Michael Atkinson

Antitrust is anti-fun, anti-wakefulness, and anti-interesting.

It's a TV show and a facile one at that.

A walking-talking affront to every middle-class middle-ager it intends to sucker, this remake of the 1979 accidental-classic screwball hits every wrong note and trips on every chair leg.

Soldiers is righteously explicit about the damage artillery does to human flesh, and for its part, it proves relentlessly unpleasant.

I'd rather watch a forgotten houseplant dehydrate and die.

Even more of a party-hearty-Marty potlatch of silliness than its predecessor. The franchise having been established, Verbinski, Bruckheimer, and Co. have been liberated to indulge in absurdities, pile on the so-old-they're-new-again clichés, and make jokes at their own expense.

It's a chilling piece of legal hysteria, and ripe for nasty farce. But Pooh plays it all for buffoonish pratfalls and fart jokes.

This all-digital indie is, by genre standards, either a misfired doodle or an attempt to Lovecraft-ize the popular movement. Or both.

That the Cold War was a wasteful charade proves Bitomsky's point amply enough, but his movie is a repetitive bore.

Glossy, gruesome police drama.

Rarely falters but neither does it ever take flight.

At once arch, derivative, and, in the end, bizarrely lyrical.

Juliet is never less than eye-catching, but is rarely more.

As the monks themselves threaten to nod off, the film's impressive narcotic effect enters the bloodstream-or so it may seem only for the unenlightened like me.

Yamada's decidedly undazzling yet expressive filmmaking approaches classicism, from a sensei training session captured in one lengthy shot to the final showdown, seen with shifting points of view that suggest a relativist unease with the cut-and-dried judgments of war culture.

Gardos, an experienced film editor, has little narrative sense, and decent performances (except from Kinski, who just worries and huffs around) are left out to dry.

Davis has energy, but she doesn't bother to make her heroine's book sound convincing, the gender-war ideas original, or the comic scenes fly. Instead, the film is buttressed by song montages and jokey chapter titles.

It's easily the most disarming and inventive movie made for genre geeks in years.

Gay jungle sex (gasp!), gone-native intellectuals, tribal rituals (gulp!), cannibalism (none of which the film shows, by the way) -- it sounds like a "Weekly World News" front page, not the thematic fodder of a highbrow non-fiction film.

After 9-11, a sick, scandalized lame-duck mayor became a national hero for simply keeping his composure on TV. Keating's film is a comet out of the past, but it's focused, if only circumstantially, on the future.

Not only microwaves what is already four-day-old fish in Paris, but lets the original director, screenwriters, and stars do the reheating.

Red Dragon's formula is so risible and rote by now that the natural reaction to scenes of peril, torture, and suffering is flippant laughter.

It wouldn't be fair to gripe about the hundreds of plot holes; the whole thing is hole.

The film slowly sheds its convincing identity as nonfiction and becomes a cruel parody of making-of docs, studio-movie pandering, and showbiz egomania.

It's a gut-twisting story handled, largely and predictably, with asbestos mitts.

Adroit but finally a trifle flat, Mad Love doesn't galvanize its outrage the way, say, Jane Campion might have done, but at least it possesses some.

A Matter of Taste's largest handicap is restraint: It's too tasteful. The climactic crisis is a broken leg, and the off-screen denouement is unimaginative.

It seems almost incontestably...the most gorgeously photographed film ever made. [23 March 1999]