Jonathan Rosenbaum

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.

Honest curiosity and observation are what make this work, and in this respect Christina Ricci (as Wuornos's lover, Selby Wall) is almost as good as Theron.

Reportedly (and understandably) Youssef Chahine’s most popular film among Egyptians, this gritty and relatively early (1958) black-and-white masterpiece also features his most impressive acting turn, as a crippled news vendor working at the title railroad station.

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

Film is still an impressive piece of work, visually and rhythmically masterful.

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.

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

Filmmakers Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newhman do a superb job of telling this neglected story in vivid detail.

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.

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).

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

But it's also Howard's and his audience's misfortune that a good time can be had by all only if nothing of substance gets said.

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.

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

This shocking, violent, and unsentimental (albeit sensationalized) drama about a second-generation drug dealer (Turner) and the callous world he lives in, produced by "To Sleep With Anger's" Darin Scott, is terrifically acted.

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

Conceived like a sports movie, this delivers passion, nuance, and historical insight along with unnecessary hokum.

I laughed a lot at the anti-Hollywood humor and generally had a fine time, in spite of the holier-than-thou hypocrisy that makes this movie easily and even intentionally Mamet's most Hollywoodish picture to date.

Though the film tapers off a little toward the end, there's a climactic scene of recognition between the heroine and her father that was one of the most exquisite pieces of acting I'd seen in ages.

The deft arabesques of cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak juice up the suspense, and if you're not too put off by the sheer ridiculousness of the story you won't be bored.

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.

Though it's a good half hour too long, this belated, overblown spin-off of the 60s TV show otherwise adds up to a pretty good suspense thriller.

It runs out of energy before the end.

Well-crafted if relatively impersonal adaptation.

One of the few white vocalists to play the Apollo, O'Day does fabulous things with her hands as well as her voice when she sings. Her talent and will to survive (in the late 60s she kicked a 16-year heroin addiction) are reasons enough to see this film.

The kids, all real musicians performing, are wonderful, and so is Black; Joan Cusack is both charming and funny as the principal.

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.

This has plenty of designer gore to go with its periodic spurts of bloodletting, and a lot of care and attention were obviously devoted to selecting locations, designing sets, and grooming handlebar mustaches. Much less attention went to making one believe that any of the events took place circa 1879, but at least the bursts of action keep coming, and most survive Cosmatos's addiction to smoldering close-ups.

Fascinating and instructive throughout.

The stunt work is pretty good, the brain work close to nonexistent.

Cage is the only actor allowed to do riffs on his assigned part, something he takes full advantage of; the others are stuck with their two-dimensional satirical profiles, which grow increasingly tiresome and unyielding as the comic plot predictably unfolds.

The best Australian feature I've seen in years.

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

I didn't feel I was wasting my time but I started looking at my watch long before it was over.

Made piecemeal over a number of years and first released in 1983, this 90-minute comic fantasy has lost little of its radical edge—in contrast to Borden’s subsequent Working Girls, which accommodated itself to a wider audience.

Beautifully composed and deftly delivered, it becomes the libretto to Potter's visual music, creating a remarkable lyricism and emotional directness.

A multifaceted misfire from writer-director Steven Zaillian.

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).

Warmly recommended to viewers who like their romantic comedies small-scale but life-size.

There's plenty of disquieting material here, but I wish the film were less antagonistic in its own right.

Too bad the overreaching script has to go after effects recalling "Alien," but as a stylistic exercise this still has its chills.

Most of this is silly, dim-witted stuff, but a few of the shocks carry some of the crude power of Jack Arnold's low-budget horror films of the 50s.

It's clear that writer Akiva Goldsman and director Joel Schumacher are bereft of ideas and using the MTV clutter as a cover-up.

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 must-see.

Another piece of phony uplift from producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

It's not clear why Steven Spielberg's Amblin decided to make a live-action entertainment starring the least interesting and most saccharine of all 50s cartoon characters, the friendly ghost who can't help scaring people, but here's your chance to search for an answer.

I was never bored but only occasionally interested.

