Michael Atkinson

Follows a predictable low-comedy path, but does it with such fierce appeal and beautifully wrought wit that it doesn't feel quite like any comedy American theaters have seen since the equally underrated "Grosse Pointe Blank."

This is not a movie, really, but a back-rub and a cup of tea for Tsai purists, for whom the filmmaker's company, behind or in front of the camera, is all that's required.

May be an elaborate stunt, a bungee jump, but even so, it's forceful enough to leave a rare palpitating residue.

Ishii's rough-hewn film may be the nastiest entry in its dubious but resonant subgenre since "I Spit on Your Grave." It's a black pearl for anyone who likes a little existential psychosis with their semi-softcore exploitation.

Much more so than any movie actually about spiritual discipline, the new Chinese film Mongolian Ping Pong could be a meditational object-- if, perhaps, it wasn't a sneaky comedy and, to boot, one of the most breathtaking cinematic records of landscape and sky ever filmed.

Dead flesh is a ruling motif, but Gleize's airy, observant personality makes even the graphic dismemberment of the bull, scored with flamenco stomps, buoyant and fascinating.

Perhaps little more than an object lesson in the end, the movie's nevertheless a sobering day trip, more for its hints of a forgotten history of culture collision than its sensible but rote socioeconomic sympathies.

The movie's shake-and-bake mix of "reality" and crumbling subjectivity is too deliberate to be about character--it is, rather, a game of movieness, a masquerade of Grand Guignol–as-psyche, virtually a parody of the surrealist's notion of consciousness bagged and tagged on celluloid.

The Fall of Fujimori is more-or less-than the flip side to last week's Film Forum Peru primer "State of Fear": It's a prismatic shudder, a maddening manifestation of historical ambivalence.

Farnsworth brings a smidgen of scary energy to the social hellfire, and his newbie cast often out-act the pros.

The filmmaking is fresh and unemphatic, and the acting is generally gripping.

An unassuming, unadventurous, but likable dramedy about dying and grief.

Arbeláez indulges in occasional twinges of Hollywood "emphasis," but mostly the film glides on its matter-of-fact textures.

An earnest, roughshod document, it serves as a workable primer for the region's recent history, and would make a terrific 10th-grade learning tool.

By now, grandchildren are ever-present, and stasis has set in. Apted's entire project is awesome in scale but subject to inevitable diminishing returns.

Little in a Jaoui film is particularly original, but it's all perfectly convincing.

The Weeping Meadow shares the awed sense of solemn apocalypse with his (Angelopoulos) signature films, but it's lighter, more musical and folktale-ish.

One of the year's thorniest releases.

If anything, Na's film is too much of a good thing, exceeding credibility too often (the punching-bag hero is far too lucky - good and bad - and absorbs a hilarious amount of punishment) in its pursuit of despairing violence. But that's the Korean way, and Na nails down the bottom feeder realism while slouching toward video-game hyperbole.

The most supremely odd American film of the year.

There's no missing Kellstein's unstated horror during the fight sequences, which traffic in queasy blood sport absurdity that overshadows "Battle Royale" and "The Hunger Games," because the cherubs are eight and because it's all too real.

Soldiers is righteously explicit about the damage artillery does to human flesh, and for its part, it proves relentlessly unpleasant.

As the monks themselves threaten to nod off, the film's impressive narcotic effect enters the bloodstream-or so it may seem only for the unenlightened like me.

After 9-11, a sick, scandalized lame-duck mayor became a national hero for simply keeping his composure on TV. Keating's film is a comet out of the past, but it's focused, if only circumstantially, on the future.

It's a gut-twisting story handled, largely and predictably, with asbestos mitts.

Overbay's palette is carefully lyrical, at a benumbed Martha Marcy May Marlene pitch, he pays attention to the verdant landscape and keeps his cast at a pensive and watchful low boil.

Earnest and blessed with immediate visual textures, Aviad's film is nevertheless much more a matter of feelings - shared or suppressed and then shared - than of story.

Though Lee's movie is dripping with action and beautiful details, it's aimless and, eventually, tedious.

However defined, the movie's a moody piece of Wellesian chiaroscuro (shot by Max Greene, né Mutz Greenbaum) and an occasionally discomfiting underworld plunge, particularly when the mob-controlled wrestling milieu explodes into a kidney-punching donnybrook.

Stylish, sullen, and a little predictable, Tell Me Something is the match of any American film in its quasi-genre, though you suspect that without a world market to target, it might've been even more anxious and intrepid.

Saraband doesn't ask to be considered prime-cut Bergman, and it isn't, although its slightness may not matter to the art-film starving class.

It’s a buffet of psychosexual delicacies, borrowed and otherwise, all staged with hot-blooded, straight-faced vigor.

Naturally, the worm turns again and again in this demi-Hitchcockian death trap, and Nakata knows how to shoot scenes of breath-holding paranoia: from a distance, simply, in real time. (We'll see how the inevitable remake, directed by Jonathan Glazer, measures up.)

An informative if shrill primer on the last 35 years of Peruvian plight, the new doc State of Fear may only be effective as an educational tool for Americans, whose media have told them next to nothing about one of the Western Hemisphere's most horrifying killing fields.

A sealskin-slick, cat-and-mouse romance-caper trifle with a hard-on for wealth that feels downright Trumpian.

