For 6,905 reviews, this publication has graded:
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34% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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63% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.7 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 54
| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
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| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
0
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 2,529 out of 6905
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Mixed: 3,060 out of 6905
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Negative: 1,316 out of 6905
6,905
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Meta-documentary to the end, Empathy takes its leave by pretending to spy on one patient with his ear to the closed door, eavesdropping on another patient. How did watching the movie make me feel? Interested, amused, and um, empathetic. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Thanks to his mastery of montage, Buñuel naturalizes Dalí's images into a duplicitous rhythm of normality and outrage. The film suggests instances of sex and violence far more extreme than any actually represented while contriving effronteries so offhanded you can't believe you've actually seen them. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
At its most contemplative, The Trilogy is a stirring and shrewd portrait of lives lived in oblivious parallel. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.] -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
At its most contemplative, The Trilogy is a stirring and shrewd portrait of lives lived in oblivious parallel. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.] -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
At its most contemplative, The Trilogy is a stirring and shrewd portrait of lives lived in oblivious parallel. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.] -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
it may be the director's quintessential movie. It's an exercise in urban paranoia and mental disintegration that echoes or anticipates everything from "Repulsion" and "Rosemary's Baby" to "Bitter Moon" and "The Pianist." -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
Matching their superbly expressive computer-generated counterparts, the actors are all enjoyably hammy, but the real star of Antz is the art direction, a marvel of teeming detail wittier and more sophisticated than the script. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
The hyperbole can be predictable and the clichés earnest, but by and large, Charlie is a serious, often illuminating, and unavoidably entertaining account of the creature Downey calls "the most endearing superhero you might ever want to watch." -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
Without the intrusion of voice-overs or interviews, Mylan and Shenk attained a remarkable intimacy with the strapping, earnest, startlingly beautiful teenagers. -
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Reviewed by
Mark Holcomb 80
Actually manages a fresh perspective. The director, camera in tow, had unimpeded access to the devastation for a full day before being shooed away by officials, and the footage he captured (sans commentary) is both gut-wrenchingly familiar and disconcertingly foreign. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
This poignant, acutely observed movie is eloquent and suggestive in dramatizing a particular trauma in the context of an ordinary Haifa family. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Warmhearted but unsentimental, touching but not mawkish, clever but never cute, Divan is almost miraculously modest. -
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Reviewed by
Mark Holcomb 80
There's something refreshing about a pulp drama that turns on the notion that redemption is a sucker's fantasy. That knowledge may not have saved Goines, but it informs Dickerson's adaptation and results in stellar neo-noir. -
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Critic Score 80
In its ability to transform the drably mundane into something otherworldly, Marathon offers one of the most inventive reimaginings of the MTA since D.A. Pennebaker's 1953 cine-poem "Daybreak Express." -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Increasingly violent (although always distanced), The Outskirts is at once appalling and bleakly humorous. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
Chéreau's film is an unsentimental, almost uninflected, account of a preparation for death, told with a painful clarity that eventually bleeds into compassion. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
Far from a maxim-expounding sermon, the film is a fresh spring of irrational visual pleasure. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Unpretentiously poetic and casually stylish, yet perversely precise. Reconstructing the past, Carri seems to suggest, is akin to grabbing the water in a flowing stream. -
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Critic Score 80
Baritone Howard Keel makes an impressive Hollywood debut as Hutton's leading man. During the nonmusical scenes, Betty Hutton gives a crude and strident performance, exhausting to watch, but she belts out the songs with an appropriately rowdy energy. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Both resonant and skillfully devious. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Because everything is funny and nothing provides a punchline, audiences may be too shell-shocked to laugh--you know you're in Maddinville when individual cackles detonate at unexpected intervals. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
