie, where you can't see a blue sky that isn't made up to resemble the Dreamworks logo.

Once again, the overall premise is milked for some mild titillation involving the hero's sexual innocence, making one wonder if the genre's popularity might involve some deeply sublimated form of kiddie porn--arguably the distilled ideological essence of squeaky-clean Reaganism.

Claude Chabrol's capacity to make shopworn material seem almost new is especially evident in this 2007 drama, which he cowrote with his stepdaughter, Cecile Maistre.

Provocative but also infuriating, this alarmist documentary argues that the levying of a federal income tax in 1913 was unconstitutional and set America on the road to fascism.

Neve Campbell, who cowrote the story with scenarist Barbara Turner, plays one of the dancers; although her character isn't especially interesting, her story furnishes a minimal narrative thread to hold the rest together.

Differs from other authorized Hollywood musical biopics in one striking detail: its subject, still alive when most of this was made, is almost never shown as a likable person.

It's a lot more interesting than its source, thanks to the special effects and Jack Arnold's taut, no-nonsense direction.

This deserves to be seen and cherished for at least a couple of reasons: first for Joanne Woodward's exquisitely multilayered and nuanced performance as India Bridge, a frustrated, well-to-do WASP Kansas City housewife and mother during the 30s and 40s; and second for screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's retention of much of the episodic, short-chapter form of the books.

Streisand sings a fabulous version of “You’re the Top” behind the credits, and the busy script by Buck Henry, Robert Benton, and David Newman keeps things moving, but the spirit of pastiche keeps this romp from truly rivaling its sources.

Enjoyable but thin.

Malick still has an eye for landscapes, but since "Badlands" (1973) his storytelling skill has atrophied, and he's now given to transcendental reveries, discontinuous editing, offscreen monologues, and a pie-eyed sense of awe. All these things can be defended, even celebrated, but I couldn't find my bearings.

Carell and Apatow collaborated on the script; it does manage a few laughs, but the characters seldom progress beyond the two-dimensional.

This is a fairly accomplished first feature -perky, visually inventive, and unusually nast

The movie evokes Howard Hawks (in spirit if not to the letter) with its tight focus on a snug, obsessive world of insiders and camp followers where the exchanges between buddies and sexes have a euphoric stylishness and a giddy sense of ritual.

The storytelling is so masterful that Hattendorf doesn't have to spell out the striking parallels between the persecution of Japanese after Pearl Harbor and the harassment of Muslims after 9/11.

Given recent similar incidents of young con artists posing as journalists, this is a timely and compelling film, but I wish the filmmakers had widened their focus to address the kinds of journalistic corruption that go beyond simple fibbing.

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

Newly updated but shamelessly hokey, Steven Spielberg's version of the 1898 H.G. Wells yarn about murderous invaders from outer space starts off as a nimble scare show like "Jaws."

A first-rate Hollywood entertainment--at least if one can accept the schizophrenia of combining a cop/buddy action thriller with an angry satire about the shamelessness of the media.

Some of Roth's cars become characters, their voices furnished by Ann-Margret, Jay Leno, Brian Wilson, Matt Groening, Tom Wolfe, and others. The pace never flags, and the enthusiasm is infectious.

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

Sadly, the technical logistics seem to have impeded the dreamlike flow a movie like this requires.

The tragic tale that emerges is full of powerful lessons and impenetrable mysteries

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.

This comedy drama is capably acted and undeniably touching in spots.

Uneven but generally funny.

In some ways it’s a loose remake of Yang’s previous feature, A Confucian Confusion, but it succeeds even more in capturing the tenor of our times.

A so-so romantic comedy.

The three lead actors all manage to be terrific without showing off—Leigh, in the course of an exquisite performance, does one of the best impersonations of a country southern accent I've ever heard—and the use of Miami locations is a consistent delight. The late Willeford wrote four Hoke Moseley novels, and this crisp, funny, grisly, and perfectly balanced adaptation makes me yearn for Armitage to film a few more of them.

Despite some awkwardness, this feature by writer-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland is a fascinating look at the area's Mexican-American milieu and other local subcultures, full of feeling, insight, and touching performances.

A lot more imaginative and entertaining than one might have thought possible, a feast for the eye and mind.

Provides a valuable refresher course in our less-acknowledged methods of meddling in the affairs of other countries.

We finally learn much more about Moskowitz than about Mossman, and more about Mossman than about his novel, but Moskowitz's passion for books is irresistible.

