Walter Addiego

A long documentary that's very hard to watch - at times, it's harrowing.

It would be wrong to say Close’s performance in The Wife is wasted, but it certainly deserves a better movie.

The movie deals with themes of secular and religious love, of how they may intersect and diverge, that are suggestive of Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer.

De Felitta has taken potentially overripe material and given it real heart.

You can take it straight as an example of a bygone day of outsize filmmaking or enjoy it as kitsch, but it's exhilarating either way.

Costner’s performance is mostly monotone, but Harrelson has some nice moments portraying Gault as surprisingly reflective.

Well-made and modestly enjoyable.

This is a nearly miraculous conjunction of director, material and actor.

Bala, by the way, means "bullet." Laura Zúñiga, the real-life beauty queen on whom the film is loosely based, was called "Miss Narco" in the Mexican press.

The director’s skill pushes what could have been the same old song into a likable testament to the saving powers of young love and rock ’n’ roll.

This Belgian crime thriller makes compelling viewing out of a "you can't be serious" plotline.

Hand it to directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker, who could have made the story into a black-hat/white-hat affair. Without soft-pedaling Cobb’s noxious ideology, they implicitly raise questions about how Leith responded to the perceived danger.

The silence captured in this documentary -- a meditative look at life in the Carthusian monastery of the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps -- may be the most eloquent you'll ever hear.

The film's sense of intimacy, its closeness to real people and painful events, allows it to reach a deeper place than more conventional pieces of political rhetoric.

This is filmmaking of high energy and wit. What it adds up to is debatable. You can view it as a bright twist on the being-a-cop-is-lonely sort of police picture, or as a mini-anthology of quirky not-quite-love stories. If it's hard to say where Chungking Express arrives, the trip is still exhilarating.

The filmmaker works with economy and has a knack for creating a sense of foreboding, which is good because the plot is simply a working out of the old saw that violence begets violence.

This nightmarish revenge drama from Korea is grueling, intense, cruel -- the very definition of extreme cinema.

A loose, amiable documentary tracking several decades in the life of this most unusual farmer.

An old-fashioned and family-friendly comedy.

Gets blue-ribbon results from its thoroughbred cast of improvisational comics.

The film is honest enough not to exaggerate the beneficial results of Parvana’s courageous act.

Mainly for those who already know and like Jodorowsky’s work.

Waste Land is a film about recycling, but it's far more intriguing than the average eco-documentary.

The film refuses to soft-pedal Dickinson’s heartbreaking descent into bitterness and near-misanthropy, but sometimes operates with a heavy-handedness that’s certainly at odds with her poetry.

A potent and troubling meditation on the state of Western society.

This is contemplative moviemaking, with its deliberate pace, often static scenes and emphasis on direct sound. The director keeps the dialogue pared to the bone.

An old-fashioned prisoner-of-war movie that becomes much more because of writer-director Werner Herzog's admiration for the remarkable true story of its protagonist, Dieter Dengler.

The image that finally lingers is one shown repeatedly: a close-up of fingers gently pressing a piece of fish onto a handheld oblong of rice, painting it with a single brushing of sauce and laying it on a plate, after which the preparer steps back. We're left to contemplate the pristine creation and envy Jiro's lucky customers.

Suffice it to say that this is good family fare with plenty of decent gags (visual and otherwise), and it’s nicely acted by all the principals. In addition, Julie Walters, Peter Capaldi and Jim Broadbent turn up in smaller but still lively roles.

Nunez's style is quiet, simple and deliberate, but the film never drags.

Except for Patekar, the main actors are nonprofessionals, which works nicely here.

Not a great picture but an entirely entertaining one. [02 Nov 2008, p.N34]

Jia is passionate about his characters, but that never compromises his considerable artistic control.

Funny enough that it could make buddy pictures respectable again.

Presenting Princess Shaw looks and feels like a DIY project, which is fine because the documentary is really a hymn to self-reliance — although bolstered with a modest amount of plain old luck.

There are more enigmas than answers in Jauja, an artsy South American Western directed by Lisandro Alonso, an Argentine filmmaker who delights in undermining movie conventions.

Aronofky gets exactly what he needs from his top-notch cast. Lawrence is appealing and never allows herself to be reduced simply to a howling victim. Bardem, Harris and Pfeiffer are menacing in their own varying ways, with Bardem capable of turning on the charm at key times that makes us wonder if we haven’t misjudged him.

You might hope for a bit more depth on the kids Dellamaggiore profiles - perhaps she could have homed in on, say, two of them - but this is really nitpicking. The film is well made and genuinely inspirational.

The most amazing act in the Gran Circo Mexico doesn't take place in the ring - it's the grind between performances.

This is grim material, but director Hilary Brougher -- working from her own script that won a Sundance award -- examines the lives of these two suffering women without sensationalism or preaching.

Less ambitious than the highly successful "Secrets & Lies," Career Girls has its own modest merits - a real sense of wit, much of it expressed in Hannah's sharp verbal sallies, and a melancholy truth that both women realize.

Cunningham's work is about seeing and teaching us how to see, and that should be plenty for us.

Like Someone in Love is best suited to viewers already familiar with this extraordinary filmmaker's better work.

The film boasts an original score by Cuban pianist and composer Bebo Valdés, who was featured in "Calle 54."

This was obviously a labor of love for Soderbergh, and a fitting memorial to the artist.

Living in Emergency is sobering, in part because it powerfully conveys that, despite the group's heroic efforts, its impact is "a drop in a sea of oceans." There's never enough time, supplies or volunteers, but, as one of the doctors notes, "the demand is pretty much infinite."

Miserly on food porn but not on prefab characters, it's well short of a cinematic feast.

