Michael Atkinson

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.