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Lost in Translation
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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...its pretty images of Tokyo and oddball intergenerational friendship coalesce into something unexpectedly moving...
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Dogville
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Dogville's tongue-clucking point-and von Trier makes it broadly-is the hypocrisy of the Good Samaritan, but a less clinical film could have done so more powerfully.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Saddest Music in the World
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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...even Guy Maddin, Canada's homegrown David Lynch, stumbled with his gorgeous but inconsequential comedy, The Saddest Music In The World.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Dallas 362
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Dallas 362 sparked that rarer thrill of prodigious discovery.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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In the Cut
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Meg Ryan is desperately, unpersuasively naked in Jane Campion's ludicrous erotic thriller...
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Five Obstructions
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Von Trier's antic documentary The Five Obstructions...comically reveals the Dogmatist at his torturous worst while tapping into appealing depths of insecurity he's never allowed himself.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Goodbye, Dragon Inn
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Tsai Ming-liang's stultifying Good Bye, Dragon Inn captures none of the magic of film despite being set in a movie palace on its final day of operations.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Fog of War
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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[A] mesmerizing portrait of former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara...
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Hulk
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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I ask you: Is this not the correct way, the honorable way, for a studio to spend $150 million of its summer capital? Universal said The Hulk, and Lee heard something else, perhaps a story of dysfunctional families torn apart by ambition.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Shattered Glass
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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What Billy Ray's confident debut lacks in situational dramatics...it more than makes up for in the central performance of young Hayden Christensen...
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Yes Men
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Hilariously, The Yes Men follows a subversive group of well-organized activists posing as guest speakers...
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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28 Days Later
(2002)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Twenty-eight Days Later is a zombie flick, which makes it my kind of movie-dare I say, our kind of movie. No cinema zombie ever shambles into view without its agenda.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Corporation
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Building its indictment carefully, with well-chosen interviews...The Corporation may leave you in a rage.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
(1992)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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[A] well-intentioned but undeniably dull take...
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Pahn arrives at a coolly devastating picture of a regime that claimed more than 2 million lives.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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11-09-01: September 11
(2002)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Unified only by its depressing timidity and a surprising lack of relevance, 11'09"01 is a failure.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
(2003)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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[It] suffers for its tidy reduction of the conflict to man-vs.-monolith romanticism; it does, however, work surprisingly well as a paranoid thriller, complete with screeching tires and telephoto lenses peeking out of the slate-gray windows...
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Far From Heaven
(2002)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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When a movie gets it all impeccably, heartbreakingly right, as does Todd Haynes' stunning Far from Heaven, some critics are tempted to gush deepest purple...I'll try to stay anchored to more sensible levels of bliss.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Dogtown and Z-Boys
(2001)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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It's made with great authority; director Stacy Peralta, in his younger years, rode ramps with the best of them and was the movement's shrewdest self-promoter.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Adaptation
(2002)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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There's no good reason why this should work-the picture is a schizzy, self-indulgent mess-but magically, it does.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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25th Hour
(2002)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Spike Lee's latest-his 20th feature including TV work-is at long last the raging masterpiece many have suspected him capable of. 25th Hour eclipses everything he's done before, including Do the Right Thing...
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Morvern Callar
(2002)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Morvern Callar isn't just cool, it's downright arctic: Ramsay takes her alienation neat with rarely a chaser of glam.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Russian Ark
(2002)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Perhaps no amount of skillful reasoning could have swayed our gatekeepers from their ignorance. But as Kiarostami himself suggested in his dignified statement to the press, the embarrassment is also his, and by extension our own.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Son
(2002)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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The Dardennes build drama slowly and deliberately, often perching their handheld cameras right at their subjects' earlobes or on the backs of their necks. It's an odd choice, but one that works improbably well in achieving intimacy.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Sixth Sense
(1999)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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At root, his films are patient vindications of crazy faiths, of ghosts and comic book heroes. Loneliness is his theme, and when blessed with courageous performers, as in The Sixth Sense, he can take us just about anywhere.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Signs
(2002)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Signs is a tense experience; even the opening credits lunge at your throat with orchestral shrieks. It may one day reveal itself as a minor classic, a new Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the manufactured scare of its day.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Bowling for Columbine
(2002)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Readers of these pages need no introduction to Michael Moore, nor will they require any acrobatics on my part to go see Bowling for Columbine, which is (brace yourselves) pretty terrific.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Windtalkers
(2002)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Woo reminds us that wars are fought by people; this is what makes his film great.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Ocean's Eleven
(2001)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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As we live and breathe, Steven Soderbergh is making the best kid-stuff for adults since Howard Hawks put Cary Grant in a sombrero. It's no small achievement.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
(2001)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Jackson is working from obvious passion; he knows the most special of effects are expected of him but deploys his technology smartly.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Royal Tenenbaums
(2001)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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If it sounds bittersweet, it is, but like the best family albums, Tenenbaums is split wide with open-heartedness, and equally generous with its triumphs and failures.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Mulholland Dr.