An austere rural landscape, festering hatred, class tensions, terse dialogue - these are common currency in indie movies these days. Shotgun Stories uses them all, but manages to stand out from the crowd.

This new picture is mainly in the spirit of fun, a loose, generally good-natured comedy with screwball overtones.

What's unforeseen in Unforeseen, a superior documentary by Laura Dunn, are the consequences of a certain mind-set about mankind's relationship to the world and, finally, to itself.

An appealing Brazilian animated feature, and it’s conveyed in a handsome, expressive style that’s pleasing to watch.

In At Eternity’s Gate, Dafoe often works in silence, but tells us everything we need to know with his face and eyes.

The Dance of Reality may not succeed, but it may hold some interest to cinephiles as a relic of a kind of extravagant, overheated personal cinema that doesn't exist anymore.

There's no getting around it. Though it's not without virtues, The Loneliest Planet may try the patience of even the most dedicated lovers of art film.

The stories are harrowing, and because they are delivered by living, breathing witnesses, they move us in deep ways that the archival footage, for all its horror, cannot.

Well made, but it's a talkfest that wears its stage origins on its sleeve.

Sound City is Grohl's first effort at filmmaking, and if it doesn't break any ground as a documentary, it's a heartfelt testament to a place he considers among the most hallowed halls of rock.

A potboiler but entertaining enough to rise above its flaws.

It's a bleak, fatalistic tale about rootlessness and the changing moral order in the machine age, but the wondrous details of the film trump any grand thematic concerns.

A liberating experience.

Sex is a persistent theme in the movie, and it’s handled forthrightly.

There’s already a small library of films about the Who and its music, but this is the first I know of that examines the men who almost accidentally wound up managing one of the most incendiary of ’60s rock groups.

It may surprise you to hear that in the end there is a sliver of hope offered in Under the Tree, so thin that it’s almost not there. A less interesting movie might simply have served up a headlong plunge into the abyss — but Sigurdsson gives us a tiny flicker of light.

Who can resist a good horse story? Simply and directly made, Dark Horse is a rousing documentary.

The hits just keep on coming in Muscle Shoals, a hugely entertaining, perhaps overlong, documentary about the renowned recording studios in the small Alabama town of the film's title. It's mandatory viewing for fans of the classic rock, soul and rhythm and blues of the 1960s and '70s.

For some viewers, it will be more than they want to know, but for Lynch’s many partisans, it’s required watching.

His personal efforts are praiseworthy, but if glacial melting is in fact the "canary in the climate coal mine" (his words), the movie might have given us a bit less of Balog and a bit more of the startling sequences he produced.

History rendered with enough brains and imagination to more than make up for its few stumbles.

Adams does offer quite a turn: Portraying a version of Disney's Snow White, she owns the character, down to every warble and twirl.

Francis Ford Coppola's Jack has its affecting moments, but in the end illustrates the pitfalls of the "concept" movie, the kind you can boil down to a one-line hook.

A captivating mix of formality, ambiguity and offbeat humor. On the surface a simple fable, it's actually much more.

No film could convey all the complexities of the case - what Crude does is air the plaintiffs' claims and show the lawyers at work.

The film raises significant questions about manhood and offers a few gripping sequences, but isn’t fully satisfying.

In short, a nice, predictable film unlikely to linger in the memory.

An engaging documentary attempt to probe her mystery, and it offers some answers - she was secretive and stubborn, a hoarder of epic proportions who seems to have had fits of instability. She also wasn't always nice to her young charges.

Although the director’s multipronged approach may dilute the impact of Intent to Destroy, there’s no denying the film’s value as an introduction to a major piece of history that continues to inspire debate of the most intense kind.

Bujalski has a serious talent for finding resonance in the mundane.

The quiet machinations of this Frenchman and commodities trader helped win the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and bring an end to South Africa’s apartheid system.

the movie comes perilously close to implicitly justifying the killing that sparked the plot - a killing, by the way, that is close to senseless.

It may not sound funny, but there's a bleakly comic air about the story, and a bit of surrealism, suggesting the most caustic side of the Coen brothers.

It's impossible to listen to Francesca's parents, deadly serious about art as a higher calling, without feeling both saddened and disturbed.

The film's grungy, ultra-low-budget look, thanks to the Safdie's handheld camera, is just right for catching the crummy, hardscrabble, rat-infested milieu.

With more than a hint of the magazine’s trademark insouciance, the film gives us a close look at how the selection process works and introduces us a to a handful of younger artists, as well as such stalwarts as George Booth and Roz Chast.

A potent social allegory told with humor and mystery.

This affecting documentary focuses on their 2004 production, a play whose themes of forgiveness and redemption certainly ought to have some resonance for the inmates.

Graizer takes his time and never feels the need to spell everything out, and The Cakemaker is a testament to what filmmakers can achieve when they trust the audience.

Some of the movie probably will mystify viewers not steeped in Middle Eastern history and culture, but a good deal of the humor can be appreciated by anybody.

In general the film is so impressive that we can't leave the theater without wanting more.

A harrowing story about the will to survive amid the most brutal conditions imaginable.

It's a life worth remembering.

Though the material might lend itself to heavy-handedness, director Ole Christian Madsen is steady, and he gets fine performances from the two leads and Stengade.

What stays with the viewer is a sense of a man unraveling from his own mistakes and weaknesses.

This easygoing movie fully captures the couple's charm and offers a unique look at the '60s and '70s New York art scene.

It's a testament to what happens when all the right ingredients come together. Wag the Dog is the best political satire in years.

A sobering documentary.

The story, based on a real incident, may be simplistic, but that's the nature of fables.

Though not flawless, this is a compelling study, in Dogme style, of a wounded young woman who spends her working life spying on others.

The film is dazzling and bewildering in equal measure.