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Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

1. China Heavyweight 2012 Chang falls into a repetitive training-advice-meal scene structure that's less than revelatory, and the bouts are so blurrily filmed and so leavened with reaction shots that you can't really see what's going down. full review
2. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon 2012 The cast begins in that mumblecore mode of quietly overreacting to everything, but once the testosterone starts oozing, the characters jump out into four substantial dimensions. full review
3. Dreams of a Life 2012 Left with barely any there there, Morley compensates with long reenactments starring look-alike Zawe Ashton that are never quite convincing but instead suck more air out of the haunting vacuum left behind in Vincent's wake. full review
4. For Ellen 2012 The film does find a patient balance between its obvious sincerity and the scenario's lack of depth and surprise. full review
5. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai 2012 It may well be Miike's best film, a patient, ominous piece of epic storytelling that conscientiously rips the scabs off the honorable samurai mythology. full review
6. Little Birds 2012 The dialogue is as stock as the characters, and James's visual palette never surpasses the adequate. full review
7. The Woman in the Fifth 2012 You're not sure what this is till it's over, but certainly Hawke's performance is his nerviest and most sincere in a decade. full review
8. The Perfect Host 2011 The heart of the film is a one-joke fizzler, leaving DHP to sashay, role-play, carry on one-sided conversations, and disco-dance on the table with just the right amount of lizardy, half-lidded sangfroid. full review
9. Wrecked 2011 Because it's so carefully parceled out and so evocatively framed, Wrecked is an absorbing ordeal, perhaps less for its survival narrative than its metaphoric heft. full review
10. I Saw the Devil 2010 Never good with nuance, Kim is a beast with disarming imagery (like the severed head that turns face-up in a river current) but has few resonating ideas, leaving the domino-tumble of brutality to become its own tiresome spectacle. full review
11. Marwencol 2010 Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmbergs Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy metafictive upshot. full review
12. White Irish Drinkers 2010 John Gray's Noo Yawker indie is a stubborn throwback to the Sundance-fueled, ethnic-neighborhood movie of the early '90s, when every film-school grad with a fresh head full of Mean Streets decided he would be the next Scorsese. full review
13. The Yellow Sea 2010 Writer-director Na Hong-Jin achieves a vibe of urban desolation right off the bat, and deepens the mayhem with acutely observed and charged details about illegal-immigrant life. full review
14. Zenith 2010 A brooding science-fiction trip enjoyed largely as a monologue. Luckily, Nikolic's lust for paranoid desperation is powerful, and his way with actors is stunningly graceful. full review
15. The Fall of Fujimori 2006 Her film remains an intriguing portrait, even if its acceptance of Fujimori's shrugging demeanor and blame- storming serve to detour our concern from its proper place. full review
16. The Ground Truth 2006 Patricia Foulkrod's film backs itself into a Support Our Troops corner, elegizing the soldiers. Iraqis do not figure in, except as bad memories. full review
17. Saint of 9/11 2006 Filmmaker Glenn Holsten sells it to the cheap seats anyway, fleshing out Judge's alcoholic struggles and his redoubtable activist work with mega-dramatic gimmickry and sentimental hosannas. full review
18. Aeon Flux 2005 The enormous, and probably impossible, amount of style and wit required to resuscitate the original cartoon into something with real faces, bodies, gravity, and locations is beyond Kusama. full review
19. Bad News Bears 2005 More irksome is the ordained focus on plot undulation and simplistic motivation, as if nobody remembered that the first film was a social satire. full review
20. Four Brothers 2005 Unremarkably schizophrenic -- half gritty sojourn into the inner-city furnace, half Hollywood brain death. full review
21. Land of the Dead 2005 Romero's fourth-grade dialogue doesn't help matters, but anyone seeking out the latest achievements in cranial ruptures, spewing-blood gouts, and ground-beef spillage need look no further. full review
22. Gigli 2003 Brest would have to go back to his outline to repair this lemon and give America something akin to what it's told it really wants -- a helping of Lopez-Affleck home movies. full review
23. The Hunted 2003 Essentially a reheating of 1982's First Blood ... but the fallout this time is simultaneously more ruthless, less emotional, and duller. full review
24. S.W.A.T. 2003 A rigmarole of stranded cliches and thrill-free action-movie legerdemain. full review
25. Tears of the Sun 2003 This Black Hawk Down theft is a trial by cliche. full review
26. Sonny 2002 Amid the cliche and foreshadowing, Cage manages a degree of casual realism ... that is routinely dynamited by Blethyn. full review
27. The Sum of All Fears 2002 A trite espionage thriller without the thrills but with a lingering measure of nausea. full review
28. We Were Soldiers 2002 By comparison, Oliver Stone's Platoon plays like the experience of a sensibly outraged man worthy of our sympathy. full review
29. The American Astronaut 2001 A lovely little wedge of garage-band silliness. full review
30. Baran 2001 Majidi's portrait of southwest Asian poverty is bloodless and fastidiously arranged, his regard for his thin characters negligible. full review
31. Rat Race 2001 A few decent running gags ... and an ocean of bad ones. full review
32. Ted Bundy 2001 In the end, Ted Bundy's only justification is the director's common but unexplored fascination with the frustrated maniac; there's no larger point, and little social context. full review
33. Lara Croft - Tomb Raider 2001 So pandering and pebble-brained you'd guess it had been test-screened on barnyard animals. full review
34. Gangster No. 1 2000 As happily glib and vicious as its characters. full review
35. The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick 2000 Dallies too briefly with Dick's writing, and too expansively with speculations about what Dick may or may not have experienced in February and March of 1974. full review
36. Scary Movie 2000 Labored, Naked Gun-ish quotes from The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project, and The Usual Suspects merely congratulate us for recognizing them. full review
37. Scream 3 2000 Logic, motivation, suspense -- anything that might make the film frightening or resonant-is buried under Dolby blams, medulla-shaming dialogue, and a rain of overdubbed hunting-knife schwings that grate like a 3 a.m. car alarm. full review
38. Following 1998 full review
39. Days of Heaven 1978 Almost incontestably the most gorgeously photographed film ever made. full review