Possibly the most Rorschachian film of all time, a symbol-only text that effortlessly conforms to any political present, and finds a foothold in your social sphere whether you're a free radical or reactionary wing nut. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
In one movie, at least, the ethical baseline (heisted, you could argue, from "Sweet Smell of Success") gave Fellini's roaming, cluttered mise-en-scène a chilling gravity he could never genuinely locate again. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
A fabulously fond and entertaining tribute to the quick-witted Lower East Side kid. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
As crass as it is visionary, Godzilla belongs with--and might well trump--the art films "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Dr. Strangelove" as a daring attempt to fashion a terrible poetry from the mind-melting horror of atomic warfare. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
Skin is less life story than luxuriant mood bath. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
Sometimes exerts the gross-out fascination of reality TV's muckier specimens--its arc suggests a slow-motion "Fear Factor," or "Extreme Makeover" in reverse. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
S21 is understated and unforgettable; in its modest way, this movie is as horrific an exposure to evil as Lanzmann's "Shoah." -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
This absorbing, significant, and shamelessly entertaining movie not only goes through the looking glass but, no less significantly, turns the mirror back on us. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Accurate enough as history to provide a potent reminder that black independent cinema did not end with Oscar Micheaux or begin with Spike Lee. -
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Reviewed by
Ed Park 80
Dodgeball is the most satisfying comedy of the past year--at least among the ones starring Stiller. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
Thrusts us into a high school senior year like no other. -
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Critic Score 80
As in "The Bear," Annaud eschews animal voice-over and visual F/X in favor of live, almost wordless action. The result is the humanization of animals and the animalization of humans. -
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Reviewed by
Benjamin Strong 80
Peralta has become a more relaxed filmmaker, and when he trusts the haunting sight of a giant wave breaking to speak for itself, the movie reaches the sublime heights of its subject. -
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Critic Score 80
Despite cloying narration, Fitzgerald's footage and interviews are fantastic. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
It is an essay in film form with near-universal interest and a remarkable degree of synthesis. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Demme, who works a clever permutation on the original ending, is more than capable of doing the thriller thing--even with material that will strike a good percentage of his audience as familiar. As an intelligent genre flick, the movie plays to his strengths. His direction of actors has never been better. -
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Reviewed by
Benjamin Strong 80
Ought to look pretty dated. Instead, Sidney Lumet's biopic of Frank Serpico, the virtuous cop who exposed a network of graft in the NYPD, feels depressingly relevant. -
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Reviewed by
Leslie Camhi 80
French director Michel Deville has managed to preserve the work's great virtues--the intimacy, discretion, grace, and humor with which it speaks of both irredeemable disaster and the taste for life that survives it. -
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Critic Score 80
Johnny's analysis and will carry the film. Of course they didn't get along--they were a rock group. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
A satisfyingly well-wrought, old-school thriller: Character drives the plot, literally. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
Spins in place with aplomb, generating exponentially more vertiginous doublings with each sweaty-palmed set piece. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
A deadpan, self-consciously prehistoric version of Jean Renoir's rueful idyll A Day in the Country, Blissfully Yours is unconscionably happy. -
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Reviewed by
Benjamin Strong 80
Director Peter Berg, an actor himself, gets quietly excruciated performances from the team members. -
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Reviewed by
Ed Park 80
E J-Yong's transposition illuminates, with satisfying crispness, the hyper-Confucian high society of the time, as well as the underground Catholic movement. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Like many cult films, it is also less than the sum of its parts. -
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Critic Score 80
The ferocious fighting moves (adapted from ancient Muay Thai manuals by veteran Thai martial arts director Phanna Rithikrai) that constitute Ong-Bak's money shots are often truly astonishing. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Revived (with vastly improved subtitles) some 14 years after it first stunned Hong Kong critics, Days of Being Wild is a sort of meta-reverie populated by a cast of beautiful young pop icons. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Too touchy-feely for some hardcore Godardians, Notre Musique is the most lucid of the master's recent films. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
All the same, Eastwood's point of view has been seasoned enough to locate poignancy and respect for his protagonists where you least expect -- saying it's an old man's movie is a serious compliment. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 80
