Jonathan Rosenbaum

One of the most striking of Ozu’s American-style silents.

A significant influence on Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this grueling pile driver of a movie will keep you on the edge of your seat, though it reeks of French 50s attitude, which includes misogyny, snobbishness, and borderline racism.

This packaged tour through the great man's career is unenlightening and obfuscating, despite an adept lead performance by Robert Downey Jr.

This isn't a major Dante effort, but his ability to make a good-natured satire that allows an audience to read it several ways at once is as strong as ever, and many of the sidelong genre notations are especially funny.

But the inspirational aspects of the tale--which mainly has to do with the determination of Close to form a vocal orchestra at the camp, despite the class divisions between the women--never quite carry the dramatic impact they're supposed to.

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

A few of the bad-taste gags are funny, and Carrey's grimaces have a certain inspired delirium, but this is a long way from the social comedy of Jerry Lewis.

Like most of Lee’s work, this movie bites off a lot more than it can possibly chew, and it bristles with the worst kind of New York provincialism.

This leads to some fairly amusing gags involving surreal ads for actual products (e.g., for Jaguar: “Sleek and smart. For men who'd like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know”). Moore's boss is so horrified by this development that he sends him to a sanitarium, at which point the movie takes an abrupt nosedive into the sort of tacky media lies it is supposedly attacking.

A strong, disturbing picture (1988) in which Meryl Streep’s beauty and talent and director Fred Schepisi’s intelligence are both shown to best advantage, without easy points or grandstanding.

A rather ho-hum if watchable neo-noir.

The only problem I was faced with was trying to understand what exactly it was that I enjoyed, and how this movie differed from the play I'd read.

One can have a reasonably amusing time with this predictable sequel, which is a bit longer on action and shorter on wit and character than the original (hence less good, in my opinion), but still diverting and harmless enough.

Arguably Woody Allen's funniest movie. A riotous object lesson in how much dialogue can transform visuals, and Allen works wonders with it.

The most obnoxious case of masculine swagger since Andrew Dice Clay, with just a tad of Paul Lynde thrown in for spice, Jim Carrey defies you not to bolt for the exit while playing the title hero in this 1994 comic mystery.

This curious ecological parable was directed by George Miller (Babe: Pig in the City), who still has an eye and a sense of humor but on this particular outing can't get the script he wrote with three others to make much sense.

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.

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.

Not to be confused with the 1959 Mamie Van Doren-Mel Torme exploitation item, this is an uneven first feature (1996) by independent filmmaker Jim McKay about the friendship of three rebellious high school seniors.

The film runs for 134 minutes, but Lumet keeps things moving with his sharp eye (and ear) for New York detail and his escalating sense of liberal outrage.

There's some excellent comedy early on involving the mutual incomprehension of Africans and Americans, though this eventually gives way to solemn, ethnocentric mush about one African's reading of the story of Jesus, demonstrating as usual that sustained subtlety is hardly Spielberg's forte.

On the whole, the adaptation is faithful but some of the qualities of Dinesen's language are lost in translation or through abridgment, and the politics have been needlessly simplified.

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.

Awkward storytelling and spotty exposition reduce it to a string of rude shocks--not even the eventual denouement provides a lucid enough account of where this is all coming from.

A mixed success, but an exhilarating try.

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.

Lacks the scariness, the mystery, and even much of the curiosity of Rivette's better work.

Often seems more old-fashioned than modern.

The script by producer David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson is serviceable but not exactly inspired.

Part of Morton's achievement is to present all four people through the viewpoints of the other three; Wagner can't do that, but the performances are so nuanced that the characters remain multilayered, and they're not the sort of people we're accustomed to finding in commercial films.

I can't think of a better portrait of contemporary Paris or the zeitgeist of 2001-'04 than Chris Marker's wise and whimsical 58-minute 2004 video...no one can film people in the street better than Marker or combine images with more grace and finesse.

A very curious and eclectic piece of work--fresh even when it's awkward.

None of the characters or ideas is allowed to develop beyond its cardboard profile.

