John Hartl

This expertly sustained 1971 suspense classic established Steven Spielberg's reputation as a director. [23 Dec 1993, p.E7]

For all its occasional long-windedness and visual dazzle, Brazil may be the "Strangelove" of the 1980s.

It's the survivors of this tragedy that must make peace with their fate, and the film finally rests with them.

George Stevens' mythic 1953 Western finally gets a video transfer that captures the crisp, bright beauty of its Oscar-winning cinematography. [17 Aug 2000, p.D3]

A stark and still-stunning medieval allegory. [14 Sept 1991, p.25]

A giddy delight, with Michael Douglas delivering what may be the most relaxed and inventive performance of his career, and Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey Jr. trailing not far behind.

Writer-director Sturges' smoothest romantic comedy, starring Henry Fonda as a naive millionaire who gets fleeced by a pair of shipboard cardsharps. [05 Dec 1997]

Raucously entertaining.

Perhaps more than ever, Marlon Brando's brutish Stanley seems the most attractive and honest character; he's also bewitchingly funny. He cuts through Blanche's lies and illusions, he satisfies Stella's sexual urges, and the fact that he does so with deliberate cruelty seems not to register. [Director's Cut; 4 Feb 1994, p.D21]

Warmer and more forgiving than Bergman's own work, it is one of the most moving films ever made about the exacting, full-time job of living with another person.[31 Jul 1992, p.17]

Inevitably, The Last Days has its moments of pain. There are just enough glimpses of the camps (some in color) to remind us of the shocking physical conditions. But the sense of dignity these people convey, their resilience in the face of evil, their implicit acceptance of this traumatic and transforming experience, is truly inspirational. [26 Mar 1999]

Feels like the first truly honest attempt to deal with the horrors of combat - and the terrible responsibility shared by all survivors.

A comedy of great charm and generosity, Ang Lee's "The Wedding Banquet" is the freshest, happiest surprise of the movie year. [06 Aug 1993, p.D16]

For me, the experience was much like seeing Mike Nichols' "The Graduate" and George Lucas' "American Graffiti" before the hype machines kicked in.

Scathingly hilarious...To Die For could be the "Dr. Strangelove" of its genre, a movie that puts even John Waters' somewhat similar "Serial Mom" in the shade.

Imported from Germany to lend class to Hollywood's new Fox studio, the great expressionist filmmaker, F.W. Murnau, did exactly that with this affecting, visually intoxicating 1927 masterpiece about a troubled young country couple (George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor) whose marital bonds are renewed during a day in the city. [12 Mar 1998]

In a severe, uncompromising manner that none of his previous films has approached, Spielberg has captured the terror of the Nazi reign as well as the determination and resourcefulness of those who resisted. He has created one of the most shocking movies yet made about the Holocaust (there were several walkouts at the screening I attended) and one of the most inspiring.

A perfectly balanced adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, with Deborah Kerr in her greatest performance. [05 Dec 1997]

Brilliant, biting, bitterly funny epic about a Jewish teenager's stranger-than-fiction adventures during World War II. [28 June 1991, p.22]

Roger & Me is always shamelessly entertaining and often hilarious. It is also, at heart, just as serious as any conventional documentary about this subject. It's an American tragedy and a cautionary tale, presented with the blazing bias of a humorist's fine rage. [12 Jan 1990, p.20]

An all-star A-movie with large themes, brilliant technique, and a dark and daring performance by its star-writer-director that remains one of his two or three best. [Director's Cut; 18 Sept 1998, p.H1]

The Third Man has so many captivating elements that it's often thought of as a romantic movie. Maybe that's the result of Welles' involvement in a radio show in which his movie character, Harry Lime, became significantly more heroic, or the television series in which Michael Rennie took over the role. [30 July 1999, p.H1]

Breathlessly imaginative.

Working with Western funding and Western camera technology for the first time, Yimou also has created the most visually striking of recent Chinese films to reach this country. [15 Mar 1991, p.25]

The film has smarts, but what really makes it fascinating is its huge heart...and the film soars because of that.

Practically perfect in its unpretentious way, MGM's Get Shorty is the kind of smart, witty, polished entertainment that restores one's faith in the studio system.

