Jonathan Rosenbaum

Much of this is hilarious as long as one can stay sufficiently removed from the realities of Siamese twins.

Some of the results ring false, but the memorable theme song and some equally memorable character acting (by Thomas Mitchell and Lon Chaney Jr. more than Lloyd Bridges and Katy Jurado) help things along.

Given the talent on board, there's an undeniable flair and effectiveness in certain scenes (such as Pacino dancing the tango with a stranger in a posh restaurant), but the meretricious calculation finally sticks in one's throat.

To Towne's credit, he's a thoughtful and conscientious romantic. He skillfully makes the two main characters a hot, volatile couple, deftly staging their courtship as if it were an erotic grudge match.

Neither the characters nor the events are exactly the same as those of the novel, but some of the same spirit comes across.

The overall effect is disturbing yet mesmerizing.

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

The film's storytelling and heartfelt pantheism are both impressive.

This is like a Ferris wheel--the ride's enjoyable but you've gone nowhere once it's over.

This isn't a visionary western like "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" (2005), but in its own quiet way it delivers the goods.

Klapisch self-consciously throws fistfuls of quirky film style at us, as if he were Francois Truffaut, but his characters are still interesting and his party sequences are especially good.

For my money, this version doesn't match the Siegel film, though it's a lot scarier and more memorable than Kaufman's low-key, New Agey version.

Torturously dull.

Jay Craven's stilted adaptation of a novel by Howard Frank Mosher lacks the urgency, the poetry, or the feeling for period that might have brought the material to life, while the cast seems to be largely squandered.

Not really a Cassavetes movie, but worth seeing anyway.

Assisted by Gordon Willis's cinematography and John Houseman's performance as the demanding Professor Kingsfield, director James Bridges manages to do a fair job with the semihokey material.

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

On a mindless exploitation level this is pretty good, but on other levels it seems to make promises that it fails to deliver on; none of the deaths carries any moral weight, and the climactic special-effects free-for-all tends to drown out all other interests.

Director Jonathan Kaplan clearly has a feel for the material, but he's at the mercy of a pedestrian script by David Arata and producer Adam Fields.

The late 300-pound transvestite Divine, John Waters’s most enduring muse, makes his/her first star entrance in this 1969 feature—the first Waters movie to play outside Baltimore—driving a 1959 Eldorado to the strains of “The Girl Can’t Help It.”

The power and reach of this undertaking are formidable.

The story's resolution isn't very satisfying, but I considered most of this movie time well spent.

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.

Elliptical, full of subtle inner rhymes...and profoundly moving, this is the most tightly crafted Kubrick film since "Dr. Strangelove," as well as the most horrific; the first section alone accomplishes most of what "The Shining" failed to do.

This 1981 release is one of Brian De Palma's more interesting and better-made thrillers, though it's even more abjectly derivative than his Hitchcock imitations (borrowing mightily this time from Antonioni's Blowup, as the title suggests).

As usual, Lee tries many kinds of stylistic effects and uses wall-to-wall music (by Aaron Copland and Public Enemy); what’s different this time is how personally driven the story feels.

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.

Just about everyone in this sharp, passionate feature is chillingly good.

A lot of superwimp gags executed by Luke Wilson grow out of this premise, as do some tacky 50s-style special effects. The movie's too slapdash to keep its characters consistent, but this has its moments.

Though the basic brains-versus-beauty tension suggests a female variation on "The Nutty Professor", this is a softer version of the dilemma than Jerry Lewis offers -- easier to take and easier to forget.

The actors make this fun if you can overlook the ludicrous view of Jeremy Leven's screenplay.

Wong Kar-wai's idiosyncratic style first became apparent in this gorgeously moody second feature.

Like many sequels this is actually a remake, and it suffers from the law of diminishing returns.

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.

Both actors work hard to give this disturbing crime story some flavor and substance, but the narrative is overextended and poorly organized.

Cutesy and unconvincing parable.

An accomplished, effective, grisly, and exceptionally sick slasher film that I can't with any conscience recommend, because the purposes to which it places its considerable ingenuity are ultimately rather foul.

This may be Reed’s most pretentious film, but it also happens to be one of his very best, beautifully capturing the poetry of a city at night (with black-and-white cinematography by Robert Krasker that’s within hailing distance of Gregg Toland and Stanley Cortez’s work with Orson Welles).

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

For torture and violence freaks, every clank and thud is duly and hyperbolically registered.

Too preoccupied with personality and emotion to qualify as porn, but still very much concerned with the kind of interaction that goes on in such a place, this is a touching if relatively specialized chamber piece.

Unfunny and instantly forgettable comedy.

One thing I especially like about it, apart from the flavorsome 40s decor in color, is that it's silly in much the same way that many small 40s comedies were.

