David Sterritt

Dull despite its suspense-driven story.

This well-directed Hong Kong drama is at its best when it captures the casual affection that grows between the main characters. It also touches on important Chinese social and political themes, but Kwan understates these so sketchily that they build little psychological power.

Filmed in a leisurely, understated style, this dark comedy is downright entrancing. A spectacular directorial debut.

Unabashed "Star Wars" clone.

Overacted, overdirected, and overcooked in the usual Tornatore manner, but sheer energy and enthusiasm keep it watchable and listenable most of the way through.

The dialogue and acting are stagy at times, especially in the early scenes, but the characters are compelling and the Indian atmosphere is vividly sketched.

The main characters are unremarkable, and most of the acting is dull.

As quietly dazzling as a small, very precious stone.

Four chuckles and a lively final-credits sequence are a mighty poor score for 99 minutes of alleged comedy, and the sentimental stuff is even worse.

Although this "Moonstruck" knockoff is diverting to watch, it's basically a low-budget loaf of Italian-American movie clichés.

Its best moments are as exuberant and insightful as anything the screen has given us this season, and its passionate concern for believable characters in a recognizably real world offers a refreshing change from the current spate of feel-good fantasies.

Kim's movie conjures a sense of spiritual discipline as suspenseful as it is stunning to watch and exhilarating to contemplate.

How could such a high-octane cast produce such low-octane horror?

Gallo's earlier work suggests he has directorial talent, but here it's buried beneath too much ego to be detectible.

In reducing Presumed Innocent to a 126-minute film, director Pakula has necessarily stripped it of many complexities and ambiguities that lend the novel much of its interest. The performances are capable, if rarely inspired.

Some slow and vulgar moments aside, it's a minor treat for viewers who don't mind keeping their expectations low. [11 Oct 1985, p.25]

The movie's most original features are the awfulness of the dialogue and the hamminess of Richard Jordan's performance as a Nazilike policeman. He seems to have given up on the project long before director Alan Johnson ran out of film. [28 Nov 1986, p.39]

What makes the film stunning is less its metaphorical scheme than its cinematic style. Always a matter of flowing camera movement, Kubrick has photographed much of the action with long "traveling shots" that capture time and space as a seamless whole, not fractured into the bits and pieces of standard editing techniques. [26 June 1987]

Frankenheimer doesn't recapture the magic he once created in movies like "The Manchurian Candidate," but he does cook up an effective thriller in the "French Connection" vein.

Taking great commercial risks, director Martin Scorsese avoids movie-star performances and the psychological storytelling that Hollywood movies normally thrive on.

In this exquisitely filmed adaptation Pacino is as vivid a Shylock as we're likely to see. Despite all the scholarly excuses for this drama, though, it's shot through with outrageously anti-Semitic attitudes.

Rarely have Gibson's tears seemed more fictional than in this supposedly authentic account of a historical event that's far too tragic to merit such superficial treatment.

Sometimes disturbing but consistently fascinating.

The same story was told vastly better in the 1949 melodrama "The Reckless Moment."

Wittily written and deliciously acted, Lonergan's debut film is a clear cut above the average.

The comedy is often crass and crude, but it makes telling points about how much of "race" is more about the words and gestures we use than the actual colors of our skins.

Eventually you realize the whole movie has been about young showoffs who think it's uproarious to gross out neighborhood grownups.

Carpenter pulls out all the action-adventure stops, but he and coscripter Larry Sulkis forgot to write dialogue the audience could listen to without howling in disbelief.