Jonathan Rosenbaum

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.