This bracing courtroom thriller is the most entertaining and satisfying John Grisham adaptation I've seen.

Brian De Palma's 1992 thriller borders on incoherence and irrelevance as plot, but as a chance for De Palma to perform stylistic pirouettes around a void, it's full of sleek and pleasurable moments.

One very sick and messed-up movie.

His mise en scene is mesmerizing, and the final scene is breathtaking. Not an easy film, but almost certainly a great one.

According to common usage, the French word stupide comes closer to silly than to dumb, which is how I might rationalize my affection for this harebrained, obvious, but euphoric tale.

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.

About as entertaining as a no-brainer can be--a lot more fun, for my money, than a cornball theme-park ride like "Speed," and every bit as fast moving. But don't expect much of an aftertaste.

Pistol-packing De Jesus evokes Pam Grier in spots but certainly holds her own.

Broder's script makes the weird transition from satire to camp as if there were no distinction between the two. It's a bracing if at times bewildering experience.

Not to be hyperbolic, but Richard Linklater's first big-budget movie may be the Jules and Jim of bank-robber movies, thanks to its astonishing handling of period detail and its gentleness of spirit, both buoyed by a gliding lightness of touch.

By the end the story is more satisfying than you might expect.

This is pretty much the Lucas mixture as usual, this time in a Tolkien mode, with everything from the Old Testament to Kurosawa to Disney fed into a blender and turned into wallpaper. For easy-to-please five-year-olds of all ages.

Good, amusing, disreputable fun—until it starts getting solemn and preachy.

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.

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.

Here the director is more self-conscious about his didactic aims, which limits him in some respects, but there's an engaging roughness about his visual approach that keeps this movie footloose and inventive.

Howard lacks the sense of film rhythm --required to make such an exercise work. Just about the only clear triumph here is an underplayed performance by Angie Dickinson, though Winger and Rosanna Arquette also provide welcome relief from Howard and Le Mat's self-indulgent carousing.

Has some of the ring of truth, even though the movie lingers far too long over its own epiphanies.

This 2005 British feature by writer Anthony Frewin and director Brian Cook, both former Kubrick assistants, uses Conway's unlikely saga to mount an appreciative send-up of a certain style of gay extravagance.

This is basically sloppy, all-over-the-map filmmaking with few hints of self-criticism and few genuine laughs.

It's especially good in its handling of actors and its sharp feeling for characters who can't even describe their own problems, much less analyze them.

This inspirational vehicle, based on a true story, is as hokey as it sounds, and it sometimes cuts too fast to allow us to see the dancing properly. But as in "Saturday Night Fever," the sense of reality giving way to fantasy on a dance floor is potent, and writer Dianne Houston and director Liz Friedlander are so sincere that they make much of it work.

Although most of the elements are familiar and virtually all of the characters are unpleasant, this is a better than average melodrama--mainly because of the volcanic power of Kathy Bates in the title role.

Choreographically stunning like most of Woo’s work, especially before he headed west.

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

Almost no plot here and even less character--just a lot of pretexts for S-M imagery, Catholic decor, gobs of gore, and the usual designer schizophrenia.

The results are skillful, highly affecting, and ultimately more than a little pernicious.

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

Material so bereft of plot and insight that all it can provide is actorly turns with no cogent means for tying them together.

The potential for moral confusion in a liberal-minded family -- unpacked so ruthlessly in Noah Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale" -- is scrutinized with more ambiguity in this good-natured comic subversion of the holiday get-together.

Clint Eastwood's ambitious 1988 feature about the great Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker) is the most serious, conscientious, and accomplished jazz biopic ever made, and almost certainly Eastwood's best picture as well.

Offers so much frenetic fast cutting to so little purpose that it becomes an ordeal.

The period detail is more vibrant than the minimal story.

So visually striking, so compulsively watchable as storytelling, and so personal even in its enigmas that I found it much more pleasurable than any of the Hollywood genre films I've seen lately.

It's largely Kazan's authentic feeling for the locale, aided by Boris Kaufman's superb black-and-white cinematography, that makes this movie so special, combined with a first-rate ensemble.

