David Ansen

A superbly taut and well-made thriller that jumps from Geneva to Rome, from Paris to Beirut, from Athens to Brooklyn, each lethal assignment staged with a mastery Hitchcock might envy.

This powerfully contained, painfully funny performance has to rank with the greatest work Nicholson's ever done -- This road movie gives you emotional whiplash, and you’ll be glad you went along for the ride.

Judd Apatow is making the freshest, most honest mainstream comedies in Hollywood.

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."

Schnabel, screenwriter Ronald Harwood and Spielberg's great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski have found a way to take us inside Bauby's mind--his memories, his fantasies, his loves and lusts--transforming a story of physical entrapment and spiritual renewal into exhilarating images.

It's a bravura, all-stops-out, inexhaustibly inventive performance. I don't know how much was improvised, and how much comes from White's sharp screenplay, but Black may never again get a part that displays his mad-dog comic ferocity to such brilliant effect. He, and the movie, kick ass.

Reiner has made a very hip, sophisticated sendup, but his affection and feel for life on the road keep the satire friendly. This is surely the funniest movie ever made about rock and roll, and one of the funniest things about it is that it may also be one of the most accurate. [5 March 1984, p.81]

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

Leon Gast's remarkable film -- which is intercut with terrific recent interviews with eyewitnesses Norman Mailer and George Plimpton -- is about much more than one stupendous fight.

One of the year's best: a rich, funny, enormously humane portrait of a middle-class Taipei family in the throes of romantic, economic and spiritual upheaval.

Depp is such a soulful presence he gives you a glimpse of this maniac's pain and pathos. Bonham Carter is extraordinary. She reinvents Mrs. Lovett from the inside out.

Wonderful...Based on an autobiographical novel by Reidar Jonsson, My Life as a Dog captures the manic mood swings of a turbulent prepubescence with deft tonal swings of its own: under its sweet, puppy-dog surface, this movie has teeth. [25 May 1987, p.72]

This powerful, lyrical meditation on Arenas's life achieves a kind of hallucinatory urgency as it leaps and twists through his life.

Once again Disney has come up with a winning animated feature that has something for everyone on the age spectrum.

This brilliantly disturbing movie is constructed with surgical precision. Haneke lets no one off the hook least of all the viewer.

Their (Murray/Johansson) brief, wondrous encounter is the soul of this subtle, funny, melancholy film.

Eastwood takes the audience to raw, profoundly moving places. If you fear strong emotions, this is not for you. But if you want to see Hollywood filmmaking at its most potent, Eastwood has delivered the real deal.

The Wild Bunch still retains its sorrowful, fatal power because of the complexity of Peckinpah's attitudes about violence. He forces us to confront our own voyeuristic ambivalence; we're alternately horrified by the butchery and exhilarated by the orgiastic energy his balletic spectacles stir up.

Platoon is a ferociously compacted work, but the filmmaking rarely calls attention to itself; it never distracts from the dirty, horrific subject at hand..."Platoon" captures the crazy, adrenaline-rush chaos of battle better than any movie before. Stone is ruthless in his deglamorization of war, but not at the expense of the men who fought there. [5 Jan 1987, p.57]

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

The eroticism in Cuaron's road movie (which broke all box-office records in Mexico) is the real deal: tactile, sexy, psychologically charged.

It's not to be missed in any language. In a year that has given us such marvelous animated movies as "Ratatouille" and "Paprika," this vibrant, sly and moving personal odyssey takes pride of place.

Constructing a work of implacably interlocking images, the 76-year-old director -- as clear-eyed, still and attentive as a beast of the forest observing human folly -- has produced an Olympian protest against the modern world. Yet his lucid mastery produces not despair, but an odd exhilaration. [16 April 1984, p.93]

Smart, generous, as subtle as it is expansive, this is storytelling of a rare order. Six hours may seem like a big investment, but the emotional pay-back is beyond price.

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]

Infused with the bleak romanticism of Melville's gangster movies ("Le Samouraï," "Bob le Flambeur"), and deepened by his own experiences in the Resistance, this hard-bitten tribute to freedom fighters makes most current movies look flabby and undisciplined. Don't miss it.

A technological triumph. [19 May 1980]

You have to pay close attention to follow the double-crossing intricacies of the plot, but the reward for your work is dark and dirty fun.