Michael Atkinson

Like the film, Pai's character is muddily conceived and ill-focused, but the coltish, tremulously delicate Castle-Hughes is a hypnotic camera subject.

As news, it smokes CNN.

Berberian may sound like it's more fun to pick over afterward than watch, but it's also masterfully crafted.

Good Night, and Good Luck's primary handicap is history itself -- the toe-to-toe televised dialogue between McCarthy and Murrow was, however arguably vital to the Wisconsin senator's eventual retreat, brief and less than epochal. Even so, the wonderfully mustered context wins out.

The film will come to share the video store shelf with Harlin's infinitely stupider rendition soon enough, but it's a shame they couldn't have been released theatrically head-to-head -- a death match-cum-clinical trial that might've supplied some objective stats on how much condescension the American moviegoer actually enjoys.

Maddin's movie is, frame for frame, the densest and most spectacular (albeit cardboard-cheap) film playing anywhere.

But Monsters, Inc. -- directed by Pixar soldier Pete Docter, not by master digital comic John Lasseter -- turns out to be stingy on context, commentary, and the prism-ing view of pop culture that made the earlier films mint.

The Central Park Zoo is cheaper, you can walk away from the penguins after 10 minutes, and it has snow monkeys and beer.

The cast never skips a beat, particularly Mark Margolis as the most obnoxious dinner customer in cinema history and Summer Phoenix as his unfazed waitress.

The sense of continuing life is quietly remarkable.

Oasis is utterly beguiling because Lee, like many other percipient Asian filmmakers, is simply more attentive to his characters' emotional tumult than the audience's.

Nothing if not confrontational.

It's a gut-twisting story handled, largely and predictably, with asbestos mitts.

One of the year's best films, and certainly its most challenging so far: At more than three hours, watching it is less like consuming entertainment and more like living.

Im's movie approaches a seething, primitivist beauty that evokes Makhmalbaf and parallels the contrapuntal textual investigations of Resnais.

It's a satisfying swan song.

Confident, mature, deeply conceived, and convincingly inhabited, it's a surprisingly humane film -- despite the close-range shotgun spray.

Continuing the autobiographical torrent begun nearly 30 years ago, Bright Leaves is an utterly mundane miracle, a sampling of gentle insight and poetic retrospection quietly at odds with the exploitative culture around it.

Little in a Jaoui film is particularly original, but it's all perfectly convincing.

Skolimowski's Eastern Bloc–existentialist chops finally emerge in the last act, as the futility of looking for a diamond in the snow evolves into a sex-death underwater ballet.

At its most contemplative, The Trilogy is a stirring and shrewd portrait of lives lived in oblivious parallel. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]

Obsessives can be seductive, and Toback is interesting for the same reasons his films are often unendurable: He's not an artist so much as a giant pop-cult testicle pumping absurd energy in a rampaging, self-justifying gout.

Much of what Faithless contains happens off-screen, told and retold as stories within stories, and so the actors typically work like oxen.

Keane is a painfully specific figure but at the same time a totem, lean and frightening, for a morass of modern anxieties. That might be this phenomenal film's emergent achievement: Its raw hopelessness is its universality.

The actors all function as best they can as glowering clichés, though the narrative's temporal jump presents difficulties.

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.

While the astonishing street footage of "l'affaire Langlois"--perhaps more familiar to the French than to us--is where this exhaustive talking-heads portrait becomes beautifully, bafflingly surreal, the whole project, however conventional, has the allure of a communal embrace, a home movie of a motherland left irrevocably in the past.

Wacky, vividly conceived but mundanely executed cartoon fantasy.