Michael Atkinson

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.