Michael Atkinson

Demonstrates that even if you live in a country intimately familiar with fascist occupation, you might still not have the least clue how to communicate that experience on film.

For many the question remains about how Treadwell's eventual death should be regarded--as a tragedy, as a fool's fate, or as comeuppance for daring to humanize wild predators and habituating them to human presence. Herzog's perspective is, of course, scrupulously nonjudgmental.

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.

Inept, unfunny, and so brimming with bad ideas it's a wonder it wasn't manufactured by mandrills rather than adult humans.

It's such an accomplished, beguiling film in its details that you almost don't notice that the story is scattershot, arbitrary, and thin -- almost.

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.

Brand-new and uproariously unimproved.

Stilted as a beach house, the movie crawls from one harangue to another.

It's not easy to endure, despite -- or due to the embarrassment of -- an all-star cast.

The movie is a shambles, a rambling, disjointed love tragedy with a story that amounts to little more than a mess of fade-outs, sloppy montages, and dramatic sketches.

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

Costner's not a mannered showboat, and what we get isn't a riff—it's a semi-oblivious glimpse of bitter outlaw banality.

Garcia's tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few. Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reason--or at least no reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about.

This "Black Hawk Down" theft is a trial by cliché until the climax, which suggests a dress rehearsal for the torching of Baghdad.

It's yet another serial killer movie, a plot element that by this point in time, far from being disturbing or fascinating, is just plain dull.

Despite terrific comic acting...and an atomic first hour, Fight Club makes a few wrong turns and ends up lost itself.

The Weeping Meadow shares the awed sense of solemn apocalypse with his (Angelopoulos) signature films, but it's lighter, more musical and folktale-ish.

A tepid and surprisingly dull farce stamped from the "About Mary" mold.

The movie's single brilliant invention -- Julianne Moore as a used, contentious, profoundly odd floozy on her own magical mystery tour.

What should have been an idiosyncratic 20-minute short is distended by repetition and loads of standard indie-film time-killers.

One of our very few consummate movie star actors, Washington can't quite elevate this dismal material as he's been able to do in the past, but he retains his dignity.

A thoroughgoing mediocrity that musters up just enough low-down chuckles to remind you that you're not watching another Freddie Prinze Jr. yawner.

On a strictly experiential level, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes is remarkable, tactile, and affecting; as a piece of sociopolitical culture with context and ramifications of its own, it's a worthless ration of war propaganda--ethnocentric, redneck, and enabling.

If you're considering the scenario via Japan's ubiquitous pedo-porn tendencies, you're too educated for this exhaustive, manga-based bloodbath, which trails after these angsty teenyboppers on a scorched-fake-earth path through hundreds of growling baddies of every genre size and type.

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.

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.

Saleem, a Paris-based Kurd, displays the visual confidence and subtle screwball rhythms of a master, exploiting offscreen space, deadpan compositions, and deft visual backbeats, as well as attaining a breathtaking fidelity to real light and landscape.

The most supremely odd American film of the year.

Marquise is almost ironically uninflected, like a tense game of chess. But soon the no-nonsense two-shots and scarlet-satin self-consciousness let the story build to genuine fireworks. No costume-drama escapism here, just distilled social warfare.

Written, directed, and edited with the offhand shoddiness of a day worker thinking about his evening beer.

Antitrust is anti-fun, anti-wakefulness, and anti-interesting.

It's a TV show and a facile one at that.

A walking-talking affront to every middle-class middle-ager it intends to sucker, this remake of the 1979 accidental-classic screwball hits every wrong note and trips on every chair leg.

Soldiers is righteously explicit about the damage artillery does to human flesh, and for its part, it proves relentlessly unpleasant.

I'd rather watch a forgotten houseplant dehydrate and die.

Even more of a party-hearty-Marty potlatch of silliness than its predecessor. The franchise having been established, Verbinski, Bruckheimer, and Co. have been liberated to indulge in absurdities, pile on the so-old-they're-new-again clichés, and make jokes at their own expense.

It's a chilling piece of legal hysteria, and ripe for nasty farce. But Pooh plays it all for buffoonish pratfalls and fart jokes.

