Phil Hall

A style-rich, substance-weak B-level gangster movie which is noteworthy for two unusual reasons: it is one of the very few films from Thailand to gain international release and it is the perhaps the only film of its genre to feature a love story between a hit man and a pharmacist.

Watching these old pros elbow their way into the spotlight is the film’s finest surprise, but watching Plowright out-act them all is the ultimate joy.

A delightfully silly romp which reinvents the legendary Italian lover's adventures into the realm of broad farce.

Although the film is handsomely filmed and features a surprisingly frank view of the political machinations within the upper ranks of Tibetan Buddhism – even the Dalai Lama comes across as a bit of a wheeler-dealer – Unmistaken Child is more than a little disappointing.

The results are either darkly comic and tragic, depending on the viewer's mindframe. But McElhinney's route to these results, as with the Bertolucci, is nothing short of stunning.

It is not only the year's best documentary, but it is also among the finest films ever made about religion.

While it would be foolish to expect a completely faithful Shakespeare adaptation from Godard, there is no pleasure in being fooled into thinking that this vague, obscure, annoying, cacophonous wreck of a film is anything but a joke being played by a self-indulgent filmmaker.

One of the year's best films. It is an extraordinary triumph of nonfiction filmmaking, presenting a wild mind game that leaves the viewer invigorated by its sheer audacity and complexity.

A dull film, inspired by a true story.

About as funny as a funeral.

The film is a visceral overload of wordplay ranging from the spontaneous neighborhood park jams to the overflowing concert venues.

It is a shame the film doesn't cast a wider net into deeper political waters – the outrage is barely scratched in this production.

A small, no-budget, seemingly unsophisticated film that creates a minor energy miracle by fueling its running time on pure raffish charm.

With a stronger actress who could have been in greater command of the character, Freeze Me would have been a cold-hearted masterpiece rather than the okay thriller it turned out.

Paltrow gives the performance of the year, and perhaps of her career, in this extraordinary and powerful dissection of genius, jealousy, madness and serenity.

Never quite clicks, primarily because the central male characters are badly miscast.

At the risk of being called an anti-Semite, I would like to propose a moratorium on Holocaust movies -- While it would be crass to discount the importance of the subject, at the same time one has to admit there is some degree of excess going on here.

If you want pure, undiluted, 100% guaranteed entertainment, Soap Girl is the film to enjoy. This film is a wonderful work of fun, with a marvelous ensemble cast who have more energy, sex-appeal and charm than any group to strut and vamp across the camera in recent memory.

Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou has created so many memorable films (most recently the wuxia double-play "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers") that one can easily excuse his new clinker Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.

The single worst Shakespeare film ever made.

Handsomely produced but emotionally inert offering.

Beautifully produced but emotionally vacant drama.

A lopsided effort which is part-thriller, part-social commentary, and totally forgettable.

A noisy, chaotic affair.

A pleasant diversion which mixes snatches of Wilde's waspish humor with a stylish Art Deco environment. The result is amusing to the ears and easy on the eyes.

The true power of the film comes from young Marko Kovacevic, who plays the poetic child lost in a family and culture where poetry has no meaning.

The result is a great-looking bore.

Maybe someday an enterprising filmmaker will make a film about this forgotten chapter in Muslim-Jewish relations. It would be a lot more compelling and memorable than the nonsense in Monsieur Ibrahim.

One of the greatest art documentaries ever made. Through an imaginative mixture of rare footage, audio recordings and contemporary interviews with the living legends of modern art, Rosen has created a cinematic portrait which is, in itself, a work of art.

The film is a bore.

After sitting through this movie, you will want to throw something more pungent than rice at The Groomsmen.

A guilty pleasure diversion. Yeah, it is dumber than a bag of hair. But it is also fast, occasionally funny and genuinely entertaining in an old-fashion no-brainer manner.

A diverting and delightful visit with two unheralded indie cinema veterans with a surplus amount of anecdotes and zany film clips.

