Michael Atkinson

Suzuki has made the ultimate meta-movie, a self-parodying, surrealist gangster daydream as intoxicating and insubstantial as an absinthe swoon.

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.

Easily the year's most trying, tormented, and thrilling movie ordeal.

It's a small movie trying to seem epic, or a bloated monster trying to seem lean (real B movies don't have 14 producers), but it's clear that at 99 minutes, 16 Blocks should've been at least 20 minutes shorter still.

Gay jungle sex (gasp!), gone-native intellectuals, tribal rituals (gulp!), cannibalism (none of which the film shows, by the way) -- it sounds like a "Weekly World News" front page, not the thematic fodder of a highbrow non-fiction film.

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.

The commonest sort of cultural pasteurization.

The best film ever made about competitive surfing in Papua New Guinea (and Best Documentary of the year as per Surfer Magazine).

Naturally, the worm turns again and again in this demi-Hitchcockian death trap, and Nakata knows how to shoot scenes of breath-holding paranoia: from a distance, simply, in real time. (We'll see how the inevitable remake, directed by Jonathan Glazer, measures up.)

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

The movie does what any self-respecting politician would do: sidestep the issues, soft-pedal mortal costs, talk a fat game, and divert your attention away from history with exercises in spectacle and power.

Earnest and blessed with immediate visual textures, Aviad's film is nevertheless much more a matter of feelings - shared or suppressed and then shared - than of story.

Unoriginal and mired in bad jokes.

If this silly retread works at all, it's because of Coogan, who comes at the creaky premise with almost Streepian commitment and who is destined, it would seem, for better things.

Fox's briskness leaves certain questions gaping open. As in, how cynical and derisive is she deliberately being of Rinpoche's teachings, since all we get are trite homilies and vague advice?

For some fans, the taste of on-location color matters most, but Nuñez's idea of the characters' ordinariness translates to flavorlessness.

Moody, pretentious, but potent.

The voyage is never less than interesting, even when you have no idea where it could possibly go.

Schmaltz served in a hand-painted cup, Happy Times culminates in a Chekhovian complement of two narrated letters that have a mutually corresponding force the rest of the film only hints at. By then, our hopes have fatally diminished.

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.

The most supremely odd American film of the year.

A classic Sundance résumé movie -- texturally interesting, bubbling with ideas, and as structurally predictable as a cardboard box.

The three stars are all perfectly naturalistic, but their roles are too bloodless and their patter too dry.

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.

If the movie stops short of exploring its own baggage, the actors still make for unforgettable company.

Barrett's trajectory is exciting, but his tribe is hilariously, dryly Irish about the experience.

Ivey hits the turf pitching and catching dialogue like a pro, but nothing could have saved What Alice Found from a fundamental cinematic illiteracy.

The frequent song interludes will distract the kids (but send the adults into comas), and the anti-Disney satire rages as never before.