This all-digital indie is, by genre standards, either a misfired doodle or an attempt to Lovecraft-ize the popular movement. Or both.

That the Cold War was a wasteful charade proves Bitomsky's point amply enough, but his movie is a repetitive bore.

Glossy, gruesome police drama.

Rarely falters but neither does it ever take flight.

At once arch, derivative, and, in the end, bizarrely lyrical.

Juliet is never less than eye-catching, but is rarely more.

As the monks themselves threaten to nod off, the film's impressive narcotic effect enters the bloodstream-or so it may seem only for the unenlightened like me.

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.

Gardos, an experienced film editor, has little narrative sense, and decent performances (except from Kinski, who just worries and huffs around) are left out to dry.

Davis has energy, but she doesn't bother to make her heroine's book sound convincing, the gender-war ideas original, or the comic scenes fly. Instead, the film is buttressed by song montages and jokey chapter titles.

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

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.

After 9-11, a sick, scandalized lame-duck mayor became a national hero for simply keeping his composure on TV. Keating's film is a comet out of the past, but it's focused, if only circumstantially, on the future.

Not only microwaves what is already four-day-old fish in Paris, but lets the original director, screenwriters, and stars do the reheating.

Red Dragon's formula is so risible and rote by now that the natural reaction to scenes of peril, torture, and suffering is flippant laughter.

It wouldn't be fair to gripe about the hundreds of plot holes; the whole thing is hole.

The film slowly sheds its convincing identity as nonfiction and becomes a cruel parody of making-of docs, studio-movie pandering, and showbiz egomania.

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

Adroit but finally a trifle flat, Mad Love doesn't galvanize its outrage the way, say, Jane Campion might have done, but at least it possesses some.

A Matter of Taste's largest handicap is restraint: It's too tasteful. The climactic crisis is a broken leg, and the off-screen denouement is unimaginative.

It seems almost incontestably...the most gorgeously photographed film ever made. [23 March 1999]

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

Mild as satire and completely unconvincing as tragicomedy.

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.

Despite exposition delivered so redundantly and witlessly you think you're in a Kaplan class, Stigmata manages to be incoherent.

When he isn't overreaching for absurdity, Curtis can write bouncy patter, but each character gets about 60 seconds before the movie jumps deck to the next love-seeker and the next moony pratfall.

Endearingly pretentious -- as if it swallowed a thick brick of Beckett and can't pass the uncooperative Beckettian stool.

Throughout, Tykwer reaches for mysteries he has no idea how to evoke, relying instead on his actors' empty stares.

Though Lee's movie is dripping with action and beautiful details, it's aimless and, eventually, tedious.

Ozon -- has finally hit a home run, and Rampling is his most remarkable RBI.

Since Lee is a sentimentalist, the film is more worshipful than your random "E! True Hollywood Story."

However defined, the movie's a moody piece of Wellesian chiaroscuro (shot by Max Greene, né Mutz Greenbaum) and an occasionally discomfiting underworld plunge, particularly when the mob-controlled wrestling milieu explodes into a kidney-punching donnybrook.

Virtually plot-free, the movie's organic cultivation of Argentina's economic tension and ethnophobic woes is smooth as silk.

Isn't terribly revealing, and though it is interesting to watch Condo paint, it's only interesting for so long.

85 percent explosions and editing idiocy (a window can't break without director Peter Hyams cutting between five different angles) and 15 percent Arnold trying to grow a third dimension. Seeing him try for "sad" is like watching a dog try to talk.

Stylish, sullen, and a little predictable, Tell Me Something is the match of any American film in its quasi-genre, though you suspect that without a world market to target, it might've been even more anxious and intrepid.

Dim and eye-rollingly foolish -- Call it Dumb, Dumber, Dumber Still, and Dumbest.

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

The digital-video results play like a flatulent teenager's first discovery of jazz, cigarettes, and hooch.

What's not recognized enough is the indelible, self-sickened performance of William Holden as Desmond's boy-toy/hired hack.

It's the casting of Liam Neeson as the nervous breakdown that turns the movie to asphalt -- it's like watching Andre the Giant play Woody Allen.