Pivots on the characters' racism and xenophobia, playing tricks with our own biases and ultimately justifying an extravagant array of coincidences and surprises.

Despite the fitful energy and the beauty of the settings, the ugliness of the mise en scene and the crudity of the editing tend to triumph.

A fascinating and entertaining piece of work.

Director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and cowriters Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger preserve some of the novel's storytelling flair, and Dustin Hoffman does a swell turn as the antihero's Italian mentor. But despite a fairly spectacular climax, the material's generic limitations eventually catch up with the plot.

An enjoyable though distinctly second-degree comedy by writer-director Andrew Bergman. Full of fun around the edges, it's rather flat and unfelt at the center.

Despite the cast -- Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Theresa Russell, Robert Wagner, and Bill Murray -- I found it preposterous.

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.

Writer-director Robert Shallcross believes in it so passionately that he came close to convincing me too.

Writer-director Marcos Bernstein is more interested in how a melodramatic imagination can distort reality, a concept he explores with charm and tact.

James Whale’s brilliant and surprisingly delicate 1936 rendition of the Kern and Hammerstein musical, which was based on an Edna Ferber novel, is infinitely superior to the dull 1951 MGM Technicolor remake and, interestingly enough, less racist.

There's nothing really new...but it has craft, pacing, and an overall sense of proportion, three pretty rare classic virtues nowadays.

A masterpiece of some kind, though clearly destined to be controversial and contested everywhere it shows—not only for the sexist, racist, and homophobic rage it exposes but also for its brilliant confrontational style.

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.

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

Combining the gentle with the vulgar as only the English can, this lively comedy is bursting with character and energy.

As satire it's toothless and at times close to incoherent; its predictable swipes are aimed equally at conservative racists and bleeding-heart liberals.

What makes the strongest impact is the superb documentary photography and the "found" audio segments--telemarketing ads left as voice messages.

The main novelty of this conventional, slight, but charming youth picture is that it's English and therefore more class-conscious than most American equivalents.

For better and for worse, this is seductive storytelling as well as investigative journalism, and I wasn't always sure which mode I was in.

Probably the most influential of all silent films after The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance launched ideas about associative editing that have been essential to the cinema ever since, from Soviet montage classics to recent American experimental films. And in the use of crosscutting and action to generate suspense, the film's climax hasn't been surpassed.

Stylistically captivating, subtly nuanced, and structurally unpredictable.

Every effect is so calculated that only the conscious minds of filmmakers and viewers are engaged--and not by very much or for very long.

This cagey and compelling 2004 documentary looks at the world of wine, but it's actually a nuanced, provocative piece of journalism about globalization and its discontents.

David Morse, who plays the driver, gives a relatively sharp and understated performance -- for me the only bearable thing in the movie.

It’s a historical marker in a way that few other films are — not only the nail in the coffin of the French New Wave and one of the strongest statements about the aftermath of the failed French revolution of May 1968, but also a definitive expression of the closing in of Western culture after the end of the era generally known as the 60s.

None of the characters emerges as very sympathetic.

Misogynistic claptrap about a divorced husband (Dustin Hoffman) fighting for the custody of and learning to cope with his little boy (Justin Henry) - a movie whose classy trimmings (including Nestor Almendros's cinematography) persuaded audiences to regard writer-director Robert Benton as a subtle art-house director.

Half-funny mockumentary.

Ben Stiller directs Lou Holtz Jr.'s script with plenty of unsettling edge, and Carrey throws himself into his part as if it meant something.

There are a few pretty good design effects en route, but not enough to compensate for all the embarrassments.

As for remakes, it stands to reason that if you try to redo a work of art without the original artist, you're bound to damage the artistry as well.

Watchable enough on its own terms.

The film never strays much beyond the obvious, despite a conscientious effort by Tim Robbins to humanize a white security officer.

Yet some of the laughs come too easy and linger too long; for the film's message to have maximum impact, the laughter has to stick in your throat.

Unprecedented in its intellectual ambition, this is endlessly stimulating; it probably tries for too much, but it shames many other contemporary essays that try for too little.

An epic about the Irish patriot (Liam Neeson) during the last years of his life (1916-'22), it clearly represents a lot of thought on Jordan's part, yet it's dramatic and cinematic sludge.

Reasonably entertaining spy-versus-spy shenanigans were for me partially undercut by the hypocritical pretense that the CIA and its various forms of mischief were somehow being ridiculed.

Overwritten by Billy Crystal and Peter Tolan, overdirected by Joe Roth, overplayed by most of the cast, yet typically undernourished.

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.

