Michael Atkinson

Stunning in its guileless self-love, Smith's doodle-movie shows virtually no sign of being made for an audience. The 90-minute by-product of Smith's let's-shoot-a-movie pot party can be mystifying -- we've all stood soberly by as high friends guffaw at nothing in particular, but now we can pay for the privilege.

Full of well-observed supporting riffs, Crash might've accumulated more frisson had it cast a clearer eye on how social tension actually plays.

Just another basketcase with a blade.

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.

This is not the can't-we-get-along Arab-Persian world we see in most liberal nonfiction films, but a broader and helplessly apocalyptic view of an entire region crazed with anger, frustration, and bloodlust into objectifying death as a weapon, a cause for cosmic glory, and little else.

C&C hardly coalesces, but then again, it doesn't try to--never more or less than what it appears to be, the film is a slow honky-tonk thud-beat, only intermittently punctuated by a joke or idea.

One of the year's thorniest releases.

Sitting through the film is like Chinese water torture, for sure, and for reasons beyond the forced, idiotic campiness of the thing. For one thing, there is not one word of dialogue.

Years of HBO seasoning has given Garlin and his cast a sure touch and great timing...but the whole project is mean-hearted and lazy, and it dawdles in repetition and dead air as if it's got a 14-show TV season to spin out.

Takes us through reams of fascinating drama, from the first heroic forest-saving protests to the reactive police violence and resulting dead-of-night firebombs to the core group's implosion after the FBI tightens the net.

So Goes the Nation has no new conspiracy theories, settling instead for a meticulous examination of the two political parties' hellbent voter-seduction strategies, from demographic outreach to slam ads.

Exhilaratingly anxious, Dominik Moll's new film Lemming charts familiar territory but does it with gravity and panache.

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.

All in all, the movement turned out to be a godsend for Rio natives, but the film is merely a pep rally.

Predictably, the holes in the narrative set us up for a twist or three, but, in balance, it's a pleasure to be back in the wet alleys and spy-patrolled streets of the GDR, however vague they seem without '60s black-and-white cinematography.

Faust is not your great-granddaddy's selling-your-soul fable, but something new, a dreamy immersion into the messiness of myth, where hubris and desire can get lost in the chaos of time and retelling.

Either way, Kim's rather clumsily acted film remains monstrously effective ookiness, with crepuscular cinematography (by the Hollywood-destined Kim Byeong-il) that suggests a nightmare endured from inside a suffocating velvet pillowcase.

Hardly a project worthy of grown men and women.

Kill Your Darlings is an undernourished and over-emphatic film.

The director knows how to apply textural gloss, but his portrait of sex-as-war is strictly sitcom.

Easily the best millennial movie, Don McKellar's Last Night is also the only one to use the idea of apocalyptic end-time as a vehicle to explore the absurdity of human desire.

Repetitive, aimless, and as frustrating as you'd imagine any two-hour music video to be.

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.)

A film that's bound to be loathed for its irrationalities and narrative drunkenness, just as it will be beloved for its original risks and manic visual energy.

Hardly the kids'-sports movie we need, but maybe it's as much as we can handle.

It might be the most lonesome film about a tropical vacation we've seen, and the greatest film ever made about the weird socioeconomics of tourism.

May be Jordan's wildest mis-shot yet, so dense with dying fizzle and limp ideas that I began to wonder if Jordan has an evil twin, or if there are in fact several Neil Jordans, among them at least one literate stylist and one humor-handicapped village idiot.

Complain all you want about Willis's posturing and the rabbit-in-the-hat ending (predicated as it is on a vast plothole), the film is still a rarity, a studio horror movie focused on a child's traumatic stress.

An adept mood maker, Medem strains madly for cosmic alliances, fairy-tale imagery, and fated coincidences, but he triumphs only with two hot bodies, a cluttered apartment, and a Shower Massage.

Burton's films are endearing and impassioned despite the fact that they generally fail to tell a whole story, create a single rounded character, or inspire even mild laughs or chills.

The Rod Serling tension Byrkit is angling for never quite arrives, nor does any real Borgesian frisson. But thanks to its social setting, it does offer a vivid and perhaps intentional satirical portrait of L.A. culture.

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

Thrusts us into a high school senior year like no other.

It's a small, unassuming movie grasping at whole-hog homo psychopathicus, with its feet planted squarely in Texan grave dirt and its head lost in the ether of Christian derangement.

Rarely falters but neither does it ever take flight.

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.

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.

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

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.

Mature and adroitly performed but ultimately underachieving.

The film's details are spot-on, its tone ludicrously ironic, and its casting deft.

Since Lee is a sentimentalist, the film is more worshipful than your random "E! True Hollywood Story."

A modest, formulaic day trip from Kazakhstan.

It's all fascinating, but must Kalatozov's careening angel of cinema be laid bare?

Throughout, Tykwer reaches for mysteries he has no idea how to evoke, relying instead on his actors' empty stares.

