Kevin Thomas

Joe Somebody sends audiences home happy but also with an awareness that happy endings have to be earned in real life as on the screen.

Parents may find their attention wandering, but the simple tale contains valuable life lessons for their youngest offspring, who will likely be enchanted.

A work of art whose beauty has the eternal power of redemption.

The result is hopelessly inane, humorless and under-inspired.

A leisurely, understated film reminiscent of any number of Japanese counterparts featuring quietly heroic rural teachers. It is easy to label the film as slow, old-fashioned and sentimental, which it certainly is, but it has the tenacity of its heroine, the pretty and intelligent Melinda (Alessandra de Rossi).

An across-the-board winner, an exuberant crowd-pleaser that marks its writer-director-star Cheech Marin's first effort apart from his longtime partner Tommy Chong.

A runaway hit in France last year and the country's official Oscar entry, is a well-nigh irresistible film celebrating the redemptive power of music.

An elegant, sophisticated mystery.

An engaging and forthright documentary.

Julien Hernandez's Sex, Politics & Cocktails gives all three a bad name.

Tantalizingly structured to intrigue us right from the start.

An across-the-board delight featuring a spot-on ensemble cast that treats the most awkward and embarrassing moments in the rites of passage with affectionate hilarity.

Just another lurid, contrived, xenophobic tale about Americans trapped in hideous foreign prisons.

Talkington not only has style but also a terrific way with actors, giving them the confidence to go over the top while having fun doing so.

Terrific escapist fare, stylish, outrageous and compelling.

A dreary title for an even drearier picture.

A handsome work of authoritative yet understated style, responsive to mood, subtleties and nuance in exploring its especially well-drawn and intelligent lovers.

Raises it to the level of an art film with fully drawn characters, a serious underlying theme, and a sophisticated style and point of view.

A dense, faithful and absorbing adaptation of the Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel. [08 Nov 1996]

Arthur Lubin's elegant 1942 color version of the Gaston Leroux chiller remains one of the best, with a chilling yet poignant Claude Rains prowling a Paris Opera house, wreaking hideous revenge. [20 Oct 1996, p.4]

A great poetic epic that blends the stirring visual daring of Russia's cinema of revolution with an intoxicating Latin sensuality. [21 Jul 1995, p.F8]

A solid genre film that offers the satisfactions of the familiar while deriving its resonance through its specific and telling references to the '60s.

So strong and secure in its remorseless movement that you buy into what's happening, its people so firmly gripped in the vise of fate and their own character flaws.

Unconscious is a ribald sex farce of considerable imagination and inspired wackiness and a meticulous period piece of the Art Nouveau era.

Let It Ride looks good in a low-key way, and Giorgio Moroder's eclectic, funky mood-setting score is crucial in helping maintain tone as well as pace. [21 Aug 1989]

Leaves us with a heightened appreciation of the bold and personal films made by a number of filmmakers of the former Yugoslavia.

Sweet, however, are the uses of melodrama in the skilled hands of Tornatore, for he transcends the lurid and the coincidental with range, depth and insight, and a bold, confident, suspenseful style, to create a fable of love and redemption.

Not long into this most exhilarating and enjoyable of movies, it becomes reminiscent of such vintage jewels as Carol Reed's simultaneously thrilling and amusing "Night Train to Munich."

The attempt to find humor in mean-spiritedness is way beyond Paris and Fejerman's abilities, and their last-reel attempt to portray Sofia as an ultimately liberating force for her daughters is as contrived as My Mother Likes Women is repellent.

The filmmakers have brought such breadth and depth to the material. Everyone counts in this film, not just Julia Lambert.

Wickedly funny and subversive.

Hampered by an ending that overreaches needlessly, the film is nevertheless worthy and unmistakably the effort of an enduringly distinctive and important filmmaker.

Takes us down a familiar path without discovering anything new along the way.

A tour de force of technical brilliance, with flashes of humor and a wild spirit of adventure signifying that you're not supposed to take it too seriously, but the cumulative impact of its avalanche of mayhem is so numbing that it's enough to shrivel your soul.

Once again Chabrol's son Mathieu has composed a crucially evocative score, and Renato Berta's cinematography is gleaming. Merci Pour le Chocolat crackles with wit and elegance, humor and pathos.

