David Ansen

Summer hasn't arrived, but the funniest riff on a summer movie genre has already landed.

The meal is more than mouthwatering -- it's Dinesen's metaphor for the transcendent power of art. This bountiful movie, like the feast itself, can turn your heart. [14 March 1988, p.61]

It's not exactly news that pro football is just big business with the cleats showing. But North Dallas Forty brings the news home in fresh, funny and powerful ways. It's a bitter comedy of Sunbelt manners that packs a substantial emotional wallop. Director Ted Kotcheff, who stays faithful to the spirit of the novel by Peter Gent (an ex-Dallas Cowboy), captures the vulgar, born-again spirit of nouveau riche Dallas society, but he never condescends. The cogs caught in this corporate wheel always remain sweatily human - this is a locker-room satire with soul. [6 Aug 1979, p.55]

Full of bravura moments and high-wire performances.

The payoff comes at the end, when the myriad threads pull together with a shock like a noose tightening around your neck. Built with old-fashioned craftsmanship, Lone Star is not a movie you'll quickly forget. [8 July 1996, p.64]

A great horror movie is like a good shrink--and a lot cheaper, too. It purges us through petrification. That horror movie, thankfully, has arrived. It's called The Orphanage," and it is seriously scary.

The beauty of this extremely clever movie, directed with fleet, robust theatricality by John Madden, is how deftly it manages to work on multiple levels.

It has the feel of a classic coming-of-age story. It's the sleeper of the summer.

Tropic Thunder is the funniest movie of the summer--so funny, in fact, that you start laughing before the film itself has begun.

Blake Edwards's riotous, deeply felt "10" proves just how many fresh turns are left on this well-traveled road and demonstrates again that a gifted writer-director can convert the most conventional commercial formulas into a movie as personal, in its way, as "Apocalypse Now." Edwards provides the side-splitting slapstick one expects from the maker of five "Pink Panther" movies, but he gives us something more: an introspective, bittersweet comedy of manners about a man whose voyeurism prevents him from seeing himself...This is the sort of classical Holly wood comedy that will still look good in 30 years. [15 Oct 1979, p.133]

Filled with funny, gritty Tarantino lowlife gab and a respectable body count, but what is most striking is the film's gallantry and sweetness. Tarantino hits some new and touching notes with Grier and Forster.

Desplechin is an inspired impurist. His Christmas Tale is untidy, overstuffed and delicious: a genuine holiday feast.

The movie puts us in Maria's shoes, taking us step by suspenseful step through her physical and spiritual ordeal.

It sounds grimmer than it plays, thanks to Jenkins's sardonic, deadpan humor and the superb cast, who invest these damaged characters with rich, flawed, hilarious humanity. This bittersweet X-ray of American family dynamics may not be a Hallmark-card notion of a holiday movie, but it's one any son or daughter can take to heart.

World Trade Center celebrates the ties that bind us, the bonds that keep us going, the goodness that stands as a rebuke to the horror of that day. Perhaps, in the future, the times will call for more challenging, or polemical, or subversive visions. Right now, it feels like the 9/11 movie we need.

Forest Whitaker, uncorking the power that he usually holds in check, gives a chilling, bravura performance as Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin, whose bloody regime slaughtered more than 300,000 people. This intelligent, sometimes gruesome thriller is based on a novel by Giles Foden.

Tex, a Walt Disney production, makes good on that studio's promise to return to quality family filmmaking. You don't have be 16 to be moved by it -- having been 16 will do. [02 Aug 1982]

The images of war that Folman and his chief illustrator, David Polonsky, conjure up have a feverish, infernal beauty. Dreams and reality jumble together.

An extraordinary movie. [5 Nov 1984, p.74]

A hauntingly beautiful tone poem.

It may be the most original American movie of the year. It's funny, fast literate and audacious. [01 Sep 1980, p.45]

The movie's slight, anecdotal structure is deceptive; you wouldn't guess how big an emotional wallop it packs.

This is not a movie that can bear much postgame scrutiny. The minute you begin to question one element of the plot, gaping holes of logic appear throughout.

This delightful film, with its surprising depth charges of emotion, has the feel of a movie that's going to lodge itself in the public's affections for a long time to come.

