David Sterritt

Leconte justifies his vaunted reputation by lending freshness and feeling to what could have been a gimmicky tragicomedy.

Kubrick's great 1964 tragicomedy about superpowers on the nuclear brink continues to fascinate new generations of moviegoers, as its frequent reissues attest. A genuine classic.

Barry Levinson's dark comedy is sly, funny, and unnerving.

Isn't just a double whammy, it's a whammy squared - a goofy, stylish heist movie that'll steal moviegoers from other pictures.

The movie is a mish-mash of action-adventure clichés, book-ended with lame attempts at psychological interest. Written, directed, and acted with ham-fisted heaviness.

A romantic comedy that's pleasant, if not exactly spellbinding.

Some of the film's points are made a bit too heavily, but the subject is as timely as it is timeless, and many of the performances strike a pitch-perfect balance between parody and passion.

Has a graceful simplicity that many will find hard to resist.

Splendidly acted, sensitively directed.

The movie makes up in sweep and splendor what it lacks in psychological depth and dramatic impact.

Like the recent "Mona Lisa Smile," this tale could have been an effective feminist fable if it weren't so calculated.

Steven Spielberg's historical drama is more stilted and didactic than its fascinating subject deserves, gathering great emotional force only in a harrowing scene depicting the Holocaust-like suffering of slave-ship captives.

The drama is as obsessive as its heroine. Crossword mavens may enjoy it, but it's too monomaniacal for comfort.

Moody, atmospheric, and bewitching, like other first-rate examples of modern Thai cinema.

While it's a splendidly acted film, A Beautiful Mind is also a wasted opportunity.

Only the acting of City Hall is strong enough to deserve a vote of confidence. Pacino does a solid imitation of Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, bringing dark-toned fervor to his intimate scenes and delivering speeches with enough pizazz to remind us that politics and show business have an awful lot in common. [20 Feb 1996, p.13]

The influence of Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier looms heavily over the whole film.

This unusual romantic drama is sensitively acted by a well-chosen cast and subtly directed by Cox.

Egoyan's cinematic brilliance shows up intermittently in this atmospheric thriller, which gains most of its punch from Hoskins's surprisingly subtle performance.

Bird's keen visual imagination keeps the action grimly watchable.

Although the first hour builds effective suspense, the story sags into a warmed-over combination of The Silence of the Lambs and both versions of Cape Fear, and the violent climax looks like it was shot in an Everglades theme park. [17 Feb 1995, p.13]

This sequel to Jia's excellent 1997 drama "Xiao Wu" is less original and absorbing than its predecessor, and less visually impressive than "Platform," his 2000 look at Chinese sociopolitical change.

The rock scene hasn't been the same since this hilarious 1984 comedy.

Siegel calls it a talking-heads film about the talking cure, and that pretty well sums it up. The nonfiction scenes are most interesting, and could have easily sustained the whole picture.

The movie works fairly well as a pitch-dark comedy, and very well as a dead-on satire of upward mobility and its discontents.

Quite restrained for what's basically a horror movie, and very well acted.

Masterly by any measure.

The subject is likable and the story has possibilities, but why does every single performance sink into a self-indulgent mess of hammy overacting?