Michael Atkinson

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.

Strains our patience with overacting and photography so sumptuous you can't help but ponder why so much bloodshed and mayhem is being so expertly prettified.

Polished and adroit ado about next to nothing, Hodges's film owes everything to Owen, who nails the vaguely unsavory, unreadable, half-lidded hunks that inhabit every profitable entertainment-industry outpost.

(Paradis) delivers what might be the most affecting film performance ever given by a supermodel.

The movie neither inspires us to pine for what might've been nor makes Gilliam-style filmmaking seem like a noble pursuit.

As it is, Duris, capable and dull, is no Keitel, 2005 is no 1978, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped is no "Fingers."

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.

Formally astute, visually arresting, and fearlessly horrifying.

Some of the buckshot hits its target: Shrek's second sidekick, assassin-turned-comrade Puss in Boots, is voiced by Antonio Banderas as an outrageously mock-dramatic Spaniard with most of the pig-pile screenplay's best toss-offs.

Metropolis is "A.I." without tears.

Arresting, visually accomplished documentary.

The movie's only discernible purpose is as publicity for the book. An admitted egomaniac, Evans is no Hollywood villain, and yet this grating showcase almost makes you wish he'd gone the way of Don Simpson. Instead, he'll probably get an Irving Thalberg award.

First-timer Dylan Kidd's film isn't Molièrian in its misanthropy, but rather as boneheaded as an hour of talk-radio hobgoblin Tom Leikis.

Buoyant with quiet smiles and unpretentious fondness.

Kate Plays Christine is a documentary, but often a totally fake one, cheekily defining itself as its own making-of DVD supplement and documenting its own evaporation into near-nothingness. Every scene cries — or whines — about the entire project's inherent impossibility.

Winterbottom was set on bare-bones realism, and so the scalding lyricism of ferocious terrain and sociopolitical absurdity seen in, say, "Kandahar" or "A Time for Drunken Horses," is never resourced.

White’s revelation-free, nostalgia massage of a film works the archivals with genuine fondness.

The movie is so brisk, even-handed, and realpolitik you're never quite sure if it has anything to say.

Chabrol sets us up, of course, which is half the fun, and the experience is a delight for lack of pomposity (his visual storytelling remains no-nonsense) as well as genre expertise.

The details are eye-opening (or ear-opening, in the case of marching songs taught to the new Marines about slaughtering Arab schoolchildren), but soon Foulkrod's film backs itself into a Support Our Troops corner.

When it isn't TV-movie familiar, Egoyan's film is bughouse crazy, mixing in campy pulp elements that bleed pressure away from the story.

Shot in silvery black-and-white, Duck Season is not charmless, just insubstantial.

The film makes no more or less sense than Ridley Scott's Legend or Jim Henson's Labyrinth, and in fact has a creaky, blue-gel '80s-ness to it, but for many, keeping up with Miike's cranked output is an end in itself.

As fascinating as the case is as history, however, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy is a TV show, not a movie.

As obvious in many ways as its title (and its poster), Mean Creek retains a gritty working-class ambience, but it feels over-rehearsed.

Plays like "The Honeymooners" might have if Ralph Kramden were from Pakistan, but with less laughs and more ignorant spite.

Turturro's movie is all surface, all artifice, and little substance. Actors love artifice; the rest of us wait for it to clear so we can find something meatier.

Produced by veteran Chicago doc outfit Kartemquin (and correspondingly bullshit-free), Siegel’s archive-and-talking-heads narrative revels in forgotten details—like Ali, during his suspension from boxing, appearing in an Off Broadway musical about slavery, the taped footage from which is eye-popping.

Another break in the tension is the inescapable fact that every Holocaust movie, however hair-raising, essentially thrums the same self-sacrifice-versus-self-preservation chord. It's not fair, but there it is: We've been here before.

Involuntary doesn't simplify its stories into a single point of view or idea; rather, Östlund is merely visiting these high-pressure moments in which Swedish culture frays, melts down, and betrays its ultra-civilized idea of itself.

Harmless and affectionate, The Dish gives its clichés breathing room, and so a few are pleasantly surprising.

It is merely another inept teen movie ripping off better horror movies.

It seems easily the most valuable piece of film to emerge about the war in all of its three-plus years.

