Stephen Holden

Looks and feels like a fever dream about an alternate universe. Suffused with a sense of wonder, it hovers, dancing inside its own ethereal bubble.

Like its would-be lovers, Wild Grass chases itself in circles as it scrambles genres, examining seeing, thinking, remembering and imagining with a zany awareness. In Georges's words: "After the cinema nothing surprises you. Everything is possible."

Bad Hair is an uncomfortably accurate depiction of a poignant mother-son power struggle in a fatherless family in which each knows how to get under the other’s skin.

It makes for continuously riveting, visceral entertainment that evokes a Gallic "Scarface" without the drugs.

This hilarious fake documentary -- deserves a place beside the comedies of Christopher Guest in the hall of fame of semi-deadpan spoofs.

Putty Hill doesn't strive for overt social commentary. It drops you into a world that the director, who grew up in the area, knows firsthand: a suburban fringe of stasis, downward mobility and lowered expectations.

Near the beginning of the movie, the younger Wexler admits that the film is his attempt to get closer to his father. This sense of personal mission helps make Tell Them Who You Are the richest documentary of its kind since Terry Zwigoff's "Crumb."

The movie is realistic enough to make all corporate climbers, but especially men over 50, quake in their boots. If you are what you do, what are you if you're no longer doing it?

Mr. Young's passionate cracked whine assumes an oracular power.

The sweet, solemn music of George Harrison, who died two years ago, has rarely sounded more majestic than in the sweeping performances of the enlarged star-studded band that gathered in London at Royal Albert Hall on Nov. 29 to commemorate his legacy.

A misanthropic dentist, a roguish ghost and a zany Egyptologist: as these unlikely companions scamper around Manhattan in the buoyant comedy Ghost Town, they resurrect the spirits of classic movie curmudgeons like W. C. Fields and such romantic comedians as Cary Grant and Carole Lombard in Woody Allen territory.

More than an indelible portrait of a sociopath with the soul of a zombie, Tony Manero is an extremely dark meditation on borrowed cultural identity.

Your religion or lack of one doesn't matter. At some point while watching the film, you may feel that music IS God, or if not, a close approximation of divinity.

[A] pessimistic, grimly outraged and utterly riveting documentary.

Not since "Y Tu Mamá También" has a movie so palpably captured the down-to-earth, flesh-and-blood reality of high-spirited people living their lives without self-consciousness.

The wonder of Mr. Hata's anthropomorphic fairy tale, which opens today at Cinema 3 and other theaters, is that it is cast with real animals who seem to share deep affection. And the mixture of realism and fantasy lends this children's film a poignancy that cuts much deeper than might a similar story featuring animated characters. [25 Aug 1989, p.10]

Donald Cried is an acutely insightful, exquisitely written and acted triumph for Mr. Avedisian, who understands how the past permanently clings to us.

By focusing on musicians who are talented but finally not good or persistent enough to succeed in the big time, Not Fade Away offers a poignant, alternative, antiheroic history of the big beat.

Beautifully written and acted, Tell No One is a labyrinth in which to get deliriously lost.

Far from romanticizing creativity and the artistic process, Mr. Baumbach’s films portray the world of painters, filmmakers and literati as an overcrowded, amoral jungle of viperish entitled narcissists stealing from one another for fame and profit.

The glue holding the film together is Adam Newport-Berra's elegant hand-held cinematography, which captures changing shades of winter and the frightened faces in natural light with an astonishing intensity.

Brilliant, over-the-edge concert film Notorious C.H.O. carries candid sexual humor into previously uncharted territory.

The scenes of gore and destruction are even more spectacular than Hong Kong's fog-shrouded skyline. The director repeatedly places the viewer at the center of the crossfire and turns the gyrating camera into the next best thing to a lethal weapon.

Victoria is a sensational cinematic stunt.

Mr. Malkovich is one of the few actors capable of conveying genuine intellectual depth.

The film skillfully interweaves several strands to tell a true story with a happy ending.

You probably won't feel comfortable when Humanité is over, but as you leave the theater you will feel more alive than when you entered.

For all the alarming statistics cited in the film, Burn is not a depressing movie. The firefighters interviewed are remarkably resilient men who talk enthusiastically about the adrenaline rush of their work. And the film makes you thankful for members of this macho breed, who relish risking their lives to save others.

Ms. Hunt's eye for detail has the precision of a short story writer's. She misses nothing.

The Hunter never declares who is good or bad or right or wrong. And the implications of Martin's decision when the moment of truth finally arrives are left for the viewer to unravel.

Mr. Sarsgaard gives the riskiest screen performance of his career. Save perhaps for Sean Penn's outbursts in "Dead Man Walking" and "Mystic River," no actor in a recent American film has delivered as explosive a depiction of a man emotionally blasted apart.

This is the exceedingly rare film that understands how lonely, insecure preadolescent children can become so consumed by their feelings that they lose sight of ordinary boundaries and unconsciously act out their parents' darkest fantasies of passion and revenge.

By the end of this reflective, wise, often hilarious movie, you feel as though he (McElwee) has slapped a huge chunk of raw, palpitating life onto the screen.

Superstition, witchcraft, exorcism, talismans that ward off evil: in this land of the supernatural, irrationality prevails. But War Witch is so cleareyed that it makes you wonder how much more irrational this world is than the so-called civilized one under its camouflage of material wealth.