It's Korzun's film, and she is in complete control of her character, never divulging too much of the haunted woman under the studied facade of American hotsiness.

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

Because stateside newspapers aren't enough, "The Battle of Chile" (possibly the most riveting and vital historical document ever put on celluloid) should be a prerequisite to Guzmán's new doc, The Pinochet Case.

For all its originality, O Brother doesn't seem to have a point, or enough spark to distract us from the lack thereof.

It might be worth enduring the Limburger to see Fraser morph from freckled-faced Rod McKuen dweeb to seven-foot albino ball star and never miss a beat.

Safe Conduct -- a rangy, irreverent, episodic odyssey through French filmmaking during the Occupation -- is one of the very best movies ever made about the life of moviemaking.

Dissing a Bond movie is quite like calling a dog stupid, but when it has the temerity to run over two hours, you feel like winding up with a kick.

Essentially a reheating of 1982's "First Blood" -- a psychologically wounded warrior-vet pits himself against civilized America -- but the fallout this time is simultaneously more ruthless, less emotional, and duller.

Lusts for a feel-good ending the material doesn't comfortably provide. One can't help wondering how dismal Jerry and Dorothy's life together will be after the credits roll.

The sense of continuing life is quietly remarkable.

Offers director Roger Spottiswoode a chance to have the worst actor in Beverly Hills play scenes with himself.

The characters are barely characters, the story barely a story, and the elliptical filmmaking style that so besots Denis' many fans could drive you to drink.

The bubble-kid moms can whine all they want, but Bubble Boy is a liberated movie --liberated from tastefulness, of course, but also from logic, suffering, consequence, and temperance.

Cursed--but ironically!--with stomach-churning '60s decor, Slevin might round off in Park Chanwook country, but the lingering sense of it is as an amusement park for the actors, who are as infectiously overjoyed for the bouncy badinage as preschoolers on Christmas morning. Like tired parents, our enjoyment is primarily vicarious.

Disheveled tripe pieced together with the good intentions.

Michôd wants a Greek epic but doesn't have the material. Animal Kingdom is a work of obvious ambition, and seeing a debut filmmaker swing for the fences like this is its own kind of moviehead satisfaction.

Perhaps a radical re-editing of Fear X-like Lynch did on “Mulholland Drive”-could rescue the film's workaday unease from the dread taboo of derivative weirdness. It's half a movie, but a half that hums.

Wastes a ton of potent material.

Saraband doesn't ask to be considered prime-cut Bergman, and it isn't, although its slightness may not matter to the art-film starving class.

Can't surmount its own ineptitude.

Wenders's The Million Dollar Hotel is something of a monstrosity -- liquored self-indulgence taken to its own astral plane.

Earthsea seems to be a stupendously dull place. It would try the patience of any kid.

At its most indulgent and posturing, Piñero plays like a movie the man himself might've made, between scores.

Yim's film is kneecapped by its soundtrack twice over.

Sheridan seems terrified of the book's irreverent energy, and scotches most of its élan, humor, bile, and irony. What's left wouldn't have substantiated a memoir of any reputation, much less a movie.

Sandler is less goofy than spitefully self-absorbed, and most of the comedy feels like child abuse.

Allegiance to Chekhov, which director Michael Cacoyannis displays with somber earnestness in the new adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, is a particularly vexing handicap.

The commonest sort of cultural pasteurization.

It is merely another inept teen movie ripping off better horror movies.

There's something dull and evasive at the film's center--for one thing, contrary to its festival buzz, Bad Education tiptoes around the issue of priesthood pedophilia; lovelorn gazes are as desperate as it gets.

Its sluggish, amateur-Kiarostami character would be off-putting if the material weren't so powerful.

For the discouraged filmgoer, Erice's tone poem will be a ray of hope itself.

An explosive experience...and you have to love the movie's rabid energy and lust.

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.

An earnest but fatally amateurish and stereotypical melodrama about fraternity hazing.

Packed with melodrama, and often it works in the passionate, easy-to-watch manner of an old-fashioned "woman's film."