An appalling masterpiece.

There's a sense of ease and contentment to it that has never been so prominent in Allen's work before.

Sean Penn gives the most riveting, selfless performance of his career.

Everything clicks here.

In his finest, funniest, most poignant film to date, Tim Burton plays cinematic alchemist, turning drive-in schlock into movie gold.

Could be called the "Red Badge of Courage" of World War II movies.

Perhaps the primary reason A Room With a View is so involving is that Ivory has cast the film perfectly, and given each of the actors ample room to breathe. Even the characters you're not supposed to like are allowed their moments of vulnerable humanity.

Quentin Tarantino's latest movie puts an epic spin on a favorite genre, taking it to time-tripping levels rarely tested by its forerunners.

Affliction could be their (Nolte, Coburn) finest couple of hours on film; they do seem to be father and son, rather than actors playing these roles.

L.A. Confidential is at the same time his (Hanson) most personal movie and Hollywood filmmaking at its best.

It's as wise and funny and revealing as anything ever created by Mike Nichols and Elaine May.

This is an ambitious movie that attempts too much rather than too little.

Wickedly funny, scathingly original new comedy.

All but guarantees that you'll want to see Chicken Run more than once.

In the hands of Minghella and his star, Matt Damon, Ripley has become a more complex character, in some ways more understandable and approachable, in other ways as enigmatic as ever.

He [Anderson] simply doesn't allow for dull moments, and his gifts for irony and showmanship are clearly appreciated by a collection of actors who have rarely been better.

Hilarious and high-spirited.

Eustache's screenplay is specifically set against the backdrop of the failed student revolts of the late 1960s, and occasionally the sight of Leaud in bellbottoms makes it look like a time capsule. Yet the moods, the emotions, the debates seem profoundly contemporary.

Much of this is funny, some of it is scary and a lot of it is as twisty as a mystery thriller. Very little of it, thanks to a superb cast, is predictable.

The Hunchback marks a return to the Gothic stories Walt Disney used to tell in his most vivid early features, and for the most part it's a welcome one. [21 June 1996, p.F5]

Twisty, terrific little thriller. [29 Apr 1994, p.D31]

Smarter and funnier than the recent theatrical release, "Drop Dead Gorgeous," Michael Ritchie's superficially similar beauty-contest satire was mostly ignored when it came out in 1975. It has since become a classic, and a high point in the careers of Bruce Dern, Annette O'Toole, Barbara Feldon, Michael Kidd and Melanie Griffith. [05 Aug 1999]

It's extremely well-made by a filmmaker who knows what he's doing and doesn't let the limitations of a $100,000 budget get in his way. The photography, acting, editing and use of sound effects and music are quite professional; McNaughton's movie looks and sounds as if it cost much more. It's also genuinely upsetting.

In the end, The Final Year can offer only the perspective of time and history as a consolation.

An ingenious mixture of themes from narrative sources as ancient and varied as Hamlet, the Old Testament and The Odyssey. [24 June 1994, p.D3]

Proudly declaring itself "an irresponsible movie" yet pointedly aimed at politicians who have done little to address a lethal epidemic, Gregg Araki's The Living End is in fact an attempt to make a morally charged statement about the AIDS crisis. [11 Sep 1992, p.03]

Sergei Urusevsky's amazingly mobile cinematography is so expressive, and Kalatozov's heightened sense of drama so contagious, that this becomes one of those rare movies that makes you look at the world differently. [23 Jun 1995, p.H26]

An irresistible NASA instant classic about the conquest of space — via the Voyager missions.

Completely ignored at the Oscars in 1939, "Midnight" seems more sophisticated and durable than several of that year's winners.

Suspense is the key element in The Long Walk Home. That may seem like a frivolous thing to say about a fictionalized but scrupulously authentic account of the 1955 civil rights bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. Yet it's what holds this movie together, gives it distinction and makes it considerably more than a TV-movie-style docudrama. That, and the richly imagined performances of Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg. [15 Feb 1991, p.24]

The first-time writer-director, Miguel Arteta, does a remarkable job of drawing us into this destructive world and making its rules and rituals seem casual and almost natural. [8 Aug 1997, p.G10]

The most entertaining portrait of a wildly talented, socially untamed filmmaker since The Bad and the Beautiful. [21 Sep 1990, p.28]

Wonderfully confident and strange, Take Me to the River marks an auspicious directing debut for Matt Sobel. There’s not a stale moment in it.

