John Hartl

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]