As with Nostalghia, Tarkovsky’s previous work of exile, it’s possible to balk at the filmmaker’s pretensions and antiquated sexual politics and yet be overwhelmed by his mastery and originality, as well as the conviction of his sincerity.

A provocative and stirring climax to the Corleone saga, as well as an autonomous work that sometimes shows Coppola at his near best.

I wasn't exactly engaged, but this time boredom never took over.

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.

Beginning with almost no dialogue at all, Le samourai unfolds like a poetic fever dream.

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.

This 2005 farce about a hellish Passover seder panders to middle-class Jews as gleefully as Tyler Perry's movies pander to middle-class African-Americans, though there's less religiosity and a greater degree of self-hatred in the vulgar stereotypes.

Despite the familiar story arc and MTV visuals, Bendinger puts this across with a certain amount of pizzazz, and the competitive gymnastics are often spectacular.

The unfocused story is so bereft of any clear sense of period or location that the political melodrama sometimes seems to be taking place inside a cigar box.

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.

Powerfully illustrates what globalization has been doing to underdeveloped countries around the world.

If Wahlberg in a beret is your idea of fun, don't let me get in your way.

Heckerling still has some of the sensitivity she showed in handling actors in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and she has a deft way of illustrating her heroine's fantasies about possible mates without any fuss.

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.

Stupid, vicious, and pretentious, though you may find it worth checking out if you want to experiment with your own nervous system.

If Bertolucci had restricted himself to Siddhartha’s story he would have remained on solid ground, at least as a storyteller, for the interpolated religious tale is far and away the best thing in the movie, full of enchantment and wonder.

Of course the movie's real raison d'etre is watching Ice Cube tear up government facilities and blockades with a tank, spout Schwarzenegger-style kiss-off lines, and commandeer the kind of babes and high-tech cars that James Bond usually plays with.

This adaptation of Christina Crawford's memoir about her driven, abusive mother is arguably too good to qualify as camp, even if it begins (and fitfully proceeds) like a horror film. Director Frank Perry, who collaborated with three others (including producer Frank Yablans) on the script, gives it all a certain crazed conviction.

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.

Masterfully charted and acted.

This delightful 1989 pop-fantasy musical about Valley girls and extraterrestrials gives the talented English director Julien Temple an opportunity to show his stuff in an all-American context. The results are less ambitious and dazzling than his Absolute Beginners, but loads of fun nevertheless: his satirical yet affectionate view of southern California glitz is full of grace and energy.

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

Recklessly biting off more than they can possibly chew, the filmmakers still give us a memorable apocalyptic view of 1987 England.

It has plenty of visual sweep, fine action sequences, and, thanks especially to Brad Pitt (as Achilles) and Peter O'Toole (as King Priam), a deeper sense of character than one might expect from a sword-and-sandal epic.

I didn't laugh once.

For most of the running time I was mainly confused, as well as mildly nauseated by the gross-out details of a tale that tends to be more slimy than scary.

This stupidly contrived thriller is all the more disappointing if you admire previous work by Berry and director James Foley (After Dark, My Sweet).

Uneven but generally funny.

Nicely written as well as filmed.

Simultaneously quite watchable and passionless.

A worthy entry in the dystopian cycle of SF movies launched by "Blade Runner" (including "The Terminator" and "Robocop"), this seems less derivative than most of its predecessors yet equally accomplished in its straight-ahead storytelling, with plenty of provocative satiric undertones and scenic details.

Much as Emile de Antonio's neglected "In the Year of the Pig" (1968) may be the only major documentary about Vietnam that actually considers the Vietnamese, this film allows the people of Iraq to speak, and what they say is fascinating throughout.

Too much of the story is unfelt and mechanical—the grimly humorless Tracy (Beatty) is never very convincing as an object of desire or admiration.

There's more soul to be found in any Kong close-up than in this film's overplayed reactions, which are used to instruct us what we should be feeling at any given moment. This is never boring, but I can't recall another Spielberg film that left me with a more hollow feeling.

Walter Hill directed this 1989 feature from a pulpy script by Ken Friedman (based on John Godey’s novel The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome), and its nasty, predictable plot and unpleasant characters aren’t made any more bearable by Hill’s customary smoke, sweat, funk, and neon.

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.

By common consent, this is 1939 drama is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s poorest and least personal works, though it has some compensations.

Woo's third Hollywood movie, Face/Off, is the first to balance his visual imagination with the emotional intensity of his Hong Kong films.

Harris’s refusal to treat her heroine strictly as role model or bad example makes her portrait a lot livelier and less predictable—as well as more confusing—than the standard genre exercises most reviewers seem to prefer. What’s exciting about this movie is a lot of loose details: frank girl talk about AIDS and birth control, glancing observations about welfare lines and the advantages of a boy with a car over one with subway tokens.