Tries way too hard to be clever and shrewd.

Although the film is built around the town's big centennial celebration, there are no big dramatic events in the usual sense; the film's focus is the complications, readjustments, and discoveries of middle age, and it's entirely to the credit of old movie buff Bogdanovich, who wrote the script, that there isn't a single film reference in sight.

Strongly recommended.

A Chayefsky movie isn't hard to identify, but I think it's safe to say that these days a Charlie Kaufman movie is even more recognizable.

Impressive for its lean and unblemished storytelling, but even more so for its performances.

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

Though the look aspires as usual to be both otherworldly and familiar, there's nothing that doesn't reek of southern California (as opposed to Hollywood) plastic, and this is as true of the characters as the decor.

Expresses with uncommon power the highly relevant issue of public indifference to genocide, which is especially well dramatized by a scene with Elias Koteas as an actor playing a Turk.

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

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.

This obsessive movie, awarded the grand jury prize at the Sundance festival, may not quite live up to its advance billing; the subject is powerful, but the filmmaking often seems slapdash, and the final half hour dithers.

Exciting not as ethnography but as storytelling, as drama, and as filmmaking.

If this were witty, it might have qualified as a downtown version of "All About Eve"; if it were believable, I wouldn't have come away feeling that the actors (including Dylan McDermott and Chloe Sevigny) were wasted.

It's a letdown from the man who brought us "Men in Black" and "Addams Family Values."

This is obviously a sincere undertaking, and there's a certain homemade charm to the special effects used in the combat scenes.

I was floored by Cronenberg's mastery of the material. Fiennes gives one of his finest performances; Miranda Richardson, playing at least three characters in the protagonist's twisted vision, is no less impressive.

More concerned with attitude than character and too moralistic to be much fun.

Alison Lohman isn't very convincing as the reporter who's trying to dredge up some dirt on the entertainers, and the elaborate flashback structure can't hide the fact that the story never fully comes to life.

A brave effort to stare down the specter of American failure, it gets off on the wrong foot by pretentiously turning the doomed hero into a Christ figure--a traffic cop with arms extended in crucifixion mode--before the story even gets started.

Action-adventure pictures have a lamentable tendency toward mindlessness, but Edward Zwick's epic story has numerous virtues apart from suspense and spectacle.

Running beyond three hours, the movie more than overstays its welcome, and despite some vague genuflections in the general direction of The Godfather regarding family ties and revenge, there are simply too many years and locations covered, too many crane shots and rainstorms.

Billy Wilder’s soggy and uninspired 1963 adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, minus the songs.

While the level of imagination here is scaled to the bite-size dimensions of TV, the sense of an alternate universe felt in Herman's TV show is woefully lacking. But fans and undemanding kids may still be amused.

A fairly enjoyable piece of junk from Oliver Stone.

A reasonably updated facsimile of a 50s service romp called Operation Mad Ball, a similar celebration of high jinks.

I enjoyed this while it lasted, especially for the cast.

It's also about pain, which both tempers and complicates the eroticism.

It doesn't have the polish or the momentum of an Indiana Jones adventure, and isn't too engaging on the plot level, but at least the filmmakers keep it moving with lots of screwball stunts.

One of the earliest of the Disney true-life adventures (1953), this won an Academy Award for best documentary, in spite (or because) of its celebrated use of square-dance music with footage of scorpions.

There are many fleeting poetic moments in The Neon Bible--moments so ecstatic that you may feel yourself rising off your seat. And if much of the rest of the movie tends to be clunky as narrative, that's a small price to pay for pieces of enlightenment you can happily carry around inside your head for months.

The results are too pretty and well acted to be a total washout, but the fascination with evil and power that gives the novel intensity is virtually absent; what remains is mainly petty malice and mild cynicism.

This is the silliest horror movie I've seen in years, though some of the special effects are pretty good.

One of Francois Truffaut's best middle-period films, albeit one of his darkest and most conservative.