A Matter of Taste's largest handicap is restraint: It's too tasteful. The climactic crisis is a broken leg, and the off-screen denouement is unimaginative.

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

Shower isn't a bad movie -- just a baneful sign of things to come.

Plays best as a dry exercise in historical doublespeak and rationalization.

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.

On one hand a seat-o'-pants digital-video quickie designed for blunt trauma, and on the other a veritable index of classic genre-stuff, Boyle's film creates an acute sense of movie-viewing danger.

In terms of raw wit and fearless satire, the South Park kids put Mike Myers and Adam Sandler to shame.

It's such an accomplished, beguiling film in its details that you almost don't notice that the story is scattershot, arbitrary, and thin -- almost.

It's a uniquely lonely film, and one of the year's most memorable.

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.

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

Madagascar's relaxed density is a relief given the DreamWorks tendency to overbear, overblast, and overcaricaturize.

The cast is largely nonprofessional, and the story has the simplicity of myth.

Mild as satire and completely unconvincing as tragicomedy.

The loss of the first film's hurtling who-am-I? story engine is keenly felt, and too much time is spent observing the characters get on and off planes, trains, and automobiles.

Rarely falters but neither does it ever take flight.

Slick and grown-up as Richard Gere himself, this intricate fiscal thriller takes a dead bead on extreme privilege.

An explosive experience...and you have to love the movie's rabid energy and lust.

Hardly the trippy icon the doc’s title suggests, the artist is now more like everyone’s slightly seedy hedonistic granduncle, happiest sketching cartoon pigs and walking the moors of County Cork.

A pleasant old man's movie, in the end, but not one for which Boorman will be remembered.

The tale's faux-fable simplicity is cunningly eloquent.

The upshot is a general fog of two-dimensional characterization, slowly churning plot gearwork, and an ineffective air of forced lyricism.

Far from creating a pungent portrait of a society gone mad with blood and greed, Schroeder's movie strives for political points while it's whiffing on simplicities like character, motivation, and believability.

All of the filmmaker's fine work and good intentions cannot make this repetitive and finally tiresome saga fly.

It's a film, a rather gorgeous one, of glances and ephemera and delicate metaphors.

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

What's abundantly clear is how far this kind of moviemaking has come from any knowledge of real criminal life; it's a geek's ineffectual daydream of mayhem.

Not a farce, or comedy or drama, but essentially a doodle interrupted by nouveau ballet performances, the entire contraption assembled to please the ego of Neve Campbell.

Accomplished, middlebrow costume-drama entertainment. It's not so simple that it could be mistaken for the work of, say, Lasse Hallström, and yet it's not so sophisticated that audiences of "Chocolat" would be mystified.

It is only once the movie has exhausted its roster of "weird" notions and contrived images that it finds its emotional footing, leaving you with one half of a lovely, woebegone film.

Hackford's movie falls into a meandering saunter. As the music grows dull, so does the movie.

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

Although it's thoroughly retooled, H.G. Wells's scenario doesn't allow for many soft landings, and the extreme respect for havoc on view quite properly keeps the Spielbergian cutesies to a minimum.

15 Minutes settles into Richard Donner-style goulash.

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.

The film is a vehicle for Applebroog-appreciation, daughterly and otherwise.

The movie is trite like the ocean is big.

Plenty of twisty scripting makes the queasy damage seem conceptually neat and tidy, as if that's a good idea, but what we need here is a little more meat.

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

One of the year's best imports and one of the very few queer movies that transcends its sexual orientation.

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.

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.

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.

A superb, wise, and witty Taiwanese film about being single and what to do about it.

It's yet another serial killer movie, a plot element that by this point in time, far from being disturbing or fascinating, is just plain dull.

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.

Still, the textures of Refn's wallow in bad behavior are completely convincing, if the plot-stuff is a little familiar and if the overarching notion that, as Quentin Tarantino said somewhere, "gangsters have kitchens, too" seems by now valid but no longer terribly fresh.

A modest and mildly pretentious mediocrity in the Woodman canon.

Honestly, Courtney and his crew all seem like nice people, but if there's an unironic audience for this kind of romantic jock-cup fondling, I'm not interested in knowing it.

Romero's fourth-grade dialogue doesn't help matters, but anyone seeking out the latest achievements in cranial ruptures, spewing-blood gouts, and ground-beef spillage need look no further.

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.