A tepid, pretentious indie that flies from the memory like a tissue in a twister.

A pale, derivative little Brit ditty that will be forgotten almost as speedily as it was dumped...into theaters.

Bani-Etemad's generational melodrama observes a blue-collar dynastic collapse worthy of Lillian Hellman, but stays steadfastly fixed on the quotidian of Tehran life.

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.)

It's gibberish, but when X works at all, it works not on the brain, but on the gut.

An informative if shrill primer on the last 35 years of Peruvian plight, the new doc State of Fear may only be effective as an educational tool for Americans, whose media have told them next to nothing about one of the Western Hemisphere's most horrifying killing fields.

Can only be enjoyed with a skullful of Old Bohemian and a faceful of high school crotch.

Has an unforgettable artery of hot-blooded talent coursing straight through it.

The summer's best cinematic equivalent to a lazy afternoon in the shade with a cool drink.

Romero's fourth-grade dialogue doesn't help matters, but anyone seeking out the latest achievements in cranial ruptures, spewing-blood gouts, and ground-beef spillage need look no further.

A sealskin-slick, cat-and-mouse romance-caper trifle with a hard-on for wealth that feels downright Trumpian.

Laughton understood Agee's proximity to Grimm vaudeville, and fashioned the most intensely expressionistic movie of its day.

Clumsily staged (a bike accident any 15-year-old Super-8 maven could’ve cut better), lit like a soap opera, and acted with all the bribed relish of a peanut butter commercial, Majidi’s movie is merely the simplistic bid being made by every national industry impatient for mass audience attention. Gallingly, it may succeed.

Les Mayfield's unintentionally wry American Outlaws just smells -- of filmmaking manure as well as yard-sale revisionism.

The movie is trite like the ocean is big.

From the (prolific) output of a largely unfashionable director, Wyler's Wuthering Heights has a distinctive look that elevates it above the blandness Goldwyn productions are so often charged with.

Being French, the film at least has indelible details -- something a Hollywood remake would fix but good.

Vertical Limit's real problem is its digitized sheen. Every shot seems to have been CGI-enhanced, so the movie has an overpasteurized, Velveeta-like glow -- processed movie food.

Assiduous, temperate, and a lot more honest about government and politicians than any other Hollywood film of the last few decades, Thirteen Days is nevertheless too little, too late.

Full of well-observed supporting riffs, Crash might've accumulated more frisson had it cast a clearer eye on how social tension actually plays.

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.

This sweet, pensive gabfest is neither conventionally romantic nor pornographic.

The acting, by a large cast of little-known young Brits chewing on South London accents like dog bones, is uniformly splendiferous.

Nothing if not confrontational.

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.

Moody, pretentious, but potent.

The movie is typical Hill-pulp: modestly scaled and efficiently cheesy.

As the full-length sorta-satire it has become, Edmond is all sizzle and little meat, a veritable tangent act dropped from "Glengarry Glen Ross" because it was several marks too silly.

A brooding, stunningly realistic portrait of familial self-destruction that raises far more questions than it can possibly answer.

Following is modest and engaging, but in being strenuously clever, it surrenders any dibs it might have on being relevant, or original.

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

Watching it is a smidgen like listening to the same monkey-walks-into-a-bar joke for the 105th time, but for the Spierig brothers, it is clearly a demonstration of fast-cheap capabilities and a one-way ticket straight out of Queensland.

There's no denying bespectacled, brace-ridden, homely wild child Eliza (Lacey Chabert), who can speak to animals and emerges as one of the most stirring heroines in contemporary media.

Only Giovanni Ribisi, with a back-of-the-bus speech about the betrayals of insurgent and counter-insurgent politics, finds a genuine moment. All the same, for some unfathomable reason, Dylan's autumnal self-salute is not particularly difficult to watch.

There's enough rosy-cheeked drama, triumph, and sacrifice for a ready-made Hollywood remake.

Merely an indulgent vehicle for Mrs. Ritchie -- and Madonna is so spectacularly convincing as a hateful, self-absorbed, nouveau riche ogress that her character's third-act transformation is as preposterous as her overmuscled physique.

