David Sterritt

The story's celebration of honesty is commendable, even if the treatment of homophobia is no deeper than the hero's swimming pool.

The screenplay isn't remotely as funny as it tries to be, and the visual style is equally unexciting.

Taylor Hackford's thriller makes a mischievous assault on today's legal system, but its points would be more telling if the story didn't veer so often into needless sensationalism and eye-catching effects.

The visuals are spectacular at times, but the screenplay is trite, intermittently vulgar, and just not funny.

In sum, the classical Ron Howard and his splendid cast have made a spellbinding movie that joins "Million Dollar Baby," as well as "Raging Bull," the first two "Rocky" pictures, and "Fat City" as one of boxing cinema's all-time heavyweight champs.

Mighty monotonous after a while.

It's bold, and big, and even beautiful at times. That's more than most recent movies can claim. [26 Aug 1982, p.19]

The result is yet another remake that should send viewers scurrying to video stores for the original.

Too chilly and distanced to build the emotional impact it would like to have.

The consequences aren't remotely as comic as they're meant to be.

The first half packs some clever surprises, but eventually you'll wish you'd signed up with another movie.

The thriller's best and worst features all stem from a highly unusual plot structure that builds to a genuinely startling conclusion.

Impressively filmed but not dramatic enough to justify its length.

The story takes place in 2013, but you'd hardly know it from the age-old clichés Kevin Costner purloins to tell this overblown action yarn, which relies so heavily on ideas borrowed from John Ford westerns that the Hollywood giant should have been credited as codirector; too bad Costner can't invest them with Ford's kind of life and originality, though.

The documentary is revealing and chilling, although it doesn't explore the inner workings of the American criminal-justice system as thoroughly as one might wish.

Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith give uproarious comic performances as government agents ordered to keep New York's monsters in Manhattan, where they'll blend right in with the rest of the confusion.

The picture often rambles as aimlessly as its characters, but its vivid depiction of alienation and self-destructiveness among suburban youth has much cautionary value.

The overall effect is imaginative but overambitious, though Troche unquestionably has cinematic talent.

A change from summer fare, but it doesn't make the picture compelling to watch. You won't find the detail of the "Godfather" films or the psychological complexities of Martin Scorsese's gangster movies. The plot holes are big enough to hide Al Capone's illicit millions in.

The infuriating thing about XXX isn't that it delivers thrills and spills to moviegoers who don't know any better, but that its Hollywood hype reinforces the notion that brain-dead entertainment is what movies are all about.

It's surprising that so much material, so many moods, and such an interesting cast end up making such a small, unmemorable splash.

Watching Demme's documentary is both a crash course in the nation's tumultuous past and a provocative visit with one of its most colorful citizens.

The picture is equally long on eye-dazzling camera work and New Age sentimentality.

Some of his theories seem cockamamie compared with current intellectual norms, though, so it's too bad the filmmakers don't give him time to make a coherent case.

Written and directed by Deepa Mehta, this Indian production is not filmed very interestingly, but reveals much about conflicts between traditional and modern attitudes in Indian society.

Daft, excessive, boring.

Witherspoon fills the screen with bright-eyed bounce. The rest of the cast is as forgettable as the flimsy story.

Eddie Murphy does his patented routines effectively, and the dialogue has some pungent moments, but the movie doesn't succeed as the "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" update it would like to be.