Its special effects are used so seamlessly as part of an overall artistic strategy that, as critic Annette Michelson has pointed out, they don't even register as such, and thus are almost impossible to trivialize, a feat unmatched in movies.

It's Fellini's last black-and-white picture and conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he ever did—certainly more fun than anything he made after it.

This heart-warmer by Robert Benton has some of the tender wisdom and humor of his other features (e.g., Nobody's Fool).

The results may seem overripe and dated in spots, but she coaxes a fine performance out of Nolte, and the other actors (herself included) acquit themselves honorably.

Thoroughly researched, unobtrusively upholstered, this beautifully assured entertainment about Victorian England is a string of delights.

The film is absorbing enough as an intimate family portrait, complete with friction.

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

This is one of those slick, violent, ridiculous Hollywood jobs that make little sense as a story, a comment on life, or a depiction of characters, but are moderately enjoyable in their spinning of movie conventions. There's even a good De Palma-style fake shock ending.

The film is full of relevant insights into the kinds of compromises, trade-offs, and combinations of skills and personalities that produce media, and the personal stories are deftly integrated.

This is truly a great film, recently celebrated at length in "My Voyage to Italy," Martin Scorsese's documentary about Italian cinema.

Masterfully charted and adeptly played, but also rather minimalist.

Registers as frighteningly typical and indicates how successful the Bush administration has been at convincing Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and armed with weapons of mass destruction.

This movie feels like it was made by a bank rather than a person.

Four writers worked on the script, and they all should hang their heads in shame.

This is the apotheosis of Classics Illustrated filmmaking, aiming at nothing more than tasteful reduction, and the fact that it's done so well here doesn't mean that it's necessarily worth doing.

I have no objection to soap opera when it's delivered with conviction and a sense of urgency, but this sappy tale ... held my interest only moderately.

The thriller plot, while serviceable, registers as somewhat gratuitous, but the Buenos Aires locations are nicely used.

Apart from some softening of the extreme violence (through manipulations on the sound track) and some fancy intercutting, this is every bit as unpleasant as Olmos can make it, but occasionally edifying as well.

Franklin and Murray manages to live up to the demands of a thriller without sacrificing character to frenetic pacing, and the film exudes a kind of sweetness that never threatens to become either sticky or synthetic.

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

A good concert film might have been culled from Vaughn's 30-date LA-to-Chicago tour in September 2005, which showcased stand-up comedians Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, and Sebastian Maniscalco and included bits with Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Dwight Yoakam, Justin Long, and Keir O'Donnell. But this is more like a DVD extra for that film.

They're all instructive and interesting in one way or another, and they're indispensable viewing for residents of isolationist, or at least isolated, countries such as this one.

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

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

Allen doesn't get us to care much about any of the characters here.

Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden) directs with obvious feeling rather than cynicism, and I was swept away by it despite the story's anachronisms.

Cassavetes's “Gloria” may have been action-packed nonsense, but it was enjoyable precisely because it was all of a piece. This Gloria is simply pieces--a few of them enjoyable, most of them not.

An astonishing tour de force--especially for Irons, whose sense of nuance is so refined that one can tell in a matter of seconds which twin he is playing in a particular scene.

Director Ken Kwapis (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) gives this script by many hands a certain gloss it doesn't deserve.

The movie has some of the braggadocio of its white-trash hero, building to its competitive climax as if it were a gladiatorial sporting event, and it carried me all the way.

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

Seems like a dopey idea to me, but if you aren't familiar with the Fitzgerald novel, you may enjoy this; at least Jones and his costars play the story as if they believed in it.

Definitely worth checking out.

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.

The Fort Lauderdale setting imparts little flavor or atmosphere, and the same goes for the flagrantly unerotic dances.

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

Apart from a few incidental flickers of Wang’s sidelong humor, there’s little of his personality evident in this film about a divorced underground cartoonist (Tom Hulce) finding himself enmeshed in a murder plota story that steadily loses coherence and interest the longer it proceeds.

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

Perhaps this movie isn't as wise or as profound as Simon wants it to be, but it is certainly a cut above sitcom complacency, and packed with wit and charm.