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

Far from creating a pungent portrait of a society gone mad with blood and greed, Schroeder's movie strives for political points while it's whiffing on simplicities like character, motivation, and believability.

The question of whether this is a movie about reincarnation or fate or middle-aged delusion remains unaddressed far beyond our capacity to care. Many of the admirably long conversational scenes are pointless; some, like Harden and Linney's climactic bitch-fest in a hotel room, are flat-out absurd.

Broad and pleasantly idealistic, and the evident ardor for 150-year-old graphics (especially Dore's Ancient Mariner masterstrokes) is hard to argue with. But is it a movie or the best-designed episode of "Nova" ever?

In a culture clogged with appropriated effluvia and remake cop-outs, Willard is wittier and nastier than we deserve.

It's an easy movie to loathe, but it's designed imaginatively and enjoys the committed attention of its cast.

Zeta-Jones is merely ravishing, but Clooney owns the film. Ordinarily best at sardonic, man's-man confidence, he strides through Intolerable Cruelty with fantastic screwball zest. To see Clooney tenderize, season, grill, and serve this ham hock of a role is to see an old-fashioned virtuoso in perpetual motion.

It's a simple pleasure watching an American movie that respects genre, knows its limitations, and genuflects at the memory of Don Siegel in the age of Spielberg.

Topsy-Turvy is flawless, borne along by a savagely witty screenplay that Leigh directs like the gears of a clock.

Doyle loves bad jokes and his story has no rhyme or reason, dissolving in its last third into a bungled heist and jailhouse face-off.

Self-involved, amateurish, and unoriginal.

Filthy fun, if not much more.

Oak-stiff and witless, but a few scenes muster up embarrassed chuckles.

So feel-sniffly-good it could make you revisit lunch.

Heist is a neat, bouncy, minor-key crime procedural that shakes no rafters. Glorious, freestanding Mametisms are dropped into it like beef hunks into clear soup.

A pleasant and surprisingly polished fish-out-of-water comedy.

Just isn't funny enough to sustain the lunacy.

An utterly empty-skulled genre mechanism and nothing more.

Based on a memoir by a grown daughter of the eldest girl and rarely digressing from the journey itself, the movie is a dusty, calloused, primal Odyssey, as forceful and single-minded as a bullet train.

Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy metafictive upshot.

For some viewers, this will seem a trial of predictability and unrelenting sweetness; for others, it's more than enough.

The gooseberry Harlin came up with will win no proselytizers, but it does have a pleasant matinee modesty, a cool sepia-period look, and an interesting flashback relationship with Nazis.

What's abundantly clear is how far this kind of moviemaking has come from any knowledge of real criminal life; it's a geek's ineffectual daydream of mayhem.

All of the filmmaker's fine work and good intentions cannot make this repetitive and finally tiresome saga fly.

To say that it's dull barely scratches the surface.

A self-adrenalizing, self-destructing pop-culture whirligig.

Mychal Judge, the popular gay FDNY chaplain who perished in the fallen towers and was the day's first official casualty, has been so designated by this treacly, worshipful doc, something he would surely have deemed ridiculous.

A drearily over-cynical farce.

A superb, wise, and witty Taiwanese film about being single and what to do about it.

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

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

It is only once the movie has exhausted its roster of "weird" notions and contrived images that it finds its emotional footing, leaving you with one half of a lovely, woebegone film.

A mess, bouncing nonsensically from one style of farce to another, leaving large vacuums and dead spots — which may themselves, of course, be deliberate.

All of the stories are conceived as ongoing plights, and have no third act. Which would be an improvement on Haggis's hyperbolic civics lesson if Avelino had the chops to master realism and embrace ambivalence. The acting is pro enough to keep your blood up, but the reverb is minimal.

An overwhelming portion of Saved! is wall-to-wall Jesus-Jesus-Jesus talk, closer to dead air than social spoof. At times, the screenplay (including Mary's voluminous narration) has the monotonous cadence of a recruitment sermon.