A stirring and touching production, and it is difficult not to be moved by the women’s medical progress. However, it suffers from a somewhat leisurely pacing.

Typical of too many films produced in Israel: plodding, verbose, badly-made and completely monotonous.

Small, amateurish Israeli feature.

Sadly, Naqoyqatsi quickly degenerates into a monotonous skein of banal images which strangely reinforces the message that we're living in a damn dull society.

For those who never heard of "The Goldbergs" and its amazing star, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg will provide a special introduction to a special person.

A stale and poorly researched documentary.

This is an excellent movie -- by all means, flock to it!

Sometimes Duck Season is amusing. More often, though, it is boring and icky.

Okay, this isn’t a great film. Maybe it’s not even a good film. But for 1954, “The Last Time I Saw Paris” filled the bill with enough mindless silliness to keep people amused for two hours. Even today, it’s good for a cynical laugh.

This extraordinary work of cinematic art is among the most sublime, compelling and beautifully crafted films to grace the big screen.

Cimino fashioned a deep, multi-textured screenplay rich with fully dimensional characters. His ensemble cast brought the story to vivid life. Kristofferson gave a career peak performance here as a man who seems perpetually out of his element.

Offers the Iraqis a rare chance to share their anger and their lives with the outside world. The resulting production is a raw and powerful film that demands to be seen.

Zhang Yimou is seriously off his game with the utterly ridiculous Curse of the Golden Flower, a new epic that feels like "Hero" meets "The Lion in Winter" meets "Peyton Place." The film is worthless as a serious work of art, but it may offer the jaded viewer a surplus source of MST3K-inspired wisecracks.

Fairly mundane and frequently boring.

A thoroughly awful Korean production which vainly attempts to recast the slam-bang conventions of American action-adventure flicks into the sticky world of contemporary Korean politics.

A good film, but it should’ve been a great one.

Valeria Bertucelli and Ingrid Rubio as Elena and Natalia barely register for the camera, either in their adult incarnations or as the mod teens of 1975 Argentina.

The film presents the Rwandans in the worst possible way: venal, corrupt, vicious, stupid, barbaric and completely incapable of governing themselves. Honestly, I've seen more intelligent and sympathetic depictions of Africans in Tarzan movies.

A mild but diverting farce about misperceptions involving gays and goombas.

The film's leisurely pacing is often too slow for its own good, and many scenes meander endlessly with no true payoff.

Clooney has littered his film with such a high quantity of mistakes that it is hard to know where exactly to begin finding fault.

London is the independent film world's equivalent of a fiasco.

A well-intended but hopelessly ill-focused documentary which wants to be the "That's Entertainment!" for the New York theater but seems like a hodgepodge of anecdotes, factoids and moldy memories.

This sounds an awful lot like "Memento." But unlike that movie, the French-Swiss-Spanish-Italian co-production Novo opts for a Eurotrash sex comedy approach instead.

Unfortunately, Brooks errs badly by having his film centered in India. Yes, India - which, as most people know, is not a predominantly Muslim country. Rather than look for comedy in the Muslim world, Brooks uses this film to make fun of contemporary Indian society.

Fans of prison flicks would do better to catch the HBO series "Oz" or the five millionth rebroadcast of "The Shawshank Redemption."

It is a horrifying and devastating spectacle of life gone dreadfully out of control, yet it is also riveting and hypnotic in such a dramatic sensation that you are left breathless by the sequence of events which will haunt and torture for as long as your memory remains intact.

Alas, the big screen also magnifies the problems with Once Upon a Time in the West. Specifically, Leone’s insistence on style trumped the need for substance. The film is basically a B-Western stretched an agonizing 165 minutes.

A raw, brutal, hypnotic journey into the world of seven heroin addicts who barely survive on the streets of New York City. It is a film of great sadness and pain.