This indie, a sweet, tart and smart satire about a family of losers in a world obsessed with winning, is an authentic crowd pleaser. There's been no more satisfying American comedy this year.

Bob Hoskins, who won the best-actor award at Cannes, is ferociously good. George is both a comic figure and a tragic one, and Hoskins never overplays either hand. At first it's hard to swallow this ex-con's naivete, but he makes George's romantic agony so real it barely matters. The 20-year-old Tyson is stunning, and the more you learn about this elegant femme fatale, the better her performance seems. Caine is wittily slimy: his voice always a shade too loud, his blood pressure too high, he creates a pungent cameo of corruption... Jordan has chiseled a dark, sleazily glamorous gem.[16 June 1986, p.75]

The mordant, deadpan humor that streaks through Dead Man is echt Jarmusch, but it's in the service of his most mysterious and deeply felt movie, a meditation on death and transfiguration that, by the end, has thrown off the protective veil of irony. [03 Jun 1996, Pg.75]

This Superman, which infuses its action with poetry, soars as a love story filled with epic yearnings, thwarted desires and breathtaking imagery.

Ruthless People is a tight, vulgar, low-down black farce that starts funny and, wonder of wonders, gets funnier as it goes. [30 June 1986, p.59]

Comedy and suspense, satire and shame are all mashed together--with breezy confidence.

Barry Sonnenfeld's bouncy, immensely likable adaptation.

Face/Off is a summer movie extraordinaire: violent, imaginative, crazily funny and, oddly moving. Hollywood has finally wised up and let Hong Kong auteur John Woo strut his stuff in all its undiluted, over-the-top glory.

Sarandon is touching and funny--a truly fresh performance. But the movie's sweet, elegiac heart belongs to Lancaster. Lou may be the role of his lifetime, and he carries it gently, obviously cherishing the gift. [06 Apr 1981, p.103]

This is the most personal, deeply felt film from the gifted director of "Under the Sand" and "Swimming Pool." Ozon leaches his melodrama of all sentimentality, and moves us all the more.

There hasn't been a studio movie as unapologetically adult, sophisticated, and nuanced as Up in the Air in some time.

In Peggy Sue Got Married, Francis Coppola takes a familiar, sitcomish premise -- the one about a grown woman who time-travels back to her high-school days -- and invests it with rich and surprising colors. Imagine a paint-by-numbers comic book put in the hands of a Rembrandt; the bold comic outlines remain, but the subject is transformed by the dark palette and subtle brushwork into a tale reverberating with complex, adult emotions. [6 Oct 1986, p.73]

This is an epic you have to listen to--it's about people who trade in words, who make revolutions in their heads, and Beatty and Trevor Griffiths's script is full of some of the best talk in any movie this year. [7 Dec 1981, p.83]

The true allure of Titanic is its invitation to swoon at a scale of epic moviemaking that is all but obsolete.

Exuberantly theatrical yet every inch a movie, and some numbers ("The Cell Block Tango") are so entertaining you might want to applaud.

Noyce uses his Hollywood craft to unfold this primal, powerful story, he has an epic feel for the harshly beautiful Australian landscape and he gets wonderfully natural performances from the three girls. His bold, lyrical images stay in your head, like an unaccountably beautiful nightmare.

Reveals a chilling reality: how hard it is to tell a simple truth when big business doesn't want it told.

A tad dark for little kids, this one-of-a-kind movie delivers 80 minutes of idiosyncratic inspiration.

Deep Blue Sea gives good rush -- earning its stripes as one terrific junk movie.

There’s not a whisper of melodrama or sentimentality in the way Moretti tells his tale, guiding us through the stages of grief with calm, devastating lucidity.

Ferociously intense, furiously kinetic, it’s expressionist film noir science fiction that, like all good sci-fi, peers into the future to shed light on the present.

