Michael Atkinson

Something does have to give, and that's the nine-figure public patronage of this kind of anemic, wit-free entertainment. Meyers's shakin' moneymaker isn't the worst film of 2003 -- no cat suits, for one thing -- but something scarier: a standard-issue bog of glossy idiocy and audience disrespect.

Built to outrage, appall, and indict.

May be the ultimate paradigm of self-reflexive cinema, eating Godard's tail for him and one-upping the classic anti-cartoon Duck Amuck by submitting to a cunning entropy and a self-inquiry so relentless the movie never moves from square one.

It seems easily the most valuable piece of film to emerge about the war in all of its three-plus years.

As the basest form of genre hootenanny, it wimps out: There's no twist, no showboat acting, not even an outrageous crisis of paternal violence.

The Truman Show is one of the films for which the '90s will be remembered, and it is not to be missed.

The movie hardly has enough beef on its bones to make a meal. The very notion that movies about torture are considered "horror," and are more profitable now per foot of celluloid than any other type of independent film, is what's qualmy.

A big, stupid bull with bodacious tits, but that's not to say it doesn't dish out some lite hardy-hars.

How enlightening you find Damian Pettigrew's obsessive film depends on whether you're as adoring of Fellini as he was of himself; for the devoted, it's a gold mine.

Roth never fully exploits the woods around him, and the homes of the locals are far too middle-class, but because so many clichés are discarded amid the flesh rot, even the patented "Night of the Living Dead" coda feels sharp-edged and genuine.

Wallows in the same affected retro stylishness as the earlier film (Croupier), suffers from the same lack of narrative focus, and is just as choked with clichés.

Follows a predictable low-comedy path, but does it with such fierce appeal and beautifully wrought wit that it doesn't feel quite like any comedy American theaters have seen since the equally underrated "Grosse Pointe Blank."

From the beginning of his career a fervent, epic documentarian, Herzog is a personal filmmaker as well, and My Best Fiend is certainly his most intimate and introspective film.

A film the family might've made themselves: sophomoric, hagiographic, amateurishly strobe-happy, and thoroughly hippiefied.

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.

No other movie released this year is as much of a filmgoing necessity as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux.

One Missed Call, one of the five movies he made in 2003, is no more than Miike's shot at generating a polished, rote, expertly composed J-horror flick.

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.

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

Stay home. Your entertainment-seeking efforts would be better expended perusing old phone books. The white pages.

Far more preposterous in its details than the average blam-quip-kerplow, The Art of War isn't helped by the performances.

Logic, motivation, suspense -- anything that might make the film frightening or resonant -- is buried under Dolby blams, medulla-shaming dialogue, and a rain of overdubbed hunting-knife schwings that grate like a 3 a.m. car alarm.

As is typical of contemporary Italian movies, every one of Comencini's women seems on the verge of a hysterical collapse.

The story -- is just what fills in the gaps between slow-motion fireballs, Matrix-style frozen mayhem, and Halle Berry's notoriously undraped breasts.

Tries to show the oh-so-human side of Gospel-hawking, His Word, the Path, and so on.

Kid-pulp screenwriter Goyer (Dark City, Blade I and II) manages some mature textures but his movie never surmounts its manipulative ideas.

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.

Scene-by-scene, things happen, but you'd be hard-pressed to say what or why; occasionally, a poetic moment leaps out of the soup.

Eccentric enough to stave off doldrums, Caruso's self-conscious debut is also eminently forgettable.

Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration is merely about birds, and though you learn less about the various species Perrin circled the globe to document than you might from an afternoon with Animal Planet, you become intensely chummy with the process and labor of flying.

Mattei is tiresomely grave and long-winded, as if circularity itself indicated profundity.

A pale imitation of the original Winnie the Pooh Disney shorts of the '60s, but a vast improvement on the current Pooh TV series and straight-to-tape specials.

Yet another leaden, witless, cliché-drunk, teen romantic comedy starring the preposterously good-looking stars of mediocre TV series.

Zucker's frenzied trifle is painless, with a few decent running gags -- and an ocean of bad ones.

Arguably the most dysfunctional culture of the past few centuries, North Korea is a cosmically mad movie waiting to happen. But for now, Heikin's is merely insubstantial.

The film galumphs along in static panels, prioritizing flash over thought, hyperextending a story that would barely sustain a children's picture book.

Just as fabulously cartoon-Gothic as "Sleepy Hollow."