Amy Goodman's narration, though correct, has a petulant, Spanish Inquisition ring to it, only made more childish by the film's cheap idealization of the senator from South Dakota as some kind of pacifist Savonarola, overdue for canonization.

The climax comes at you like a thrown cream pie, but given its faux-mythic nerve, it's tolerable. Too bad this latest station in Costner's ongoing self-crucifixion is such small potatoes until then.

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.

Kurosawa strolls through his narrative with relaxed confidence, suggesting apocalyptic significances without assuring us that he has anything particular on his mind.

Uniquely jacked into a ripe sense of antique-nursery Victoriana and buzzing with a pre-adolescent metaphoric charge, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan is a primary text of modern culture, and P.J. Hogan's live-action rendition is the only one, screen or stage, to completely uncage this changeling and give it flight.

Suzuki has made the ultimate meta-movie, a self-parodying, surrealist gangster daydream as intoxicating and insubstantial as an absinthe swoon.

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.

Easily the year's most trying, tormented, and thrilling movie ordeal.

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.

Gay jungle sex (gasp!), gone-native intellectuals, tribal rituals (gulp!), cannibalism (none of which the film shows, by the way) -- it sounds like a "Weekly World News" front page, not the thematic fodder of a highbrow non-fiction film.

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.

The commonest sort of cultural pasteurization.

The best film ever made about competitive surfing in Papua New Guinea (and Best Documentary of the year as per Surfer Magazine).

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.)

Whatever extraordinary ingredients are necessary to fashion a 1776 home run, this movie doesn't have them.

The movie does what any self-respecting politician would do: sidestep the issues, soft-pedal mortal costs, talk a fat game, and divert your attention away from history with exercises in spectacle and power.

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.

Unoriginal and mired in bad jokes.

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.

Fox's briskness leaves certain questions gaping open. As in, how cynical and derisive is she deliberately being of Rinpoche's teachings, since all we get are trite homilies and vague advice?

For some fans, the taste of on-location color matters most, but Nuñez's idea of the characters' ordinariness translates to flavorlessness.

Moody, pretentious, but potent.

The voyage is never less than interesting, even when you have no idea where it could possibly go.

Schmaltz served in a hand-painted cup, Happy Times culminates in a Chekhovian complement of two narrated letters that have a mutually corresponding force the rest of the film only hints at. By then, our hopes have fatally diminished.

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.

The most supremely odd American film of the year.

A classic Sundance résumé movie -- texturally interesting, bubbling with ideas, and as structurally predictable as a cardboard box.

The three stars are all perfectly naturalistic, but their roles are too bloodless and their patter too dry.

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.

If the movie stops short of exploring its own baggage, the actors still make for unforgettable company.

Barrett's trajectory is exciting, but his tribe is hilariously, dryly Irish about the experience.

Ivey hits the turf pitching and catching dialogue like a pro, but nothing could have saved What Alice Found from a fundamental cinematic illiteracy.

The frequent song interludes will distract the kids (but send the adults into comas), and the anti-Disney satire rages as never before.

Washington directs with proficient blandness charged only occasionally by organic acting moments.

Land of Plenty is a woozy fantasia on California dreaming, all agog at urban strife and blabby with redundant voiceover.

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.

By far the most independent independent-genre flick to grift screen space in Manhattan since Douglas Buck's "Family Portraits," James Bai's Puzzlehead has only its ideas and speculative frisson to sell it.

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.

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.

At times you can feel Van Sant trying to loosen the movie's windpipe-folding collar, but he doesn't get far, except with Busta Rhymes, as Jamal's gone-nowhere big brother.

In time, Carrey's monkeyshines, Jude Law's silhouetted reappearances as Snicket, and the inevitable descent of Beverly Hills pathos blunt the movie's fastidious dark-carnival humor.

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.

It's a simple pleasure watching an American movie that respects genre, knows its limitations, and genuflects at the memory of Don Siegel in the age of Spielberg.

An overwhelming portion of Saved! is wall-to-wall Jesus-Jesus-Jesus talk, closer to dead air than social spoof. At times, the screenplay (including Mary's voluminous narration) has the monotonous cadence of a recruitment sermon.

Authentic ethical dialogue is conspicuous for its absence, as is the potentially disturbing view of a normal, working-class corner of American society going not-so-quietly cuckoo.

What rescues Major Dundee in the end from its many conflicts and unresolved passions is Heston.

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

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

Damon and Kinnear are both pitch-perfect, inhabiting their ingenuous, codependent little universe together with the commitment of eight-year-old best friends. True to form, the Farrellys toss sophomoric spitballs at us, but nothing stems the rise of big-hearted generosity.

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.

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."

Not nearly enough time is spent in court--that is, on the movie's ostensible subject. (Besides, the down-to-the-wire deliberation scene is risibly unconvincing and abbreviated.)

Despite the soft-spoken Smith, a type-A British liaison self-named the Turbocharger, and the apparent involvement of the IRA, the doc prioritizes flash over facts, leaving you pining for the New Yorker exposé it could've been.