Desson Thomson

With the exception of the opening scene -- whose purpose is chiefly comic -- the movie is one, extended climax. Even with flashbacks and other time jumps, it never lets up. You have to go back to Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1952 "The Wages of Fear" to recall suspense this relentless.

An extraordinary and brilliant (and almost wordless) film that takes us above ground and below it, up in the air and deep below water, to follow its conundrum of a story.

A sobering reflection on our culture's attitude toward violence.

Reveals itself detail by searing detail.

A guaranteed pleasure for anyone who ever loved pop music, owned a record collection or suffered in love

Wickedly funny. In fact, Heathers may be the nastiest, cruelest fun you can have without actually having to study law or gird leather products. If movies were food, Heathers would be a cynic's chocolate binge.

In this final installment of a glorious trilogy (which includes the films “Blue” and “White”) he has saved his greatest for last.

It doesn't matter how many times you see these images. They're always exciting.

The film's not only funny and weird, it's oddly poignant. I miss Hedwig already.

It is sheer brilliance and testament to the vitality of an old master.

After watching Vertigo at the Uptown, I was awestruck.

Masterfully arranged for color, texture, decor and camera fluidity, The Conformist is more like a symphonic poem than a movie. (Review of 1994 Release)

A jarring, mesmerizing documentary.

With its deft intercutting of place and time, the film creates a powerful sense of mysticism and fate.

There's a lot in this movie, simple, big, small and exciting. It's the year's first serious contender for big prizes. What's not to like about this picture?

This movie, directed with precision and an appreciation for (relatively) rich character texture by Sam Raimi, remembers all the fine elements of the original film (and the comic book story). It reprises them perfectly, including wonderfully choreographed, skyscraper-hanging fights.

Want to see something strange, funny, twisted, brilliant and macabre? Sure you do.

A movie that dares you to slow down and enjoy the subtleties of life.

Lilya's struggle to make a life for herself is both heartbreaking and heart-stirring.

Imaginative, slightly creepy, but tremendously appealing to all ages. It's ripe to bursting with visual effects a heady combination of stop-motion and computer-generated imagery. And it has a delightful cast of personable bugs and larvae, all bound for New York City via floating fruit.

The 11-year-old Osment evokes the boy's terror and awful predicament so memorably, you'll never forget him.

A beautifully textured, disarmingly simple movie about romantic devotion.

Sinfully watchable ensemble movie.

One of the great movie satires. And if it isn't the funniest rock spoof ever made, it certainly shares the title with "The Rutles."

Each revelation seems more disturbing than the next. But Chinese treatment of Tibetans is only half the heartbreak. The other is the amazing resilience of the Tibetans, who are overwhelmingly Buddhist.

Everyone in the cast is terrific, including Dermot Mulroney as Wolf, the beret-sporting cameraman who thinks he's a genius but can't seem to stop screwing up shots, and Wanda (Danielle Von Zerneck), a tough-talking assistant director who gets weak in the knees whenever Chad gets close. Best of all is Buscemi, a wonderfully offbeat, edgy performer who has appeared in such independent films as Mystery Train and Reservoir Dogs. He carries the emotional weight of the movie as his dream project faces impending doom, his red-rimmed, frog-like eyes threatening to burst with exasperation.

A canny (and profoundly sexy) movie.

Sure, the heroes and villains are arranged in a convenient moral gallery. But the performances, Weir's adroit direction and John Seale's superb cinematography take care of that banality.

So full of pep you can't help surrendering to its creative energy.

Every moment of the way, there is a delectable sense of subtle menace and, at the center of it all, Huppert's haunting expression, part sphinx, part grace and maybe part scary.

Climb into this rig and you'll be sweating bullets.

A hugely absorbing social drama that is, by turns, excruciating, sad and sardonic.

Demonstrates what writer-director Levinson does best: evoke the sights, smells and atmosphere of his youth with intelligence, humor and a keen sense of social perspective.

It has its own sunsplashed vitality, thanks to spirited writing by Audrey Wells and winning performances from all three principals.

Takes you down paths full of primitive, almost biblical implications, but it also finds comic relief in moments of palpable tension.

A witty, raunchy comedy, which proves that a well-written piece of business – oozing with sex, wit and nasty intrigue – works for any generation.

One of the most thought-provoking documentaries of recent times.

Shows us, in an extraordinarily simple way, the hopes and frustrations of one woman's life.

I love the movie's originality, its sense of macabre humor, its resourcefulness, and the great Walsh, whose memorable narration kicks off the movie.

The animation, rendered in good old-fashioned watercolors, is appealing. It's easy, rather than flashy, on the eyes. But the best thing about the movie is the humor.

The result is a time capsule par excellence...This is the best of times and the worst of times, African American style.

Amounts to a rare gift and an opportunity to appreciate the end of an era and celebrate one of the screen's most subtly etched heroes: the soft-spoken Monsieur Georges Lopez.

Eve's Bayou is a movie unto itself, a rousing, original yarn about family life that includes everyone, whether they're from Louisiana or miles away. [07Nov1997 Pg N.48]

It's a masterful little film, and, thanks to Zhang's seasoned hands, it's subtly heartfelt but never manipulative.

In this good-natured film, even the smallest efforts at kindness yield positive results.

For students of cool ... Le Cercle Rouge is required viewing.

As with his other works, [Mann] binds sound, music and pictures into one hypnotic triaxial cable and plugs it right into your brain. He makes this almost-three-hour experience practically glide by.

