David Ansen

This movie has teeth, and it's not afraid to bite. [6 July 1981, p.7]

This hothouse tale of grief, sex and betrayal is told with a cool detachment that renders it commendably unsentimental--and slightly remote.

A dizzying mixture of the sophisticated and the naive, the deft and the clumsy, Bulworth is overstuffed, excessive, erratic -- and essential.

Comic electricity.

The word for The Changeling is chilling. Medak doesn't pummel the audience with gore and Exorcist-type shock tactics. More than once, he raises real goose bumps using nothing more extraordinary than a bouncing rubber ball. [31 Mar 1980, p.82]

As brilliantly shot as it is brutally single-minded, this is a war movie shorn of all its usual accouterments: the battle is the plot.

Lively, likable and refreshingly unsensationalistic about the drugs and sex that come with the territory, this techno-propelled mash note to the rave spirit sticks to the surface.

Lurid, illogical and utterly off-the-wall, this funny-scary exercise in low-budget schlock is a marvelous orgy of cheap thrills, including a supernaturally sinister mortuary, a hideously wriggling severed finger, one furry flying creature, dwarfs from the Undead, and the goriest - indeed the only - blood-sucking flying steel ball in movie history. [16 April 1979, p.86]

A vital entertainment that struts confidently between comedy and drama.

Though a few scenes are amateurish and the lighting is less than polished, "The Wedding Banquet" is such a genial, openhearted sitcom that only a confirmed grump could resist it. [16 Aug 1993, p.61]

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

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]

He’s (González Iñárritu) conjured up a dark, brutal vision of urban life that sticks to your skin like soot.

Intimate, moving and playful.

A meditation on love, faith and science in the guise of a thriller, the movie's a tad schematic, but thoroughly gripping.

Jarmusch's punk minimalist style, deadpan humor and delicious timing are all his own, and his oddball drifters, whose major goal in life is hanging out, are three slob existential stooges Sam Beckett might envy. You wouldn't choose to hunker down with them in real life, but they're great company on screen. These dead-end kids may be headed nowhere not so fast, but their oddball odyssey is headed straight for cult-movie heaven. [08 Oct 1984, p.87]

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]

One of the things that makes Signs such a refreshing summer movie is that it goes against almost all the grains of contemporary Hollywood razzle-dazzle filmmaking -- as did “The Sixth Sense.”

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]

Manages to be simultaneously subversive and sweet.

A fast and furious feature film that starts at a gallop and never stops to catch its breath. [9 Aug 1993, p.57]

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.

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.

This true story, deftly embellished by writer Jeremy Brock and directed at a bracing English trot by John Madden, is a splendid showcase for its three superb leads. [28 July, 1997, p. 69]

The film is mostly successful in transporting the viewer to another age: the costumes, the body markings, the fierce Mayan masks, all feel right. And keeping the dialogue in subtitles was a smart move. Even better are the faces, which never fail to fascinate. But for all the anthropological research that went into the movie, what is Apocalypto trying to say?

It’s as formulaic as "The Sum of All Fears," but it feels fresher, hipper, less inflated.

As warm and lived-in as an old pair of boots, The Snapper is an honorable feel-good movie.

A clever, pleasingly sentimental tale of prehistoric times.