Moore's best film to date is this comic and grimly entertaining reflection on America's gun craziness and why we kill one another.

The period detail is more vibrant than the minimal story.

Stone's all-purpose conspiracy theory, built like a house of cards, rivals "Mississippi Burning" in its sheer crudeness and contempt for the audience.

What I like about these camera movements, combined with the exotic, erotic ambience of Mychael Danna's score, is that they simultaneously implicate us in the characters' fantasies and place us at some distance from them. We literally view the action from shifting perspectives, but the rhythm and direction of our drifting gaze seem to place us directly inside the obsessions of the characters.

It's a piece of disposable fluff -- though that's exactly what's so appealing about it.

This is possibly the funniest lesbian romp since "Go Fish."

Maybe the magic will work for those who loved the book, but I found this film stultifyingly self-important and, despite the regularity with which it cuts to the chase, weirdly static.

While largely effective, Greenwald's documentary is not a complete success.

Don't expect any psychological depth here, but the cool wit and fun... are deftly maintained, and Sonnenfeld provides a bountiful supply of both fanciful beasties and ingenious visuals.

Slick and effective escapism with a touch of poetry (a la "The Sixth Sense") that left me vaguely dissatisfied once the mystery was supposedly resolved.

Sincere, capable, at times moving, but overextended, this picture is seriously hampered by its tendency to linger over everything--especially landscapes with silhouetted figures, and not excluding its own good intentions.

A top-notch courtroom drama that will keep you guessing if you haven't read the book; even if you have, it is still a very well crafted story.

More than an interesting curiosity, it's one of Losey's best English efforts, and Viveca Lindfors contributes a striking part as an eccentric sculptress.

Prince himself, passing through a spectrum of costumes and sexual roles, is never less than commanding, as performer, composer, and director.

More entertaining than "The Spanish Prisoner" -- it also turns out to be more conventional and predictable.

Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed this, repeatedly alludes to the 1957 "An Affair to Remember" as her principal point of reference, yet at no point does she indicate any awareness of what makes that tragicomic love story sublime and this one merely cutesy.

Ambling along like a wry, laid-back “Heart of Darkness” this likable and touching film makes full use of Frank’s remarkable photographic eye and Wurlitzer’s witty, acerbic, and quasi-mystical handling of myth that has already served him well in his novels. The results are a resonant reflection on the music business and a memorable ode to wanderlust–with lots of good music (by Dr. John, Joe Strummer, and others) on the sound track.

Puzzling, intriguing, and often compelling, apparently set in the present but magical and futuristic in tone.

Zwigoff not only presents a complex human being and the range of his art but also guides us through a profound and unsettling consideration of what it means to be an American artist. Essential viewing.

You may find much of this, despite the apparent sincerity, too cutesy and self-satisfied for its own good.

The SF hardware (enjoyable) and thriller mechanics (mechanical) of this Jerry Bruckheimer slam-banger don't mesh very well with reflection, and the action trumps most evidence of thought.

The results are pretty obnoxious and only intermittently funny, but certainly characteristic.

May be amusing if you feel a pressing need to feel superior to somebody, but the aim is too broad and scattershot to add up to much beyond an acknowledgment of small-town desperation--something Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis did much better back in the 20s and 30s.

You won't be too bored.

Poorly acted, over-the-top, and generally out-of-control bloodbath.

Succeeds at least in being offbeat, but its inanities and glib pretensions are so thick that it mainly comes across as tacky and contrived.

Starts off with a lot of promise and excitement but winds up 165 minutes later feeling empty and affectless.

Everything seems to fall into place according to earlier Egoyan films, which suggests that you're likelier to enjoy this one if you haven't seen the others.

Story is fairly conventional and not especially well told, though as usual Tran's images are so sensual and beautiful that I was rarely bored or frustrated.

This is every bit as silly and adolescent as you'd expect from Besson, and about as contemporary as "The Perils of Pauline." But I was delighted by the balletic and acrobatic stunts, some of which evoke Tarzan.

Considering that none of the characters is fresh or interesting, it's a commendable achievement that the quality of the storytelling alone keeps the movie watchable and likable.

Even though he's psychologically expanded his source, the material is a bit too schematic to work as much more than a scaled-down thriller.

This is better than good, it's wonderful: if facial expressions can be compared to colors, Gedeck works with an unusually broad palette, constantly surprising us, and she helps her costars shine.

In what I saw, Madonna in the title role tries bravely not to buckle under the weight of Stone and Parker's sense of Stalinist monumentality and fails honorably, while the Lloyd Webber music goes on being nonmusical.