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

As Dr. Octopus, Alfred Molina makes a more baroque supervillain than Willem Dafoe did as the Green Goblin, but the other stars--seem happy to be giving us more of the same.

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

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

Nichols is so astute at directing the actors (who also include Bill Nunn, Donald Moffat, and Nancy Marchand) that it's relatively easy to overlook the yuppie complacency, shameless devices (starting with an adorable puppy), and product plugs (especially Ritz crackers) that undermine the seriousness of the whole project.

The results are masterful, admirably unsentimental, and never boring, if also a little stodgy.

It may drive you nuts, but it’s probably the most inventive and original Godard film since Passion.

Imagine combining bad imitations of the "Ace Ventura" and "Austin Powers" movies and you'll have a rough idea of this feeble Dana Carvey farce.

Broadly speaking, the popular literary biopic is a hopeless subgenre, but this account of the relationship between Sylvia Plath and husband and fellow poet Ted Hughes manages to test the rule thanks to its unusual seriousness and first-rate performances.

This brisk, free-falling fantasy about the famous collators of German fairy tales, played here as a kind of comedy act by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, is Terry Gilliam's most entertaining work since the glory days of "Time Bandits," "Brazil," "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," and "The Fisher King."

Wears its art, as well as its heart, on its sleeve -- so much so that I feel guilty for not liking it more.

Storper is pretty good at playing with and against certain western cliches in his treatment of the good guys (including Annette Bening's character), but resorts to pure cliche when it comes to the villians (e.g., Gambon and James Russo).

The adroit mixture of pantheism and sentimentality continues to be sufficiently timeless to allow Disney's heirs to recycle this picture endlessly.

A mainly routine Hong Kong action film from fleet and floppy-haired action hero Jackie Chan. It's light on plot and character, but the stunts are well staged.

I'm a sucker for fantasies, but this one is so undistinguished and arbitrary that it left few traces in my consciousness, apart from the impression that the filmmakers resort to cruelty whenever they run out of ideas, which is often.

This outrageous comic fantasy may not sustain its brilliance throughout all of its 112 minutes, but it keeps cooking for so much of that time that I don't have many complaints.

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.

If your idea of a good time is watching a lot of stupid, unpleasant people insult and brutalize one another, this is right up your alley.

A highly entertaining form of ecological agitprop--radical but accessible.

To boost this movie's rating to "worth seeing" would make me feel like a publicist or simply a dope.

Stylish and effective, if slightly overlong, thriller.

Foreigners who argue that Americans are Neanderthal savages can point to this movie as persuasive evidence.

The theatrical monologues come close to defeating him (Wenders), and only Jessica Lange, as one of Shepard's abandoned girlfriends, manages to avoid cliche.

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

Well-intentioned but obvious drama.

However one chooses to take its jaundiced view of history, it's probably the best film to date by the talented Kusturica (Time of the Gypsies, Arizona Dream), a triumph of mise en scene mated to a comic vision that keeps topping its own hyperbole.

It's hard to deny that Marlon Brando's performance as a dock worker and ex-fighter who finally decides to rat on his gangster brother (Rod Steiger) is pretty terrific.

High-spirited martial arts and comedy, with heavy doses of Star Wars and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

This 1962 thriller is better than the Scorsese remake—above all for Robert Mitchum's chilling performance as a vengeful ex-con and an overall brute force in the crude story line—though it's arguably still some distance from deserving its reputation as a classic.

Better in certain ways than the original Apocalypse Now, though the flaws are also magnified.

Yes, the picture is flawed, but it is still something unusual in contemporary movies, a work that deserves to be called honorable, and not only in its intentions.

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

The director (Hallstrom) and cast are all excellent.

Promises more than it delivers.

If the Disney animated original (1961) -- adapted from Dodie Smith's novel -- tried to approximate live action, this 1996 Disney live-action remake often tries to evoke cartoon.

It's the romantic sparring with Catherine Zeta-Jones as another glamorous thief -- not the unsuspenseful heists -- that makes this silly thriller lightly bearable.

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

God save us when director Taylor Hackford decides to become a metaphysician and Al Pacino decides to demonstrate his genius by reading the phone book--or, to be precise, a script only slightly less repetitive and long-winded.

