Sean Axmaker

Hot Fuzz is something all too rare in movie comedies: a story rather than a string of disjointed skits, with hearty characters behind its caricatures.

It's a simple film with a direct message, but the glimpses of the surrounding social culture that has adapted to the horrors give this Third World "How Green Was My Valley" its identity.

The funniest thing I've seen this summer.

The live camel birth (shown in all of its excruciating beauty) is enthralling, and the cultural details, however staged, provide a vivid window into a world that is fast disappearing.

Jia's compassion for the drifting souls struggling to create a life for themselves in such a transitory existence makes the metaphor resonant.

An engaging and generous profile of the fascinating folks who have chosen to live at the end of the world.

Blunt, somewhat artless, but very effective.

It's a tender, tough, uncompromising film, photographed with a disarming directness and seeming simplicity that looks almost naked next to the dramatic constructions of most films. It just makes her precariousness all the more real.

The slapdash comic flailing of screenwriter and TV scribe-turned-director Ed Decter is only compounded by a script so disconnected you have to wonder if pages were lost on the way to the set.

An inspired melding of action thriller, satire and biographical drama through the looking glass of a funhouse mirror.

It's so beautiful and moving and simple that I'm willing to forgive Majidi his contrivances.

It may not keep you guessing to the end, but there are enough surprises and wry revelations, right down to the last play, to make this a most satisfying cinematic confidence game.

Feels like the effort of a tired artist reworking the same themes.

This beautifully sculpted poetic naturalism has more in common with the expressive use of words in the great screenplays of '40s and '50s than with modern movies.

These are mortal souls and unglamorous bodies and Ferran explores their affair in its earthy, physical and fleshy reality.

Winterbottom carves his own intimate tale out of the sprawling material, a modest miniature with witty flair and moments of humility.

A classic fairy tale with a contemporary sensibility and a spooky horror under the candy-house fantasy.

It's messy and unsettled, but Bellocchio's distaste for the cynicism and mendacity is potent and sincere.

Danny Aiello is right at home as owner Louis, a paternal Italian father to all but his own son, reigning over the throng from his corner table like a benevolent lord and maybe underworld gangster.

In the face of intolerance, Two Family House lovingly celebrates the triumph of love and acceptance over prejudice.

Aoyama's monochrome images are filled with a simple shadowy beauty and his scenes are rich in tender sensitivity and empathy.

Plays in spots something like a stage play smartly brought to screen.

The insistent crosscutting suggests there is something powerful between the two stories, but apart from vague connections of jealousy, emotional tension and conversations that constantly dance around the real issues, they don't resonate across the years.

While Look at Me at times falls into familiar plotting, it never offers false hope or false characters.

It all feels like a performance for the camera: von Trier as madman producer taunting the elder filmmaker.

This bracing portrait of a woman who painfully accepts her responsibility as a citizen is a revelation.

Affliction has rarely been so sensitively explored.

What gives the story resonance is the tenderness and sacrifice and even innocence del Toro reveals amid the savagery.

Highly entertaining.

Despite the cat-and-mouse games between cop and criminal, this is less a battle of wills than one man's battle for his own soul. Nolan bravely treads where few American films dare to delve -- into the world of ambivalence and ambiguity -- and emerges with a compelling portrait.

Behind the narrative twists and contrived dramatic complications is a searing and scary look at dysfunction.

Andrew Bujalski's refreshingly modest look at life in the directionless netherworld between college and career is the rare film that finds its story in the minor contradictions and simple conflicts of ordinary people doing, well, not exactly nothing, but nothing important.

The poetic justice strains the verisimilitude of a film otherwise grounded in a tough reality, but there is a guilty satisfaction to it all.

The film walks a fine line between contempt for Polanski's crimes and sympathy for his trials and his screwed-up psyche, and it manages both while showing us why he fled the U.S. rather than face the corrupted judicial circus.

It's just the kind of film that you'd expect a jury led by Quentin Tarantino to choose, a bloody and brutal revenge film immersed in madness and directed with operatic intensity.

Vital and alive. Frustration and malaise rumble through every richly textured frame, but behind it all is a restlessness and a desire for something better.

Confronts the line between the celebration and the exploitation of innocence with an uneasy tension that is discomforting at best.

So stuffed with Maddin-ess that it never manages to get past the glorious surfaces. McKinney strides through his role with a knowing wink, and the sheer volume of creative imagery is as distracting as it is entertaining.

It's less a deconstruction of the heist film than an ambitious contemplation of our fascination with the genre, directed with a dispassionate eye at a ruminative pace and centered by a queasily emotionless figure wading through a swamp of moral ambiguity.

The result is rich, lush -- simply exquisite.

Emitai (1971) remains Sembene's masterpiece and his most important achievement. [03 Aug 2001]

In a farce like this, where the story is merely a string of martial-arts movie cliches lined up to be parodied, that has its own rewards.

This is full of talk in the European art cinema tradition: intellectual conversations (often in multiple languages at once), gentile dinner conversation with an international all-star guest list.

A date film with a hook for men.

It's more admirable than enjoyable, beautifully crafted and artfully unpleasant.

Sweet, sexy, and unexpectedly enchanting, Yana's Friends is the little feel-good comedy that could.

Ashton Kutcher wants to be taken seriously so badly it hurts. So does this metaphysical mess of a movie, a pseudo time-travel drama so complicated it takes more than half an hour just to establish the gimmick. And a gimmick it is.

The three stars communicate the fears and dreams and frustrations of teenage girls with subtlety, sensitivity and dignity.