An engrossing study of a protagonist who variously inspires pity, clinical interest, fondness, and revulsion-sometimes all at once. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
A bracingly no-nonsense, highly professional policier—as proudly old-fashioned as its curmudgeon hero. -
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Reviewed by
Amy Taubin 80
Largely a showcase for Puri, and he rises to the occasion with a performance that bursts from the screen and tears into your heart. -
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Reviewed by
Amy Taubin 80
A spare, formally ingenious, journalistically acute piece of filmmaking. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Manages to be not only consistently droll but cumulatively poignant and even scary. -
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Reviewed by
Mark Holcomb 80
What finally makes Town Bloody Hall so compelling -- and unsettling -- is the impression that such serious, spirited debate is a thing of the past. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 80
Chaiken ably balances real-time rhythms with propulsive incident -- she catches subtler interior strains, too. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Filled with purposeful, if absurd, activity rendered gravely hilarious through Tsai's deadpan, distanced representation of extreme behavior. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
The cast never skips a beat, particularly Mark Margolis as the most obnoxious dinner customer in cinema history and Summer Phoenix as his unfazed waitress. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
It's a heart-sundering vision of preadolescent helplessness that rivals passages of "Landscape in the Mist" and "Ponette." -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Made with considerable wit and style, Horn's thoughtful celebration of the era and its most uncanny diva could function as the show's ("East Village USA") supplement. -
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Reviewed by
Leslie Camhi 80
"A very odd thriller" is how Italian director Marco Bellocchio describes My Mother's Smile, his uncannily beautiful and deeply humanist exploration of the nightmares that resurface from a Roman atheist's Catholic childhood. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
A work of great charm and bold aesthetic impurity, Agnès Varda's Cinévardaphoto is a suite of documentary shorts. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 80
Amid the muddy scrubbery of the camp and its hinterland surroundings, Ghobadi catches some striking compositions. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 80
The movie has the addictive episodic intimacy of great TV. -
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Critic Score 80
It's a perfectly realized grace note whose lack of any obvious message only reinforces the movie's abundant wisdom and patient humanism. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
The film is a model of precision and economy, from the scrupulous framing and editing to the dryly note-perfect performances. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Steamboy doesn't have the deep melancholia or the visionary élan of last year's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Consistent in its graphic invention from first to last, however, it's a sensationally designed piece of work. (The retro stylistics are comparable to Brazil, David Lynch's Dune, and The Iron Giant.) -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Chow manages to have his cake and eat it too: Kung Fu Hustle is a kung fu parody that's also a terrific kung fu movie. -
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Reviewed by
Leslie Camhi 80
This delightfully sensual documentary gets inside the artist's creative process while also treating viewers to glorious music by the likes of Wagner and Satie. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
The final scene is as close to perfection as any Amerindie has come in recent memory--in a single reaction of Marnie's, we see a small but definite shift in perspective; abruptly, Bujalski stops the film, as if there's nothing more to say. It's a wonderful parting shot for a movie that locates the momentous in the mundane. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Not the least remarkable thing about this deadpan, deceptively haphazard ensemble comedy, a movie as much choreographed as directed, is the way that--at the final moment--the mist simply evaporates. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
With remarkable directness and composure, it shatters the myth of childhood innocence and the deathless taboo of prepubescent sexuality. -
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Reviewed by
Joshua Land 80
Its title an acknowledgment of the reality of evil, Shake Hands With the Devil touches on the unanswerable hows and whys, but its ultimate subject is the terrible burden of command. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
An all-access fan's valentine as artfully scrappy and likably wide-eyed as its subjects. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
Having emerged from his new German cinema heyday as one of the world's most guileless and original documentary filmmakers, Herzog has slowly been crafting a four-dimensional fresco of the planet, its most human-resistant landscapes, and our dubious dramas in confronting the chaos. -
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Reviewed by
Leslie Camhi 80
Pitch-perfect performances and a light-handed but razor-sharp script keep this satire brisk and biting. -
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Critic Score 80
Weisberg, whose stripped-down style seems refreshing amid the current spate of super-produced docs, gives you what you want, if what you want are dismally deferred American Dreams and harsh economic realities. And you should. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