Formulaic but fairly well-done.

For a movie that consists almost entirely of real sex and real rock 'n' roll, 9 Songs feels remarkably conventional.

Wong uses his brief evocations of the future mainly as a way of poetically lamenting the past.

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.

Haven't we seen this already?

If you're happy to watch a thriller about a tenth as good as Alfred Hitchcock's, director D.J. Caruso and screenwriters Christopher B. Landon and Carl Ellsworth hold up their end of the deal, at least until the proceedings devolve into standard horror-movie effects and minimal motivations.

The problem with all the time-travel high jinks, involving multiple versions of the major characters (a gimmick that Robert Heinlein handled much better in stories like “By His Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies—”), is that in order to make the plot even semiintelligible, writer Bob Gale and director-cowriter Robert Zemeckis have to turn all these characters into strident geeks and make the frenetic action strictly formulaic.

Nevertheless, the cast of mainly unknowns is so good, and Linklater is so adept at playing them off one another, that the two-hour running time never seems overextended.

This is the kind of tasteful tearjerker that's often overrated and smothered with prizes because it flatters our tolerance and sensitivity.

The three neighborhood kids who venture inside this toothy trap are wittily conceived (as are other characters, like a goth babysitter), but though the overall conception suggests Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle," the frenetic pacing seems as American as an apple pie in your face.

Flat and unconvincing.

The filmmakers treat all the characters, not to mention the audience, as sitcom puppets.

This is a fascinating and easy-to-take set of musings on a fascinating artist.

Unafraid to look absurd but lacks the self-conviction needed to come off as camp.

Though the filmmaker has by now ridiculed the martial-arts drama virtually out of existence, the final dance number -- actually closer to festive stomping than tapping -- somehow manages to transcend irony, conveying instead only Kitano's childlike exhilaration, with a sense of ease regained.

Has memorable characters and images. Yet the story is elusive and occasionally puzzling, and some of the ideas are amorphous and self-conscious.

Enjoyable but thin.

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

Mechanical, soulless.

This is a new form of obscenity that might be called suicide porn. It's not just the voyeuristic surveillance that's obscene, but the use of suicide footage as counterpoint to other stories as they're told. Steel shows no special insight into the subject, though even that couldn't justify such hideousness.

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.

Leslie Dixon's script and TV sitcom specialist Garry Marshall's direction are basically warm, funny, and lighthearted, and the relaxed amiability of the two leads—as well as Chicagoan Michael Hagerty and Roddy McDowall (who doubles as executive producer)—helps to make this good family entertainment.

A deeply stupid and offensive action comedy-romance.

The silly story is basically just an excuse for some thrills and goofy one-liners, but even if the more likable characters tended to get killed off too early for my taste, I wasn't bored.

The eroticism is powerful, and the documentary candor and directness of the sex scenes make this well worth seeing.

Given the audacity, it would be a pleasure to report that the results are hilarious, but most of it isn't even funny, and the sense of "anything goes" hangs heavy over the film as it develops.

The movie's suggestiveness gives way to a certain thinness and lassitude.

What seems most striking today, in spite of the many moments of comedy and elation, is how painfully candid and personal it is in its despair and disillusionment.

Rather wan in its anything-goes spirit of invention, the movie has a surprisingly low number of laughs; some of the initial premises are good, but there's very little energy in the follow-through, and this time Murray's listlessness seems more anemic than comic.

Fairly strong on period atmospherics, but it mainly adds up to yet another pointless adaptation of a literary standby.

Needless to say, the plot goes nowhere, but under the pornographic circumstances Figgis, Cage, and Shue all do fine jobs.

The special effects, for once, are witty rather than overblown, and director Nora Ephron, writing with her sister Delia, handles the material with some grace and confidence.

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.

Considering the degree to which Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct are already self-parodies, writer David O'Malley and director Carl Reiner don't have to do much to show how silly they are; in order to understand how silly this movie is, on the other hand, all you have to do is sit through it.

Powerful and haunting.

Watchable, if at times familiar.