Collateral is a slim drink of thin beer, remarkable only as evidence that Mann might have a modern masterpiece in him if he were cut loose and allowed to roam around in his own obsessions.

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.

Though Maclean uses every trick available to make up for the missing inner voice, we never get into Crudup's mellow loser like we should. Maclean's got an incisive eye, but it's poised on the outside of the terrarium looking in.

One of those hellishly predictable digital-monster gauntlets that makes you pity the actors.

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

C&C hardly coalesces, but then again, it doesn't try to--never more or less than what it appears to be, the film is a slow honky-tonk thud-beat, only intermittently punctuated by a joke or idea.

Although inexplicable brogues and burrs appear and disappear, and although Stone post-produces the dickens of his movie trying to generate the maximum spit-fog of sound and fury, Alexander manages to be as dull as the Victor Mature films of the 1950s, which barely moved at all.

Somehow manages to stay afloat on a sea of pretension, thanks largely to some splashy visuals.

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.

Still, the vapor traces of farce and policier that waft from this terribly earnest film never coalesce -- perhaps our own cultural remove allows what plays straight at home to be experienced as slightly daffy.

Metropolis is "A.I." without tears.

Gigli berates, insults, dismisses, throttles, and bellows at Bartha's meticulously aped retard, and then turns sensitive and warm—it's hard to decide which attitude is more insulting.

A clumsy, witless cartoon version of E.B. White's rather uncelebrated children's story.

Cannot help but be merely another debacle that Tammy Faye will survive, eyelashes and integrity intact.

Has only its actors to keep it afloat.

Having emerged from his new German cinema heyday as one of the world's most guileless and original documentary filmmakers, Herzog has slowly been crafting a four-dimensional fresco of the planet, its most human-resistant landscapes, and our dubious dramas in confronting the chaos.

It's all fascinating, but must Kalatozov's careening angel of cinema be laid bare?

Fawzi shoots the proceedings in clumsy, gotch-eyed spurts, and the level of incoherence is impressively high.

Compare it to what passes for sophisticated filmmaking in this country and the movie becomes a living instrument of cinematic humanism: lovingly intent on observing, not judging; concerned with sympathy, not control; accepting the inevitable ambiguities, not denying them.

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.

A shovelful of silly manure from the get-go.

Easily the best directorial debut of the year, and possibly the most mature and haunting film to ever come out of Scotland, Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher is a throat-catching masterpiece of lyricism, observation, and stone-cold realism.

What rescues Major Dundee in the end from its many conflicts and unresolved passions is Heston.

The blood is raspberry syrup, the gags gag, and the film virtually falls over itself informing us how lame it is.

Confessions keeps its cards close, and Kaufman is perfectly capable of starving his screenplay to save it, and perfectly happy with being misunderstood.

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.

An overproduced, video-director remake, slick and grue-marinated and loud as a sonic boom.

If you're expecting an experience approximately as dumb, badly acted, and childish as a pro wrestling match, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Basinger takes her shuddery Stanwyckness very seriously, but everyone else has a ball.

There's precious few yucks, for one thing, but you can't say you're surprised that the astonishingly humorless Lyne hadn't noticed or cared that the Nabokov original is a droll comedy of errors first and a self-pitying romantic tragedy second.

I'd take the stakes driven right through my platform pumps over listening to Bruce Vilanch jokes, but that's me.

By far the most independent independent-genre flick to grift screen space in Manhattan since Douglas Buck's "Family Portraits," James Bai's Puzzlehead has only its ideas and speculative frisson to sell it.

A bone-tired tale underneath.

Without the intrusion of voice-overs or interviews, Mylan and Shenk attained a remarkable intimacy with the strapping, earnest, startlingly beautiful teenagers.

Brilliant, mind-boggling.

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.

This movie doesn't just kill time but tortures it.

Squint through the humbug, and there's some genuine life going on.

It's not the freshest scenario, and Baker lets Lucky sputter and moan about his fate for so long that we wonder, as his sensible girlfriend does, why we're bothering with such undiluted dickness.

It'll make you cyberlaugh, it'll make you cybercry, just like cyberlife -- One thing is certain: your boredom

15 Minutes settles into Richard Donner-style goulash.

A watchable mediocrity at best.