Like "Blissfully Yours" and Apichatpong's first feature, the exquisite-corpse road movie "Mysterious Object at Noon" (2000), Tropical Malady promotes new ways of seeing. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
On a first viewing, the movie seemed a dilution of the formal strategies Jia had perfected-at once less dispassionate and less empathetic. After a repeat viewing, it still strikes me as Jia's fourth-best film (that it's one of the year's best says plenty about the level at which he's working), but it's more apparent that The Worl d's muffled emotional impact should be understood as a function of its setting. -
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Critic Score 80
It's a stunning sight inside this notorious jail compound, which is better known for violence and corruption. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Sinagra 80
It's an exhilaratingly decentered tale, with the perspective shifting around so there's no character with whom we totally identify throughout. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
Broad and pleasantly idealistic, and the evident ardor for 150-year-old graphics (especially Dore's Ancient Mariner masterstrokes) is hard to argue with. But is it a movie or the best-designed episode of "Nova" ever? -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
An engrossing quartet of hour-long films by British documentarian Adam Curtis, doesn't so much challenge Freud's theories of the unconscious as shadow them through the corridors of corporate and political power. What emerges is nothing less than a history of 20th-century social control. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
Just as fabulously cartoon-Gothic as "Sleepy Hollow." -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
Although le Carré's story may seem predictable and unduly focused on the plight of a pale, wealthy Old Worlder adrift in a sea of needy East Africans, the movie's human material is masterfully manipulated. -
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Reviewed by
Leslie Camhi 80
It's rare that a documentary conveys an artist's worldview so compellingly, but then Glennie is no ordinary musician. -
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Critic Score 80
A love letter to New Orleans, Make It Funky! reminds us of what has been lost in the flood, and of an artistic spirit that will never dissipate. -
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Critic Score 80
Akira Kurosawa once said that Toshiro Mifune could give him in three feet of film the emotion any other actor would take 10 to deliver, but in a single flash of Fonda's electric turquoise orbs, Leone (Kurosawa's first and sincerest flatterer-imitator) managed to say as much about John Ford, the devil, and the corruptions of the Way Out Western world as the genre ever would. -
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Critic Score 80
Wolfe's anecdotal musicology succeeds precisely because of its bare-bones, bawdy yet beautiful approach--just like the music Vargas makes. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Tender, cruel, and very funny, Baumbach's fourth feature turns family history into a sort of urban myth. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
Good Night, and Good Luck's primary handicap is history itself -- the toe-to-toe televised dialogue between McCarthy and Murrow was, however arguably vital to the Wisconsin senator's eventual retreat, brief and less than epochal. Even so, the wonderfully mustered context wins out. -
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Reviewed by
Ed Park 80
This latest and biggest installment is a whimsical success of a very high order: The pace never lags, the invention is incessant, and it makes you want to have a bite of cheese afterward. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
While the astonishing street footage of "l'affaire Langlois"--perhaps more familiar to the French than to us--is where this exhaustive talking-heads portrait becomes beautifully, bafflingly surreal, the whole project, however conventional, has the allure of a communal embrace, a home movie of a motherland left irrevocably in the past. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
The Passenger is a relic of that moment in international co-production when famous European auteurs hitched their wagons to hip and eager Hollywood stars. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
From the cast and location to the attitude and premise, many things in The Ice Harvest are inescapably reminiscent of the Coen brothers. But as a director, Ramis is far less flashy and not nearly as pleased with himself. This is one of the most sustained movies of the year, as classic in its structure as "Double Indemnity" or "No Exit." -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Given the large cast, the international hopscotch, and the tantalizing illusion of depth, the movie's tone is "Frontline" meets John le Carré. Compared to the complacence of something like "The Interpreter," it's a regular brain tickler. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
The Power of Nightmares is essentially polemical. As partisan filmmaking it is often brilliant and sometimes hilarious-a superior version of "Syriana" (which also prudently subtracts Israel and the Palestinians from the Middle East equation). -
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Reviewed by
Leslie Camhi 80
This evocative film is a poignant testament to the twin forces of love (however blighted) and the unconscious. -
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Critic Score 80
At times, the film plays like an extended infomercial for John's new company, Angelic Organics, but the agrarian fantasy is so compelling here that the revitalization of the American family farm begins to seem not just possible, but probable. -
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Critic Score 80
