David Ansen

Structured like a farce but filmed like a Qaalude dream, this marvelously performed fairy tale packs a lot of style into its minuscule budget. [19 Nov 1984, p.135]

What this version offers is the chance to watch Russell Crowe and Christian Bale—two of the more charismatic, macho leading men around--duke it out psychologically, while another fine but less well-known intensity artist, Ben Foster, steals

This is a movie that sticks its political neck out, that throbs with dread, paranoia and outrage, that doesn't coddle the audience by neatly tying things up.

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]

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 movie belongs to Hudson as the proud, self-destructive Effie. When she's center stage, Dreamgirls transports you to movie musical heaven.

Escape From New York gets more conventional as it goes along, settling for chases and narrow escapes when it could have had wild social satire as well. Carpenter has a deeply ingrained B-movie sensibility--which is both his strength and limitation. He does clean work, but settles for too little. [27 July 1981, p. 75]

This affable, well-built comedy is Reitman's best since Ghostbusters.

This movie is about giving us a privileged glimpse of the Stones in action. It's a record of an astonishing musical chemistry that has been evolving, with no signs of calcification, for nearly five decades. As a bonus, there are delicious guest appearances by Buddy Guy and Jack White.

A stunning crime drama that shares its protagonists' rabid attention to detail and love of adrenalin.

For a movie full of hairraising depictions of wife beating, What's Love Got To Do With It is a rousingly entertaining musical biopic. And that's what a movie about the unstoppable Tina Turner should be: sassy, playful, soulful and triumphant, like Tina herself. [21 Jun 1993, p.66]

Gripping from start to finish.

Slides gracefully between comedy and pathos (it aims for tragedy, but doesn't quite get there).

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

Has a flavor all its own-sweet, whimsical, homegrown. A quirky romantic for the 21st century, July finds humor and magic in places where no one has looked before.

What blasts off the screen like a heat wave, burning in the heart, is the sheer toe-tapping, booty-shaking joy of making music.

The Secret of NIMH is an ambitious and entertaining debut that will delight and terrify kids everywhere. If there are flaws in NIMH they are a product of its ambition: visually, moments when the animation is almost too busy to take in; dramatically, an eclectic and overstuffed plot that threatens the balance of the movie. But better a surfeit than a soporific. [12 July 1982, p.75]

Rabbit Hole deftly sidesteps sentimentality and still wrenches your heart.

[Stillman] has a keen sense of group dynamics and a fine comic ear.

When this historical adventure kicks in, it's thrilling in the way old-fashioned epics used to be, but its romanticism has a fierce, violent physicality that gives it a distinctively modern stamp.

There's a great story here, but it feels like American Gangster hasn't been mined for all its riches.

In the antic, melancholy comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, the singular Wes Anderson (“Rushmore”) abandons his native Texas for a storybook vision of New York.

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

Damon's Ripley is considerably different from the charming sociopath in Patricia Highsmith's novel or the smooth lothario played by Alain Delon in the 1960 French thriller "Purple Noon."

A hugely entertaining thriller shot through with dark shards of agony and paranoia. It takes nothing away from the original while delivering pleasures all its own.

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

Narnia, brightly lit and kid-friendly, has an appealingly old-fashioned feel to it. Adamson, codirector of "Shrek," wisely doesn't try to hip-ify the tale, leaving its curious blend of medieval pageantry, Christian fable and children's bedtime story intact.

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