Michael Sragow

Christie’s passionate, vulnerable performance keeps pulling the entire movie into her point of view.

Vincente Minnelli makes use of the wide screen with graceful, fluid movement, and he helps Martin anchor his usual breeziness with just the right amount of anxiety.

Ball and his cast overcome clichés with gusto.

What revs up the movie and keeps it humming is the driving energy of early rock, with its innocent/rebellious spirit, and its theme that teens must find their own ways to love and fight.

Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, the movie captures a more elusive and universal fear—that of losing the power to respond, emotionally and morally, to the evidence of one’s own senses.

The action goes beyond conventional excitement to achieve a tragic grandeur.

Martin Scorsese’s début feature has just the slightest bit of story line, but the movie is a fascinating portfolio piece: a black-and-white blueprint for “Mean Streets."

A third of the way through Smart People, I channeled Randy Newman's "Short People" and thought, "Smart people got no reason to live."

It's a rhythmless, graceless piece of filmmaking. But if you have an ounce of misanthropy in your body, a picture like this can draw it to the surface the way a leech draws blood.

Costner does something difficult: In the middle of a tepid comic whirlpool, he finds the humorous aspect of inertia.

You never believe that Paltrow's character is insane, even when she herself does. She has too sturdy a core.

The result is not a first-class film noir but a top-grade acting class. You admire it without enjoying it.

Step Brothers at its best is a smarter "Dumb and Dumber."

Aside from Brando's performance, The Wild One hasn't aged well. Although its leather and chrome iconography and Brando's hipsterism inspired biker and rebel cults for decades to come, it fits all too snugly into the musty category of "cautionary tale." Its story ultimately reduces Brando's biker to the quintessential crazy mixed-up kid. [27 Jan 2002]

At best, North Country just inspires you to read the book.

De Palma's direction shines, but noir script doesn't match his gifts.

Once you get past the movie's needlessly fragmented framing device and its protracted introduction to a xenophobic rural Minnesota town, the core story gains some traction in your mind.

The film is tense and engrossing. But it lacks exactly what the title advertises: the sense of inexplicable familiarity that should haunt you as the story unfolds and leave you all a-tingle when it ends.

Watching The Lost City is like falling into a delirious dream on a marathon train ride only to be roused every 15 minutes by a conductor punching your ticket or barking out the next stop.

Too bad the bulk of Rowling's humor goes down a black-magic drain.

The way Frank structures and directs this film, it's too predictably "unpredictable."

It's infuriating in more ways than one. Yet it's also somehow touching in its melange of melodrama and modernism.

Fellowes sets the screen for a tale of subterfuge in the upper crust, a la Agatha Christie.

No matter how good-natured, The Holiday ends up a glutted farce.

The first half is diverting and inventive. But the filmmakers use the second half as a box-office insurance policy. They fill it with the conventional super-heroics and heartbreak that they spend the first 45 minutes gleefully deconstructing.

Even when you're disappointed with the film's predictability, there's something invigorating about the way it embraces literacy and argument.

Director Joe Wright's new movie version of Pride and Prejudice is more Gene Kelly than Fred Astaire: more earthy and athletic than balletic.

Journey is weary, yet imaginative.