The pseudomystical vagueness that seems to be Spielberg's stock-in-trade stifles most of the particularity of the source.

Missing is most of Tarkovsky's contemplative and mystical poetry (which is why it's 90 minutes shorter), and added are some unfortunate Hollywood-style designer flashbacks -- The story is still strong and haunting, but I'd recommend seeing this, if at all, only after the Tarkovsky.

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

Spirited, quintessential, and often hilarious.

Out of Sight engaged me less and less, until by the end I no longer cared which of the characters lived or died. Not even the engaging Jennifer Lopez, George Clooney, Albert Brooks, Don Cheadle, and Ving Rhames or the talented secondary cast can survive the abbreviations and last-minute shoehorning their characters receive.

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

Provocative and entertaining.

A feeble sequel to The Naked Gun that's about one and a half rungs down from its predecessor and a good four or five down from Airplane!

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.

Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals.

This is basically Hollywood nonsense with all the usual dishonesty, but it goes down easily.

The film can't simply be discounted as a skim job on the original; Romero's dark social commentary, which grew in impact over his entire Dead trilogy, is still very much present here, even if it no longer has the same bite and urgency.

On the very edge of coherence -- but I find its decadent erotic poetry irresistible.

Gardos -- treats it competently, though without much freshness or imagination.

The wonderful Richard Farnsworth plays the lead, and he was clearly born for the part...a highly affecting and suggestive spiritual odyssey.

The surprising thing about George Lucas's first feature (1971), a dystopian SF parable now digitally enhanced and expanded by five minutes, is how arty it seems compared to his later movies.

Garcia seems to be aping the "Godfather" movies and Warren Beatty's "Reds," but the movie's gracefulness is limited to its handling of the music (some of which Garcia wrote).

I haven't seen the original, and this mishmash -- doesn't make me want to.

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.

Confounds expectations -- about slasher stories and about film narrative in general, in part by being closer to a collection of interconnected short stories than to a novel.

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

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.

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."

Shot on a shoestring and none the worse for it, Jean-Luc Godard’s gritty and engaging first feature had an almost revolutionary impact when first released in 1960.

Months after seeing this, I still feel I know most of these people as if they were old friends.

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.

Despite a certain originality, the movie isn't really a success, not only because the plot bites off more than it can chew (the film doesn't conclude; it simply stops), but also because, like its hero, it has some trouble distinguishing between petty irritations and cataclysmic traumas.

The main activity charted in the documentary is a kind of adolescent mischief, as Dick and a private investigator seek to uncover and expose the anonymous MPAA employees.

It bored me clean out of my wits.

I don't know if Rob Reiner is the one to blame for this atrocity, but he directed and coproduced.

The result is a dull and campy 97-minute bloodbath offering little distinction between good guys and bad.

The Coens' lack of interest in Mississippi is fortunately joined by a healthy appreciation of gospel music, while their smirking appreciation of stupidity extends to every character in the movie while including no one in the audience.

The engineering of the special effects is fairly impressive, and the sight of so many objects and creatures being buffeted about carries a certain apocalyptic splendor.

Affecting and offbeat.

I was wooed by its sexy romanticism all the way through to the mysterious and beautiful coda.

With Hurd Hatfield memorably playing the title part, the 1945 film also includes juicy performances by George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, and Donna Reed. Deeper and creepier (that is to say, better) than anything turned out by Merchant-Ivory, this is both very Hollywood and very serious in a manner calculated to confound the “Hey, it’s only a movie!” crowd.

This is a pretty stupid comedy in spots, with holes wide enough to drive trucks through, and director Arthur Hiller is as clunky as ever, but the cast is so funny and likable—above all, costars Jim Belushi and Charles Grodin, and newcomer Loryn Locklin—that they almost bring it off in spite of itself.

The material is familiar, the Berkeley locations are strictly boilerplate, and there are times when the characters seem more like high school students than college kids.

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.

Contact is so burdened with social, political, and religious issues that they infect and ultimately overwhelm much of the philosophical content.

Lots can be said for The Aviator as entertainment, though not much for it as edification.

The actors do a pretty good job, though not good enough to sustain 133 minutes.

Aside from one slow-motion sequence, the film treats its subject with few commercial concessions, so one hopes that the horrible and decidedly unmemorable title won’t keep people away; this may be the best movie about disaffected youth since River’s Edge and Pump Up the Volume.

This 1950 effort shows Disney at the tail end of his best period, when his backgrounds were still luminous with depth and detail and his incidental characters still had range and bite.

Maybe I've seen too many James Bond movies by now, or maybe the trouble with this 20th installment is that the filmmakers are trying too hard to top the excesses of the predecessors.