Michael Atkinson

A swamp of clichés, contrivances, and cheap ham-and-cheese hero sentimentality.

Nonchalantly freaky and uncommonly pleasurable, Warm Water may well be the year's best and most unpredictable comedy.

The lovely ball-&-socket meeting of the two artists' sensibilities is what makes the doc sing, even if it is a chronicle of a death foretold.

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai is more than just another bid for respectability, like "13 Assassins" -it may well be Miike's best film, a patient, ominous piece of epic storytelling that conscientiously rips the scabs off the honorable samurai mythology.

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.

The actors are all on target (particularly Penelope Wilton as Shaun's relentlessly cheery mum), and taken on its own shaky legs it's a wittier genre coda than "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein."

Most of all, it's an early chapter of Demy's courtship with the provincial France of his youth, with the most bewitching generation of French actresses, and with movies.

Brothers emerges as no less or more than Bier's claustrophobic compositions and unimaginative choices.

Yamada's decidedly undazzling yet expressive filmmaking approaches classicism, from a sensei training session captured in one lengthy shot to the final showdown, seen with shifting points of view that suggest a relativist unease with the cut-and-dried judgments of war culture.

The Dance of Reality may be Alejandro Jodorowsky's best film, and certainly, in a filmography top-heavy with freak-show hyperbole and symbology stew, the one most invested in narrative meaning.

Garrone's film grows in your head afterward, making royal hash out of a cultural paradigm we'll be loath to remember years from now—if, by then, everything hasn't become "reality."

A hellzapoppin’ filmization of the Offenbach opera, with stops pulled out by P&P’s resident design team and choreography by Brit-ballet arch-pope Frederick Ashton, the movie was as intensely expressionistic as any film since Caligari, and at the same time a nova of springtime élan.

Suzhou River might be more pulpy than profound, but it still sings its old song better than we've heard in years.

A near-perfect confection, a beautifully executed Hollywood all-you-can-eat salad bar of glamour, plot twists, breathtaking Mediterranean vistas, and jazz.

Emblematic of the man's (Oshima) career: ironic, ambiguous, sublime.

Aviva Kempner's utterly conventional documentary plays like a lost chapter from Ken Burns' "Baseball."

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

Dolls risks the bank on symbology as gaudy as teen anime and as heavy as a stone temple.

The entire matter of totemistic home-team dementia is roasted on a spit and then embraced for all its sorry pointlessness.

Pure, irrational, claustrophobic, gritty, unpretentious.

Hitting the ground in his ultra-naturalistic mode, Assayas only uncages his star's formidable smile once or twice and never demands our empathy, making Clean a uniquely pungent portrait of dependent personalities and the strain they put on the social weave.

Strains our patience with overacting and photography so sumptuous you can't help but ponder why so much bloodshed and mayhem is being so expertly prettified.

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.

(Paradis) delivers what might be the most affecting film performance ever given by a supermodel.

The movie neither inspires us to pine for what might've been nor makes Gilliam-style filmmaking seem like a noble pursuit.

As it is, Duris, capable and dull, is no Keitel, 2005 is no 1978, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped is no "Fingers."

As much as Lady Vengeance spins around its implacable protagonist like a rabid dog on a rope, the film becomes in its last, galling act an unlikely but stunning ensemble piece.

Formally astute, visually arresting, and fearlessly horrifying.