Jack Mathews

As joyously energetic now as the day it arrived.

A gorgeous, wonderfully inventive computer-animated comedy.

Whether the movie will make you believe a shocking-orange stock car has a future with a lavender Carrera, it's more fun to follow than a televised freeway chase.

Its characters are as entertainingly quirky as any he's given us before, and his familiar themes -- strangers in a strange land, lives reformed by chance encounters -- are played out with much higher stakes and with greater purpose.

Mostow, with his first feature, has made such a convincing, fast-paced, edge-of-the-seat thriller that you'd swear you'd never seen anything quite like it.

Clever, compelling, funny and unpredictable, and it has a lollapa-looza of an ending.

While it won't rival the Harry Potter movies as a cultural milestone, the luminous, irresistible Stardust is no less industrious at scavenging myths and legends and making something altogether new from the familiar pickings.

The story itself is a smooth little gem.

Ale's community is like a band of pirates - collegial, bickering, larcenous and supportive - and his life within it is both heartening and heartbreaking.

Sensational...as authentic as news footage, and far more intimate.

Stamp, whose ability to make Wilson simultaneously coarse and charismatic is irresistibly entertaining.

What keeps the film from becoming obnoxiously redundant is the conviviality of the comedians. These are funny people even when they're not telling the joke.

Perversely funny.

Built from a perfect story-telling collaboration.

The memories recalled here aren't epic tales, just moments that make life worth living. Like seeing a good movie. [12 May 1999, p.44]

Works on every level. The humor and language are as crude as an R rating allows, but Carell and Apatow's script is so hip, funny and - yes - innocent that it's never offensive.

Arguably Lumet's best film in 20 years.

Locks in on its self-destructive subjects so precisely, it's almost unbearable to watch.

Every once in a while, a performance pops out of a Hollywood movie that is so brilliant and unique to the matching of actor to role that it's impossible to imagine anyone else achieving it.

Given the near total absence of intellectually ambitious American movies today, a critic's first impulse after seeing Francis Ford Coppola's reedited Apocalypse Now may be to treat it as the new, improved version he says it is and proclaim it a masterpiece - if not in 1979, then now. But it's not that simple: Apocalypse Now Redux is not a new movie, and neither is it necessarily improved.

The performances are all terrific, but Gene Hackman is close to a career best as the family patriarch Royal, the most useless man you can't help loving.

A slick, fast-paced production with first-rate performances and an emotional punch you won't soon forget.

Represents the year's biggest gamble - and it delivers the year's biggest and most ambitious fantasy.

It's not as clever, or as consistently funny, or as well-cast as "Shakespeare in Love," but Richard Eyre's Stage Beauty is the most fun I've had with the Bard since that 1998 Oscar winner.

Darkly hilarious.

It's a slice of life, with all the trimmings, and one of the strongest films of the year.

28 Weeks Later has a stronger story line, equally fine performances, greater tension, enough gore to satisfy the most hard-core zombie fan, and a narrative pace that flings us from the opening scenes to the very last image.

A two-hour, one-joke comedy that never gets old, Stuck on You is the most mature, consistently funny and satisfyingly sweet movie in the rollicking careers of brother filmmakers Bobby and Peter Farrelly.