Andrew Bergman's The Freshman is a charmed comedy, the kind of seemingly effortless movie in which everything falls neatly into place, as if ordained by nature.

Eat Drink Man Woman is so cleverly plotted, edited, scored, performed and photographed that the audience is frequently just as surprised as the characters, yet Lee and his co-writers plant just enough clues to keep you from feeling tricked. [05 Aug 1994, p.E22]

Elegantly photographed by the legendary Henri Decae, who emphasizes smoky blue and darkest blacks, "Le Samourai" has film-noir style to burn. [25 Apr 1997]

The movie is a model of clear, precise storytelling, of state-of-the-art technique used to advance a story rather than show off.

This is the swiftest, funniest, most lunatic comedy to date from the team that created "Top Secret," "The Naked Gun," "Ruthless People" and "Airplane!" [28 June 1991, p.23]

Godard's technical innovations have become so commonplace that they no longer jolt. But the aura of urban fatalism remains compelling, and so does the acting by Jean-Paul Belmondo as a Bogart-worshipping fugitive and especially Jean Seberg as his amoral girlfriend. [02 Aug 1991, p.24]

Aside from the Brechtian ending, Taste of Cherry is not a difficult film, although the implications of the characters' references to "true" Moslems, "brave" Kurds and multiplying Afghans may be entirely clear only to an Iranian audience. [3 July 1998]

The Marx Brothers at their purest and funniest - no romantic subplot, no musical interludes with Harpo, no distractions from the fun of watching Groucho deflate Margaret Dumont as he becomes dictator of Fredonia and frivolously declares war. Cleverly directed by Leo McCarey, it was the team's least popular 1930s film, perhaps because the tone of non-stop anarchy proved too unsettling to Depression audiences. [10 May 1991, p.65]

You can't help getting into the spirit of it.

Simultaneously smart and myopic, sneaky and forgetful, the mother Debbie Reynolds plays in Albert Brooks' Mother always keeps you guessing. [10 Jan 1997, p.F1]

Bugsy is really pretty wonderful. It's the kind of old-fashioned yet multi-layered movie that Hollywood filmmakers seemed to have forgotten how to make in 1991, when well-written, carefully structured screenplays often appeared to have gone the way of manageable budgets. It couldn't have arrived at a more welcome moment.

A soothing 76-minute respite from the noisy clutter of Hollywood's holiday-oriented movies, Microcosmos invites us to "fall silent" while it shows us the spectacularly exotic sights of a world almost beneath our notice, where "time passes differently." [22 Nov 1996]

Farrow is hilarious when she's aggressively pursuing Mantegna; amusingly dumbstruck when she's fighting off a group of male partygoers (one of the secret potions makes them fall in love with her); and touching when she's trying to reconcile with her sister (Blythe Danner) or sell her lame script ideas to an old friend who works for the networks (Cybill Shepherd). The performance is a triumph of sensitivity to rapid mood swings that stops just short of turning the movie into The Three Faces of Alice. [25 Jan 1991, p.22]

Moving 1965 love story with the late Elizabeth Hartman giving an excellent performance as a tormented blind girl who falls in love with the only person who treats her kindly (Sidney Poiter). It was Hartman's debut, and she and director Guy Green succeed in keeping it from becoming overly sentimental. [23 Aug 1990, p.F5]

A thoroughly satisfying musical-comedy romp.

Today it has a classical feeling to it, with rich, on-target performances by Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons and Michael J. Pollard. [10 May 1991, p.65]

The most operatic of Hollywood epics, Anthony Mann's El Cid is dominated by a go-for-broke Miklos Rozsa score and Robert Krasker's gorgeous wide-screen photography, which takes full advantage of the movie's Spanish locations and its eye-filling sets and costumes. [27 Aug 1993, p.D13]

Mamaengaroa Kerr-Bell, who plays Grace, had never acted before, and neither have a couple of the other key players. But under the careful direction of television veteran Lee Tamahori, they all do credible and forceful work.

