Michael Atkinson

Requiring an enormous amount of suspended disbelief, the original Rings may be a culture-specific phenom; despite strenuous efforts to Americanize Nakata's field of bad dreams, the preview audience did a lot of cackling.

Resuscitates the filmgoing summer with a vital jolt of pure piss and vinegar.

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.

Might be structured like a soggy house of cards, but it's shot beautifully and acted expertly.

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.

Madagascar's relaxed density is a relief given the DreamWorks tendency to overbear, overblast, and overcaricaturize.

Not only is the dialogue endless...it's like driving behind a 15 mph geezer on a one-way street.

Invoking unpleasant memories of "Caligula" (only without the sex), Titus does no justice to Shakespeare.

Strangers With Candy regularly lampoons junkie-reparation melodramas and after-school specials, but with so little focus it's never clear what the film, or even Sedaris's vaudeville buffoon incarnation, is supposed to be parodying. That may be its fascination for some--it's a satire without a baseline, free-floating in its own self-indulgent ether.

Though rife with incidental plot holes, Foote's movie feels right even when nothing important is happening...which is much of the time.

Manure of a relatively clover-scented variety, George Hickenlooper's The Man From Elysian Fields is at primal odds with itself.

Israel's one-man new wave, Amos Gitai, surveys his nation's hardscrabble quotidian in Alila, which dallies with both Kiarostamian spirit and Altman-esque fabric, examining the intersecting lives of a dozen or so Tel Aviv residents.

Far from engaged, the film practically surrenders in an arthritic faint.

May worship heedlessly at Duras's memory, but it's a testament to Moreau alone.

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.

It's easily the most disarming and inventive movie made for genre geeks in years.

Appears to have been written and directed by a grade-school dropout snorting airplane glue.