With a clumsy hip-hop score permeating every free inch of the soundtrack and ugly 16mm cinematography that would never be allowed out of Film School 101, the audio-visual experience is a wreck. The quality of Quality of Life is non-existent.

What may have seemed energetic and innovative four decades ago is fairly enervated today, and only the most rabid Godard fanatics will find reason to seek out its new theatrical re-release.

How does Xanadu qualify as the greatest movie musical? Simple: it offers nothing but pure wall-to-wall fun and nonsense to keep a smile on one’s face from the opening credits (which cleverly spoof the logo of Universal Pictures) through the end of the picture. [11 Aug 2005]

Such garbage that taking a shower at the Bates Motel is a more appealing alternative.

One could literally milk a thesaurus in trying to find the right words to lavish on Saraband: brilliant, towering, majestic, challenging, remarkable.

In many ways, Let it Be is the best Beatles film of all since they are not playing the Beatles but rather are being themselves.

Inert, inept epic.

Quirky, entertaining documentary.

In throwing hatchets at Murdoch and his silly Fox network while pretending the rest of the media world is fine and objective, the film comes across as a shrill, one-note slam against a very easy target.

Achieves the impossible by taking one of the most compelling and harrowing stories imaginable and channeling it into one of the most ordinary movies of the year.

A beautifully crafted documentary.

One of the year's best films. An extraordinary work of intellectual maturity and emotional depth.

About as much fun as a grouchy ayatollah in a cold mosque.

Painfully boring.

Grim and frequently depressing, and despite the artistry of its framing it nonetheless is a very difficult movie to endure.

Chicago is a failure, but that should not come as a surprise. Bob Fosse, who directed and choreographed the original 1975 Broadway production, was long baffled in making a film of the show and eventually gave up trying.

If Dogville has a reason for importance, it is the astonishing all-star ensemble who try very hard to put life into their cardboard characters and make this silly film work.

Through the Fire is a fraud masquerading as a documentary.

Tsotsi emerges as being among the finest films ever to come out of Africa. It is a brilliant, jolting and altogether powerful blast of energy and emotion.

Reconfigured into a very different one-woman movie by Gibson and director Jeremy Kagan. Unfortunately, the transformation was not successful.

The film's screenplay is thick with major lapses in logic, resulting in a story that ultimately makes little sense.

An extraordinary achievement on all possible levels.

Filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, who helmed the excellent "Rana's Wedding," missed the boat on this one. He may have hoped to give a human voice to the suicide bombers, but instead he gave them a misfired movie.

For telling America to acknowledge how far the country has deviated from its values and how painfully it has failed to make the world safer, this is the most important movie of the year.

The Quiet is best for cheap laughs by jaded moviegoers with absolutely nothing better to do with their time.

A documentary which wobbles and weaves as much as often as it soars.

Such a hopeless mess that there's no fun in tossing insults at its endless shortcomings.

Provides lethal evidence of what becomes of those who deposit their sincerity into the command of a religious lunatic.

Where Song of the South errs badly is in its regurgitation of the horrible myth that black slaves were always singing and happy and just loved working on massah’s plantation.

Quite frankly, the film looks terrible and moves with painful slowness, while the voice performances by both the juvenile and adult actors are so lacking in character that one could almost assume the cast performed their lines phonetically.

A potentially great film stuck inside a not-so-great film. Watching Dog Run is fairly painful since flashes of brilliance peek out and shine at unexpected moments.

It is a painful but important subject, to be certain, but the film dilutes its own effectiveness by devolving into a collection of talking heads who often seem to be repeating each other.

Achieves the impossible in taking a genuine socio-political tragedy and turning it into an anvil drama which will fray the patience of the most sympathetic audiences.

While Fryar is a charming man and his work clearly deserves recognition, A Man Called Pearl is an obvious case of building a three-story house on a one-story foundation. Really, can you make a feature-length film about a man who carves unique shapes out of trees, shrubs and bushes?

If there is one film which makes the most out of life, this is it.

Nothing more than a big old chunk of horse poop.