Recaps and effectively mythologizes this nugget of modern folklore in brief interviews with Young and a band of old reliables, including Spooner Oldham, Grant Boatwright, and Ben Keith. -
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Critic Score 80
A multi-perspectival film vastly superior to "Crash," Vladan Nikolic's dynamic thriller Love reinvigorates a stale cinematic format and imparts a compelling message all without a single head-on collision. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
Promiscuously inhabiting several planes at once, Reygadas's restless inquisition may already be this year's movie to beat. -
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Reviewed by
Leslie Camhi 80
A life so tragically and quickly extinguished presents maudlin temptations, but director Marc Rothemund ably resists them. His gripping, moving film focuses on a breathtakingly brief five-day period. -
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Critic Score 80
While Little Fish takes a turn for the generic in its final act, solid acting, an atmospheric soundtrack, and flare-filled cinematography more beautiful than an Apple screensaver are enough to keep the film afloat. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
Michael Glawogger's rather majestic Workingman's Death takes a symphonic structure to document some of the ugliest and most dangerous shit work on the globe. -
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Critic Score 80
This picture remains faithful to the underlying affability of both Chappelle and Gondry, orchestrating a feel-good homestyle vibe that, while peppered with moments of sly political commentary, never harshes its own, slightly bittersweet mellow. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Our Brand Is Crisis manages to be remarkably suspenseful. -
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Critic Score 80
Under Ted Demme's accomplished direction, the film unfolds with a kind of ruthless simplicity, observing, rather than stating, the neighborhood's intricate social connections. -
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Reviewed by
Amy Taubin 80
While the acting ensemble is crucial, it's not the only asset here. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Above all, this is an action film--or, better, a transaction film. It's not just that the Dardennes orchestrate an exciting motor scooter purse-snatching and a prolonged hot pursuit. L'Enfant is an action film because every act that happens is shown to have a consequence. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 80
Jeff Feuerzeig's tremendous documentary runs on the motive force of intelligent fandom and radiates an ineffable grace. -
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Critic Score 80
Caveh Zahedi's one-of-a-kind movie--a funny, inventive, ground-shifting hybrid of essay film, mea culpa, and pathological real-life romantic farce--aims for truth by wrecking its own verisimilitude. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
It seems almost incontestably...the most gorgeously photographed film ever made. [23 March 1999] -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
Best understood as a memorial…Like most memorials, it is respectful, premised on competing obligations to the dead and the living, and eager to stress that the deaths were not in vain. It not only tells us we should never forget but also illustrates how we should remember. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
The climactic Christmas Day dinner of dreadful retribution is a terrifying prospect, but for anyone with a yen for our great lost genre, it's also some sort of gift. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
A successful novelist and restrained actor's director, Carrére makes the transformation of a silly marital argument into a cosmic upheaval look easy, and profound as well. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
Cavite is such a shrewd melding of form and content that any seeming contradictions and shortcomings end up working to the film's advantage. -
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Critic Score 80
Spread the word: This delirious import is the most (maybe the only) fun action movie of the summer. -
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Critic Score 80
There is magic in these intimate passion plays, which are filled with sloppy, loving detail and are mounted without a hint of pretension. Each banal moment becomes achingly gorgeous, not least because of Spiteri's disarmingly straightforward performance. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
Yamada's decidedly undazzling yet expressive filmmaking approaches classicism, from a sensei training session captured in one lengthy shot to the final showdown, seen with shifting points of view that suggest a relativist unease with the cut-and-dried judgments of war culture. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
The movie may not be a single-bound building-leaper but Bryan Singer reconfigures the daddy of all comic-book sagas into something knowing, witty, and even sensitive. -
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Reviewed by
Mark Holcomb 80
Eschewing the jock-like aversion to "artiness" inherent in most sports docs, John Hyams's contemplative snapshot of professional bull riding, Rank, ups the ante for the form. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Downey, who, having grasped that he's playing a cartoon character, delivers the most animated performance. (Midway through 2006, this supporting turn is the performance to beat in what seems the year's American movie to beat.) -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 80