This sweet, pensive gabfest is neither conventionally romantic nor pornographic.

The acting, by a large cast of little-known young Brits chewing on South London accents like dog bones, is uniformly splendiferous.

Nothing if not confrontational.

Moody, pretentious, but potent.

There's enough rosy-cheeked drama, triumph, and sacrifice for a ready-made Hollywood remake.

The film's blast of self-mocking overkill can be charming.

Filthy fun, if not much more.

Thick with reenactments and cute cutaways, the movie evolves into a cultural inquisition, following this stranger through the strange land of bad-news America, where the truth is still waiting to be exhumed.

Heist is a neat, bouncy, minor-key crime procedural that shakes no rafters. Glorious, freestanding Mametisms are dropped into it like beef hunks into clear soup.

Hitting the ground in his ultra-naturalistic mode, Assayas only uncages his star's formidable smile once or twice and never demands our empathy, making Clean a uniquely pungent portrait of dependent personalities and the strain they put on the social weave.

Its realism is patient and inclusive.

Ogalla makes it happen: Bedroom-eyed and shaggy, looking every inch like a reincarnation of dead-too-soon ‘70s French star Patrick Dewaere but without the haywire intensity, he's an amiable spectacle.

For all of its well-schooled orthodoxy and visual splendor, Kekexili remains somewhat off-kilter--the characters' passionate wartime camaraderie and doomed sense of martyrdom aren't quite reflected in the facts of volunteer service and devotion to a balanced ecosystem.

The film's Endsville, when we reach it, is almost an anticlimax, thanks to the masterfully orchestrated ensemble acting and the countless dramatic mini-explosions unleashed along the way.

The actors are all on target (particularly Penelope Wilton as Shaun's relentlessly cheery mum), and taken on its own shaky legs it's a wittier genre coda than "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein."

The hair may thin considerably under Brick's hat after a while, and Hammett redone remains Hammett half done, but while the plates are in the air, it's a spectacle of nerve.

In the end, we glimpse footage of the real Augiéras, but by then, the film wanders off into its own set of suggested Cagean possibilities, and what you get feels closer to a fable-essay about the meaning of art than a narrative. Sweet stuff.

By way of a tragic left hook, Haroun's relaxed movie climaxes back where it began, on the devastated home ground. The journey, however pessimistic, is like a gentle handshake.

As much as Lady Vengeance spins around its implacable protagonist like a rabid dog on a rope, the film becomes in its last, galling act an unlikely but stunning ensemble piece.

The film survives on a thick diet of genuine acting moments...Probably no other actor (Hurt) standing today could've brought this much juice to such a potentially simplistic character.

A mild upkick in pacing and texture can be credited to director Alfonso Cuarón (more Little Princess than Y Tu Mamá), who avoids Chris Columbus's mastodon-like setups and knows a bit more about whipping up atmospherics.

Im's movie approaches a seething, primitivist beauty that evokes Makhmalbaf and parallels the contrapuntal textual investigations of Resnais.

Ostensibly factual, helplessly self-conscious -- Adanggaman is being touted as the continent's first film about slavery as it was experienced on African soil—where the victims and enslavers were both native peoples.

Moving and ambitious in scale like nothing else in cinema, Michael Apted's Up films began in 1964 as a BBC news program exploring an old Jesuit maxim: "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man."

Arriaga's script (a prize at Cannes) has a lovely, fascinating shape to it, even if his crushing portrayal of white Americans--all of them, even Jones, suffering from a zombified affect and crippling shortsightedness--is somewhat counterset against his Mexicans, who are all morally balanced, if not always happy or nice.

As the miners make clear, workers have no rights in this democracy that they don't fight like dogs for, and the film has no conclusion--the combat will always continue.

Nominated last year for a short-doc Oscar, the featurette is a lovely modern mini-myth, sarcastic and Beatrix Potter–y in turn.

Slowly evolves into an oddly affecting mood piece.

As hokey as "Braveheart" and yet much more apocalyptic, Thanit Jitnukul's muscular jungle bloodbath outdoes Hollywood's recent efforts at combat ultra-realism.

Another doc sharing some of its cultural DNA, the spelling-bee melodrama Spellbound, had children, families, social conventions--Creadon's film has only words and people with a little time to waste.

Busting with clips from films Haskell Wexler shot and directed, the doc is a rare thing: an ingenuous portrait of a thoroughly Four-Square Artist, Assembled With Love And Rockets Inside A Family's Spite-Tainted Gates.

The historical road less traveled - shot in re-enactments that are obviously familiar with the terrain - is beguiling enough.

Hardly a scene goes by without a digitally fractured flashback or spasm of editing punctuation, rupturing the movie's otherwise carefully wrought sense of authenticity.

This peculiar and sweet film--which lushly scores the silent tournaments with Henry Mancini and Tommy Dorsey--more or less leaves it at that, exploiting the poetic surreality of the overdressed Zulus in Pierre Cardin primping in the basements and barren fields of the Transvaal but resisting the urge to contextualize or explain it.

Much of what Faithless contains happens off-screen, told and retold as stories within stories, and so the actors typically work like oxen.

There are trifling signs of freshmanship, but also a steady observant eye, and in the end Leap Year bears heartbreaking witness to hopeless depression, isolation, and the failure of sex as few movies ever have.