51 Birch Street, like the best of the recent wave of personal documentaries, is both a compelling story and an eye-opening bit of social history.

While the characters lack the quirks and affectations that have enlivened the impulsive figures from past Dogme films, the passion of the players and Bier's sensitive direction give these utterly normal figures a vivid aliveness, along with dignity and everyday beauty.

As dazzling as they come, a visual pageant of strange undersea creatures hunting and scavenging and floating across the screen.

A beautiful and compassionate work, at once stark, sensory and spiritually grasping, that challenges us to forgive even the most monstrous sins.

Imagine Warren Beatty in "Shampoo" by way of a Jewish Rambo.

The song may be somewhat familiar, but Sach gets understated performances from his entire cast and finds interesting harmonies as they play out their clashing duets.

Scratch could use some of the wit and jagged energy that defined "Hype!"

He (Chan) still can turn a silly little action comedy like this into a high-spirited, butt-kicking good time.

Tommy Lee Jones steps behind the camera to direct himself in the most impressive directorial debut the American cinema has seen in some time, a contemporary western both rough and poetic, laconic and passionate.

Sivan makes it all quite beautiful with verdant imagery and tastefully melodramatic direction, but at the cost of emotional and social ambiguities, not to mention living, breathing characters.

Makhmalbaf's astounding and haunting imagery tells a story of devastation, desperation and poverty.

An excellent documentary equal parts extreme sports and social anthropology.

The disingenuous attempt to give the tawdry story some kind of social import only makes the tinny caricatures more insincere, while his erotic display of 15-year-old girls isn't a satire of a sexualized culture, it's just dirty.

It's bloody brilliant.

This collision of skate punk and pop-culture archaeology is the most entertaining slice of cultural history I've seen in years.

Bruckner's restrained performance reveals a girl drowning in her own lack of self-esteem. When she finally comes up for air, she shatters the surface with a force that, in the hands of a less thoughtful director, could send her spinning down the melodramatic road to ruin.

The new parody from the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, takes another swipe at the corpse armed with the same old weapons. This time, rigor mortis has set in.

The restrained drama both punctures the mythic ideal of the samurai culture (trained as fighters, they mostly serve as clan bureaucrats) and spins a romantic portrait of one man who values principle over protocol despite the cost to his reputation.

A playfully offbeat, willfully wide-eyed tale of lonely, inarticulate people looking for connection in a disconnected world.

Think of easy jazz or soft soul, with Rudolph's cinematic improvisations soaring and circling the melody while adding quirky variations.

A handsome documentary on a brutal subject.

It's more than simply a well-crafted piece of fake history.

You don't have to be a teenager to appreciate the raunchy humor and the uninhibited overkill of Seth's porn-obsessed chatter, though it probably helps to be a guy.

The orderly and clean drama is more like theater than history come to life.

Unusual even for Japanese animation.

The rough, exposed emotional candor of Cheung's singing voice carries into her performance.

An airless, mannered mess.

It's a gloriously baroque vision and Leconte believes in his sequin and sawdust fantasy with such unabashed enthusiasm that he makes it work even through its most absurd moments.

Given the possibilities it's not particularly inventive, but it is nice to see a comedy so affectionate with the conventions it spoofs.

At more than two hours, Kippur is something of an ordeal.

The earthy imagery is delicate while the drama is oddly elliptical, creating a lovely film of storybook images and parables. It's both obvious and elusive and, historical specifics aside, almost timeless.

Never comes alive.

More reinvention than remake, this black-humored, blood-soaked adventure is a colorful if impersonal audience pleaser done up in a showy, fluid style with a tongue-in-cheek flair.

This is no Disney fable and the apocalyptic vision isn't for everyone, but science-fiction fans and adventurous filmgoers will find this ingenious explosion of retro-cyberpunk a compelling dystopian vision with a gleam of hope.

For all of its weakness, Ju-On: The Grudge is creepy and unnerving, qualities in short supply in gore-filled American horror films.

From Harry's perspective, it's a grotesque life, a dead end for his new protege Michel, but Moll also shows the sensitivity beneath the sniping and that's where With a Friend Like Harry ... really scores

Scott owns the film from scene one.

Secret Ballot is an education hiding in a comedy, a parablelike portrait of the irresistible forces of modernization and democracy meeting the immovable inertia of tradition, culture and power relations written in the blood of the past.

Winterbottom's compassion transforms In This World from a political statement into an eloquent and involving human drama.

Zambrano shows an impressive sensitivity toward his actors and their characters and never allows hopelessness to quash hope in this lovely film.

Sweet and sour and sexy.

Chabrol's deliberate and drawn-out observations often work against the dramatic tension, but his gift is making the audience believe that emotion and obsession trump logic for these deluded characters.

With less lampooning and satirical asides, Sicko may be less "entertaining" than Moore's previous films, but it's also more affecting and effective.

It's the kind of stunt that gets Oscar nominations and accolades. Theron turns it into a raw, bristling performance that deserves them.

Played by Lucy Russell with a defiant, unapologetic embrace of aristocratic privilege, Grace is a maddening yet fascinating character.

The Divine Intervention of the title lies somewhere between hope and fantasy. In a world in which Santa Claus is assaulted in Nazareth, what do you have left?

Anyone who claims to support the troops owes it to them to see the film and hear their stories.

Director Mohammad Rasoulof has fashioned the ultimate metaphor for a society adrift from its culture.

Explores cloudy, discomforting realities of the Holocaust not usually addressed in such films.

It's filled to overflowing with mischievous gags for kids and adults alike, tickling the periphery of the story and crammed into every frame with playful abandon. It gives potty humor a good name.