Edward Guthmann

All things considered, The Long Day Closes is a remarkable film -- tender and intelligent, long on mood and short on ''action,'' a cinematic poem that stands head and shoulders above the summer harvest of bonehead action thrillers. [23 July 1993, p.C9]

A superb documentary.

Inspiring and largely unsentimental, this is as much a love story as a tale of courage.

Cool, chiseled and savagely funny, Kubrick's cautionary doomsday farce never ages but gets more relevant with time. [12 March 1999, p.D15]

Typically, films about '60s subculture recycle the same set of media cliches and teach us nothing. Harron approaches the milieu with curiosity, compassion and an anthropologist's eye.

A terrific documentary.

Photographed in lush black and white by Sergei Urusevsky, who worked with the amazingly inventive camera operator Alexander Calzatti, "I Am Cuba" unfolds like a cinematic Olympics of complex, acrobatic camera moves.

A great achievement: tense and passionate, a film that one feels not just emotionally but also physically.

Boorman enlivens The General with a number of scenes, like that one, that play against the con ventions of crime movies. He and Gleeson, both of whom were denied the Oscar nominations they deserve for this film, do exemplary work and give us one of the liveliest, smartest and most surprising films in a long time.

The beauty of Morris' achievement is the way he fuses Hawking's work in theoretical physics with his subject's life history -- finding subtle connections between the two, and avoiding the pat, predictable structure of biographical film. [28 Aug 1992, p.C3]

A first-rate crime thriller and further proof that Soderbergh is one of our great contemporary film stylists.

Rippingly good, old-fashioned movie epic.

It's a tribute to Day-Lewis that he can play a character like Danny -- cautious, withdrawn, inarticulate -- and endow him an eloquence and grace that aren't dependent on language. Without him, The Boxer might still be a powerful tale of loyalty and love, with a core of moral complexity; with Day-Lewis in the lead, it approaches greatness.

Crumb is one of the most provocative, haunting documentaries of the last decade.

Explosive entertainment, with the tension and volatility of its subject matter.

The cruelty of his methods aside -- and Polanski wasn't the first director to terrorize an actor for the sake of a performance -- Repulsion is a frightening, fiercely entertaining experience that holds up to time. (Review of May 1998 revival)

Egoyan's voice is so clear and loving, his vision so forgiving and his film so intelligent that you come away refreshed.

The film underscores the paradox in this man's life: the split between the mild-mannered New Yorker and the fearless vagabond who joined an Arakmbut hunting raid.

A story that's startling, soulful and absolutely unforgettable.

A lot of actors are labeled "brave" for taking on difficult scripts like this, but Spacek is the real thing: an artist first, without vanity, and a movie star almost by default.

This is a smart film, told in a minor key, that augurs well for Whaley's directing career.

In scene after scene -- the long wedding sequence, John Marley's bloody discovery in his bed, Pacino nervously smoothing down his hair before a restaurant massacre, the godfather's collapse in a garden -- Coppola crafted an enduring, undisputed masterpiece. [21 Mar 1997, Daily Datebook, p.C3]

All the actors are good, but it's Farnsworth's brilliantly simple performance that brings The Straight Story so close to greatness.

The writing, by Rapp and Catherine Dussart, is exquisite, and the performers, including Francois Truffaut's old colleague Jean-Pierre Leaud as a magistrate, are all first-rate.

In his big-screen directing debut, British film maker Danny Boyle demonstrates wit, intelligence and economy of style.

Director Nicholas Hytner doesn't soften or cosmeticize Miller's tale -- it's often uncomfortable to watch -- and he draws an emotional pitch from his actors that helps us understand the mob fury and irrational fear that make a situation like the one in Salem possible.

Magical and haunting, The Piano has the power and delicate mystery of a gothic fairy tale. [19 Nov 1993]

Enchanting documentary that also serves as an animated gallery of Goldsworthy’s uniquely ephemeral art.

A wonderfully twisted comedy.

It's a glamorous revenge romp, a "9 to 5" mixed with "Auntie Mame," and it gives each star the opportunity to do her best work in a long, long time.

The difference is that Iain Softley, who directed Wings of the Dove, and his screenwriter Hossein Amini, who wrote the overlooked "Jude," are keen observers who bring a wealth of ambiguity and mystery to the surface -- and release their characters from the cliches that easily could have swallowed them.

Part fairy tale and part bogeyman thriller -- a juicy allegory of evil, greed and innocence, told with an eerie visual poetry.