An efficient genre piece with a few provocative metaphysical trimmings; the mainly English cast is effective.

If the relatively prosaic Minghella, making his movie debut, lacks the suggestive poetic sensibility of Lewton, he does a fine job in capturing the contemporary everyday textures of London life, and coaxes a strong performance out of Stevenson, a longtime collaborator. Full of richly realized secondary characters and witty oddball details, this is a beguiling film in more ways than one.

A festival favorite in 1992, this flamboyant Australian crowd pleaser and first feature by Baz Luhrmann ("Moulin Rouge") struck me then as one of the more horrific and unpleasant movies I'd seen in quite some time.

He resisted commodification by continuously reediting his other films and reworking his live performances--a dazzling legacy that influenced everyone from Warhol to Fellini to John Waters. In some ways Smith's art became commodified only after he died and his estranged sister gained control over his work, though that did lead to this documentary, a fascinating introduction to his special world.

The film delivers old-fashioned star turns and glittering cameos (Jon Voight and Mickey Rourke are especially good, but Danny DeVito, Mary Kay Place, Danny Glover, Virginia Madsen, Roy Scheider, and Dean Stockwell--not to mention old-Hollywood icon Teresa Wright--also provide considerable pleasure).

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.

Watchable but not very illuminating.

Directed by Darrell Roodt from a screenplay by Ron Harwood, this has a strong sense of dignity about its characters, and Jones and Harris are both effective. Whether it deserves to replace the Korda version is another matter.

Romero's fourth entry, turns out to be his most conventional as an action thriller--though it's every bit as gory as the others and more clearly class-conscious.

Payne's entertaining but familiar comedy lacks the insolence of his "Election" and the freshness of his work with Kathy Bates in "About Schmidt."

In one sense, this seemingly melodramatic plot premise is contrived, registering more as myth than as real possibility. Yet thanks to what the movie has in mind and especially what the actors bring to it, it's a lovely myth, one that has the ring of deeply felt truth.

John Zorn's ethnically tinged score is effectively minimalist without succumbing to Philip Glass-style monotony, and Harris Yulin is effective as the hero's semi-estranged father.

Neither PC nor crudely anti-PC, this tough and tender movie, like its characters, is prepared to take emotional risks, and the comic book milieu is deftly sketched in.

Director Jonathan Demme's farcical and broad 1988 comedy, written by Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns, doesn't really work, but there are plenty of enjoyable compensations.

Only about half of the disconnected gags and oddball conceits pay off, but their gleeful delivery takes up most of the slack.

This is somewhat fuzzy as narrative, but it's a potent mood piece, and its portait of urban loneliness has some of the intensity of "Taxi Driver" without the violence.

As an interweave of crosscut miniplots, this isn't nearly as interesting or as pleasurable as Jeremy Podeswa's recent "The Five Senses."

Haneke is still a masterful director, and his authority carries this well-acted and attractively shot account of a family from an unnamed city trying to survive in the sticks after an unspecified catastrophe.

The animation seeks to dazzle, but with a self-consciousness that's relatively new to the Disney studio. The results are fun and fast moving, but far from sublime.

If you haven't lived until you've seen Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill duke it out in a vat full of red paint, here's your chance; personally, my idea of hell would be having to see this stinker again.

Most of what transpires is low-key, affectionate comedy and a fair amount of fun.

The Big Lebowski is packed with show-offy filmmaking and as a result is pretty entertaining.

Your enjoyment of this picaresque tearjerker may depend on how much you can tolerate its shameless contrivances and didactic social realism, whereby the story exists only to illustrate the plight of illegal aliens. I was ultimately more moved than appalled, but it was a close contest.

Despite a hokey prologue and ending (the latter imposed by producer Charles Evans), this is one of George Romero's most effective and interesting horror thrillers—not as profound as his remarkable Living Dead trilogy, but unusually gripping and provocative.

The title modifies a term coined by political scientist and philosopher Arthur Bentley that refers to the interactions between people and their environment, and the notion of a shifting center is what gives this experiment much of its interest and also limits it from going very far in any single direction.

Unfocused, condescending, and corny.

The Coens do an efficient job of stamping their signature grotesquerie on sumptuous Beverly Hills and Las Vegas settings and ladling on gallows humor and malice, sometimes with the verve of early Robert Zemeckis.

This held me, but I was grateful when it released me.

The best Australian feature I've seen in years.

