Michael Atkinson

Squint through the humbug, and there's some genuine life going on.

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.

Seasonally it's more appropriate as a May Day bacchanal, but in any month Demy's movie makes for an evocative globe-paperweight tableau of its place and time, and a concise demonstration of the disquietude inherent in classic fairy tales.

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.

Nolan and his co-screenwriter David Goyer can only press the big buttons so hard—it's still an old-school superhero summer movie, the plotting tortuous, the characters relegated to one-scene-one-emotion simplicity, the digitized action a never ending club mix of chases and mano a manos.

Sags, lollygags, and blusters too much to sustain the what-the-hell momentum that Kitano achieves in his best movies.

A decent little exercise in nativist outrage, Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, with its dynamic between indigene and colonial oppressor, could've easily been a western.

Pure, irrational, claustrophobic, gritty, unpretentious.

A competent, earnest ethnographic video doc that never quite rises above its own best intentions.

Now, we have Jeremy Renner as another Treadstone mega man (there were nine, apparently), and though he is a likable enough pug-nosed action figure, the Damonlessness is sorely felt.

It is, for a contemporary CGI-fraught fantasy-slash-living-video-game, not at all bad, dotted with moments of Bosch and steady on its storytelling feet.

Israel's one-man new wave, Amos Gitai, surveys his nation's hardscrabble quotidian in Alila, which dallies with both Kiarostamian spirit and Altman-esque fabric, examining the intersecting lives of a dozen or so Tel Aviv residents.

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

It's not a movie you could call dispassionate, however aimless and unfocused. It's a Molotov cocktail tossed in several directions at once.

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

Has one of the most stupendously tasteless premises in cinema history, and much of the time when this movie tries to beckon a smile, the effect is closer to astonished nausea.

For all of the film's preciousness, the pungent notion of having your young-teen self gazing in horrified disappointment at the adult you've failed to become is as fresh a thematic undertow as it is disquieting.

Casting Tokyo as a neon wilderness thick with aged "perverts" and teenage pimps, the movie frames a critique of socially permissible pedophilia as indelible as Harada's eavesdropping mise-en-scène.

Murray is always pleasurable company, and his barely suppressed soulfulness might've supported this dawdling big-fish story if its insistent larkiness had abated and let a little reality in, as had "Rushmore."

Instead of hitting the gas and allowing the scenario to rock 'n' roll with g-forces, Reitman keeps his movie small, unvaried, slack, and deliberately and oddly, completely smoke-free.

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

It's all about the performances. Kechiche is reserved and superbly troubled, but Wright Penn, her stardom-crippling reserves of bitterness and bile rising to the surface, is a scary monster in full bloom, and her habitation of this wacky role makes the movie worth its weight in pixels.

It's a shame that Jeepers Creepers cops out -- as American genre movies have been doing for years -- and plays it safe with an F/X-heavy creature that no one would believe in a thousand years.

You're not sure what this is till it's over, but certainly Hawke's performance is his nerviest and most sincere in a decade.

The naked, artless display of nerve and rebellious bile is altogether unique in modern movies.

Rock is brave, fully invested in his character, and with a wide-open face and foolish grin, outrageously funny. It's a singular performance achieved without condescension or camp. Who'd a-thunk it?

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.

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

Hribar's film is not remarkable or ingenious in its creation of ethnic gusto and peripheral naturalism, but it's adept enough for a pass on M:i:III.

Hilary and Jackie tries far too hard to dictate emotional involvement right out of the gate, and you're left counting off the doom-laden cues for things that are sure to return full circle.

It's boilerplate Miramax: a sentimental import with lovingly photographed Euro locale.

Electric Shadows is committed to movies-as-escape swoonery, but the script's late disasters are also predicated on cinema and filmgoing, suggesting an ambivalence the rest of the film seems oblivious to.

Machuca is still a half-measure. Wood is fastidious about period set design, but not much else; rather than burning with experience, the film feels opportunistic.

Sometimes clumsy and dry, always sympathetic, and wryly interested in the impact food has on social intercourse, Be With Me is eventually affecting once its elliptical shape becomes clear.

