Hal Hinson

House Party isn't a great movie, but it's heartfelt and enormously winning. In its own modest, ramshackle way, it manages to seem innocent even when it's profane. And maybe a party that demonstrates that those two qualities aren't necessarily opposed is exactly the kind we need.

True Believer is a thriller about moral rejuvenation, and there's not much wrong with it that another actor in the lead wouldn't cure.

There are a great many movies about the tragic experience of the Jews during the Second World War, but only a handful as passionate, as subtly intelligent, as universal as this one. In Europa Europa, Agnieszka Holland tackles a great theme and, in the process, has made a great movie.

When a master dedicates his genius to the production of schmaltz, it's not a pretty sight.

Written and directed by Richard Brooks, the picture is more style than content, but what style.

Even at their most disturbing, Brian De Palma's films have always seemed like brilliant abstractions, sinister theorems from a bloody virtuoso. But Casualties of War, the director's rigorous, unflinching, masterly new film, is something else altogether. It is a film of great emotional power and great seriousness in which all of the filmmaker's talents and interests are in balance. It is a breakthrough work, a signal of an artist's blossoming maturity, and one of the most punishing, morally complex movies about men at war ever made.

As a writer, Baumbach loves smart, glib talk, and he has a sharp ear for fast-paced, overlapping dialogue; as a director, though, he prefers long takes that allow his characters to work out their feelings.

All in all, the picture goes down fairly easily, and by any estimate it's an improvement over other Pryor nonconcert films such as The Toy or even Brewster's Millions.

This is an impassioned movie, made with conviction and evangelical verve. It's also hysterical and overbearing and alienating.

There's a synergistic overlap here between Cronenberg's own particular brand of weirdness and Burroughs's; they're both twisted in ways that complement each other nicely.

Our culture may be drifting toward the sort of calamity that Stone describes in Natural Born Killers, but the hysteria he depicts seems to come from within him. His soul is in turmoil and so he keeps trying to convince us that we're sick.

Unlike “Metropolitan,” which for all its brittle wit seemed clunky and stagebound, Barcelona is sharply paced and alive on the screen.

Working from the script by Jeff Maguire, director Wolfgang Petersen ("Das Boot") plods through the narrative as if he were completely unconcerned with giving it even a semblance of credibility.

Roxanne is the most unabashed, and most satisfying, romantic movie to come along in years. It's a swooning, delicate, heart-on-its-sleeve work. And so fulsome is its tenderness and naivete' that it requires a leap of imagination from the viewer to get on its wavelength. Few recent movies, though, reward the stretch as this one does.

This brilliantly naive, low-budget shoot-'em-up presents every action as if it were brand spanking new.

Alan Parker's sexy, hilarious, exuberantly energetic new film, The Commitments, has so much rhythmic juice that it's nearly impossible to stay in your seat.

Big has a warmhearted sweetness that's invigorating; it makes you want to break out the Legos. It's only near the end of the film, when Hanks has to play the scenes for pathos, that the movie becomes cloying.

At its worst, River's Edge is crackpot sociology. Jimenez and Hunter use the characters' lack of affect as an indictment. The film has a hectoring, hysterical tone. It wants to find out why these kids, who have grown up in splintered, lower-middle-class homes, are like they are. They want to blame somebody.

What it establishes is hard to put your finger on. It's not a sensibility, exactly; it's more of a sense that the filmmaker's heart is in the right place -- that she is a sophisticated, caring, feeling person.

One of those rare movie history lessons that don't make you feel as if you're facing the chalkboard. It's an impassioned movie, with vehement, soulful performances from Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek, but it's also a work of great restraint and proportion. 

Boyle's characters, too, are young and fresh and promisingly rude - especially McGregor's Alex - but they become less and less interesting as the movie progresses.

The movie is a joyless, inconclusive affair. By not making Orton either a homosexual hero or a working-class hero, avenues that were both open to them and that lesser minds might have traveled down, the filmmakers have shown great intellectual taste. But it's not the kind of taste that's illuminating. Ultimately, they seem not to have known exactly what to make of their subject.

Stylish, intelligent but rather soulless bit of moviemaking.

A gigantic achievement, an endowment of riches.

In Sleepless, though, we're as stuck on these people as the director is, and it puts us in a receptive, forgiving mood. We fall -- and I think a lot of people will fall hard for this movie -- even though we know we shouldn't.

This isn't an experience that we encounter much at the movies these days, and that's not meant as a criticism; it's high praise.

What John Hughes, who wrote, directed and produced the film, has done here is make a weirdly inventive, off kilter comedy out of the horrors of modern travel. And in the process, he's also managed to make the funniest road movie since Lost in America.

It's a terrific, disquietingly entertaining little film -- a piece of genuine Gothic Americana.