(2001)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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With Mulholland Drive, the trance that comes so easily to him is finally charged with the doom of a classic.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Rollerball
(2002)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Rollerball is an unbelievable bomb, but one of the most educational-revealing corporate desperation at its vulgar low.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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What Time Is It There?
(2001)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Throughout, Tsai makes his rhymes work with an almost subliminal grace: from him to her, from clocks to hearts, from an ancient Paris graveyard to the modern passageways of locker-like columbaria...
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Together
(2000)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Moodysson excels at this delicate staging of inappropriateness; his true theme begins to cohere out of the sullen stares of children forced to tap undeveloped reserves of patience as the adults test the limits of liberation.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Planet of the Apes
(2001)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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No remake would have been deemed complete without a shockaroo ending-and this Apes has its lulu, which I won't disclose-but it leaves behind the stink of arbitrary mystification.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Memento
(2000)
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Memento would only be half as fun with only one gimmick or the other. Instead, the backward storytelling and the frozen man make for a wonderful pair, combining into something far more redemptive than it sounds.
Posted Mar 16, 2020
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15 Minutes
(2001)
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A.S. Hamrah
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It's pretty clear it's the audience who the filmmakers think are the sheeps here.
Posted Jan 29, 2019
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Series 7
(2001)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Series 7 never cracks, it's true. His film may be revenge for all the segments he had to produce for tabloid-TV news magazines earlier in his career, but those spots take their revenge on him as well: His movie looks like a TV show.
Posted Dec 04, 2018
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People's Republic of Desire
(2018)
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Michael Atkinson
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It's the massive number of fans, coupled with the obvious catastrophic loneliness and blind devotionalism, that makes Wu's film so haunting.
Posted Nov 02, 2018
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Ghost World
(2001)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Ghost World is animated by a tension between Seymour's 78 rpm universe and Enid's dedication to a punk etho
Posted Oct 31, 2018
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Moulin Rouge
(2001)
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A.S. Hamrah
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If its goal was to reveal the emptiness of postmodern bricolage at the blockbuster level, it has succeeded. By any other standard, it's a mess.
Posted Oct 29, 2018
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Araby
(2017)
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Michael Atkinson
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It's a soft bolero of a film, painting a searing portrait of life for developing-nation laborers but coming around in the end to touches of loveliness and humanity we didn't see coming.
Posted Jul 05, 2018
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A Gray State
(2017)
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Michael Atkinson
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Nelson's film is a fairly straightforward police-file-and-talking-heads affair, energized by the use of Crowley's own storehouse of footage, and in essence positing him as a co-director.
Posted Dec 13, 2017
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Spettacolo
(2017)
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Michael Atkinson
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Certainly, it will be difficult for many American viewers to resist not only the vacation porn, but the vision of a village so intimately bonded by its years of collective self-expression that it's nearly a social ideal.
Posted Sep 14, 2017
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War for the Planet of the Apes
(2017)
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Eileen Jones
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It saddens me to report that, though there are still great scenes of primate conflict, the third film of the trilogy succumbs in the end to fatal chicken-heartedness.
Posted Jul 20, 2017
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A Ghost Story
(2017)
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Michael Atkinson
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I was still knuckling my forehead in skepticism through to the last few minutes. But that's when the film's mournful ache abruptly feels earned, and its mysteries become tangible. Days later I was still thinking of Lowery's inspired imagery
Posted Jul 13, 2017
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Okja
(2017)
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Michael Atkinson
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For someone whose films are bursting with outrageous computer imagery, and whose sensibility could be characterized as hyperviolent satiric pulp, Korean director Bong Joon-ho sure is a gung-ho Captain Planet.
Posted Jun 29, 2017
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The Little Hours
(2017)
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Michael Atkinson
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Goofy as it is, Baena's film has a lovable humility to it. It doesn't try to be the definitive anything, even as it stands as arguably the savviest Decameron adaptation ever made.
Posted Jun 20, 2017
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A Quiet Passion
(2016)
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Michael Atkinson
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As the sisters' lives slide into an autumnal dark age, Davies' artificiality gives way to emotional nakedness that's at times hard to watch.
Posted Apr 13, 2017
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