Michael Atkinson

Demonstrates that even if you live in a country intimately familiar with fascist occupation, you might still not have the least clue how to communicate that experience on film.

For many the question remains about how Treadwell's eventual death should be regarded--as a tragedy, as a fool's fate, or as comeuppance for daring to humanize wild predators and habituating them to human presence. Herzog's perspective is, of course, scrupulously nonjudgmental.

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.

Inept, unfunny, and so brimming with bad ideas it's a wonder it wasn't manufactured by mandrills rather than adult humans.

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.

As amusing and sharply performed as it is, Lisa Picard quickly grows thin and dull. Perhaps it would have been better as a real documentary, with Kirk and DeWolf simply playing their pathetic selves.

Brand-new and uproariously unimproved.

Stilted as a beach house, the movie crawls from one harangue to another.

It's not easy to endure, despite -- or due to the embarrassment of -- an all-star cast.

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.

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

Costner's not a mannered showboat, and what we get isn't a riff—it's a semi-oblivious glimpse of bitter outlaw banality.

Garcia's tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few. Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reason--or at least no reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about.

This "Black Hawk Down" theft is a trial by cliché until the climax, which suggests a dress rehearsal for the torching of Baghdad.

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.

Despite terrific comic acting...and an atomic first hour, Fight Club makes a few wrong turns and ends up lost itself.

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

A tepid and surprisingly dull farce stamped from the "About Mary" mold.

The movie's single brilliant invention -- Julianne Moore as a used, contentious, profoundly odd floozy on her own magical mystery tour.

What should have been an idiosyncratic 20-minute short is distended by repetition and loads of standard indie-film time-killers.

One of our very few consummate movie star actors, Washington can't quite elevate this dismal material as he's been able to do in the past, but he retains his dignity.

A thoroughgoing mediocrity that musters up just enough low-down chuckles to remind you that you're not watching another Freddie Prinze Jr. yawner.

On a strictly experiential level, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes is remarkable, tactile, and affecting; as a piece of sociopolitical culture with context and ramifications of its own, it's a worthless ration of war propaganda--ethnocentric, redneck, and enabling.

If you're considering the scenario via Japan's ubiquitous pedo-porn tendencies, you're too educated for this exhaustive, manga-based bloodbath, which trails after these angsty teenyboppers on a scorched-fake-earth path through hundreds of growling baddies of every genre size and type.

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.

Saleem, a Paris-based Kurd, displays the visual confidence and subtle screwball rhythms of a master, exploiting offscreen space, deadpan compositions, and deft visual backbeats, as well as attaining a breathtaking fidelity to real light and landscape.

The most supremely odd American film of the year.