Cahiers-savvy cinephiles will recognize Fanfan as the type of handsome prestige production that the French New Wave overthrew in the early '60s, but this example of the "cinéma de qualité" is hardly a musty artifact, with its compact editing, its breezy and mischievous tone, and, in a country not yet a decade removed from the Nazi occupation, its acrid anti-militarism, clear from the ash-dry narration of the opening battle sequences onward. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 80
Lassie puts its trust in kids to be grown up, and appeals honestly (minus the usual knowing winks) to grown-ups by returning them to a state of childlike wonderment. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Gently persistent in its ironies, "Funny Ha Ha" managed to be both charmingly lackadaisical and annoyingly smug; Mutual Appreciation, which Bujalski shot in grainy black-and-white in hipster Brooklyn (and is self-distributing), is even more so. -
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Critic Score 80
The story of American punk rock (1980–1986) isn't a lot easier to summarize than that of any other major war, but it's quite a bit funnier, as this belated documentary overview--based on Steven Blush's like-titled tome--proves in each of its 90 exuberantly irritable minutes. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
If Old Joy is more laid-back and contemplative than "Mutual Appreciation," it's because the characters are more weathered. Open-ended as it may appear, it has a crushing finality. For all the wool-gathering and guitar-noodling, this road movie is at least as tender as it is ironic. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Sweet, crazy, and tinged with sadness, Michel Gondry's new feature The Science of Sleep is a wondrous concoction. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
More fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It's also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring. -
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Critic Score 80
No mere Western-guilt-inducing harangue, this highly informative documentary by British brothers Marc and Nick Francis is a model of patient storytelling. -
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Critic Score 80
The film is no maudlin pity-fest: It's an absorbing account of fraternal love and obsession, as Stephen's brother assembles a "guerrilla science" foundation to find a cure when no one else will. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 80
Berg by no means excuses Father O'Grady, but she offers evidence of a devastating childhood that explains his pathology. For the ambitious creeps who allowed him to indulge it, and who still sit in office, there's no excuse. -
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Critic Score 80
These are men who know of what they speak; they're also eloquent, erudite, and funny as hell. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 80
[Goldthwait] handles it beautifully, crafting from such rough stuff something astoundingly sweet and sharply funny about forgiveness, unconditional love, tenderness, and the things we hide just to get ourselves from one day to the next. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Nelson has fashioned a compelling movie around an unfathomable mystery. To see Jones's face, eyes hidden behind trademark aviator shades, is to experience the last shock in Psycho. His is the blank stare of living death. -
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Critic Score 80
Sandra Hüller, a young German stage actress making a harrowing feature debut, invests Michaela's terrified, possibly schizophrenic outbursts with unholy conviction. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
A terrific movie in the Antonioni tradition, Climates confirms 47-year-old Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan as one of the world's most accomplished filmmakers--handling the end of a relationship and the cloud of human confusion rising from its wreckage as if the subject had never before been attempted. -
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Critic Score 80
The real value of this film is its treasure trove of archival footage, rare clips that document this genius of an artist as a young man. -
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Critic Score 80
Following a hardworking, goodhearted man as life beats the hell out of him, this documentary is moving almost to the point of exploitation. -
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Critic Score 80
The film version of The History Boys is a lesser thing, more fixed in space and time and rendered almost unbearably "cinematic" in patches by Hytner's gymnastic camerawork. Yet the ideas and feelings of the piece remain so rich that it almost doesn't matter. -
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Critic Score 80
Waters's best bits are nostalgic, as he remembers his late friend and frequent collaborator Divine. Part memoir, part lecture, This Filthy World reaffirms what most of us already know from "The Wire": In a town full of delightful misfits, Waters may be Baltimore's sanest citizen. -
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Critic Score 80
Condon grasps what has eluded most of his contemporaries: Anyone can give us the old razzle-dazzle, but what makes a movie musical soar is nothing more or less than the quiet exhilaration of two individuals on the screen, enraptured by song. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 80
Like his equally father-fixated, and equally wonderful, 2003 film "Lost Embrace," Burman's beguiling tribute to his Jewish father -- or, for all I know, the one he wishes he had -- is warm and deep enough to give humanism a good name. -
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Critic Score 80
Maurice, the protagonist of Venus, is a suit lovingly tailored to O'Toole's ravaged but commanding frame. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 80
Notes on a Scandal, brilliantly adapted by Patrick Marber from the darkly comic Zo Heller novel, is a grim piece of work -- "Fatal Attraction" for the art-house crowd, shorn of its predecessor's fearful misogyny. -
