David Ansen

Wise Blood, a virulently comic, grotesquely unforgettable adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's celebrated novel of customized redneck religion and redemption, is as strange and original a movie as Huston has ever made. [17 Mar 1980, p.101]

Busier, messier and thinner than its predecessor...the studied hipness can get so pleased with itself it borders on the smug.

This clumsy attempt to merge Jane Austen's classic with Bollywood musical conventions falls painfully flat.

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.

Lehmann isn't in perfect control - the movie gets off to a flat-footed start, and the conclusion is chaotic - but when Heathers hits its stride, it reaches wild and original comic heights. [2 April 1989]

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]

Instead of being moved by Christ's suffering, or awed by his sacrifice, I felt abused by a filmmaker intent on punishing an audience, for who knows what sins.

Imagine "The War of the Roses" remade as a James Bond fantasy, with appropriately high-tech weaponry, and you have some idea of what Doug Liman's heavily armed comedy has in store.

Unfortunately, this narf's a drag: she talks like a fortune cookie and doesn't really do anything. Still, the multicultural cast is fun, the images have a painterly beauty and there are some beguiling comic touches before the story sinks into a swamp of solemn metaphysical glop.

It's a shaggy-dog road movie, with all the team's usual ingredients but one -- it's not funny. There's no fresh insight in Things Are Tough All Over, little of their surrealist pothead non sequiturs, and to see them through, they've begun to fall back on tired, conventional sight gags -- a car going through a carwash with its top down, Cheech hiding in a spinning laundermat dryer. [6 Sept 1982, p.75]

An engaging and touching flight of fancy. [17 July 1995, p.60]

Dead of Winter is played straight and not without style, but the material (by Marc Shmuger and Mark Malone) is such implausible, antique claptrap it's hard not to think of it as camp. [23 Feb 1987, p.79]

All shots and no scenes, which is nice for a picture book but deadly for drama.

A mix-and-match crowd-pleaser that shouldn't add up, but delightfully does.

A meticulous, spellbinding, provocative depiction of the final days of the Third Reich.

As long as it stays focused on showbiz, Bewitched is light, frothy fun. But Ephron insists on turning Bewitched into a love story, and that's when the fun starts to seep out of the movie.

The comic setup is smart, and the undertone of seriousness makes the first part of "City Slickers" genuinely amusing. But when the movie decides to get seriously serious it wears out its welcome fast. Did we really pay to see a male-sensitivity-training movie on horseback? [24 June 1991, p.60]

Zaillian tells it with warmth, humor and zest. The cast is first-rate. Laurence Fishburne plays the rather underdeveloped role of Vinnie, Josh's other teacher, a speed-chess hustler with a more instinctive approach to the game than Pandolfini. Joan Allen is Josh's protective mother, determined to see that his childhood isn't stolen by the monastic demands of the game. Best of all is young Pomeranc, a chess whiz with no previous acting experience. [30 Aug 1993, p.52]

Gillespie’s movie walks a delicate line through a minefield of potential bad taste. Directed with patient, low-key sensitivity, it never goes for a cheap laugh at its protagonist’s expense.

That American Pop is a work of anti-nostalgia does not make it any less banal than the sunny trip-down-memory-lane formulas it mocks. For all his very real skills as an animator, Bakshi's limitations as an artist are all too clear in American Pop. There's something perversely small-minded about a saga of pop music that resolutely refuses to convey any sense of the joy of making music. Bakshi's ears hear only the downbeats. [16 March 1981, p.94]

As the credits roll by, you may suspect you have wandered into a fund-raiser for the Actors Guild. [13 Aug 1979, p.75]

Though it tells us that it's about a man who gives pleasure for a living but is incapable of accepting pleasure, it is in fact about the guilty obsessions of a filmmaker who seems incapable of giving pleasure to an audience. [11 Feb 1980, p.82]

Attempting a frame-by-frame duplication of Warner Bros. '40s filmmaking--even the extroverted acting style apes the period--Soderbergh has produced a movie so self-conscious that it's drained of all life.

As Good as It Gets works: by the end you'll no doubt be won over by its cranky hero. But for those of us who cherish the quirkily unformulaic Brooks of old, it's a tainted victory.

In the hard-driven, sitcomish Broadway production, these colorful disasters too often seemed willed and self-conscious. The difference here, under Bruce Beresford's direction, is the unalloyed pleasure of watching Spacek, Lange and Keaton devour these juicy parts with lip-smacking relish. [22 Dec 1986, p.75]

Using the distinctive cinematographer Barry Sonnefeld, who shot "Raising Arizona," DeVito gives his comedy a crisp, colorful pop look: you can almost see the broad cartoon outlines drawn around the figures. [14 Dec 1987, p.69]

Why is this movie Hitchcock's masterpiece? Because no movie plunges us more deeply into the dizzying heart of erotic obsession...The older you get, and the m ore times you see it, the more strange, chillingly romantic thriller pierces your heart.