I wasn't bored at all by this, and Angela Bassett's action-hero charisma often blew me away, but fans of Bigelow at her best (e.g., Near Dark) may be put off by the movie's calculation, which doesn't always fit with its intellectual pretensions.

There's nothing in the aesthetic and neo-Freudian delirium within hailing distance of Vertigo, and the plot's often more complicated than complex, but Herrmann's overpowering score and De Palma's endlessly circling camera movements do manage to cast a spell.

This is simply efficient, routine storytelling with a high gloss but an undernourished sense of character.

Coppola does a fair job of capturing the fish-tank ambience of nocturnal, upscale Tokyo and showing how it feels to be a stranger in that world, and an excellent job of getting the most from her lead actors. Unfortunately, I'm not sure she accomplishes anything else.

I wouldn't call this 1960 picture one of Billy Wilder's best comedies—it's drab, sappy, and overlong at 125 minutes.

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

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.

This frantic tale seems at once preachy and incoherent, collapsing into a more or less random collection of disconnected, unfocused scenes.

A geek festival that mainly invites us to hoot at a bunch of alleged crazies.

Beautifully structured and emotionally wrenching.

As usual Spielberg is too bored by everyday life to use his premise for anything but a fairy tale, whose cheap pathos suggests a bad Chaplin imitation. This grows progressively phonier and eventually devolves into "Mr. Roberts," with Stanley Tucci filling in for James Cagney as an airport bureaucrat.

The story has its corny aspects, but thanks to Scott's skill as an image maker and as a storyteller--proceeding from the very blue and very abstract water seen behind the credits to the climactic, extended storm--this is superior to both "Dead Poets Society" (as a tale about a boys' school and its charismatic teacher) and "Apollo 13" (as a true-life action adventure).

Full of high spirits and good vibes.

An entertaining if humdrum 1993 documentary...Seeing the actual deliberations behind image making has a certain built-in interest, but I expected more surprises.

Though praised when it came out (1930), Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Sean O’Casey’s play, with some of the original Dublin cast (including Sara Allgood as Juno), is a fairly deadly case of canned theater that’s pretty close to what Hitchcock many years later would refer to as “photographs of people talking.”

The only thing that keeps the proceedings bearable is the cast gamely rolling with all the shameless sitcom punches the script keeps throwing at them.

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

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.

The silliness only slows down for a few hokey romantic interludes. But if you like to see stuff crash or blow up, this is your movie.

The set decor is more intricate than any of the characters.

Less suspenseful than the original but more ethically nuanced, politically pointed, and violent.

"Bill & Ted's Aurora Adventures" might almost serve as the subtitle for this very silly but enjoyable 1992 comedy, developed from characters introduced on Saturday Night Live--heavy-metal fans (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey) with a cable access show in Aurora, Illinois.

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

This egregious collection of cock-waving cliches is the silliest piece of macho camp since Roadhouse.

Crichton keeps the laughs coming with infectious energy.

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.

With its American, English, and French characters representing the three cultures Polanski has known since he left Poland, it's also quite possibly his most personal film—and certainly his most self-critical.

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.

Jon Voight, the all-purpose villain, does a pretty good job of imitating Marlon Brando imitating a Paraguayan snake expert, but the rest of the players--including Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, Owen Wilson, Vincent Castellanos, Jonathan Hyde, and Kari Wuhrer--seem to be in a hurry to pick up their checks.

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.

This may not have gotten much publicity, but it's a lot more engaging than most movies that have; Forster alone makes it unforgettable.

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

Behind all the macho bluster stand (or, it would appear, sit) director Tony Scott, writers Michael Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick, and producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, trying (and failing) to get all the characters to behave like grown-ups.

An experimental feature that keeps shooting off its ideas like an endless row of skyrockets, Kikujiro ultimately conveys this grief with such sustained intensity that it can only leave a scorched path of devastation in its aftermath.

What emerges is oddly ineffectual and uninvolving.

An appalling piece of junk that tries to redo The Odd Couple and Grumpy Old Men in presidential terms.