A smart, restrained entertainment, it doesn't splash around in blood and hysteria. It doesn't have to.

Exciting, smart and enormously enjoyable.

There's an extra dimension here, not present in the other comedies. Not only is the material amusing, it's charmingly engaging.

When Gray brings things to a narrative conclusion, the movie feels perfectly structured. If it were any longer, it would tip the overindulgence scale, and lose its effectiveness. But at 80 minutes, the film feels compact and pithily observed. And you're quite prepared to meet Gray on his next flight of self-absorbed fancy. [30 May 1997, p.N41]

Truly a movie for world audiences with a message that's devastatingly subtle.

It's a magnificent comic experience.

The movie's pace is unhurried by Hollywood standards, but it's all the richer in character detail.

I'm talking cheap visual gags, painfully embarrassing moments and other sophomoric humor guaranteed to get you and your friends almost vomiting with laughter.

Lures us in with extraordinary subtlety. Keeping sound effects and incidental music to a relative minimum, it builds its suspense almost subliminally. So when something scary or shocking does occur -- deprived of those Hollywood-style cues -- we are truly startled.

A hilarious fantasy, about a plucky piglet that learns how to tend sheep, Babe is a barnyard charmer.

The movie holds you in thrall from first frame to last. Hatred is hatred unslaked. So is racism, ugliness, love, lust and sorrow.

A delirious mixture of spectacular gun battles, furious explosions and breathtaking stunt work, it's also one of the strangest stories to ever get the green light at a Hollywood studio. You have to take your hat off to Paramount Studios for allowing such inspired weirdness to see the light of day.

Thanks to Caine's subtly nuanced performance, there's a deeper dimension to everything. He's snappily ironic at times, sometimes amazingly delicate, always engaging.

Piquant, thoroughly engaging character drama.

In Get Shorty, director Barry Sonnenfeld's spirited adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel, Travolta's rebirth accelerates directly into adulthood.

You realize this is a story about the life beyond this movie, about the great changes in life we never give ourselves time to consider. And for a moviegoing experience, that's a lot of bang for your buck.

One of the most enjoyable experiences of the year.

You can feel the movie's sensibility and its powerful emotions in every aching image, which leaves you so caught up in these ancient times, you're loath to return to present-day normalcy.

Spade and Warburton might not have made The Emperor's New Groove one of the mouse factory's all-time greatest, but they've certainly made it one of the funniest.

To appreciate the movie, you have to be okay with vampire violence. I don't mean subtle little nips at the neck and, ooooh, it's directed by Werner Herzog.

A stylish hoot: entertainingly edgy and ludicrous all at once.

An intriguing yarn.

Ford makes such a dynamic president in Air Force One, you may find yourself favorably weighing his odds in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Enormously entertaining.

Watch this film. You may never look at nature indifferently again.

Cuts a path directly to the heart.

A well-orchestrated nightmare that keeps you on edge until the very end.

Mike Myers unleashes (or seems to unleash) the entire contents of his comic mind.

Without hesitation, I hand the comic award to Smith. She plays a pinched guest known as Constance, Countess of Trentham, to such a hilarious tee, her tee runneth over.

An extremely affecting experience, down to the last agonizing moment.

Hilarious, painful and brutally frank.

Although it's a drama, Osama feels like urgent documentary.

Realized beautifully by director Bille August, Intentions is a moving, profound requiem to all human relationships.

Unusual, unexpected and strangely refreshing. For this movie to have resorted to a familiar action-flick finish with everything explained, pressed and dry-cleaned would have rendered it banal.

The movie does what any great musician should: It lifts an idea to the heights of ecstasy; it sells its song.

This all makes for a deeply entertaining experience that engages our hearts as well as our funny bones. And it's gratifying to see Cruz finally get her due.

A truly satisfying holiday picture, the kind everyone can enjoy.

A disconcertingly assured tango between tenderness and brutality.

The chemistry between the actors, particularly between Anton and Kinnaman, is sometimes magical.

The movie's big action scenes, at times, make you forget you're even watching animation. There's an in-your-face sequence involving a runaway, crashing train that will make you squirm in your seat trying to get out of the way.

It's a wonderful postmodern hug of a movie, and never once do you not know you're watching a movie.

The dance between authenticity and storymaking works beautifully.

There's visceral horror, too, including a grisly image -- a horror-in-miniature involving a fingernail -- that located an open nerve in my jaded ability to endure screen violence.

Notre Musique is really a poetic essay, masterfully intermixing the director's mournful-toned, philosophical narration with documentary and staged moments.

John Boorman's childhood and the London Blitz happened to coincide. Which is great for the movie Hope and Glory, because he turns both events into exquisite myth.

It feels like real life unfolding before your eyes.

It's the atmospheric sideshow that earns the highest marks.

Without its animation, A Scanner Darkly would have made a fine cautionary tale about drug addiction, paranoia and institutional treachery in a police state. But with a technique that turns the existing live action into a two-dimensional cartoon, the movie goes one -- maybe even 10 -- better. It becomes its own living, breathing metaphor.

Mamet doesn't just give us an enthralling heist flick, he makes the language something to savor. You're biting your nails with your ears peeled.

Steers refreshingly clear of the usual cliches. Character takes the wheel and dictates the action, not the other way around.

Costner (with Michael Blake's screenplay) creates a vision so childlike, so willfully romantic, it's hard to put up a fight.