But it's Lopez's movie, and its limitations are hers: Both actress and movie tackle emotional turmoil with a minimum of insight.

Taking the medium slopes and never venturing into extremities, Shepard gets all of his laughs if not the ironic heart-tugs, and his cast is perfectly in tune. (Davis in comedic-observant mode is funnier than most American actresses in fifth gear.)

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

It's a generous document of cultural passage, and not incidentally, the sexiest naturally nudist American movie since Murnau's "Tabu." Moss, however, keeps himself out of the picture and neglects massive amounts of context that might've made Same River a stunner.

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

The doc is also fat with film clips from before and after the 1979 revolution, but innocent of sensationalism as they are, Iranian films aren't terribly quotable—except when used to illustrate how filmmakers must choreograph their action so that men and women never touch on-screen.

Bad Guy, one of the seven films in Kim's fascinating back catalog, is another kind of cocktail--simple, bitter, served straight and in an unwashed glass.

A film the family might've made themselves: sophomoric, hagiographic, amateurishly strobe-happy, and thoroughly hippiefied.

One Missed Call, one of the five movies he made in 2003, is no more than Miike's shot at generating a polished, rote, expertly composed J-horror flick.

We're accustomed to an omniscient understanding of what movie characters, particularly in dramas about love and loss, are thinking, but Hong distributes information with a saline drip. Often, of course, his two lonely fools don't quite know what they're thinking, either--Woman can sometimes come off like an introverted "Carnal Knowledge" with two Jack Nicholsons.

De rigueur hypocritical as it may be coming from Hollywood, Click is a cultural critique, with the dull blade and impact of a battle-ax... But it's a farce about loss, and it doesn't flinch.

It is, like most, an unnecessary remake, but the new, digitally boosted Dawn of the Dead brings it on with a 10-minute overture that might be the most upsetting tin-can apocalypse modern movies have ever seen.

She (Rossellini) is radiant in a profoundly ordinary and believable way, as always, and stirs up generational pathos all by herself.

A pleasant and surprisingly polished fish-out-of-water comedy.

Just isn't funny enough to sustain the lunacy.

The first 15 minutes of Nowhere to Hide rock, and after that it's got nowhere to hide from its own excesses.

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

A cute, clichéd, coming-of-age comedy.

The movie is a shambles, a rambling, disjointed love tragedy with a story that amounts to little more than a mess of fade-outs, sloppy montages, and dramatic sketches.

As a portrait of a man barely qualifying for a cinematic portrait, Benjamin Smoke is a trifle, but when Sillen and Cohen turn their cameras on the weedy, workaday, hellhole America that Benjamin calls home, the movie comes alive.

For many, the enticement of seeing two old pros smartly step through their pressurized pas de deux might be reason enough to buy a ticket.

Aviva Kempner's utterly conventional documentary plays like a lost chapter from Ken Burns' "Baseball."

A pale imitation of the original Winnie the Pooh Disney shorts of the '60s, but a vast improvement on the current Pooh TV series and straight-to-tape specials.

Feels repetitive and impacted.

It's a polished, beautifully made movie with a rotten heart.

The film has a standard trajectory, but the details are unpredictable: Kitano fluctuates between goofy pratfalls. . . and elliptical pathos.

If you're expecting an experience approximately as dumb, badly acted, and childish as a pro wrestling match, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Might be structured like a soggy house of cards, but it's shot beautifully and acted expertly.

Showing the sex seems to be the film's raison d'etre, which gets you only so far.

Likable, but frustratingly lazy, Ghost Dog has coolness running all through it, but little substance.

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

Clubfooted but earnest, Pandya's movie never forgets about its second-gen issues, but never quite plumbs them, either.

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

Exploring a specific generational moment in mid-century Italy's social weft, Amelio's family saga might be his grimmest film, if only for the tragic exploitation of fraternity.

Gaby Dellal's cynically mushy film, like "The Full Monty" and its ilk, is best savored only by its target demo: middle-classers who see one imported film a year, the selection in question requiring working-stiff melodrama and leprechaun burrs gently and lovably mangling the English dialogue.