Green Dragon's portrait of refugee angst is decidedly glossy; the grief and lostness are glimpsed rather than explored.

One of a barely acknowledged sub-breed of indie: howling-vanity amateur-work.

Mood is everything, trumped up by a score so rich with pop songs, bossa nova drama, and symphonic mournfulness it's almost a movie on its own. 2046 may be a Chinese box of style geysers and earnest meta-irony, but that should not suggest there aren't bleeding humans at the center of it.

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

Has a customarily jovial air but a deficit of flim-flam inventiveness.

De rigueur hypocritical as it may be coming from Hollywood, Click is a cultural critique, with the dull blade and impact of a battle-ax... But it's a farce about loss, and it doesn't flinch.

It is, like most, an unnecessary remake, but the new, digitally boosted Dawn of the Dead brings it on with a 10-minute overture that might be the most upsetting tin-can apocalypse modern movies have ever seen.

It's an altogether remarkable piece of work, deepening the genre while whipping its skin off, satirizing an entire nation's nearsighted apathy as it wonders, almost aloud, about the nature of truth, evidence, and social belonging.

Winterbottom never provides the empathic connective tissue we expect. Love it or not, 9 Songs amounts to a common human rite fastidiously caught in amber, giving off no heat or joy but crystallized for the future.

An adroitly made, perfectly acted little nightmare.

Actually lighter, wittier, and more original than it has a right to be.

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

An entrancing glimpse of true underground Americana.

Promiscuously inhabiting several planes at once, Reygadas's restless inquisition may already be this year's movie to beat.

It's "Broken Flowers" with bourbon and ten-gallons and meta-country soundtrack warbles.

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

Promised Lands is the only western documentary made about the war, but today, the movie seems more remarkable as a Sontag artifact than as political filmmaking.

As matinee probations go, the movie's tainted by too many bad songs and too much of Bruce Willis.

Like nearly every other Kiarostami film, Close-Up takes questions about movies and makes them feel like questions of life and death.

It might be the most maturely conceived role in Burns's films, but the plot around it is flimsy, the visual storytelling simpleminded, and the general ideas for character one-note. At 78 minutes, the movie says howdy, rewards little, and does not test its welcome.

This is not the can't-we-get-along Arab-Persian world we see in most liberal nonfiction films, but a broader and helplessly apocalyptic view of an entire region crazed with anger, frustration, and bloodlust into objectifying death as a weapon, a cause for cosmic glory, and little else.

Bizarre, confused, sanctimonious manure that makes Lurie's own "The Contender" look responsible by comparison.

In the end, Ted Bundy's only justification is the director's common but unexplored fascination with the frustrated maniac; there's no larger point, and little social context. "Badlands" this ain't.

Might be the most original film of the year.

Bertolucci's masterpiece--made when he was all of 29--will be the most revelatory experience a fortunate pilgrim will have in a theater this year is a foregone conclusion.

I've seen only a few films in my lifetime that so potently express the golden hopes of childhood and parenthood, as well as the inevitable decimation of that hopefulness -- that forward-looking bliss -- at the hands of catastrophe, or merely age, spite, and exhaustion. Or, as for the Friedmans, all of the above.

It might be the scariest movie ever made.

To spend even 10 minutes in the movie's universe is to experience the Sartrean nausea of an utterly hollow head and heart.

Obvious, simplistic, and never funny, Johnson's movie may be useful only as real estate porn--Cornwall and the Isle of Man never looked so super cute.

Feels repetitive and impacted.

Easily the best millennial movie, Don McKellar's Last Night is also the only one to use the idea of apocalyptic end-time as a vehicle to explore the absurdity of human desire.

As obvious in many ways as its title (and its poster), Mean Creek retains a gritty working-class ambience, but it feels over-rehearsed.

Despite this ripe framework and the talent on deck, ILYW is not a satire...Rather, it becomes a cold-serious, dead-air brood about how tough, lonely, and desolate it is being a celebrity.

A modest and mildly pretentious mediocrity in the Woodman canon.

If you see it, the sequel will be your fault.

Although it's thoroughly retooled, H.G. Wells's scenario doesn't allow for many soft landings, and the extreme respect for havoc on view quite properly keeps the Spielbergian cutesies to a minimum.

Complain all you want about Willis's posturing and the rabbit-in-the-hat ending (predicated as it is on a vast plothole), the film is still a rarity, a studio horror movie focused on a child's traumatic stress.