though I disagree with him about 90 per cent of the time Armond White is with me on declaring "Kung Fu Hustle" & "The War of the Worlds" the best this year so far...

"War of the Worlds is Steven Spielberg's equivalent to Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend. It's an apocalyptic vision based in how we live today, amidst worldwide trauma, but every astonishing sequence demonstrates the hard psychic work of civilized man forced to rehumanize himself. This challenge to good-time filmgoers' expectations is the latest example of the 70s modernist urge to revise genre in order to face life more knowledgably. Weekend was based in theoretical political disillusionment; Spielberg's road movie has the taste of bitter experience."