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

Despite the aggressive silliness of this enjoyable comedy, the emotional focus on the painful social experience of high school makes the film real and immediate, and the flavorsome dialogue in Robin Schiff's script gives the leads a lot to work (as well as play) with.

At least the special effects and outer space vistas are more handsome than usual.

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.

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.

Sitting through this barrage of all-purpose insults aimed at obvious targets was an unenlightening chore.

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.

The narrative kept me glued to my seat.

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

This 2005 feature offered me my first taste of Guy Ritchie's macho-centric artiness, and I hope it's my last.

The special effects are impressive, but they don’t add up to a movie.

Directed by Richard Benjamin, this is an inordinately silly comedy that manages to be pretty likable if one can get past some of its harebrained premises.

Martin Scorsese's first feature (1968), set in New York's Little Italy and starring Harvey Keitel in his first role, can be read as a rather rough draft of Mean Streets, down to the use of rock music and Catholic guilt.

By the end Smilla has become a formulaic action hero--equally at home in an evening dress and blue jeans--not a marginalized victim seeking to uncover the source of her wound, and the film collapses around her like glaciers of melting ice.

Carax has a wonderful cinematic eye and a personal feeling for editing rhythms, and his sense of overripeness and excess virtually defines him.

All this is supposed to be as cute as bugs and chock-full of worldly wisdom, but even with lead actors as likable and as resourceful as these, the material made me alternately want to gag and nod off.

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.

If it speaks with a quieter voice than many of Bogdanovich's early pictures, what it has to say seems substantially more personal and thoughtful.

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

The performances, especially of Penn and Robbins, are so powerful and detailed (down to the Boston accents) that they often persuade one to overlook the narrative contrivances (particularly the incessant crosscutting), the arty trimmings (including Eastwood's own score), and the dubious social philosophy.

Directed by Katt Shea Ruben from a script she wrote with producer Andy Ruben, this starts off with some spark and drive, in part because of the writing and playing of Gilbert's character, but gradually sinks into cliche and contrivance as the familiar genre moves take over, dragging down the characters, plot, and style.

The film gets campier by the minute.

As directed by Rob Reiner from a script by Lewis Colick, it offers the most decent and convincing portrait of the contemporary south I’ve seen in ages (apart from Sling Blade).

Fresh, character driven, often funny, and unfashionably upbeat (as well as offbeat).

I'm usually a sucker for courtroom dramas, but Rob Reiner's highly mechanical filming by numbers of Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of his own cliched and fatuous Broadway play kept putting me to sleep.

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.

If you want to know what the Warhol scene was all about, this is even better than the documentaries.

A talking bulldog named Frank steals the show.

The performances are strong (my favorite is Deborah Harry as an older waitress) and the sense of eroded as well as barely articulated lives is palpable.

Loaded with facile social themes, opaque characters, pointlessly intricate flashbacks, and inflated technique.

The unfunniest comedy I can recall seeing in ages.

I don't see this slightly better-than-average drug thriller, with slightly better-than-average direction by Steven Soderbergh, as anything more than a routine rubber-stamping of genre reflexes.

I was bored well before the end, but found the first half hour pretty funny.

Beautiful and challenging documentary.

The first four letters say it all.

Terminally boring.

Considering the 32 writers (including Tom S. Parker, Jim Jennewein, and Steven E. de Souza) who worked on this live-action adaptation of the 60s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series about a Stone Age family, one might have expected a few funny lines here and there, but this is mirthless (and worthless) from top to bottom.

Grim, phantasmagoric view of recent and not-so-recent Russian history.

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

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

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.

As an action thriller with music by Isaac Hayes it's not bad.

Thanks to a fairly good script, this thriller about a Soviet cop sent to Chicago to apprehend a Soviet drug dealer is a respectable enough star vehicle.

Not all of these ideas are successfully dramatized, and you may have trouble believing in most of the characters, but as a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities, this 1989 film has the kind of grit and feeling that few action comedies can muster, with Eastwood and Peters interesting and unpredictable throughout.

Another giggly gross-out comedy for teenagers.

More fun to think about than to watch.