Likable, but frustratingly lazy, Ghost Dog has coolness running all through it, but little substance.

Go see this movie and you'll be...yup. You should save your money; Norm Macdonald should save his career, by quitting movies altogether.

The ride is remarkable.

Seasonally it's more appropriate as a May Day bacchanal, but in any month Demy's movie makes for an evocative globe-paperweight tableau of its place and time, and a concise demonstration of the disquietude inherent in classic fairy tales.

First-timer Dylan Kidd's film isn't Molièrian in its misanthropy, but rather as boneheaded as an hour of talk-radio hobgoblin Tom Leikis.

Too amateurish to lampoon or evoke either film industry, Bollywood/Hollywood is a movie that owes its presence in theaters to a certain ethnic soccer comedy still circulating like a virus.

Kim's movie rocks -- I saw it cold a year ago, and I don't think I've been as entranced and appalled by an Asian film since Shinya Tsukamoto's "Iron Man."

A ponderous stage adaptation that expends only the mildest effort to overcome its staginess.

Sitting through the film is like Chinese water torture, for sure, and for reasons beyond the forced, idiotic campiness of the thing. For one thing, there is not one word of dialogue.

Visconti's film remains a Euro-culture touchstone, though not nearly as convincing or visually stunning as its reputation insists.

While the line-readings are often dead-on, Fishburne's movie suffers from the usual one-room claustrophobia and Mametian repetitions.

Irritatingly repetitious and piled high with long-foreseen conclusions.

The film's details are spot-on, its tone ludicrously ironic, and its casting deft.

It's a polished, beautifully made movie with a rotten heart.

You can't help wondering how the same Fifth Gen filmmaker who made "Yellow Earth" and "Life on a String" could've fallen on such hard times, or justified such goofiness to himself.

Not nearly enough time is spent in court--that is, on the movie's ostensible subject. (Besides, the down-to-the-wire deliberation scene is risibly unconvincing and abbreviated.)

The loss of the first film's hurtling who-am-I? story engine is keenly felt, and too much time is spent observing the characters get on and off planes, trains, and automobiles.

Has storytelling rambles and lapses that no amount of electrifying jump-cuts and original image-making can compensate for.

An ingenious, incredibly entertaining, Rorschach-blot meta-comedy based on a spec script (by first-timer Charlie Kaufman) that is completely unlike anything anyone has ever seen before.

Soft-boiled blarney so sluttish with Hollywood clichés it could've been made in Burbank.

The ambitions are so paltry that our response should be too: Wolf Creek is unimaginative, light on the grue and heavy on the faux-serious desperation.

Nolan and his co-screenwriter David Goyer can only press the big buttons so hard—it's still an old-school superhero summer movie, the plotting tortuous, the characters relegated to one-scene-one-emotion simplicity, the digitized action a never ending club mix of chases and mano a manos.

As a portrait of a man barely qualifying for a cinematic portrait, Benjamin Smoke is a trifle, but when Sillen and Cohen turn their cameras on the weedy, workaday, hellhole America that Benjamin calls home, the movie comes alive.

Bloodless, lip-biting psycho-carnage.

The comedy is somewhat doused by posture and repetition, and the characters' whimsical behavior is endearing and irritating in turn. Which still makes it the absolute best neo-samurai judo farce in town.

Sags, lollygags, and blusters too much to sustain the what-the-hell momentum that Kitano achieves in his best movies.

For all of its well-schooled orthodoxy and visual splendor, Kekexili remains somewhat off-kilter--the characters' passionate wartime camaraderie and doomed sense of martyrdom aren't quite reflected in the facts of volunteer service and devotion to a balanced ecosystem.

The film's Endsville, when we reach it, is almost an anticlimax, thanks to the masterfully orchestrated ensemble acting and the countless dramatic mini-explosions unleashed along the way.

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

A modest, formulaic day trip from Kazakhstan.

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

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."

A decent little exercise in nativist outrage, Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, with its dynamic between indigene and colonial oppressor, could've easily been a western.

Just another basketcase with a blade.