If the title, knee-jerk cast, pop-song intro, and schmaltzy plotline of his new film Changing Times is any indication, he's (André Téchiné) now the French mainstream, the premier Gallic pilot of high-toned soap opera.

If I were 13, I might be sufficiently entranced by the movie's bicycle stunts (down stairs! across countertops!) and wouldn't be wondering why ideas for science fiction films haven't progressed very far from "Star Trek's" first seasons all those decades ago.

Left with barely any there there, Morley compensates with long reenactments starring look-alike Zawe Ashton that are never quite convincing but instead suck more air out of the haunting vacuum left behind in Vincent's wake.

Suggest a Clintons-at-home scenario for 2001 -- haunted by the ghosts of dalliances past.

Artless but seductive.

Even though Gray is no raw-boned rookie-he has made TV movies for decades, plus, back in the day, a single Steven Seagal floater-his movie is rather inexcusably obvious, going for "troot," but recycling dese-dose-dem clichés already pressed into plastic lumber 25 years ago.

The Aviator could've been a "Raging Bull" brother film, given that masterpiece's crystalline purity of purpose and humiliated courage. But it brakes far short.

Hardly gay camp for nothing, sword-and-sandal epics cannot help but teeter on the brink of self-mockery, and Troy, for all its grim seriousness, embraces both the clichés and the beefcake.

It's a small movie trying to seem epic, or a bloated monster trying to seem lean (real B movies don't have 14 producers), but it's clear that at 99 minutes, 16 Blocks should've been at least 20 minutes shorter still.

If this silly retread works at all, it's because of Coogan, who comes at the creaky premise with almost Streepian commitment and who is destined, it would seem, for better things.

For all of its careful realism, Lan Yu is constructed around clichés, plummeting toward a modestly heroic sacrifice and a tearjerking act of fate. But Kwan is a master of shadow, quietude, and room noise, and Lan Yu is a disarmingly lived-in movie.

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.

However misjudged and evidently cobbled together in the editing room, Dark Blue does have the nerve to drive right through the riots with Russell's saber-toothed bigot, implicitly linking the two phenomena and not being shy about the suffering on either side of the combat.

Quindlen's book is wry and deeply sad in its prose, but watching actors run this very simple maze is significantly less entertaining, or convincing.

It's a TV show and a facile one at that.

The film slowly sheds its convincing identity as nonfiction and becomes a cruel parody of making-of docs, studio-movie pandering, and showbiz egomania.

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.

When he isn't overreaching for absurdity, Curtis can write bouncy patter, but each character gets about 60 seconds before the movie jumps deck to the next love-seeker and the next moony pratfall.

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.

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

It might be worth enduring the Limburger to see Fraser morph from freckled-faced Rod McKuen dweeb to seven-foot albino ball star and never miss a beat.

Cursed--but ironically!--with stomach-churning '60s decor, Slevin might round off in Park Chanwook country, but the lingering sense of it is as an amusement park for the actors, who are as infectiously overjoyed for the bouncy badinage as preschoolers on Christmas morning. Like tired parents, our enjoyment is primarily vicarious.

Michôd wants a Greek epic but doesn't have the material. Animal Kingdom is a work of obvious ambition, and seeing a debut filmmaker swing for the fences like this is its own kind of moviehead satisfaction.

Wastes a ton of potent material.

Would that Harris had simply let the images and their historical context speak for themselves. His narration is simplistic and narcissistic... and the textual ideas he and his interviewees present about the intersection between race and imagery are hardly fresh.

The film will come to share the video store shelf with Harlin's infinitely stupider rendition soon enough, but it's a shame they couldn't have been released theatrically head-to-head -- a death match-cum-clinical trial that might've supplied some objective stats on how much condescension the American moviegoer actually enjoys.

Director John Irvin, whose hapless 40-plus-year résumé runs from early Schwarzenegger to late Harold Pinter, never gets in the way, but the resulting sangria cocktail is mild, unchallenging, and kinda dull.

As the full-length sorta-satire it has become, Edmond is all sizzle and little meat, a veritable tangent act dropped from "Glengarry Glen Ross" because it was several marks too silly.