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 writing and directing of Jonathan Darby, a British TV veteran and Hollywood executive, make the proceedings neither believable nor compelling, so what might have been another "Rosemary's Baby" isn't even a halfway decent genre exercise.

The musical value of this footage is so powerful that nothing can deface it, despite the best efforts of Zwerin to do so: all the worst habits of jazz documentaries in treating the music, from cutting off numbers midstream to burying them with voice-overs (which also happens on the sound track album), are routinely employed.

Mesmerizing.

The script runs out of ideas long before he does, and the film doesn't build dramatically as much as it could. But it's an impressive debut, full of bizarre imagination and visual flair—a must for fans of offbeat horror films.

Kiarostami tries to explain himself and reveals contradictions and a penchant for hyperbole--along with surprising insights.

First-rate agitprop about the ruthlessness of South African apartheid, directed by Euzhan Palcy (Sugar Cane Alley) and adapted from Andre Brink's novel by Palcy and Colin Welland. The relentless plot is effectively set up and expertly pursued, and Hugh Masekela makes some striking contributions to Dave Grusin's musical score.

David Mackenzie, who directed the remarkable Scottish drama "Young Adam" (2003), delivers another masterful, disturbing tale of illicit passion, erotic obsession, and sudden death set in the 1950s.

This sounds like a slender premise on which to hang a feature, but director Ning Hao is more interested in ethnography and landscapes than narrative and often holds our interest by concentrating on how folklore, technology--motorbikes, cars, trucks, films, TV--and imagination affect a nomadic way of life.

Unfortunately, a conclusion stuffed with so many improbabilities that it left me gaping in disbelief. Prior to that, this is pretty much fun.

While billed as a romance and a thriller, the film strictly qualifies as neither, appealing to our prurience, guilt, hatred, and dread.

To my knowledge there's no one anywhere making films with such a sharp sense of contemporary working-class life -- but for the Dardennes it's only the starting point of a spiritual and profoundly ethical odyssey.

It's ultimately a losing battle when the audience's lack of interest in eastern Europeans is assumed at the outset.

If I were a Christian, I'd be appalled to have this primitive and pornographic bloodbath presume to speak for me.

With so many dubious elements at play, even the half-good ideas get lost in the shuffle.

Dreyer’s radical approach to constructing space and the slow intensity of his mobile style make this “difficult” in the sense that, like all the greatest films, it reinvents the world from the ground up. It’s also painful in a way that all Dreyer’s tragedies are, but it will continue to live long after most commercial movies have vanished from memory.

What's most conspicuously missing is the kind of background information needed to assess many of Eichmann's statements.

A highly enjoyable and offbeat thriller.

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

This moves back and forth between slightly clever and dopey or silly, kept vaguely watchable by the charming leads.

While it's easy to imagine an infinite number of bad courtroom comedies based on this scenario, this 1992 movie turns out to be wonderful—broad and low character comedy that's solidly imagined and beautifully played.

It has been called both detached and loaded, unfairly slanted as well as balanced by some of its critics--I can only testify that I found the film both troubling and absorbing over two separate viewings.

Very slickly and glibly put together, with a sharp eye for yuppie decor and accoutrements; even Woody's habitual, fanciful vision of an all-white New York is respected.

If you can swallow one more amnesia plot and one more recycling of favorite bits from Godard's Bande a part, pressed to serve yet another postmodernist antithriller about redemption, this has its compensations.

Despite the sudsy, overlit look of William A. Fraker's cinematography and Downey's varying success with sight gags, this is still a lot of fun. An additional kicker is provided by the picture's crazed doublethink morality, which implies that incest is OK as long as you've got amnesia.

Some of the most exhilarating camera movements and most luscious black-and-white cinematography you’ll ever see inhabit this singular, delirious 141-minute communist propaganda epic of 1964, a Cuban-Russian production poorly received in both countries at the time (in Cuba it was often referred to as “I Am Not Cuba”).

I guess one out of three ain't bad.

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

A fleet, enjoyable Jackie Chan romp.

If you're looking to be romantically captivated, this movie just might do the job.

