Jonathan Rosenbaum

There's not much humor to keep it all life-size, and by the final stretch it's become bloated, mechanical, and tiresome.

Recklessly biting off more than they can possibly chew, the filmmakers still give us a memorable apocalyptic view of 1987 England.

It has plenty of visual sweep, fine action sequences, and, thanks especially to Brad Pitt (as Achilles) and Peter O'Toole (as King Priam), a deeper sense of character than one might expect from a sword-and-sandal epic.

I didn't laugh once.

For most of the running time I was mainly confused, as well as mildly nauseated by the gross-out details of a tale that tends to be more slimy than scary.

This stupidly contrived thriller is all the more disappointing if you admire previous work by Berry and director James Foley (After Dark, My Sweet).

Uneven but generally funny.

Nicely written as well as filmed.

Simultaneously quite watchable and passionless.

A worthy entry in the dystopian cycle of SF movies launched by "Blade Runner" (including "The Terminator" and "Robocop"), this seems less derivative than most of its predecessors yet equally accomplished in its straight-ahead storytelling, with plenty of provocative satiric undertones and scenic details.

Much as Emile de Antonio's neglected "In the Year of the Pig" (1968) may be the only major documentary about Vietnam that actually considers the Vietnamese, this film allows the people of Iraq to speak, and what they say is fascinating throughout.

Too much of the story is unfelt and mechanical—the grimly humorless Tracy (Beatty) is never very convincing as an object of desire or admiration.

There's more soul to be found in any Kong close-up than in this film's overplayed reactions, which are used to instruct us what we should be feeling at any given moment. This is never boring, but I can't recall another Spielberg film that left me with a more hollow feeling.

Walter Hill directed this 1989 feature from a pulpy script by Ken Friedman (based on John Godey’s novel The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome), and its nasty, predictable plot and unpleasant characters aren’t made any more bearable by Hill’s customary smoke, sweat, funk, and neon.

More than an interesting curiosity, it's one of Losey's best English efforts, and Viveca Lindfors contributes a striking part as an eccentric sculptress.

By common consent, this is 1939 drama is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s poorest and least personal works, though it has some compensations.

Woo's third Hollywood movie, Face/Off, is the first to balance his visual imagination with the emotional intensity of his Hong Kong films.

Harris’s refusal to treat her heroine strictly as role model or bad example makes her portrait a lot livelier and less predictable—as well as more confusing—than the standard genre exercises most reviewers seem to prefer. What’s exciting about this movie is a lot of loose details: frank girl talk about AIDS and birth control, glancing observations about welfare lines and the advantages of a boy with a car over one with subway tokens.

The pseudomystical vagueness that seems to be Spielberg's stock-in-trade stifles most of the particularity of the source.

Missing is most of Tarkovsky's contemplative and mystical poetry (which is why it's 90 minutes shorter), and added are some unfortunate Hollywood-style designer flashbacks -- The story is still strong and haunting, but I'd recommend seeing this, if at all, only after the Tarkovsky.

It isn't very good, but it doesn’t seem to care, which turns out to be rather refreshing.

Spirited, quintessential, and often hilarious.

Out of Sight engaged me less and less, until by the end I no longer cared which of the characters lived or died. Not even the engaging Jennifer Lopez, George Clooney, Albert Brooks, Don Cheadle, and Ving Rhames or the talented secondary cast can survive the abbreviations and last-minute shoehorning their characters receive.

The film is both wise and tender in its treatment of relationships -- between birds, between people, and between birds and people.

Provocative and entertaining.

A feeble sequel to The Naked Gun that's about one and a half rungs down from its predecessor and a good four or five down from Airplane!

The characters' behavior isn't always believable, and the jerky rhythm takes some getting used to (there may be more attitude here than observation). But the defiant absence of any conventional plot has a cumulative charm.

Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals.

This is basically Hollywood nonsense with all the usual dishonesty, but it goes down easily.

The film can't simply be discounted as a skim job on the original; Romero's dark social commentary, which grew in impact over his entire Dead trilogy, is still very much present here, even if it no longer has the same bite and urgency.

On the very edge of coherence -- but I find its decadent erotic poetry irresistible.

Gardos -- treats it competently, though without much freshness or imagination.

The wonderful Richard Farnsworth plays the lead, and he was clearly born for the part...a highly affecting and suggestive spiritual odyssey.