Not a horror movie but a witty, expertly constructed psychological thriller.

The wonder of the movie, which Mr. Beatty wrote and directed from a story he wrote with Bo Goldman, is that it is so good-humored. Fools and idiots abound, but demonic, systemic evil does not.

This comic jigsaw puzzle is crammed with deliriously funny little bits.

It is Mr. Sabzian's poignancy that makes "Close-Up" much more than a clever reflection on film-versus-life as an endless hall of mirrors.

The tone of the narration is so wrenchingly honest that the film never lapses into self-pity or relies on mystical platitudes.

Trees Lounge is not much more than a jumble of beautifully acted sketches that introduce the characters in Tommy's world.

Wildly entertaining, sexy and beautifully shot in the Canadian heartland.

The concert scenes find the stage awash in such intense joy, camaraderie and nationalist pride that you become convinced that making music is a key to longevity and spiritual well-being.

This is a scary but inspiring film with real heroes and villains.

So good it leaves you starved for more.

The degree to which Smashed refuses to indulge a voyeuristic taste for the kind of sordid details exploited by reality television amounts to an unspoken declaration of principle. In lieu of self-pity, Smashed substitutes tough love.

The story is deepened with a distinctively European political subtext as the increasingly grandiose Mesrine engages in a running dialogue with various characters about the differences between gangsters and revolutionaries.

Paul is not a sociopath like Tom Ripley, and the movie does not convey the same diabolical Hitchcockian sense of being manipulated by a slightly sadistic master puppeteer. As the story sprawls across the screen, it darts from one incident to the next as though it were inventing itself as it goes along.

One of the most sophisticated dog movies ever created.

Witty, exquisitely fine-tuned screen adaptation of Nick Hornby's 1995 novel

The kind of movie that seduces you into becoming putty in its manipulative card-sharking hands and making you enjoy being taken in by its shameless contrivance.

This wisp of a movie doesn't pretend to be more than a series of disconnected vignettes in a moody story that sometimes seems invented on the spot. The boy, for all his eccentricities, is a healing spirit who, without realizing it, gives Rose the fortitude to face her problems and resume her old life, for better or for worse.

Like no other film about middle school life that I can recall Monsieur Lazhar conveys the intensity and the fragility of these classroom bonds and the mutual trust they require.

Blind evokes a dreamy, dour fusion of Charlie Kaufman and Ingmar Bergman. Its few flashes of wry humor are outweighed by mystically beautiful images.

The movie’s unblinking observation of a friendship put to the test is amused, queasy making, kindhearted and unfailingly truthful.

Most of the humor is too lighthearted to offend all but the most reverent believers, and the movie’s inventiveness rarely flags.

The Skeleton Twins is a well-written and acted movie about contemporary life that doesn’t strain for melodrama and is largely devoid of weepy soap opera theatrics. A small, precise, character-driven vignette, it has no pretensions to make any kind of grand statement about The Way We Live Now.

Ms. Rozema has made a film whose satiric bite is sharper than that of the usual high-toned romantic costume drama.

Establishes its mood of playful erotic suspense in the first 10 minutes and sustains its cat-and-mouse game between therapist and patient through variations that are by turns amusing, titillating and mildly scary.

Mr. Mendelsohn's ability to evoke a child's-eye view of a suburban environment is the most seductive element in a movie whose primary attraction is an atmosphere so heady that you can almost taste it.

The accumulation of sharp candid flashes adds up to a disturbing vision of Los Angeles as a teeming jungle of dysfunction.

It all has a ghostly feel, like eerie murmurs during a séance: the static of history heard on a short-wave radio.

Despite its shortcomings, this smart, caustic movie is easily the most incisive and realistic comedy of manners to emerge from Hollywood in quite a while, and that's saying a lot.

A grim, disquieting mood piece.

The film reminds us again and again that Monk was as important a jazz composer as he was a pianist.

The son's search is one of three strands of a story that the movie weaves into a meticulously structured portrait of a complicated man who remains elusive even after key elements of the puzzle have been pieced together.

But most of the movie's notes are appallingly right.

A bleak, lyrical meditation on the frontier spirit and American machismo and its torments.

The movie partly resists the temptation to follow a predictable feel-good route to a fairy-tale ending. That said, it has enough conveniently timed little triumphs to send up warning signs.

With an intensity that few movies have mustered, The Business of Strangers makes you feel the acute loneliness of it all.

Marguerite overstays its welcome by at least 20 minutes. What redeems it is Ms. Frot’s subtle, deeply compassionate portrayal of a rich, lonely woman clutching at an impossible dream until reality intrudes.

Blurs the line between comedy and epic drama so adroitly that the two styles fuse into something quite original: a lyrical farce that pays homage to its period in any number of ways.

In Changing Times, Mr. Téchiné, the great French director, is near the peak of his form. Weaving a half dozen subplots, he creates a set of variations on the theme of divided sensibilities tugging one another into states of perpetual unrest and possible happiness.

Ron Howard's bittersweet adult comedy, Parenthood, lays out an entire catalogue of psychological stresses afflicting family life in white middle-class America, then asks if the rewards of being a parent are worth all the agony.