The mirthlessly sadistic gags tend to target people in wheelchairs or hospital beds and betray a mild if all-encompassing disgust for the source material and the audience.

John Zorn wrote the percussive score, which is compelling throughout.

Despite the flashback structure, this is a film in which mood matters more than plot, while the hero's heroic stature steadily shrinks.

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

The facts of their grim treatment, often exacerbated by their estrangement from their countries of origin, sometimes recall the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Anticapitalist propaganda that persuades and uplifts is in short supply these days.

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

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.

One more sluggish, artfully framed thriller with Rembrandt lighting set in a New York borough--a kind of picture that's awfully hard to do in a fresh manner.

The notion that Page, like Marilyn Monroe, was too ditzy to know what she was doing is more a mythological construct than an observation.

Roman Polanski's first film in English (1965, 105 min.) is still his scariest and most disturbing--not only for its evocations of sexual panic, but also because his masterful employment of sound puts the audience's imagination to work in numerous ways...As narrative this works only part of the time, and as case study it may occasionally seem too pat, but as subjective nightmare it's a stunning piece of filmmaking.

The film certainly held me, and even fooled me in spots (when it wasn't simply confusing), but when the whole thing was over I felt pretty empty. It would be facile to say it substitutes style for content; actually, it substitutes stylishness for style.

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

The source material has undergone some sentimental softening, though Hope Davis, as the heroine's sister, does a swell job of making sanity seem obnoxious.

The film is all but crushed by Tom Cruise's screen-hogging demand that everything collapse and swoon around him. If the star gave us more of a rest, we might have more of a movie.

Tim Burton's new movie is gorgeous -- shot by shot it may be the most impressive thing he's done.

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

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.

There are still plenty of laughs and some inventiveness along the way...although some of the gags and contrived plot moves stumble over their own cuteness.

A throwaway comedy that really delivers.

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

This gets very suspenseful (as well as fairly gruesome) in spots, and if it never adds up to anything profound, it's still a welcome change to have a lesbian couple as the chief identification figures.

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

As old-fashioned movie fun, this isn't bad, even -- especially? -- when it skirts the edge of silliness, and it's better than the 1960 George Pal version.

Volatile and sometimes daring performances by Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Gilbert Melki, Malik Zidi, and Lubna Azabal (as twins) contribute to the highly charged and novelistic experience.

Fascinating documentary.

The talented director Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem, Deep Cover), who brought distinction even to The Cemetery Club, his previous outing, goes to sleep here, and it's hard to blame him; why stay awake for insulting hackwork like this? James Orr and Jim Cruickshank wrote this malarkey.

Alain Resnais' 2006 adaptation of a British play by Alan Ayckbourn is a world apart from his earlier Ayckbourn adaptation, "Smoking/No Smoking"; that film tried to be as "English" as possible. But this time Resnais looks for precise French equivalents to British culture, and what emerges is one of his most personal works, intermittently recalling the melancholy "Muriel" and "Providence."

It illustrates the truism that the biggest difference between European and American directors using America as a site for fantasies is that the Europeans are likelier to know what they're doing.

Professionally made, quite entertaining, and disappointingly hollow.

The result is grimly "effective," but it made me long for Hollywood junk.

The film's hatred of Ricci and Channing and its affectionate tolerance of the hero's mousy hypocrisy and his mentor's negativity are familiar Allen motifs, but the faint echoes of his best work only make this one seem grimmer.

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

You won't be too bored.

The movie is about the interactions between these characters, and though I'm still trying to figure out what all the pieces mean, there's no way I can shake off the experience.

The punchy, nonstop visual effects (including an animation segment and stylized subtitles that sometimes suggest an online chat) crowd out coherent storytelling.

It's a devastating portrait of self-deceiving obsession, and a notable improvement on Viertel's book in terms of economy and focus.

An empty-headed horror movie (1979) with nothing to recommend it beyond the disco-inspired art direction and some handsome, if gimmicky, cinematography.

Subtle and graceful directorial debut.

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.

Seems perfectly timed to coincide with the ascension to office of George W. Bush. It's a clunky effort Bush could have written and directed.