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Critic Score 80
The effect is not unlike a Terrence Malick "Real Sex" episode -- only Bruno thwarts any viewer who craves titillation in a plain brown wrapper of moral outrage. -
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Critic Score 80
Nothing is too crazed, corny, or freakishly florid for Tears of the Black Tiger. The debut of writer-director Wisit Sasanatieng is a delightfully unabashed affair, conceived in such good, giddy spirits it might have been called "Blissfully Yours." -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Alberto Lattuada's tricky-to-parse Mafioso dates from 1962 but, with its abrupt tonal shifts and disturbing existential premise, this nearly forgotten dark comedy could be the most modern (or at least modernist) movie in town. -
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Critic Score 80
If the film shows that few men are as unreasonable as Ralph Nader, it also shows that few have so succeeded in shaping their world: His legacy of progressive legislation will affect generations to come. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 80
This is a spy movie bereft of the genre's usual, casual kicks. It's not interested in cheap thrills or playing gotcha with the audience. (Which isn't to say parts of it aren't exhilarating.) -
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Critic Score 80
Like Jean-Pierre Melville's recently rediscovered "Army of Shadows," The Wind That Shakes the Barley possesses the soul of an anti-war movie and the style of a thriller. -
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Critic Score 80
Shooter is a generically titled studio action picture that turns out to be a surprisingly deft satire about Americans' loss of faith in their government following the 2000 election, the 9/11 attacks, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. -
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Critic Score 80
My long strums are pretty f---ing tight," gushes one faux-ax-stroker in this slick, hilarious, and at times even suspenseful ode to competitive mock-rock and/or the further decline of Western civ. -
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Critic Score 80
This was basically the best idea ever. The setting brims over with the same wicked froth of danger, exoticism, and passion that 19th-century Seville must have had before it got stylized into oblivion. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Black Book, which takes its title from a secret list of Dutch collaborators, is an impressively old-fashioned yet fashionably embittered movie. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 80
No one does poetic British with more remorseless hyper-realism than the Scots, and Arnold, who amassed a raft of reputable awards for her 2003 short film "Wasp," directs with a precociously sure touch and a raw taste for graphic sexuality rare in a woman helmer. It shocks, yet feels organic to the paranoid, loveless milieu portrayed in Red Road. -
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Critic Score 80
The Flower of My Secret is a return to form, although not a return to the sort of campy, transgressive comedies that rocketed Almodovar to the top of Spanish cinema during the liberated post-Franco early 1980s. [12 Mar 1996] -
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Critic Score 80
African director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's austere, hypnotic third feature explores the legacy of Chad's decades-long civil war. -
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Critic Score 80
Into the river, miraculous landscape: Los Muertos connects with the elemental energies of sunlight, water, and leaf like nothing since Blissfully Yours. Indeed, that might have worked well for a title here -- that, or Heart of Darkness. -
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Critic Score 80
Resnais is now 84 years old; perhaps it takes eight decades of living to make a movie this compassionate, this confident--and this young. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 80
A British variation on Hollywood nonsense, and as such it's a little gloomier, a little coarser, and a lot more cerebral--oh, and funnier than all the "Reno 911!" boxed sets combined. -
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Critic Score 80
Gosling is the kind of actor who makes other actors look lazy. He is Brando at the time of "Streetcar," or Nicholson in "Five Easy Pieces," and altogether one of the more remarkable happenings at the movies today. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 80
Rudd is sweet and funny; Ron Eldard and Josh Hamilton are great as the town's aimless stud muffin and philosophizing pothead, respectively. But the movie belongs to Ken Marino, who is riotously funny. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Not for nothing did this movie open the International Critics' Week (and win its grand prize) last year at Cannes; Poison Friends may be all talk, but it's cut like an action flick. -
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Critic Score 80
On the one hand, Georgia is extremely painful; on the other, there's joy in the enterprise. [12 Dec 1995] -
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Critic Score 80
The sequel trumps its predecessor for sustained doomsday gloom and suggests this might be the man to adapt Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road. -
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Critic Score 80
Producer/director Dori Berinstein knows her way around a Broadway show -- she's produced 11 of them, including her latest, Legally Blonde -- and her insider status no doubt helped secure behind-the-scenes access as she tracks one season in the life of four musicals, and explains the unusual level of intimacy between interviewer and subjects. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 80