This isn't the supreme masterpiece it might have been, but Nichols's direction is very polished and some of the lines and details are awfully funny.

This is good, solid work that never achieves either the art or poignance of Van Sant's earlier and more personal projects.

This is stronger in terms of characters (male ones, that is) than in terms of story or mise en scene, but the actorskeep this pretty watchable.

Probably the most visually sophisticated of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent pictures and certainly one of the best, this 1927 release sets up an edgy romantic triangle in a traveling carnival that involves two boxers (Carl Brisson and Ian Hunter) and a snake charmer (Lillian Hall-Davies).

Baseball fans might find this marginally absorbing; for anyone else it's as conscientious and stylistically pedestrian as director John Sayles's other films, and a mite overlong to boot.

The overall mood is stately and melancholy, the selective use of color is ravishing, and some of the natural views are breathtaking.

Critics seemed to like this less than audiences; personally I had a ball.

Fair amount of grit and charm.

Leo McCarey’s 1957 remake of his 1939 masterpiece Love Affair, coscripted with Delmer Daves and shot in color and ‘Scope, is his last great film—a tearjerker with comic interludes and cosmic undertones that fully earns both its tears and its laughs, despite some kitschy notions about art and a couple of truly dreadful sequences.

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.

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.

So lightweight that you're likely to start forgetting it before it's even over.

A nervy as well as somber piece of work, not only for the way it confounds and even frustrates certain genre expectations, but also -- and especially -- for the way it confronts the viewer with the moral implications of that frustration.

This one's slightly better than average these days, which means slightly diverting.

If, like me, you've been wondering how Terry Zwigoff, the brilliant documentary filmmaker who made "Crumb," would negotiate his shift to fiction filmmaking, here's your answer: brilliantly.

This is fun if you're looking mainly for light entertainment.

Shot in and around the town of Bradford in long, loping takes, this sprightly comedy, adapted by Andrea Dunbar from her own play, has some of the energy that one associates with the better exploitation films that used to be produced by Roger Corman.

Lugubrious and rather contrived... Because this whole project seems detached at times to the point of indifference—no one ever seems to be having any fun, including the filmmakers—even one's clinical interest eventually begins to evaporate.

Magical, visually exciting, affecting even in its sincere hokeyness, and extremely provocative.

Whatever else you might say about this weird, creepy, and funny independent item by Guy Maddin, it's certainly different.

The extraordinary plateau attained by Hitchcock’s first sound film in relation to his overall development is the sum of many accomplishments: above all, a decisive mastery in moving back and forth between objective and subjective narrative modes.

While its slender plot (stripper Karina wants a baby and turns to Belmondo when her boyfriend Brialy won't oblige her) can irritate in spots, the film's high spirits may still win you over.

The best thing Mann brings to his picture is a strong sense of time and place.

The performances are strong, but the spectator often feels adrift in an overly busy intrigue.

Woody Allen's welcome return to straight-ahead entertainment, after 15 years of slogging through art-house hand-me-downs, happily coincided with a return to Diane Keaton as his leading lady, and she deftly steals the show.

None of the characters emerges as very sympathetic.

Like much of Verhoeven's best work, it's shamelessly melodramatic, but in its dark moral complexities it puts "Schindler's List" to shame. Van Houten and Sebastian Koch (The Lives of Others) are only two of the standouts in an exceptional cast.

If, like the filmmakers, you're willing to settle for a myth that flatters your sensibilities and shortchanges the past, you're likely to find some agreeable kicks here.

This intermittently effective UK horror thriller carefully establishes the psychological relationships among the women, then squanders this calibrated and generally plausible setup with a series of crude, implausible, and scattershot horror effects.

Sensitive, intelligent, enlightening, and sometimes surprising.

Andre de Toth’s 1954 noir is gritty, powerful, and economically told.

Schrader is no Faulkner and no Gillespie, but in his third silly attempt to appropriate Bresson's form of story telling and his second misguided effort to remake Pickpocket, he has arrived at a pretty good offscreen narration.

I never thought that a thoughtful director like Gillian Armstrong would get trapped in such Euro-nonsense, but I guess there's a first time for everything.

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

Berri remains a boring director, dotting every i and crossing every t with nothing much on his mind but platitude.

Norbu tries too hard to please and charm, but his film at least carries the advantages of unactorly faces and a premise based on actual events that dramatizes the issue of religious vocation in a secular world.

Unfortunately, after the well-honed psychological melodrama of its first half, this wanders off into the metaphysical territory of Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" (a much better film).