I found it more pleasurable as a time waster than either "Mission: Impossible."

Part of the grace and beauty of The Plot Against Harry stems from the fact that although it has at least three dozen characters and a complicated plot, it glides past the viewer with the greatest of ease.

A quantum leap in ambition from "Hard Eight" and "Boogie Nights" and is, to my mind, much more interesting.

All in all, an unusually amiable and well-made comedy.

Its particularities are the best thing about it.

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."

Perhaps the most remarkable thing here is Thornton's nuanced performance, but the film has other rare virtues: all the characters are fully and richly fleshed out (with some unexpected turns by John Ritter and singer Dwight Yoakam), and the story's construction is carefully measured.

Neil LaBute delivers his most interesting and powerful film to date, though it's also his most unpleasant and disturbing.

This movie has its share of laughs, but it's also Ron Howard's most personal film, and clearly his most ambitious--a multifaceted essay in fictional form about the diverse snares of child rearing.

Danny Glover, as hard-rock reliable as Spencer Tracy in his prime, plays onetime pianist Tyrone "Pine Top" Purvis.

One of the few Romero films written by someone else (Rudolph J. Ricci), it has a good eye for the kind of unglamorous middle-class life seldom seen in American movies.

The modeling of human figures and the sense of depth are both impressive; the characters themselves are mainly idiotic.

Moderately watchable but awfully predictable.

But if you can get swept up in the story, the movie is imaginative and compelling.

If you haven't lived until you've heard Geena Davis say "Suck my dick," New Line probably deserves your money.

Far and away the funniest comedy in town.

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.

There's a mechanical desire to work in as many outlandish twists as possible, and shallow grotesquerie quickly takes over.

Fernando Meirelles stresses old-fashioned storytelling and takes full advantage of his cast, including Danny Huston.

Though it lacks the sensational pizzazz of "Blackboard Jungle", the politics here are arguably somewhat better, and the supporting cast -- George Dzundza, Courtney P. Vance, Robin Bartlett, Beatrice Winde -- isn't bad either.

At some point in this endless thriller the suspense turns into an extremely unpleasant ordeal that Dahl doesn't know when to stop.

It's soon apparent that a closer model for this charming romantic comedy is "Bell, Book and Candle." The direction by Marc Forster (Monster's Ball) is so fluffy it's easy to drift along and ignore the logical lapses.

The main problem here is the gross inferiority of the new version to the old: compare Tracy's handling of the opening monologue with Martin's and you'll get a fair indication of what's become of commercial filmmaking over the past four decades.

Sometimes it's hard to tell what's mere overreaching and what's nostalgia for Hollywood's former grandiloquence.

The film offers a fascinating glimpse of the Iranian urban middle class, and though it eschews most of the pleasures of composition and landscape found in other Kiarostami films, it's never less than riveting.

Starts out silly, gets sillier by the minute, and frequently had me and most of the people around me in stitches.

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.

Marek Kanievska (Another Country) directs with relentlessly fancy visuals in a series of opulent southern California settings; Ed Lachman's cinematography is letter perfect as always in its handling of light and color (assisted here by Barbara Ling's flashy production design), but it's a pity to see it wasted on such claptrap.

Properly speaking, this isn't a movie with characters but with figures, each of them as overblown as a plastic inner tube.

Teen romance and operetta-style singing replace the horror elements familiar to moviegoers, and director Joel Schumacher obscures any remnants of classy stage spectacle with the same disco overkill he brought to "Batman Forever."

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.

With its flashy, pretentious visual effects, this is really a 98-minute dream sequence--though it's worth recalling that the most effective dream sequences tend to be only a few minutes long.

This has its moments, but most of these are engulfed by the overall murk.

Not even D.W. Griffith, Steven Spielberg, and Stanley Kubrick working together could succeed in making this pandering piece of nonsense work dramatically on any level except the most egregiously phony.

It's beautifully cast and filmed (cinematography by the matchless Robby Muller) and often quite moving, despite the fact that most of the characters are never developed much beyond mythic or parodic prototypes.

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.

Though its ending feels protracted--especially the climactic chase--it kept me reasonably distracted.