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.

Shot on a year's worth of weekends on a minuscule budget (less than $20,000), this remarkable work--conceivably the best single feature about ghetto life that we have--was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry as one of the key works of the American cinema, an ironic and belated form of recognition for a film that has had virtually no distribution. It shouldn't be missed.

Fortunately almost everyone acquits himself coolly and admirably; only costars Greg Kinnear and Marcia Gay Harden ham it up.

The sincerity of their performances (Lopez and Caviezel) overrides the intermittent implausibilities of Gerald Dipego's script.

A pretty good job of zipping things along and occasionally scaring us, and the digital effects are fun.

This first feature by novelist and psychologist Jeremy Leven has a fairly rudimentary mise en scene, but the actors take over the proceedings with aplomb, and Brando and Dunaway have the grace to turn much of the show over to Depp, who carries the burden with ease.

Killing Zoe has little of the style, pacing, characterization, or wit of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction (though Avary worked on the scripts of both).

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.

The movie can't explain as much as it wants to about what makes (and unmakes) a skinhead, but it carries us a fair distance.

An efficient little thriller that imparts loads of queasiness and reasonable amounts of suspense while serving as an excellent corrective to the shameless celebrations of LA police power and brutality in Lethal Weapon 3.

Apart from McVay and Lea DeLaria (as a lesbian who befriends and advises the hero), the actors mainly come across as movie types rather than characters, and despite the obvious sincerity of the project, deja vu seems written into the conception.

To my mind, this is one of Robert Aldrich’s worst films, but clearly not everyone agrees.

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.

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

Quentin Tarantino's lively and show-offy tribute to Asian martial-arts flicks, bloody anime, and spaghetti westerns he soaked up as a teenager is even more gory and adolescent than its models, which explains both the fun and the unpleasantness of this globe-trotting romp.

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

What ties all this material together is the force and humor of Moretti’s eclectic personality.

Most features composed of sketches by different filmmakers are wildly uneven. This one is consistently mediocre or slightly better, albeit pleasant and watchable. It helps that none of the episodes runs longer than five or six minutes.

If you're sick of kinky killers and English rip-offs of American genre movies, this terminally bleak and violent 1995 road movie may irritate the hell out of you--unless you're as impressed as I was by Amanda Plummer's performance.

There are plenty of laughs whenever Moore wants to twist the knife, but the bottom line is that he respects and trusts his fellow Americans a lot more than Bush does.

The results are watchable enough--sometimes funny, sometimes over the top--and fairly fresh, though also a bit calculated.

This is the dullest and least successful adaptation of the Christmas chestnut I've ever seen, possibly because the mixture of Muppets and humans creates anomalies of scale and degrees of stylized behavior that the film tries to ignore rather than work with.

If you really hate your kids, pack them off to this slapdash farce, whose only funny moment is the PC disclaimer at the end about the Disney company's humanist concern for blind people (which even literate toddlers will have trouble understanding anyway).

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.

Pretty familiar stuff, but the performances--by Adrien Brody, Elise Neal, Simon Baker-Denny, and Lauryn Hill--are relatively fresh and sincere.

Humorless, lugubrious, and interminable.

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

None of the moral ramifications of this dilemma is avoided, and to the film’s credit the behavior of the American press seems more questionable than the machinations of third-world justice.

Singleton shows some genuine talent in handling character and action, and equal amounts of confusion and attitude when it comes to matters of gender and ghetto politics.

A piece of mythmaking stupidity.

If Frank Capra had directed the Three Stooges in a Disney Christmas release, the results would have been considerably better than this godawful Fox comedy (1994) by writer-producer-director George Gallo.

The movie offers an insulting "let them eat cake" gesture toward the 1982 audience, but the pacing is so ragged and the characters so lifeless that few will be able to stay awake long enough to feel offended

The narrative, capped by a brief bad dream and the capture of a mouse, isn't always legible, but it feeds into a monumental, luminous visual style like no other.