Still about as good as Allen gets, a persuasive, nuanced, and relatively graceful portrait of an egotistical yet talented jazz guitarist of the swing era, astutely played by Sean Penn.

Overall it's what it aspires to be--a pleasant time-waster.

A fascinating humanist experiment and investigation in its own right, full of warmth and humor as well as mystery.

Not so much a sequel to "The Fugitive" as a lazy spin-off that imitates only what was boring and artificially frenetic about that earlier thriller; the little that kept it interesting.

For all its implicit misogyny, the original 1966 film version of Bill Naughton’s play remains durable because of Michael Caine’s career-defining performance as the cockney ladies’ man, not to mention the memorable title tune (sung by Cher) and driving jazz score (written and performed by Sonny Rollins).

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.

Robbins is attempting too much here, but the 70 percent or so that he brings off borders on delightful.

Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire costar in this 1942 musical—which is closer to a revue, without much plot but with loads of Irving Berlin tunes.

MGM’s opulent version of ancient Rome circa 1951, with Peter Ustinov at his most whimsical doing honors as the mad Nero...Directed with some pizzazz by Mervyn LeRoy.

Despite a certain grace in the dialogue and casual plot construction, this is positively reeking of a desire to be cheerful in the face of adversity.

Thanks to the performers (including Andie MacDowell and John Turturro), this has a certain amount of charm and warmth, but the period ambience feels both remote and uncertain.

There's an undeniable formal elegance in the way Ferrara, who coauthored the script with Zoe Lund, frames and holds certain shots, and Keitel certainly gives his all in this 1992 entry in the Raging Bull redemptive sweepstakes.

What we don’t know about these characters–and what we don’t see in certain scenes–is often as interesting and as important as what we know and see, and Assayas’s sense of how relationships evolve between people over time is conveyed with a rich and vivid novelistic density.

This pretentious 2005 art movie is somewhat interesting for its wide-screen photography of the striking locale, but the storytelling is awkward and confusing.

The first four letters say it all.

What's confusing yet ultimately illuminating is the way his gremlins function as a free-floating metaphor, suggesting at separate junctures everything from teenagers to blacks to various Freudian suppressions.

Whatever else it may or may not be, Primary Colors is first and last a mainstream Hollywood entertainment. And that means that viewers looking for engagement with political issues are bound to be disappointed.

Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith's script has its witty moments, and some of the secondary characters--such as Larry Miller as the father and Daryl "Chill" Mitchell as an irritable teacher--are every bit as quirky as the leads.

They often seem more bent on titillating or harrowing us than on helping us understand the characters.

Based on a true story, the movie was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film; some might castigate its unabashed sentimentality, but I found myself moved, especially when I recalled that this was supposedly the war to end all wars.

The portraiture is so carefully done that I regret in some ways the tricky plot--which is also carefully done, but seems at times to belong to a different movie.

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

Gondry is a soft surrealist without much of a sociopolitical agenda, closer to Dr. Seuss than Luis Buñuel,

The effect is riveting and telling--not always realistic (none of the characters carry cell phones) but often enlightening.

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

Structurally and dramatically this is all over the place, but stylistically it's gripping, and thematically it suggests an oblique response to the end of Hong Kong's colonial rule.

This nicely made 1994 comedy-drama could be described as an Australian "Easy Rider," with Sydney drag queens instead of bikers and no apocalyptic ending.

It's pretty perverse for William Wheeler, who scripted this feature, to get most of the facts wrong, inflating details that don't need any spin. (As Irving himself remarked, "You could call it a hoax about a hoax.")

Nihilistic greed was the major factor when GM terminated the car in 2001, though Paine is also careful to note the passivity of the general public.

The movie overall may be routine, but Donner gives it some spark and polish.

The cast is OK, and LaBute still has an eye, but the uses they're put to seem contrived and arty.

Director Ron Underwood (Tremors) does a fair job navigating all the key changes proposed by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel's script, and with the actors' help he makes this a diverting if bumpy ride.

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

Although the results are a bit overextended, the film is still something of a rarity nowadays: an evocative, poetic horror film without a trace of gore (and in this respect, closer to a Val Lewton film of the 40s like The Curse of the Cat People than any contemporary models).

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.

Compels questions about Kinski's bravado and artistry, and suggests that it might not always be easy to distinguish his from Herzog's.

