Phil Hall

Whereas "Cuckoo’s Nest" is a brilliantly over-the-top accomplishment, The Passenger is more brilliant with the most effortless underplaying one can ever hope to witness on screen.

Quite simply, House of Flying Daggers is a film that sets several new standards for production and entertainment values. It is a wild riot of color, music, passion, action, mystery, pure old-fashioned thrills and even dancing.

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.

Little more than a travelogue designed to show off the grandeur of the Hermitage, with the silly actors in fancy costumes getting in the way of the paintings and sculptures on display.

Do not, under any circumstance, approach this film lightly. Prepare to be depressed, agitated and shocked. And prepare to see a brilliant work of cinematic art.

This much-ballyhooed gay cowboy melodrama is an inert disappointment.

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.

This is a curious example of taking a hair-raising story and draining the drama from every corner, leaving it a bit flat and ultimately forgettable.

Rich with wonderful music and images.

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.

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.

The new bad movie from Clint Eastwood which takes Dennis Lehane's best-selling thriller and turns it into an inert mess that clocks in at 137 minutes but feels like 137 hours.

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

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 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.

It seems as if every possible cliche and story twist from any seafaring picture of the past 80 years made its way into this flick.

One of the most towering and extraordinary films to grace the screen.

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.

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

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

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

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.

While the film is admittedly imperfect, it nonetheless deserves to be seen by all Americans to provide a clear understanding of what kind of a country we are currently at war within.

Offers a remarkable tribute to one of the few people who genuinely deserves to be known as a pioneer of filmmaking. In the genre of films about films, In the Mirror of Maya Deren is among the best.

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

An extraordinary achievement on all possible levels.

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

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.

While the images presented here are peerless, James Nachtwey is a fascinating individual and it is a shame we cannot learn more about the man behind these extraordinary images.

While the Raymond Burr sequences and the subsequent clumsy English dubbing of the remaining Japanese footage made the U.S. version an unintentionally funny movie, the complete Japanese version is an unfunny bore.

An astonishing mess.

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

Even if you love all things Yiddish, there is precious little to embrace here.

Yiddish Theater: A Love Story is a slight but moving documentary focusing on the final performances given by Zypora Spaisman, the Polish-born star of New York’s Yiddish theater.

Rich with compelling, often heartbreaking stories.

Kung Fu Hustle is something you rarely encounter in theaters: a genuinely original comedy.

The film is professionally made but a thorough bore at every imaginable level.

Rarely has a film been cast with so many gifted performers who are either wrong for their roles or are given nothing to do.

A powerful film worthy of a truly extraordinary American.

What’s a muscular guy like John Cena doing in a flabby movie like this? This connect-the-dots action-adventure may appeal to undemanding ten-year-old boys but will bore everyone else.

The Stranger may not be at the same level as Citizen Kane, but what is? On its own terms, it is a fine and invigorating experience that deserves to be sought out and enjoyed.

Although not a great film by any stretch, it is a fascinating slice of a fractious period in American history.

An Inconvenient Truth is something you rarely see in movies today: a blatant intellectual fraud. Shame on all of the people involved in this travesty.

About as funny as a funeral.

This is clearly not a pleasant film to watch on many levels.

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

Inert, inept epic.

The only obvious question that Oswald’s Ghost raises is: how come Mort Sahl wasn’t in the movie? (If you don’t get that joke, you need to brush up on your Kennedy conspiracy lessons.)

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

The production values on Dirty are so painfully amateurish that it is often hard to determine what is happening. The cinematography is murky and shaky, the editing is dull and clumsy, and the sound recording isn't exactly pristine. Not that any of this matters when you have a script where every third word is scatological.

The film is a bore.

Cantet weaves a dark, disturbing story of hedonism, casual racism and the lethal consequences of self-indulgence in his superb drama Heading South.

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.

Sadly, the whole affair is little more than ennui with a pedigree.

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

Finally receiving a theatrical release 20 years after it was made, Philip Hartman’s “No Picnic” emerges as an entertaining if flawed relic from a very different era.

So ham-handed and relentlessly overbaked that it is easy to see why audiences initially stayed away from it. Just when and how did anyone come to see this as a classic?

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.

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.

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.

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.

McGrath's new film offers a treat for fans of Dickens and moviegoers who love to see a fairly large cast ham it up with delirious abandon.

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.

Among the finest films made in the Middle East. This small, subtle gem offers a vivid portrait of life in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, presenting its message with an intelligence and vibrancy that celebrates the human spirit in an environment where humanity is routinely crushed and assaulted.

To its favor, the film is blessed with strong peformances by Ozgu Namal as Meryem and Murat Han as Cemal.

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.

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.

If anything saves Elling, it is the trio of supporting performances that are closer to the real world.

A strangely inert affair. The stories devolve into one-dimensional squabbling and too many loose threads flap around the edges.

Truly magnificent.

If the state government in Massachusetts refuses to acknowledge its execution of innocent men, then at least this compelling and powerful production can serve as a graceful elegy to the doomed men who were murdered by their adopted homeland.

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.

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.

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

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.

The result is a mature, graceful and extraordinary accomplishment.

Writer/director Gary Burns offers a suffocating experience which is too boring to be accepted as a satire, too lame to be accepted as a farce, and too infantile to be accepted as a drama.

A stale and poorly researched documentary.

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 treasure in celebrating remarkable women with a unparalleled zest for life.

Although it runs 78 minutes, it feels like 78 hours.

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.

While the screen didn't really need another Carmen, it certainly needs a knockout femme fatale like Diop Gai. Hopefully, Carmen can get a much-needed rest and audiences can get much more of this stunning African icon-in-waiting.

Bruno Dumont’s Flanders is something you don't see everyday: a decidedly non-sentimental love story.

A symphony of small gestures, throwaway glances, brief exchanges of unexpected observation and silences which actually say more than pages of dialogue.

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.

Put simply, Mind Game is a mind-blowing experience.

Perhaps it is a shame that no one thought of digitally restoring and theatrically releasing the sex videos that Crane made with the many women he pleasured...that would have been far more entertaining than anything found in Auto Focus.

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.

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.

By the end of the 99 minute running time, there is a terrible sense of been-there/done-that. And for artists of the Quays' caliber, that is a huge mistake.

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

For the most part, Fleck doesn't seem particularly intrigued on finding the banjo’s African heritage – the film offers little in the way of historic value in understanding the origin of the instrument.

A remarkable triumph of documentary filmmaking. It is impossible to walk away from this film without being jolted.

Through the Fire is a fraud masquerading as a documentary.

Handsomely produced but emotionally inert offering.

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