David Ansen

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]

Peirce's taut, sure-footed first film sidesteps sensationalism without sacrificing any of the story's wonder and horror

It is a dark, spellbinding dream, full of murmurs and whispers, byzantine plots and messianic fevers. It finds its iconography of the future deep in the past. It's not always easy to follow, but it's even harder to get out of your system. For better and for worse, it takes more artistic chances than any major American movie around. [10 Dec 1984, p.93]

It is, first and foremost, a visual delight, a Victorian picture book come to life, from its brief prologue in India through its darkly enchanted recreation of Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moors.

A smart and wicked delight.

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.

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

It starts quietly, introducing its splendid gallery of fowl, rats and humans, then builds and builds until it achieves full comic liftoff.

It takes nearly three hours for Tess to reach its tragic climax at Stonehenge, but the deliberateness and occasional longueurs pay off: Tess is depthcharged, resonant. [22 Dec 1980, p.73]

The result is fascinating -- a rich, strange, problematical movie full of wild tonal shifts and bravura moviemaking.

Lyrical, original, misshapen and deeply felt, this is one flawed beauty of a movie.