Ron Howard, an exemplar of honorable mediocrity, reunites with actor Russell Crowe and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman of "A Beautiful Mind" for this epic treatment of a seven-year stretch (1928-'35) in the career of New Jersey boxer James J. Braddock.

Narrative continuity and momentum have never been among Hopper's strong points, and this time the choppiness of the storytelling diffuses the dramatic impact without offering a shapely mosaic effect (as in [his] previous films) to compensate for it.

[It] may not be your cup of tea, but you have to admire the style, sincerity, and overall sense of craft even if you don't fancy the comic-book gore.

Madonna’s aim throughout appears to be to straddle the barrier that separates the merely show-offy from the outrageous without falling squarely on either side–which may help to explain why she and her gay dancers gleefully chant that they want this to be an X-rated movie.

A very well-made genre exercise, but I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse.

Its giddy stylistics include extravagant use of color and rapid montage, which are said to be a direct homage to legendary Thai independent Ratana Pestonji.

Kramer was never much of a director, but there's still power in some of the performances, especially Poitier's.

The main problem is that Burton operates best on a modest scale; saddled with a blockbuster, he doesn't know how to animate all the dead space.

Unlike many colleagues, I'm not a fan of "Amores Perros" or "21 Grams," scripted by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu. This conclusion to their trilogy is easier to follow as a narrative, but it's even more pretentious, generalizing about the state of the modern world.

Lost me early on with its show-offy shooting and editing, portentous metaphysical conceits about winners and losers, and exaggerated displays of evil, violence, and deceit.

For me the film creates more embarrassment than sympathy, but at least it's a kind of embarrassment that's instructive.

It's fun, instructive, and stimulating, but never beautiful. Ultimately it's limited by its compulsion to knock our socks off at every turn and to compare itself with "Alice in Wonderland."

Equally impressive is Duncan's stylish handling of decor, dialogue, narrative ellipsis, and pacing, all of which call to mind the Hollywood master Ernst Lubitsch.

More memorable for its title than for anything else.

Drawn from a children's book by Croatian illustrator Milan Trenc, this fantasy isn't exactly heavy, but its ideological implications are interesting nevertheless.

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

Allen's movies specialize in contemplating the notion that money can somehow remove vulgarity or produce gentility. Small Time Crooks may conclude quite conventionally that money can't buy you everything, but most of it flirts even more conventionally with the opposite premise.

An ambitious but pretentious adaptation of Edward Lewis Wallant's novel by David Friedkin and Morton Fine, directed by Sidney Lumet.

The broad Italian family humor gets so thick at times that you could cut it with a bread knife.

There isn't an ounce of flab or hype, and the story it tells is profoundly affecting.

Vulgar, spirited, and neglected director George Sidney meets his match with this 1964 Elvis Presley vehicle: Presley, Ann-Margret, and Las Vegas itself are all ready-made for his talents, which mainly have to do with verve and trashy kicks.

Very competently mounted and acted (there are also juicy parts for Judy Davis, Tony Shalhoub, and Jon Polito), this is basically a midnight-movie gross-out in Sunday-afternoon art-house clothing--an intriguing novelty that revels in effect while oozing with cryptic signifiers.

This offbeat and unpredictable comedy-thriller throws so many curveballs, one right after another, that I doubt I've had more fun at an American movie this year.

Their gross-out humor is basically sweet tempered, for all its tweaking of PC attitudes, and though this film looks slapdash, its script (by the Farrellys, Ed Decter, and John J. Strauss) is surprisingly well put together.

Terry Gilliam's third fantasy feature (1989) may not achieve all it reaches for, but it goes beyond Time Bandits and Brazil in its play with space and time, and as a children's picture offers a fresh and exciting alternative to the Disney stranglehold on the market.

Solid, agreeable entertainment, this basically consists of plentiful gags and lighthearted satire spiked with Dante's compulsive taste for movie references, humorously scripted by Charlie Haas but without the darker thematic undertones and the more tableaulike construction of the original.

This runs a close second to September as his worst feature to date--marginally more bearable only because it's a comedy and a couple of gags are reasonably funny.

This is a remarkably gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling that, like Kubrick's other work, is likely to grow in mystery and intensity over time.

An excellent introduction to the singular vision of avant-garde stage director Robert Wilson.

This made-for-cable opus, halfway between documentary and docudrama, is willing to try anything and everything except for a consistent relationship to its material.

This is effective as straight-ahead, action-packed storytelling, losing some of its energy only in the final stretch.

After making their two best features to date, "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," the Coen brothers have surely come up with their worst.