Jonathan Rosenbaum

If you don't care about the first version, or what director Jonathan Demme's name once meant, the cast does an OK job with Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris's routine thriller script.

An impressive piece of filmmaking, with lively and suggestive depictions of pre- and postrevolutionary Cuba (shot in Mexico).

I laughed a lot at the anti-Hollywood humor and generally had a fine time, in spite of the holier-than-thou hypocrisy that makes this movie easily and even intentionally Mamet's most Hollywoodish picture to date.

The overall mood is stately and melancholy, the selective use of color is ravishing, and some of the natural views are breathtaking.

Fascinating oddity.

Their calm assurance -- Hallyday as a grizzled icon, Rochefort as a melancholy mensch -- is a pleasure to behold.

This frantic tale seems at once preachy and incoherent, collapsing into a more or less random collection of disconnected, unfocused scenes.

Pedro Almodovar's 1995 comic melodrama seems in many ways his most mature work, in theme as well as execution.... Almodovar's control over the material and his affection for his characters never falter.

At some point in this endless thriller the suspense turns into an extremely unpleasant ordeal that Dahl doesn't know when to stop.

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.

Roman Polanski's second British film is a mean little absurdist comedy set on a remote Northumberland island; it's also one of the best and purest of all his works.

The economy of both script and direction is admirable—there's no wasted motion in sight—though the film's anthology of genre cliches ultimately undermines Bates's heroic efforts to make it something more.

Cheung can't make the woman very interesting in her own right--the most compelling performance here is Nolte's.

A strong, disturbing picture (1988) in which Meryl Streep’s beauty and talent and director Fred Schepisi’s intelligence are both shown to best advantage, without easy points or grandstanding.

Evelyn Glennie has worked with everyone from Bjork to Brazilian samba groups and also gives solo concerts, and the best segments simply show her at work in her mid-30s, explaining what she does.

This is a powerful story and a splendid spectacle.

The virtue of this play and the film of this play is that many readings and meanings are possible. The same can’t be said for the propositions of its detractors, who merely want to sweep an enduring and potent form of liberal protest under the carpet.

Made piecemeal over a number of years and first released in 1983, this 90-minute comic fantasy has lost little of its radical edge—in contrast to Borden’s subsequent Working Girls, which accommodated itself to a wider audience.

It's more than a simple improvement, inverting some of the original's qualities so that the impersonal, well-crafted filmmaking remains lucid throughout.

Brad Pitt has fun with his secondary part as a pontificating lunatic, but I wish I'd enjoyed the rest of the cast more.

Though the filmmaker has by now ridiculed the martial-arts drama virtually out of existence, the final dance number -- actually closer to festive stomping than tapping -- somehow manages to transcend irony, conveying instead only Kitano's childlike exhilaration, with a sense of ease regained.

If you want to know what the Warhol scene was all about, this is even better than the documentaries.

This 1966 film was eclipsed in many people's minds by The Wild Bunch three years later, but it's a good, solid job, and with Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, and Woody Strode, how could you miss?

Beautiful and challenging documentary.

The results are obviously sincere and relatively serious for De Palma (with a fresh handling of wide-screen composition that plays on some of the moral conflicts and ambiguities), but the entire film is predicated on a fairly unquestioning acceptance of the morality of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam—the issue of whether the highly principled hero enlisted or was drafted isn't even brought up—as well as a refusal to link this war with other U.S. involvements in the third world. So the feeling of helplessness that the film honors and provokes amounts to a moral cop-out rather than a genuine confrontation with what the war meant and continues to mean.

Warren Beatty sounds off angrily and shrewdly about politics, delivering what is possibly his best film and certainly his funniest and livliest.

One hell of a movie.

A profoundly sexist and eminently hummable 1954 CinemaScope musical—supposedly set in the great outdoors, but mainly filmed on soundstages—with some terrific athletic Michael Kidd choreography and some better-than-average direction by Stanley Donen.