Michael Atkinson

A modest project with an agreeably modest point of view, but it cries out for a sharp, believable naturalism Kusama simply doesn't supply.

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.

Elling is nothing if not carefully controlled hokum -- both actors, the director, and screenwriter all worked it through first as a stage adaptation of a novel by Ingvar Ambjornsen.

This shadowy film may ooze with espionage enigma, but Darby’s real-life role finds him casting himself as a crusader; he’s like a hipster Zelig, lost among media appearances, evasive social principle and TV-propagated naïveté.

By way of a tragic left hook, Haroun's relaxed movie climaxes back where it began, on the devastated home ground. The journey, however pessimistic, is like a gentle handshake.

Resnais's lightheartedness is infectious as he dispenses with the cinematic "reality" he never quite trusted, shooting the six-person farce on obvious sets, with curtains for doors and flat theatrical lighting.

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.

Ostensibly factual, helplessly self-conscious -- Adanggaman is being touted as the continent's first film about slavery as it was experienced on African soil—where the victims and enslavers were both native peoples.

From the beginning of his career a fervent, epic documentarian, Herzog is a personal filmmaker as well, and My Best Fiend is certainly his most intimate and introspective film.

It’s a buffet of psychosexual delicacies, borrowed and otherwise, all staged with hot-blooded, straight-faced vigor.

This is not a movie, really, but a back-rub and a cup of tea for Tsai purists, for whom the filmmaker's company, behind or in front of the camera, is all that's required.

Nonchalantly freaky and uncommonly pleasurable, Warm Water may well be the year's best and most unpredictable comedy.

A movie of one billion cigarettes, Hannah Arendt is about moral reason, not personality. It could do worse than lead you straight to the woman’s books.

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

Though Lee's movie is dripping with action and beautiful details, it's aimless and, eventually, tedious.

Wastes a ton of potent material.

What emerges is not only an Underdog v. Simon Bar Sinister saga but a fascinating character study.

A laughable disaster: an agonizingly long, perversely dull, childishly conceived fantasia on marital sexual angst that could only have been made by someone (like Kubrick).

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

de Broca's efficient fencing-mania melodrama brings little that's original to the table.

For all its originality, O Brother doesn't seem to have a point, or enough spark to distract us from the lack thereof.

Pretension looms, and for many the web of symbolism will be too thick. But Rampling, to her credit, helps hold the nuthouse together.

Tognazzi's use of public spaces, streets, and offices is three-dimensional and exciting in a Michael Mann–ish way, and Ennio Morricone's all-bass-register piano score keeps things nervous. But La Scorta suffers from an anemic plot pulse-you could say the judge's bodyguards did their job too well, because nothing much happens-and the anticlimax is as dull as it is pessimistic.

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.

There's no denying bespectacled, brace-ridden, homely wild child Eliza (Lacey Chabert), who can speak to animals and emerges as one of the most stirring heroines in contemporary media.

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.

A brooding, stunningly realistic portrait of familial self-destruction that raises far more questions than it can possibly answer.

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.