The surprising thing about George Lucas's first feature (1971), a dystopian SF parable now digitally enhanced and expanded by five minutes, is how arty it seems compared to his later movies.

Garcia seems to be aping the "Godfather" movies and Warren Beatty's "Reds," but the movie's gracefulness is limited to its handling of the music (some of which Garcia wrote).

I haven't seen the original, and this mishmash -- doesn't make me want to.

The SF hardware (enjoyable) and thriller mechanics (mechanical) of this Jerry Bruckheimer slam-banger don't mesh very well with reflection, and the action trumps most evidence of thought.

Confounds expectations -- about slasher stories and about film narrative in general, in part by being closer to a collection of interconnected short stories than to a novel.

Whereas "Posession" was relatively light on its feet, this is so overloaded from the outset that it can only sink.

Kolirin has a fine sense of where to place the camera and when to cut between shots for maximum comic effect, and his two lead actors--Sasson Gabai as the band's conductor and Ronit Elkabetz (Or) as one of the locals--are terrific.

It's fun, instructive, and stimulating, but never beautiful. Ultimately it's limited by its compulsion to knock our socks off at every turn and to compare itself with "Alice in Wonderland."

Shot on a shoestring and none the worse for it, Jean-Luc Godard’s gritty and engaging first feature had an almost revolutionary impact when first released in 1960.

Months after seeing this, I still feel I know most of these people as if they were old friends.

In what I saw, Madonna in the title role tries bravely not to buckle under the weight of Stone and Parker's sense of Stalinist monumentality and fails honorably, while the Lloyd Webber music goes on being nonmusical.

Despite a certain originality, the movie isn't really a success, not only because the plot bites off more than it can chew (the film doesn't conclude; it simply stops), but also because, like its hero, it has some trouble distinguishing between petty irritations and cataclysmic traumas.

The main activity charted in the documentary is a kind of adolescent mischief, as Dick and a private investigator seek to uncover and expose the anonymous MPAA employees.

It bored me clean out of my wits.

I don't know if Rob Reiner is the one to blame for this atrocity, but he directed and coproduced.

The result is a dull and campy 97-minute bloodbath offering little distinction between good guys and bad.

The Coens' lack of interest in Mississippi is fortunately joined by a healthy appreciation of gospel music, while their smirking appreciation of stupidity extends to every character in the movie while including no one in the audience.

The engineering of the special effects is fairly impressive, and the sight of so many objects and creatures being buffeted about carries a certain apocalyptic splendor.

Affecting and offbeat.

I was wooed by its sexy romanticism all the way through to the mysterious and beautiful coda.

With Hurd Hatfield memorably playing the title part, the 1945 film also includes juicy performances by George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, and Donna Reed. Deeper and creepier (that is to say, better) than anything turned out by Merchant-Ivory, this is both very Hollywood and very serious in a manner calculated to confound the “Hey, it’s only a movie!” crowd.

This is a pretty stupid comedy in spots, with holes wide enough to drive trucks through, and director Arthur Hiller is as clunky as ever, but the cast is so funny and likable—above all, costars Jim Belushi and Charles Grodin, and newcomer Loryn Locklin—that they almost bring it off in spite of itself.

The material is familiar, the Berkeley locations are strictly boilerplate, and there are times when the characters seem more like high school students than college kids.

Leo McCarey’s 1957 remake of his 1939 masterpiece Love Affair, coscripted with Delmer Daves and shot in color and ‘Scope, is his last great film—a tearjerker with comic interludes and cosmic undertones that fully earns both its tears and its laughs, despite some kitschy notions about art and a couple of truly dreadful sequences.

Contact is so burdened with social, political, and religious issues that they infect and ultimately overwhelm much of the philosophical content.

Lots can be said for The Aviator as entertainment, though not much for it as edification.

The actors do a pretty good job, though not good enough to sustain 133 minutes.

Aside from one slow-motion sequence, the film treats its subject with few commercial concessions, so one hopes that the horrible and decidedly unmemorable title won’t keep people away; this may be the best movie about disaffected youth since River’s Edge and Pump Up the Volume.

This 1950 effort shows Disney at the tail end of his best period, when his backgrounds were still luminous with depth and detail and his incidental characters still had range and bite.

Maybe I've seen too many James Bond movies by now, or maybe the trouble with this 20th installment is that the filmmakers are trying too hard to top the excesses of the predecessors.