Stephen Holden

Fallen Angels certainly abounds in visual pizazz, clever in jokes and trendy pop references, but such things can carry a movie only so far.

The harder Mr. Radnor strains to make you love his alter ego, the more resistant you become.

Although this documentary has a powerful political subtext, it is best described as a conceptual art piece about confinement, attached to a dual biography of the artist and the prisoner.

The movie is best appreciated as a collection of whimsical toys drawn from a fantasy grab bag that encompasses everything from Grimm's fairy tales to "Star Wars."

As one comic after another recalls triumphs, misadventures and painful lessons learned, the stories become redundant.

One of the most accomplished recent films about a non-European immigrant coming to the United States.

Because Stevie has none of the glamour of "Hoop Dreams," with its portrait of gifted teenage athletes struggling for glory, it is not nearly as likable a film; but in its earnest, plodding way it is every bit as deep.

Watching it, I kept imagining the depth of feeling Ingmar Bergman and his troupe might have brought to the same material. As much as A Song for Martin hurts, it doesn't quite go the distance.

A truly majestic visual tone poem.

Anyone who attended Broadway shows in the days when ticket prices were reasonable and the actors and singers performed without amplification will feel a rush of nostalgia as these troupers offer what amounts to a breezy compilation of after-dinner remarks.

Has a lavish ceremonial gloss. It is also a very erotic movie.

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.

The story told by Mr. Bowser's film is complicated and tragic.

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]

The meek, mopey comedy In the Land of Women is the film equivalent of a sensitive emo band with one foot in alternative rock and the other in the squishy pop mainstream: a softer, fuzzier "Garden State."

Greg Whiteley's small, tender documentary portrait New York Doll looks at life after rock 'n' roll as experienced by Arthur (Killer) Kane, the original bassist for the legendary glam-punk band the New York Dolls.

For all its sloppiness, this satiric morality tale still has a sharp comic bite.

The film’s vision of a long-married couple keeping each other going with mutual love and support, and a shared resistance to outside interference, is more vital than a thousand movies populated by hot, squirming teenagers.

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.

Piles too many small disasters on top of the initial tragedy, including a drunken car accident, a drug bust and a cancer scare. It also swerves unsteadily into farce.

As smart and warmhearted an exploration of an upwardly mobile immigrant culture as American independent cinema has produced.

Alleluia is a fever dream of sex, jealousy and murder whose intensity leaves you spellbound.

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.

As a cautionary tale Lou Reed’s Berlin is an 85-minute public-service announcement that preaches "Just say no." The force of the music, however, lends this tawdry melodrama a tragic stature.

Handsomely photographed and inspirational, but not cloyingly so, it is the rare contemporary documentary that doesn't leave a residue of cynicism and outrage.

The connections made in Photographic Memory are more tentative than those found in Mr. McElwee's earlier films, which also seek answers in roundabout ways while maintaining an acute eye for light, color, space and atmosphere.

This smart, sober movie makes you feel the full weight of the challenges he faces.

Exhibition is an exquisitely photographed film that requires unusually close attention for it to reveal itself.

As smart as it is, Pi is awfully hard to watch. Filmed with hand-held cameras in splotchy black-and-white and crudely edited, it has the style and attitude of a no-budget midnight movie.

When they discover they've been made fools of, they accept this performance event with surprising equanimity. There is a lot of grumbling but no riot. They get the joke.

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.

Best enjoyed as a lavish period travelogue whose story is dwarfed by its panoramic overview.

The Mouth of the Wolf will haunt you.

Needlessly complicated, life already has more than enough petty dramas. Let It Rain may not be funny in a ha-ha sense, but it gave me an amused open-mouthed appreciation of life’s absurdities, including unanticipated nuisances like bad weather.

Heavily seasoned with epigrams worthy of Oscar Wilde, this entertaining documentary portrays Vidal as a pessimistic political prophet with streaks of paranoia and misanthropy, but a truth teller nonetheless.

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."

Although Igby has its share of glitches and tonal inconsistencies, it packs an emotional wallop similar to that of another cultural golden oldie as beloved in its way as "The Catcher in the Rye": "The Graduate."