This may be a less than ideal “Earnest,” but it still has delights, not least of all Anna Massey’s Miss Prism, Cecily’s dotty tutor, and Tom Wilkinson’s Dr. Chasuble, her clergyman admirer.

A thick stew of sex, violence and suspicion, Lee's movie -- spiked up with a virtually nonstop soundtrack -- definitely has the power to jangle your nerves.

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

Q & A is an uncommonly ambitious thriller, but it rarely goes solemn -- it's a raw, rude Cook's tour of the New York underworld, from transvestite bars to precinct offices to Mafia mansions -- with a violent side trip to San Juan thrown in. [07 May 1990, p.65]

Schygulla's heartbreaking performance--like the movie itself--will stay with you long after the film's quietly devastating final frame.

The Wrath of Khan is a small soap opera about a man coming to terms with age and death and a son he had never acknowledged. It's really On Golden Galaxy, and it would have made a lot more sense as a modestly produced hour of television. [7 June 1982, p.53]

A small, lovingly detailed story of wartime hardship and smalltown malice, Raggedy Man proceeds with a quiet, lyric, slightly sentimental charm, but it doesn't trust its own modest virtues. [05 Oct 1981, p.78]

The Fourth Protocol, based on a Frederick Forsyth thriller, ought to be gripping, but it is merely diffuse, mechanical and overlong. So much windup, so little delivery. [14 Sept 1987, p.82]

So bland and un-lived in you want to pour Tabasco all over the screen.

If this Popsicle of a movie melts long before it's over, the first half has more good laughs than all of “Sweethearts.”

If the movie is a mess, it's a vital, entertaining mess -- the most interesting film Jewison (F.I.S.T., In the Heat of the Night) has made in years. [22 Oct 1979, p.102]

As a history lesson (Depression 101), Cinderella Man feels a bit secondhand. As a true-grit tale of redemption, however, it lands one solid body punch after another.

A wonderfully taut cat-and-mouse thriller.

Thanks to everyone involved, the movie radiates a hundred pleasures.

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.

Superb moviemaking-but not exactly a superb movie. It's probably as good a screen adaptation (written by David Hare) of Hart's swank tale of tragic obsession as is possible. On every technical level-editing, scoring, cinematography, production design and costumes-the work is impeccable. And it's brilliantly acted.

A Cry in the Dark is no mere courtroom drama. Schepisi turns this tabloid story into a kind of splintered epic, a scathing portrait of Australian provincialism and prejudice at its most virulent. [16 Nov 1988, p.86C]

A haunted thriller of disturbing power.

The paradox of this razzle-dazzle movie is that it demonstrates the triumph of the advertising ethos it attacks. Still, it's bold and undeniably different (what other musical turns a race riot into a happy ending?). Under its brassy, celebratory surface it's selling a surprisingly dour message about the waylaid dreams of the teen revolution. [5 May 1986, p.78]

There's no denying that Emmerich's film, though a good half hour too long, keeps us watching.

A topical thriller that manages to be watchable despite director Alan J. Pakula's best efforts to take all the fun out of it.

Robbins eschews leftist diatribes for a bold cartoon version of history. It's as crowded and energetic as a big parade...and just about as subtle.

Foxes is a funny, rueful, sexy little movie about coming of age in a junk-food culture. [10 Mar 1980, p.88]

Rydell and his writers compose a kind of Farmers' Book of Job as they pile one misery after another on the Garveys. But all this suffering does not turn them into real people. They're those old Hollywood standbys, Mr. and Mrs. Indomitable Human Spirit. [31 Dec 1984, p.65]

Hilariously odd and prodigiously inventive.

Scene by well-crafted scene. Mamet holds you in a tight grip. But this movie is troubling. His intricate murder mystery plot may be overdetermined -- it doesn't leave enough room to satisfactorily explore the richly suggestive themes of identity, loyalty and betrayal. Gold's transformation seems willed by artistic fiat. The bleakness of his ending is a kind of intellectual cop-out: it reduces all that we've seen to hollow ironies. Homicide plays like a house afire: what it adds up to may be less than it seems. [14 Oct 1991, p.70]

Movie purists will tell you that a heavy reliance on voice-over is a sin (“show, don’t tell”), but when the words are this funny, to hell with purity.

A film as rich as a sauce béarnaise, as refreshing as a raspberry sorbet.

Speed Racer creates a timeless, visually seductive world suspended somewhere between the pop '60s and the sci-fi future.