Soft, evanescent and bittersweet.

Acting rarely gets better than this.

Deliciously witty and entertaining… A first-rate thriller, one that's likely to generate as much word-of-mouth as “Alien,'' “Carrie'' and “Psycho'' did in their time. [23 Aug 1991, Daily Notebook, p.F1]

I think what I like best about Light Sleeper -- more than Dafoe's peculiar magic or Schrader's wise, sympathetic writing -- is the fact that it gives you so much to chew on. So many contemporary films seem to evaporate as soon as you walk out of the theater. Light Sleeper resonates. [04 Sep 1992, p.C1]

A wonder of a film -- a luminous, beautifully executed drama that gathers the best cast of the year -- the best American film of the year.

On a deeper level -- and this is where When We Were Kings exceeds its expectations and becomes a great film -- Gast examines African American pride.

Delivers a full emotional palette without undue sentimentalizing.

Kore-eda weaves these images and others, building a multilayered fugue that contemplates death, asks if mourning ever truly ends and addresses the ephemeral nature of love, family and home. Everything we value and use to define and frame our lives, he suggests, is always at risk.

An original, inspired piece of work.

This is an amazing record of a group of lives -- and probably more resonant than anyone could have imagined when the project began.

Wise, delicate and impeccably performed, Yi Yi is a three- hour drama that looks at one middle-class family in transition -- and does so with such a kind and probing eye that we all see our lives reflected through Yang's lens.

Technically rough and ragged, Paris nonetheless does an excellent job of digesting a rich, multilayered subculture, and breaking it down for a general audience without oversimplification. [09 Aug 1991, p.F1]

Although it's told in the light, piquant style of his best comedies, there's a sadness at the root of Federico Fellini's Intervista. [31 Mar 1993, p.D3]

A thrilling, audacious work.

Beatty has fashioned a hilarious morality tale that delivers a surprisingly potent, angry message beneath the laughs.

Naked Gun 33 1/3 is a feast of pointless, shamelessly silly, almost consistently funny gags. Another comic gem. [18 Mar 1994, p.C1]

Addams Family Values is so much better than the first film -- partly because Sonnenfeld, who made his directing debut with the first film, has refined his directing chops, but mostly because Rudnick has contributed a delightful, mock- macabre script. [19 Nov 1993, p.C1]

All told, the best ensemble cast I've seen this year.

It's an horrific and tragic story, but somehow made beautiful through the care and attention of Schnabel's direction and Bardem's tender, unforgettable performance.

Spartacus isn't the greatest epic ever made, but it's head and shoulders above most of the sword-and-sandal wheezers that came out in the '50s and '60s. And, given the prohibitive costs of shooting an epic today, it's the kind of movie we're not likely to see anymore -- except in well-deserved revivals like this one. [13 May 1991, p.E1]

Loose, buoyant and bracingly original.

None of the advance hype on Kids can prepare you for the raw, stripped-down reality that Larry Clark captures in his astonishing first film. Nothing can prepare you, because no other film has ever caught the recklessness, sweat and tingly heat of teenage sexuality so effectively.

It's a wise, sweet-natured film, and one that manages to have fun with its charac ters without judgment or condescension. [04 Aug 1993, p.E1]

A delicate, beautifully observed study of impossible romance, Lost in Translation is one of the best films this year.

Days of Heaven is a visual poem. Slow and elegant, reverential in the way it celebrates the earth's contours and the play of light. [27 Oct. 1999, p.B3]

By far Elvis' best post-Army flick, and you can thank Ann-Margret for that distinction. [03 Aug 1997, p.34]

A conspiracy tale of high-tech chicanery, Chain Reaction has better acting, better writing, more spectacular chase sequences and more genuine drama than all of this summer's blockbusters. It's also got Morgan Freeman, as good an actor as we have today, which easily qualifies it as the one action film you should see this summer if you see no other.

Remarkable also for the uniform excellence of its cast, and for the pleasure [Altman's] actors take in the wide berth he allows them. [24 Apr 1992]

One of the year's sweetest surprises. It sneaks up on you, disarming you with its modesty and tenderness, its remarkable lack of self-infatuation.

A buoyant, picaresque farce that hums with goofy energy and mines enough ideas, jokes and setups for three movies of this description.

Nobody's Fool functions mostly as a character study, but it's also Benton's elegy to America's endangered small towns. It's a gem.