James Bridges's film, which he co-authored with Aaron Latham, has a mood and rhythm of its own -- it's in no hurry to knock your socks off. You have to get to know the characters, just as it takes time for them to get to know each other. Then suddenly, when Bud and Sissy's premature marriage starts to fall apart, you find that you care, and the spell is cast. Bridges shows an extraordinary gift for directing actors, and he gets a string of marvelous, fresh performances. [09 June 1980, p.84]

The movie is, from start to finish, a hoot... Both a savvy satire of smalltown boosterism and an affectionate salute to the performing spirit. [10 Feb 1987, p.66]

This is humanism in drag: Almodovar's passionate redefinition of family values.

A delightful surprise... Jewison does his best work in decades. [21 Dec 1987]

Few films have shown so powerfully the slashing double edge of sports fever.

Loach hurls us into the fracas, circa 1920, and creates such a vivid sense of the nuts and bolts of guerilla war you almost forget you are watching a period piece. Unlike the epic sweep of Neil Jordan's "Billy Collins," which spoke in a syntax closer to Hollywood's, "The Wind" doesn't paint over its political arguments with a patina of nostalgia.

It has the stately, well-crafted anxiety of a Hitchcock movie, except that the protagonist and antagonist are one and the same.

A demonstration of bravura acting.

Expertly shot in black and white on a shoestring budget (though maybe 10 minutes tool long), this fierce, smart jape gets you shaking with laughter, then leaves you simply shaking. [26 Apr 1993, p.64]

In some of its most powerful sequences, Lee addresses the devastating impact of crack. In Jungle Fever, he is stretching his imaginative grasp (his women have much stronger voices than usual) and refining his technique.

Malle's film -- the most personal he's ever made -- goes out of its way not to tug on your heartstrings. Dealing with the most painful memory of his childhood in France during World War II, Malle has made a film of uncommon restraint. [15 Feb 1988, p.70]

Succeeds stunningly on its own terms.

Eastwood tells his haunting, sorrowful saga with such a sure, steady hand, only a very hardened cynic could fail to be moved.

Zaillian's meaty movie, at once bleak and hopeful, speaks volumes about the maddening distance between justice and the justice system.

It's a real writer's movie, happy to linger on a psychologically telling moment--and audiences expecting a big payoff may feel disappointed. "Diner" isn't the kind of movie that jumps up and down to please. But while seeming to traverse familiar ground, Levinson and his superb young cast are sprinkling it with sparkling insights. [19 Apr 1982, p.96]

Most of the time these rowdy kids are refreshingly real...Stand By Me, like Wilson's film, owes some of its appeal to sheer nostalgia, an easy enough emotion to evoke. But there is more here as well: sweetness of spirit, and comedy that comes from a well-remembered vision of the way we were.[25 Aug 1986, p.63]

Like a hot Santa Ana wind, this sexy, unsentimental thriller makes your senses tingle. [03 Sep 1990, p.66]

Never less than engaging; all that’s missing is a proper crescendo. The picture moves along briskly, even at two and a half hours, but it seems to be running on cruise control.

The list of marvels could go on and on, testament to the teeming imagination of Burton, who dreamed up this treat more than a decade ago as a young animator at Disney. Now, back at Disney, his magic toyshop of a movie has come to sweetly malignant fife. Chances are, it will be around for many Halloweens to come.

Woody Allen's comedy Husbands and Wives is set in his familiar New York world of verbal, neurotic achievers, but there's something new in it, a rawness we haven't seen before. It makes you laugh, deeply, and it makes you squirm.

What keeps you in your seat is the acting. Keener, crisply and coolly playing against type, commands the screen. [24 August 1998, p. 58]

Luhrmann has raised the level of his game, deconstructing the Hollywood musical -- a genre all but left for dead -- and reassembling it with a potency that hasn’t been seen since “Cabaret.”

Crazy Heart gets to you like a good country song--not because it tells you something new, but because it tells it well. It's the singer, not the song.

In every detail - the superb soundtrack, the rich cinematography, the dinstinctively edgy editing - Rain Man reveals itself as a movie made with care, smarts, and a refreshing refusal to settle for the unexpected. [19 Dec 1988]

A terrific piece of work: smart, inventive and executed with state-of-the-art finesse.

Vertical Ray slows our rhythms and heightens our senses: it's a shimmering, tactile experience.

As a "Revenge of the Nerds" redux, Superbad isn't perfect. But it's super close.

