Jonathan Rosenbaum

If not all the gags work, the overall irreverence and all-American anomie are fairly contagious.

It's certainly a provocation, with a few funny moments, and for my money it's less phony and offensive than "Finding Forrester."

Francis Coppola's ambitious 1992 version brings back the novel's multiple narrators, leading to a somewhat dispersed and overcrowded story line that remains fascinating and often affecting thanks to all its visual and conceptual energy.

Tarantino puts together a fairly intricate and relatively uninvolving money-smuggling plot, but his cast is so good that you probably won’t feel cheated unless you’re hoping for something as show-offy as "Reservoir Dogs" or "Pulp Fiction."

Unfocused, condescending, and corny.

The film itself regresses, starting in the present and winding up with a cautionary ending that evokes the hokiest SF movies of the 50s.

The depiction of her risky voyage and what happens afterward is highly suspenseful and entirely believable.

A quirky, lyrical independent feature by writer-director Michael Almereyda. It's shot in luscious, shimmering black and white.

Peter Hyams, a pretty good cinematographer but a mediocre director, goes to work on a script by Andrew W. Marlowe that's designed to carry us from one bit of hyperbole to the next.

The fictional story here, set between 1984 and 1991, focuses on the investigation of a popular and patriotic playwright (Sebastian Koch); that the captain assigned to his case (touchingly played by Ulrich Mühe) is mainly sympathetic and working surreptitiously on the playwright's behalf only makes this more disturbing.

Although I have no facts to support my impression, this erotic courtroom thriller looks as if it grew out of Madonna seeing Basic Instinct and saying, “I wanna do one of those."

80 minutes of formulaic unpleasantness isn't even close to my idea of a good time, and I doubt that Hitchcock himself could have done very much with Mark L. Smith's script.

More of the same, though a lot coarser than its immediate predecessor, and the characters and situations have now calcified to the point where they're simply sitcom staples.

This isn't as snappily directed or as caustically conceived as the subsequent Risky Business, which has a similar theme, but it's arguably just as sexy and almost as funny.

Though Hanks keeps the satirical and critical aspects of this look at show biz fairly light, there's a lot of conviction and savvy behind the steadiness of his gaze, and his economy in evoking the flavor of the period at the beginning of the picture is priceless.

O'Neill showed in his 1989 "Water and Power" a poetic feeling for human evanescence in relation to southern California locales; here he proves equally astute at showing how our sense of history becomes tainted by and entangled with Hollywood myths.

The movie remystifies as much as demystifies presidential politics, but an overall mood of sweetness may help one to forgive the archaic and childish aspects of the would-be analysis, which splits everyone between angels and devils.

I only laughed once here, at a Treat Williams reaction shot; the rest of the time I was trying to figure out why Allen made this movie.

One can certainly be amused and entertained by writer-director Michael Davis's hyperbolic action frolics--I was--but not without feeling pretty low and stupid.

I've heard it said that Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the most talented character actors currently working, can't carry a film himself, and unfortunately this indie feature isn't meaty enough to prove otherwise.

So lackluster both as an homage and as a story in its own right that I was already forgetting it before it was over.

A curiously sour movie in its amused contempt for this fatuous family laced with affectionate nostalgia for its unshakable slickness and insularity, but also an undeniably strange one in its adoption of TV formats and cliches, as if these were the only indexes of contemporary reality that we have left.

Less pretentious than Platoon and more attentive to the Vietnamese than The Deer Hunter, this picture proposes with a great deal of skill and sincerity that we honor and respect the men who suffered on our behalf without even beginning to consider why they did so, or to what effect.

Polanski honors the craft of classical storytelling and never flinches from the book's melodramatic extremes in portraying the horrors of poverty.

A stunning achievement in epic cinema.

Among the pleasures to be found here are some amusing sidelong glances at how movies get made and the singing talent of Streep as well as MacLaine. There's not much depth here, but Nichols does a fine job with the surface effects, and the wisecracks keep coming.

Before the movie collapses into the utopian nonsense that seems obligatory to this subgenre, a surprising amount of sensitivity and satirical insight emerges from Eleanor Bergstein's script and Emile Ardolino's direction.

The only other adaptations I've seen of the Alexandre Dumas novel (which I haven't read) are the Classics Illustrated comic book and the 1939 James Whale potboiler, both of which I prefer to this vulgar and overwrought 1998 free-for-all, which makes you wait interminably for the story's central narrative premise.