Yet the magic of the movie is how utterly wrenching it renders these songs, which thrive alongside the film's simple, eloquent, dusky narrative. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Trust never seems dated and, as a youth film, it may even be usefully pedagogic. [30 July 1991] -
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Critic Score 80
With dialogue kept to a minimum, cinematographer Agnés Godard confirms her status as one of the most extraordinary visual artists working today. -
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Critic Score 80
More than a vibrant experiment in ethnomusical cross-pollination, it's just great fun. -
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Critic Score 80
This is Iron Curtain porn at its most shameless--a rousing industrial rock song plays in the background every time Schlöndorff wants to invoke the Spirit of Labor--but Thalbach's Agnieszka is irresistible. -
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Critic Score 80
Nothing illustrates the monstrosity of globalized commerce more vividly than the lateral tracking shot that opens Jennifer Baichwal's mesmerizing documentary Manufactured Landscapes. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
This is not so much a love story (and even less a story about love) than it is a movie of passionate loveliness. -
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Critic Score 80
"Amores Perros" is a yappy whelp compared to this striking degrees-of-separation drama by Mexican writer-director Gerardo Naranjo. -
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Critic Score 80
Simply put, Time is about the eternal war between infatuation and familiarity, and our irreconcilable need to find both in the same person. In other words, it's a parable about the root of human unhappiness. -
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Critic Score 80
There's very little explicit exposition here; instead, Majidi presents us with a series of glistening tone poems. -
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Critic Score 80
With an excess of excitable style, samba music, and heady, montage-driven metaphor that threatens to bury his film's key ideas, young-gun director Kohn--a New Yorker with South American roots--has clearly set out to make a splash. So far, he's succeeded. -
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Critic Score 80
In the Shadow of the Moon recalls the wondrous moment when America had the entire world looking up, up, and not away. -
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Critic Score 80
Impressive in scope if unremarkable in style, The Rape of Europa provides a chronology of World War II as it was experienced by "David," "Mona Lisa," and other artistic treasures the Nazis plundered. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 80
Out of this sorry tale of human trafficking emerges a fascinating portrait of this handsome, pugnacious, one-man NGO, who left a cushy life with his patrician Anglo-Spanish family to work with Mother Theresa and devote himself to the oppressed. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 80
Gilroy's up to the challenge, as is his uniformly astounding cast--Clooney, especially, as the charmed and charming man stripped of his superpowers, but also Wilkinson and Swinton as the mirror images of each other. -
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Critic Score 80
About a Son is essentially a dead rock star talking about his life for an hour and a half, and—here, jacket-blurbers!—it's deeply moving. -
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Critic Score 80
Slipping in and out of character, variously embodying, studying, and commenting on their counterparts, the actors manage both dramatic reenactment and its deconstruction with aplomb. -
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Critic Score 80
In his strikingly downbeat directorial debut, Affleck has created something of a blue-moon rarity: an American movie of genuine moral complexity. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Terror's Advocate is largely a mix of talking heads and archival footage, but as Vergés's connections to Swiss neo-Nazis and Congo secessionists are explored, the movie becomes a fantastic international thriller. -
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Reviewed by
Nick Pinkerton 80
The closest thing Gray's done to a commercial actioner, the film also applies his genius for tone (aided by superlative sound work) to set pieces that throb with trauma: a tinnitus-soundtracked shoot-out and a rain-slick car chase set to the tempo of windshield wipers. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
As archetypal as its title, Ridley Scott's would-be epic aspires to enshrine Harlem dope king Frank Lucas in Hollywood heaven, heir to Scarface and the Godfather. Or, as suggested by the Mark Jacobson article on Lucas that inspired the movie, a real-life Superfly. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 80
This wise, observant, and exquisitely tacit chamber piece complicates every May-December, academic-novel cliché in the book. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 80
The movie is dotted with moments of grace and whacked-out humor that got me on board for this damaged duo's liberation. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 80
Once it works its way through the first-timer's lookatme! snark, Juno evolves into a thing of beauty and grace. By the end, it's unexpectedly moving without ever once trolling for crocodile tears. It's a sneak attack. -
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Reviewed by
Ernest Hardy 80
A beguiling comedy from a Marxist-inflected thesis that is filled with characters who rage against the machine with pessimism, optimism, and naïveté--sometimes in rotation. -