Puiu's is the art of the seemingly artless: he takes a story that's utterly unglamorous and mundane, and transforms it into something mythic.

The superbly acted Spider is muted in comparison: it’s a quiet nightmare, painted in hospital greens and rust browns.

Brutal and precision-made, Thief is a high-tech crime movie that closes in on its subject with such relentless purpose that it approaches abstraction. Nothing enters Mann's frame that is not designed to be there: the expertise he honors in his criminal hero is mirrored by his own meticulous craftsmanship. He gets the job done--and blows you away while doing it. [30 Mar 1981, p.82]

It happens to be one of the most wildly (and disturbingly) inventive animated films I've seen.

Indoors, it's Jane Austen. Outdoors, this red-blooded, exuberantly romantic version of Pride and Prejudice plays more like Emily Brontë. Purists may object, but most will find this love story irresistible.

Scherfig and her wonderful cast slyly transmute the quotidian into the magical. It’s like watching flowers bloom in a concrete garden.

This shamefully underpromoted, gloriously silly romp made me laugh harder than any other movie this summer. Make that this year.

This is a one-of-a-kind action flick: a tale of triumph tinged at every moment with tragedy.

A heavyweight contender unafraid to take on some of the most harrowing moral and social dilemmas of the day... Prince of the City takes us into the jungle and into the halls of justice, and forces us to see how precarious the line between them is. It's a true horror story. [24 Aug 1981, p.67]

The zinger of a climax is, appropriately, the blackest joke of this blackest of comedies. [17 June 1985, p.89]

A wicked delight. Adapted by playwright Patrick Marber from Zoe Heller's acclaimed novel, it's at once a comedy of cluelessness and class, a melodrama of two women in the grips of wildly inappropriate obsessions, and a "Fatal Attraction"-style thriller.

Director Carl Franklin is a talent to watch: he gets subtle, textured performances from his fine cast; he knows how to let a scene breathe; how to create dread without strong-arming the audience. And on the subjects of racism and crime and the way the rural and inner-city experiences are linked, this modest film noir has a lot to say between the lines of its action plot.

At first, Blue Collar looks like an interracial buddy movie. Then it shows signs of becoming a caper comedy. Finally - and powerfully - it turns out to be that rarest of Hollywood commodities, a genuinely political film. And a damned good one at that. [13 Feb 1978, p.98]

Filled with delicious backstage drama, and superb actors reveling in the opportunity to play their 19th-century counterparts.

A heartbreaking comedy that is simultaneously funny and sad, raunchy and sweet, funky and elegiac. These fresh, unexpected juxtapositions are a specialty of the writer Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette"), a sworn enemy of cliché.

I expected to laugh; I didn't expect to be moved.

Writer-director Ray has a no-fuss style that is quietly, thoroughly gripping.

Moore’s stunning, subtle performance as a woman trapped in the conventions of her time encapsulates the film’s brave, double-edged beauty.

Jacquet's movie is as visually ravishing as "Winged Migration," and more gripping.

The beauty of Welcome to the Dollhouse is its pokerfaced objectivity, which neither condescends to its pubescent victim nor romantically inflates her plight.

Most of the time, Demme's deliberately unstable mixture of moods and genres produces electric results. Rachel Getting Married takes a familiar subject--the raw nerves of American family life with--and draws fresh blood.

Press and Blunt are major discoveries: in this sly and wonderfully atmospheric gem, they conjure up the role-playing raptures of youth with perfect poetic pitch.

A pretty damn good summer movie.

Being There's dry, dark humor sneaks up on you: until Chauncey arrives at Douglas's home you may not even know it is a comedy. That's Ashby's method, and his confidence pays off in one of the year's most unusual and engrossing films. [31 Dec 1979, p.48]

Gripping from start to finish.

This swiftly paced comedy is a deliciously impure compound of old-fashioned "women's film" formulas and up-to-the-minute sexual mores. It is, from moment to moment, trashy and touching, literate and ludicrous, bitchily funny and as full of sharp, sophisticated insights as it is of appalling blind spots. Part soap opera, part comedy of manners, it refurbishes shopworn cliches into a gloriously unrespectable entertainment. [12 Oct 1981, p.98]