David Ansen

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.

It's a swirling, fluid retelling of the tale that packs an impressive cargo of laughs, thrills and wonders into a watertight 88 minutes.

Frost/Nixon works even better on screen. Director Ron Howard and Morgan, adapting his own play, have both opened up the tale and, with the power of close-ups, made this duel of wits even more intimate and suspenseful.

It's a marvelous premise, and Crudup's serpentine performance has a venomous grace. But Jeffrey Hatcher's screenplay too often sacrifices psychological insight for bogus theatricality.

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

Time Bandits is at once sophisticated and childlike in its magical but emotionally cool logic, and this tone is perfectly captured in young Warnock's appealingly sensible performance. Cleese, Warner, Richardson, Holm and Connery are in great form, and the bandits (David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Jack Purvis, Mike Edmonds, Malcolm Dixon and Tiny Ross) are all gifted comic actors. Made on a modest budget, Time Bandits is a wonderful wild card in the fall movie season [09 Nov 1981, p.92]

Some snazzy expressionist cinematography and an overkill rock score cannot disguise the fact that Reckless is a totally redundant repackaging of every misunderstood-teen-ager cliche from "Rebel Without a Cause" right up to "All the Right Moves," with which it shares a bleak industrial-town setting. [06 Feb 1984, p.81]

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

In snuggling up so close to his heroine, Mazursky sacrifices some of the wild satrical highs we expect from him - the andante pacing could use a little more allegro (and a little less help from Bill Conti's overdone score). But we are more than rewarded by Muzursky's generosity and insight. He's burrowed deeper into the upper middle-class psyche than ever before, and if it's sometimes uncomfortable there, the unease is one we recognize as our own. [13 Mar 1978, p.75]

She's Gotta Have It, a black-and-white movie made on a shoestring by the 29-year-old black filmmaker Spike Lee, is fresh in both senses of the word -- sassy and original. [08 Sept 1986, p.65]

Ultimately, one's reservations are overwhelmed by the story's urgency; it's impossible not to be shattered.

Cusack is a master at playing smart, frazzled, self-flagellating hipsters, and the movie, propelled by his arias of angst, lets him strut his best stuff.

Howard's fifth movie is a keen disappointment. Clever moments and bittersweet touches aside, it leaves you wishing a modern-day Preston Sturges had written the script. [17 Mar 1986, p.82]

Small in scale, grittily realistic, charged with a fierce intelligence about how people live on the other side of the law, the film makes few concessions to an audience's expectations, but it has an edgy, lingering intensity. [03 Apr 1978, p.91]

If Animal House lacks the inspired tastelessness of the Lampoon's High School Yearbrook Parody, this is still low humor of a high order. [7 Aug 1978, p.85]

A demonstration of bravura acting.

Funny, bittersweet, its understatement yielding surprising depth charges, Broken Flowers is a triumph of close observation and telling details.

An epic both raw and contemplative, is neither a flag-waving war movie nor a debunking.

This wonderful, one-of-a-kind movie hops from Taiwan to France, from tragedy to deadpan comedy and, in its mysterious conclusion, from the worldly to the otherworldly.

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]

Urgent, gritty, sometimes weirdly funny, The Fighter might be considered his first feel-good movie. But Russell's too honest and acute an observer to serve up affirmation without leaving a subversive aftertaste of ambivalence and unease.

Quest for Fire is diverting and well made, and kids should love it. Chong is delightful as the first feminist heroine. And as bloody and brutish as the fights are, the film is resoundingly sweet-natured at heart. [15 Feb 1982, p.61]

If we must have teen movies, let them all be as sweet and seductive as Sollett's smartly observed romance.

Downey and Favreau give the movie a quirky flavor it can call its own. For that we can be grateful.

Courtney Love's performance as stripper Althea Leasure is an amazement. Funny, unfettered and almost scarily alive in front of a camera, she's the definition of a "natural."