Better-than-average sitcom stuff, enhanced by the lively performances, Doyle's own adaptation, and the able direction of Stephen Frears.

This keeps one reasonably amused, titillated, and brain-dead for a little over two hours.

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.

I was beguiled by both the eerie moods and the striking compositions, which incorporate large stretches of empty space.

The most underestimated commercial movie of 1987 may not be quite as good as Elaine May's three previous features, but it's still a very funny work by one of this country's greatest comic talents.

The dissection of Edwardian repression never gets beyond the dutiful, tasteful obviousness of a BBC miniseries.

This effective, well-paced antimilitary thriller has more conflicting flashbacks than you can shake a stick at.

Overlong but watchable.

Standard-issue liberal feel-good fodder.

The protracted shoot-out at the end of Dear Wendy is even more pornographic than the moment when a female member of the Dandies exposes her breasts. The audience is clearly expected to enjoy the bloodbath even while it disapproves.

A profoundly sexist and eminently hummable 1954 CinemaScope musical—supposedly set in the great outdoors, but mainly filmed on soundstages—with some terrific athletic Michael Kidd choreography and some better-than-average direction by Stanley Donen.

Cunningly scripted and acted, and talky in the best sense, the film is engrossing to watch but not especially interesting to ponder afterward; it's certainly an improvement on formulaic Hollywood, but on a thematic level there's still more windup than delivery.

The juxtaposition of liberal Jewish attorney Dershowitz (Silver) and von Bulow working together on the latter's defense makes for some engagingly offbeat drama, with some interesting insights into the legal process.

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.

George Roy Hill's very professional, very entertaining 1972 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's time-traveling novel, with the pseudoprofundities nicely tucked into place as peppy one-liners and narrative tricks.

None of the characters ever rises beyond the level of his or her generic functions, and by the end the overall emptiness of the conception becomes fully apparent.

The problem with this film's earnest script about corruption in college basketball is that the usually witty Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump) wrote it long before he developed his familiar jivey style. Not even an unsentimental basketball fan like director William Friedkin can wash away all the corn syrup.

The surface activity keeps one occupied, but never adds up to much because none of the characters is developed beyond the cartoon level; and the snobby sense of knowingness that's over everything is uncomfortably close to what the movie is supposed to be dissecting.

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

Perhaps the most formally ravishing-as well as the most morally and ideologically problematic-film ever directed by Martin Scorsese.

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

The movie overextends a patch of folk mysticism toward the end and then adds a silly whimsical coda, but as a comedy of errors it's often hilarious.

Thanks to a remarkable script by Bruce Joel Rubin and the directorial skills of Adrian Lyne, this works as both a highly effective stream-of-consciousness puzzle thriller offering the viewer not one but many "solutions" and an emotionally persuasive statement about the plight of many American vets who fought in Vietnam.

The first third or so offers all the dominatrix fantasies one might wish for, but then fantasy gives way to the aggressiveness of the special effects and optical effects.

The sensibility of this movie is so adolescent that it's hard to take it as seriously as the filmmakers intend us to.

Perhaps the post-cold-war attitudes behind this film are progressive, but the same old pre-nuclear-war worship of the military goes all but unchallenged.

This brilliantly and comprehensively captures the look, feel, and sound of glamorous 50s tearjerkers like All That Heaven Allows, not to mock or feel superior to them but to say new things with their vocabulary.

Stylistically lively and generally well acted. Thematically, however, it's somewhat incoherent.

Provocative documentary.

Has some flavor, and Ron Silver gives a swell impersonation of a cool and slimy studio executive.

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.

Genuinely frightening...it's nice for a change to see some of the virtues of old-fashioned horror films—moody dream sequences, unsettling poetic images, and passages that suggest more than they show—rather than the usual splatter shocks and special effects (far from absent, but employed with relative economy).

The plot of this character-driven drama is slender and the digital images rather muddy--apparently an impoverished indie feature can look bad and still not be very interesting--but to his credit, Thelemaque sticks to his minimalist turf. And the dogs are great.

The hokey dialogue and witless physical gags keep everything painful and hectoring.