Naqoyqatsi

Its best moments offer a sense of motion-picture poetry that will lift receptive viewers out of their seats.

Reggio, who is sufficiently eager for a large audience that he has allowed his film to be distributed by Miramax, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Walt Disney Co., surely one of the villains in his piece, is neither so honest nor so bold (as Moore's "Bowling for Columbine").

Images wash over you like wind-blown rain, fierce and beautiful at the same time, largely shaped into themes by the haunting music of Philip Glass, who is here joined by cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Feels like a bloated mass of data without much coherence.

By far the grimmest of these nonnarrative, nonverbal cinematic tone poems with epic ambitions. Although none of the three could be described as cheery, Naqoyqatsi, whose title is the Hopi Indian term for war as a way of life, reeks of doomsday.

Possessed of another outstanding wall-to-wall score by Philip Glass but rather fuzzy in its message, entry differs from its predecessors in that roughly 80% of its images are derived from existing sources and have been "tortured and recontextualized" to unusual and sometimes extreme effect.

Pretentious, ponderous and redundant -- You may not need linear narrative to create a great movie, but you do need some original ideas.