That's why American Movie cuts so deep: It's about the American dream, about not giving up, about being true to yourself.

Fernanda Montenegro gives a landmark performance.

Gorgeous and optimistic.

A great experience, precisely because it's so intimate and unguarded.

Emily Watson is ravishingly good -- and brings an amazing focus and intensity to what could have been a disease-of-the-week picture.

Disarms with its sincerity and frankness.

An indelible statement on loneliness and spiritual thirst.

Coming on the heels of Ma Saison Preferee, Thieves suggests that Techine is filling the void left by the deaths of Truffaut and Louis Malle, and ought to be considered his country's finest humanist filmmaker.

The result is a sprightly, entertaining film, but one in which the satire is neutralized for laughs.

The magic here is all in the telling: in the graceful, laconic direction of Jacques Becker.

Tough, mean and unsparingly honest, Ladybird, Ladybird is the kind of movie that people resist going to, feel edgy while sitting through and then can't shake off for weeks afterward. [31 Mar 1995, p.C3]

Altman has delivered a lot of surprises in his long directing career, and his new comedy, Cookie's Fortune, is one of the most refreshing -- not because it's so good, but because it's so sweet and affectionate.

Doesn't sanitize its tale of African American loss and survival -- the way Steven Spielberg's “The Color Purple'' did -- but delves deeply, heartbreakingly into an American tragedy.

The Secret Garden unfolds like a richly illustrated storybook. It's an enchanting film, full of visual surprises and a story so simple and wise that it makes most ''children's'' entertainment seem gaudy and facile and overly explicit. [13 Aug 1993, p.C1]

A delicious comedy that starts out promisingly as a pleasant gag comedy but then turns unexpectedly into a bright social satire.

Jackson has called "Creatures" a "murder story about love, a murder story with no villains." His generous approach makes it an unforgettable experience.

4 Little Girls brilliantly captures a moment in American history and tells an achingly painful story of injustice and family loss.

A haunting, beautiful labyrinth that gets inside your bones and stays there.

Extraordinary.

Red is the best of the lot: warmer, more accessible, unusually generous toward its characters. A mystical tale of chance encounters and unexpected connections, Red uses a traffic accident as a springboard to discovery.

Superb documentary.

The great thing about Reality Bites is that each of the characters comes across as real, and not some glib concoction by a screenwriter who's watched them from a cloistered distance. Childress obviously knows their world inside out, and shares it with insight and a prickly, original wit. [18 Feb 1994, p.C1]

In its sober, nonassertive way, Bopha! takes on the tone and weight of a Greek tragedy. [24 Sept 1993, p.C1]

Leigh goes right to the core of his character's lives and mines the place where we're weakest, most alone and sometimes the cruelest.

Has there ever been a live concert film as vibrant or as brilliantly realized? I don't think so. [Review of re-release]

Downbeat, ultimately tragic, but there's a wondrous, sad beauty here.

Splendid.

Plummer gives her strangest, most uninhibited screen performance to date. Playing Eunice, a wildly psychotic killer with a working-class British accent and a mysterious past, Plummer draws a streak of white-hot rage across the screen.

Manhattan Murder Mystery is splendid good fun, and especially gratifying for those of us who've missed the harmonious Allen-Keaton combo. [20 Aug 1993, p.C1]

Terrific.

An entertaining but exhausting satire on tabloid media and the way they feed our thirst for violence, Natural Born Killers stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, in banshee-out-of-hell performances, as serial killers Mickey and Mallory Knox -- a trashy, gonzo/weirdo version of Bonnie & Clyde. [26 Aug 1994, p.C1]

It's tremendously entertaining, and probably worthy of repeat viewings.

It's the versatile Miranda Richardson (the terrorist in ''The Crying Game,'' the repressed housewife in ''Enchanted April'') who gets the juiciest scene. Shattered by the news of the affair, and by the tragedy it precipitates, she beats her face with a knotted towel, and then vents her rage on her foolish husband...It's one more triumph for an actress who has no trouble channeling a kind of supernatural intensity in her work. If anyone's looking for the perfect Lady Macbeth, they needn't look any further. [22 Jan 1993, p.D1]

Angelopoulos returns to the same poetic terrain he explored in Ulysses' Gaze and Landscape in the Mist. In place of "action" and conventional narration, Eternity deals in philosophical ruminations, slippery shifts in time and long, hypnotic tracking shots that seem to whisper to us, "Slow down, observe. Listen."

Fast-paced and unerringly surprising.