Schrader has never been one to coddle an audience, and this is as uncompromising a vision as he has given us.

In Parker's hands, Billy's story has become a virtuoso horror show-an exercise in emotional manipulation designed not merely to arouse chills but to turn the audience into avengers. Despite the remarkably controlled, honestly conveyed performance of Davis, Billy finally seems far less vivid than his prison friends-Randy Quaid's highly combustible American roughneck, the superb John Hurt's strung-out English junkie. Parker captures their camaraderie well, but he fails to convey any sense of day-to-day prison life-so keen is he to get to the assaultive highlights. [16 Oct 1978, p.76]

The movie holds you in its grip from start to finish.

Told from both women's points of view, this fascinating, if sometimes overwrought, tale packs a wallop.

Where the original gave you something to chew on, the sequel is more interested in chewing on you.

It might, however, have been a greater film if its villain were as compelling as its flawed hero. Williams is effectively creepy, but next to Pacino’s rich, multileveled portrait he seems one-note, and one we’ve seen before.

Like most of this refreshingly subtle film, it's not what you expect, and it's not something you've seen before.

The beauty and scale of Miyazaki's vision shines through.

Akin's raw, powerful, multileveled movie takes us places we never expected to go.

Beresford's nice little movie seems so afraid to make a false move that it runs the danger of not moving at all. [07 Mar 1983, p.78B]

The Freshman has a preposterous plot even the writer's mother couldn't believe, and it strains and creaks down the runway, but when this baby gets off the ground, we're talking seriously funny.

A pretty damn good summer movie.

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]

Steven Knight’s smart, if overly plotted, script delivers social insights tautly wrapped in genre thrills.

Howard redeems this lumpy fantasy. Soft-spoken and mysterious, he presides over the movie with a dangerous, feline grace.

Juxtaposes beauty and horror to fashion a savage and lyrical cinematic poem.

[Rudolph] may compose from borrowed parts, but his synthesis is uniquely his own -- nutty and gorgeous and moody as all hell. [31 March 1986, p.72B]

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

What a sumptuous canvas Lean gives us, and what a superb cast. [24 Dec 1984, p.53]

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.

It's as smart, quiveringly alert and fleet of foot as a purebred pointer on the scent of fresh game.

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]

The peril of making a movie about monochromatic people is that you'll make a monochromatic movie, and Brooks hasn't entirely avoided this problem. Basically, his imagination doesn't include other people: the audience is trapped inside one insanity and starts to crave variety. Still, few comics cut so close to the bone of daily life, and that's to be cherished. [25 Feb 1985, p.85]

It's a tribute to Newell's seductive filmmaking, and to the delicious wit of the sterling cast, that this unlikely romantic idyll casts so potent a spell. A sweet pipe dream, Enchanted April won't bear much scrutiny; just bask in it indulgently like a spring sun.

Hilariously odd and prodigiously inventive.

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]

This unpretentious, affectionate biography of the horn-rimmed Texas boy who changed the course of rock 'n' roll is a real movie, with a firm grasp on its characters, an honest-to-god plot and an old-fashioned heart. [26 June 1978, p.79]

At its best, Magnolia towers over most Hollywood films this year.

If Barbarosa is a decidedly bumpy ride, its quirky ambitions are always interesting. Schepisi doesn't play safe, but he's a real filmmaker -- even his mistakes are arresting. [02 Aug 1982, p.62]

Dahl himself thought his book would be impossible to translate into film, and for all the ingenuity that's been thrown at the screen, perhaps he was right. This overgrown peach never ripens.

In this gorgeously melancholic fresco of love affairs, Tony Leung Chiu Wai plays a womanizing pulp-fiction writer in '60s Hong Kong.

Defies all laws of gravity in its pursuit of thrills and laughs—and it's so disarmingly eager to please that only a stone-faced kung fu purist could object.

This slick, handsomely produced thriller only gets the pulse half racing.

DiCaprio is astonishing.

