Michael Atkinson

Cannot help but be merely another debacle that Tammy Faye will survive, eyelashes and integrity intact.

Has only its actors to keep it afloat.

Having emerged from his new German cinema heyday as one of the world's most guileless and original documentary filmmakers, Herzog has slowly been crafting a four-dimensional fresco of the planet, its most human-resistant landscapes, and our dubious dramas in confronting the chaos.

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

Fawzi shoots the proceedings in clumsy, gotch-eyed spurts, and the level of incoherence is impressively high.

Compare it to what passes for sophisticated filmmaking in this country and the movie becomes a living instrument of cinematic humanism: lovingly intent on observing, not judging; concerned with sympathy, not control; accepting the inevitable ambiguities, not denying them.

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.

A shovelful of silly manure from the get-go.

Easily the best directorial debut of the year, and possibly the most mature and haunting film to ever come out of Scotland, Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher is a throat-catching masterpiece of lyricism, observation, and stone-cold realism.

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

The blood is raspberry syrup, the gags gag, and the film virtually falls over itself informing us how lame it is.

Confessions keeps its cards close, and Kaufman is perfectly capable of starving his screenplay to save it, and perfectly happy with being misunderstood.

Obsessives can be seductive, and Toback is interesting for the same reasons his films are often unendurable: He's not an artist so much as a giant pop-cult testicle pumping absurd energy in a rampaging, self-justifying gout.

An overproduced, video-director remake, slick and grue-marinated and loud as a sonic boom.

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

Basinger takes her shuddery Stanwyckness very seriously, but everyone else has a ball.

There's precious few yucks, for one thing, but you can't say you're surprised that the astonishingly humorless Lyne hadn't noticed or cared that the Nabokov original is a droll comedy of errors first and a self-pitying romantic tragedy second.

I'd take the stakes driven right through my platform pumps over listening to Bruce Vilanch jokes, but that's me.

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.

A bone-tired tale underneath.

Without the intrusion of voice-overs or interviews, Mylan and Shenk attained a remarkable intimacy with the strapping, earnest, startlingly beautiful teenagers.

Brilliant, mind-boggling.

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.

This movie doesn't just kill time but tortures it.

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

It's not the freshest scenario, and Baker lets Lucky sputter and moan about his fate for so long that we wonder, as his sensible girlfriend does, why we're bothering with such undiluted dickness.

It'll make you cyberlaugh, it'll make you cybercry, just like cyberlife -- One thing is certain: your boredom

15 Minutes settles into Richard Donner-style goulash.

A watchable mediocrity at best.

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

Go see this movie and you'll be...yup. You should save your money; Norm Macdonald should save his career, by quitting movies altogether.

The ride is remarkable.

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.

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.

Too amateurish to lampoon or evoke either film industry, Bollywood/Hollywood is a movie that owes its presence in theaters to a certain ethnic soccer comedy still circulating like a virus.

Kim's movie rocks -- I saw it cold a year ago, and I don't think I've been as entranced and appalled by an Asian film since Shinya Tsukamoto's "Iron Man."

A ponderous stage adaptation that expends only the mildest effort to overcome its staginess.

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.

Visconti's film remains a Euro-culture touchstone, though not nearly as convincing or visually stunning as its reputation insists.

While the line-readings are often dead-on, Fishburne's movie suffers from the usual one-room claustrophobia and Mametian repetitions.

Irritatingly repetitious and piled high with long-foreseen conclusions.

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

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

You can't help wondering how the same Fifth Gen filmmaker who made "Yellow Earth" and "Life on a String" could've fallen on such hard times, or justified such goofiness to himself.

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.)

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.

Has storytelling rambles and lapses that no amount of electrifying jump-cuts and original image-making can compensate for.

An ingenious, incredibly entertaining, Rorschach-blot meta-comedy based on a spec script (by first-timer Charlie Kaufman) that is completely unlike anything anyone has ever seen before.

Soft-boiled blarney so sluttish with Hollywood clichés it could've been made in Burbank.

The ambitions are so paltry that our response should be too: Wolf Creek is unimaginative, light on the grue and heavy on the faux-serious desperation.

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.

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.

Bloodless, lip-biting psycho-carnage.

The comedy is somewhat doused by posture and repetition, and the characters' whimsical behavior is endearing and irritating in turn. Which still makes it the absolute best neo-samurai judo farce in town.

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

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.

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

A modest, formulaic day trip from Kazakhstan.

Emblematic of the man's (Oshima) career: ironic, ambiguous, sublime.

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."

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.

Just another basketcase with a blade.