Fortunately, in image and structure Roodt and Harwood go for a steadfast simplicity that builds to a beautiful moment of rekindled faith for the grieving Rev. Kumalo that lifts Cry, the Beloved Country to a climactic moment of redemption.

An elegant work, Food of Love is as consistently engaging as it is revealing.

Although competently acted and directed, lacks a fresh point of view and its people lack individuality.

Lively and suspenseful.

Plays out like a Frank Capra movie with the "little people" taking on corrupt and indifferent officials. In the process the film strikes a strong blow for the dignity of labor and introduces an array of brave individuals.

Village of the Damned is a good-looking, well-wrought film with some knockout special effects, some dark humor and crisp portrayals.

Relatively accurate as a period piece, looks great and boasts a bevy of vintage numbers, some original recordings and others performed in an authentic manner by Ian Whitcomb and His Bungalow Boys.

It's sensational in both senses of the word: a bravura, provocative sendup of horror pictures that's also scary and gruesome yet too swift-moving to lapse into morbidity.

Petzold, who has a crisp style and sharp sense of the visual, is too talented and imaginative to allow his film to become predictable. Rather, Jerichow offers implicit, sardonic social comment as well as a compelling playing out of the eternal triangle.

The morbid tone of the original has given way to horror comedy set off by quite spectacular and imaginative fantasy sequences. Dream Warriors is no less grisly, but at least you can laugh at it.

Cumming and Leigh -- bring to their stylish, incisive and compassionate film an immediacy and a bracing snap.

Scarcely original and in no way earthshaking, but its notable cast is a pleasure to behold.

Best of the Best is a by-the-numbers martial-arts movie graced by several celebrated actors marking time between more rewarding assignments and crowned by an appallingly brutal Tae Kwan Do competition. There's nothing here except for karate fanatics. [10 Nov 1989, p.F15]

Writer Mark Saltzman and director Charles T. Kanganis do a fine job of keeping things happening and moving in an easy yet highly kinetic fashion. Although aimed at children, this smart-looking TriStar release is actually more inventive and better-paced than many a comedy for adults.

Beguiling and poignant.

An expertly made suspense thriller based on an actual incident, but on a visceral level it's about as much fun as watching someone pull the wings off a butterfly.

What Radford above all accomplishes in his filming of The Merchant of Venice is to suggest that, in essence, it is that most modern of entertainments: a dark - indeed, very dark - comedy.

Revolution #9, which is absorbing and terse, has some subtle, welcome comic relief from Spalding Gray.

Has the gritty, intimate feel of an Eastern European film--and packs the power of a genuine revelation.

Mike Armstrong's relentlessly downbeat script allows Demme to develop an ensnaring camaraderie coupled with a dark destructiveness that recalls Eugene O'Neill.

Unlikely to be ranked as one of Zhang's greatest accomplishments but is clearly the work of a major filmmaker. It is best seen as a heartfelt tribute to Takakura, as heroic and enduring a star as John Wayne.

It's too bad this Rollerball veered off-track so swiftly, derailed by bad writing and possibly also by some of that extensive post-production reworking.

The "crime" was that it was made in the first place and the "punishment" is having to watch it.

A sensitively told story of first love that could have been more affecting with a little more grit and without so mawkish a score.

Cocoon: The Return is the best kind of sequel: It doesn't merely cash in on the success of the original but actually continues its story in new directions, eliciting fresh meaning and emotion. [23 Nov 1988, p.C1]

A wisp of a wry comedy but Lungulov's touch is delicate, even piercingly so, and his direction of actors, especially Thornton and Karanovic, is beautifully nuanced.

A romantic comedy of wit and substance that actor-writer Dan Bucatinsky and director Julie Davis have moved gracefully from stage to screen with a change of title and sexual orientation.

Catches you up so firmly in its world that you find yourself accepting whatever Thornton presents right up to its deeply ironic finish.

L.I.E. has embraced tragedy, folly, perversity and outrageous dark humor. Like "Happiness" and "American Beauty," it takes an unflinching look at the darker aspects of life in American suburbia.

Wickedly hilarious. [19 Feb 1999]