Marvin's taciturn performance--a moving demonstration of masculine grace under pressure--may be his finest.

Andy Tennant's flimsy but generally likeable comedy is tailor-made for Smith's cheerfully suave comic style, and the movie goes out of its way to avoid any hint of sleaziness.

As taut and exciting as many edge-of-your-seat Hollywood escape movies.

The preposterous plot is riddled with holes, and Patton, as the psychotic homosexual aide, badly overplays his hand. Nonetheless, Australian-born director Roger Donaldson does a bangup job tightening the suspense screws inside the Pentagon. Costner, much more vibrant than he was allowed to be in "The Untouchables," brings great dash and conviction to material that probably doesn't deserve it, and Hackman finds pockets of humanity in his badguy role. The result is taut, stylish and, for those willing to suspend about three tons of disbelief, a good deal of fun. [24 Aug 1987, p.60]

The viewer finds himsel falternating between awe at the director's courage, energy and dedication, and horror at his monomania. [18 Oct 1982, p.95]

This is Depp's coming-of-age role, and he's terrific. Pacino, who's shown more flash than substance recently, reminds us how great he can be when he loses himself inside a character. The bond between these two makes the film sing.

The film seems to want us to pin a medal to its own chest.

At times Southern Comfort seems like a kind of war game itself--an academic exercise, perfectly executed but a little cut and dried. Still, it's an exercise passed with flying colors. The objective is sighted, the mission accomplished, the audience properly pummeled. [05 Oct 1981, p.78]

A deep, powerful and rivetingly complex study of Tienanmen - and, ironically, it's far more evenhanded in its account of the massacre that killed more than a thousand protesters than the Chinese government might suspect.

It’s too early to place Eminem alongside those Hollywood giants (Jimmy Cagney/John Garfield), but the promise is there. He understands the power of being still in front of a camera. Compact, volatile and burningly intense, he’s got charisma to spare.

Domestic violence has never been more savagely portrayed on screen.

The filmmakers are clearly in awe of the Chicks' fighting spirit. If you think Maines's original Bush remark was disrespectful, wait till you hear what she calls him here. Maines is not ready to make nice, and neither is this riveting documentary.

A Single Man's sleek surface may go against Isherwood's crisp, understated prose, yet the story's beating, wounded heart and its spiky intelligence still come through, personified in Firth's moving, eloquently internalized performance.

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

Ulee's Gold possesses an attribute that's increasingly rare in American filmmaking, independent or Hollywood: call it soul.

What sets Jerry Maguire above any other romantic comedy this year is Crowe's writing. He captures the venal, high-stakes world of pro sports with deadly wit and an ex-journalist's sense of detail.

In keeping with a morality tale on the excesses of wealth and power, it is extravagantly confusing, grandiosely paranoid, flamboyantly absurd and more than a little fun. Though it utterly lacks the internal consistency that "good" movies require, as a wild-goose chase it maintains a certain lunatic fascination. [04 Jun 1979, p.76]

Robbins's gutsy directorial debut isn't seamless art, but so what? After a summer in Hollywood fantasyland, at last we have an American movie that rattles our cage-and pokes a sharp spear into the body politic. Now that's entertainment.

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]

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

Nair’s stereotype-shattering movie -- like the polymorphous culture it illuminates -- borrows from Bollywood, Hollywood and cinema verite, and comes up with something exuberantly its own.

It's like a spectacular roadside accident: you can't turn away.

The astonishing thing about Alex Cox's mesmerizing movie is that it makes no attempt to conceal how boringly self-destructive its punk lovers were, yet it still holds us fascinated to its preordinated conclusion. [27 Oct 1986, p.103]

The movie crackles with the serio-comic tension of thin-skinned New Yorkers thrown together in a crisis.

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

After the taut and troubling Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood's A Perfect World feels like a breather. As usual, you can expect solid, no-fuss craftsmanship, but it's best to set your expectations down a notch.