It succeeds at showing how one man's psychic wounds contributed to an art that transmutes personal pain into garish visual satire.

That time machine - a wonderful-looking gizmo with some lasers stolen from a medical laboratory - really exists. Whether it works or not, you'll have to see for yourself. It's worth the wait.

Margaret Brown’s quietly infuriating documentary film about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, includes depressing information that many would probably be happier not knowing.

A gem of contemporary neo-realism, the movie offers a ground-level view of a poor but vital community where many residents survive by scavenging bits of recyclable steel and plastic.

Ms. O’Kane’s brusque performance portrays Christina as a woman who acts on her principles and has little time for making nice. She is a compelling embodiment of the adage “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Easy A isn't nearly as good a movie as "Clueless," Ms. Heckerling's contemporary pastiche of the Jane Austen novel "Emma." But the one-liner-loaded screenplay has the same insouciant charm.

The movie is an amusing ball of fluff that refuses to judge its characters’ amoral high jinks. Winking at the vanity of wealthy voluptuaries and hustlers playing games of tainted love, it heaves a sigh and says welcome to the human comedy.

Until it fizzles in an anticlimactic train crash, it is extremely entertaining.

Aside from appreciating the movie's sturdy performances, my reaction to this satire of the middle-class, all-German family swung from revulsion to mystification.

Gimme Danger is still plenty entertaining and includes many moments of foaming-at-the-mouth musical fury.

The performance of Mr. Barnev, who has the poker face and agility of a silent clown, defines the style of a film whose timing and physical comedy look back to 1920s slapstick.

Visually, and in its soundtrack of overlapping voices, the film sustains a mood of heightened consciousness.

Scene by scene, The Rookie does a better job of capturing the rhythms and rituals of the playing field and the electricity that flows between a team and its fans than well-regarded baseball films like "Field of Dreams" and "The Natural."

Despite a shaky narrative focus and dramatic reticence, its journey is consistently absorbing.

The glorious cinematography, by Robbie Ryan, sharply illustrates the disparity between the rugged majesty of the landscape and the savagery of its outlaws and adventurers, who resemble vermin scuttling through the underbrush of a perilous no man’s land.

The one solid element in Wild Horses is Mr. Duvall’s squinting, stone-faced portrayal of a gruff, crusty patriarch beginning to crumble.

It's all so seamy, sordid, lurid and shocking! And dull, despite a noirish gloss of wide-angle cinematography and a jaundiced, smoggy color scheme.

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.

Pressure Cooker belongs to the honorable if overpopulated genre of inspirational films (both documentaries and features) dedicated to the proposition that one committed, passionate teacher can make all the difference in the lives of disadvantaged students.

Veber's giddy social comedy The Closet finds more delicious, chortling fun in the spectacle of obsequious hypocrisy than any movie I've seen in ages.

The kind of movie that is a must to avoid on a bad day. Even on a good one, it could send you into a funk.

What does it all mean? Less than meets the eye. Amer is a voluptuous wallow in recycled psychosexual kitsch.

If its tone is considerably tougher than that of movies adapted from Nicholas Sparks novels, it is still a grown-up soap opera. And as the overly determined plot progresses, it feels increasingly Sparks-like, although there are no dewy young lovebirds to swoon over.

Its portrayal of impoverished, careworn people barking at one another and protecting their territory in a daily struggle is bracingly hardheaded.

For its first two-thirds, the film, written and directed by Thomas Cailley, seems to be groundbreaking. Then it slides into comforting familiarity.

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

The best movie of its kind since the French director Guillaume Canet's hit from 2006, "Tell No One."

Much more effective at evoking a paranoid mood than at telling a coherent story, and the jerky action sequences are among the film's weaker visual elements.

With its thunderous drama and larger-than-life characters, which lend it a brawling energy, 12 is never dull.

Mr. Wang and his screenwriting collaborator, Lu Wei (“Farewell My Concubine”), portray a world that, apart from its hardship, is thoroughly recognizable in its human complexity. Its characters are motivated by the same needs for companionship and material well-being and the same demons — greed, lust, jealousy and despair -- that drive everybody.