While the limitations of the budget occasionally show, the elegantly appropriate photography, quirky performances and Haynes' unique vision carry the day. He is clearly a director to watch. [14 June 1991, p.25]

If Unforgiven occasionally overstates its case, this is the best work Eastwood has done as a director since The Outlaw Josey Wales 16 years ago.

Glory ultimately offers a stirring answer to the historical distortions of Mississippi Burning, by presenting African Americans as people who aggressively participated in their own struggle for freedom. [12 Jan 1990, p.22]

Greenaway keeps his wits about him. His vision of human evil is as droll as it is unrelenting. Trained as a painter, he can't help making this particular hell look gorgeous. "The Cook, the Thief, etc." is, paradoxically, a beautiful, drily witty film about monstrous vulgarity and ugliness. [6 Apr 1990, p.22]

The variety of inspirations (not to mention the visual quality of the film clips) is astonishing.

Absorbing 1958 adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play about lonely people at a British seaside hotel. [20 Aug 1998]

And whether or not you think Allen's an irresponsible home-wrecker and/or Farrow's gone round the bend, Husbands and Wives towers above the recent batch of mediocre-to-awful summer movies that were created by people with less-dished private lives. For those of us who aren't directly involved, it's the work that matters. [18 Sept 1992, p.3]

Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the Vladimir Nabokov classic isn't as racy as the new one by Adrian Lyne, which opens in theaters tomorrow. But it's a lot funnier, thanks in no small part to the casting of Peter Sellers as a mystery man of many accents and Shelley Winters as Lolita's silly mother. [01 Oct 1998]

A classic European film noir with an irresistible score by Miles Davis, it builds tension from a series of seemingly minor mistakes that echo the political/military context of the postwar era.

No. 2 in the James Bond series, and the one with the most memorable villains (Robert Shaw, Lotte Lenya), the most exciting fights and chases, and Sean Connery in his prime. At this point in the series (1963), the gadgetry hadn't taken over, the budgets were still relatively modest, and the director, Terence Young, had to rely on his actors and his own filmmaking ingenuity to create excitement.[10 May 1991, p.65]

This is a confident, playful film that skewers both the amorality of the central character and, less comfortably, the gullibility of the people he so easily dupes. [5 Dec 1997, p.G5]

Captivating 1972 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's novel, starring Michael Sacks as the time-tripping hero. [09 Jul 1998]

Polanski has created his funniest and possibly his cruelest movie: a thoroughly warped tale of sexual obsession that leaves its quartet of lust-driven characters with nowhere left to hide. [18 Mar 1994, p.D3]

The finished film is graceful, gripping and more accessible than several of Scorsese's contemporary New York movies. Scorsese has created a model adaptation that manages to be both remarkably faithful to its source and more audience-friendly than the Merchant/Ivory movies to which it will be compared. [17 Sept 1993, p.D3]

The interracial love affair in Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala doesn't burn up the screen the way it did in Spike Lee's overheated "Jungle Fever." But the movie itself is ultimately more satisfying, generating much more light than sizzle. [14 Feb 1992, p.23]

Rappeneau has his weaknesses - the battle sequences lack imagination, and the finale is unnecessarily protracted - but his romantic flourishes keep most of the movie humming. [25 Dec 1990, p.F1]

Mortality rather than morality has become the central theme, and McMurtry and Bogdanovich address it with rare grace and compassion. [28 Sep 1990, p.3]

Christmas classic. [06 Nov 1997]

Breezy, good-hearted Irish comedy. [17 Dec 1993, p.H3]

This George Cukor adaptation is nevertheless regarded as the definitive Hollywood treatment. Katharine Hepburn and Spring Byington are particularly well-cast. [15 Dec 1994, p.E3]

With its opening line, “Imagine you’re dead,” The Family Fang instantly invites its soon-to-be-captive audience on an absorbing, provocative, slightly fantastic path that’s like few others.