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.

Along the way, Paradise Now sustains a mood of breathless suspense. Politics aside, the movie is a superior thriller whose shrewdly inserted plot twists and emotional wrinkles are calculated to put your heart in your throat and keep it there.

Because movies have become so invested in the unleashing of violent emotion and the escalation of hostility, that expressions of restraint, reconciliation and forgiveness can easily be read as corny cop-outs. Cry, the Beloved Country is not corny, and it doesn't cop out.

Remarkable for its seamless ensemble performances.

Like all of Mr. von Trier's films, The Boss of It All is a cold, misanthropic work that places no faith in institutions and in humanity itself. But it's also very funny.

In A Family Thing, an earnest upbeat fable about the meaning of brotherhood in America, first-rate film acting infuses a contrived story with enough flesh, blood, wrinkles, warts and beads of sweat to make it intermittently surge to life.

The dialogue and the ensemble acting maintain a near-perfect pitch.

A Monster With a Thousand Heads will make your blood boil.

Filmed in less than three weeks, Man Push Cart is an exemplary work of independent filmmaking carried out on a shoestring. Mr. Razvi’s convincing performance is a muted portrait of desolation bordering on despair.

Shot in just two weeks with a hand-held digital camera, the movie often looks frayed around the edges. Yet it has a soulful heart and a clear grasp of its rarefied milieu (Manhattan upper-level moneyed academia).

If Sweet Sweetback is unforgettable, it is also deeply flawed. The acting is mediocre at best. And in depicting women as grotesque, flailing sex machines serviced by the indifferent stud hero, it matches today's gangsta rap in arrogant misogyny.

This unwieldy amalgam of science fiction and horror, directed by Paul Anderson, douses almost every scene with glitzy special effects in a futile attempt to cover up a paucity of thought.

No matter how serious it becomes, however, La Moustache never forsakes an underlying attitude of high-style playfulness that recalls Hitchcock's cat-and-mouse romantic thrillers.

Rudy shamelessly manipulates the heartstrings and pumps the adrenaline. There are many moments in which it seems like nothing more than a promotional film for Notre Dame...For all its patness, the movie also has a gritty realism that is not found in many higher-priced versions of the same thing, and its happy ending is not the typical Hollywood leap into fantasy...Most important, it has a tough, persuasive performance by Mr. Astin that keeps the role firmly in perspective.

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

These stylized images by the Australian artist Peter Coad create an aesthetic distance from the cruelty, lending the atrocities the stature of events in a historical mural that freezes the past into an eternal present.

Today few would dispute Trumbo's assessment of that very dark period: "The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one who survived it on either side came through untouched by evil."

For all its political button pushing, Machete is too preposterous to qualify as satire. The only viewers it is likely to upset are the same kind of people who once claimed that the purple Tinky Winky in "Teletubbies" promoted a gay agenda.

Despite its ultimate lack of intellectual substance, Me and Isaac Newton is still inspiring. All seven of its subjects are fascinating, and most are extremely likable. Mr. Apted has done them all a huge favor.

The screenplay evokes this psychosexual power struggle with perfect accuracy and finely tuned performances.

This bright, entertaining movie focuses on Curtis, but it is also a portrait of a scene, whose survivors look back with a mixture of pride and a screwball sense of mischief.

In simple, blunt language he exalts "quality," "warmth," "feeling," "truth" and "beauty," without trying to define or elaborate on those concepts.

A small, mildly entertaining documentary.

Terminally scatterbrained gangster farce.

Not a pleasant film, but it is deeply, scarily rewarding.

In painting an unabashedly romantic picture of a nation whose songs spring directly from the lives of the people, the movie exalts the Marxian dream of honest working folk, with little to show for their labor, living harmoniously, joined in song.

Presents itself as an anguished brief against capital punishment, especially the execution of people who are legally insane...But the timing of its release smacks of the very exploitation that Mr. Bloomfield condemns.