Michael Wilmington

A blithe classic with Gershwin songs, Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. [03 Oct 1997, p.10]

Heavily influenced by Sternberg's "Underworld," this is one of Ozu's oddest, most enjoyable departures; it reveals him as a first-rate noir director. [09 Jan 2005, p.C11]

The star, again, is Mizoguchi's favorite actress, Kinuyo Tanaka, and the style is magisterial, exquisitely controlled--with Mizoguchi moving the story inexorably to an almost sublimely redemptive climax. [24 Mar 2006, p.C7]

The screen's most magical tale of the world of theater is this lush, intoxicating period epic: the summit of the collaboration of writer Jacques Prevert and director Carne. [12 Jan 2007, p.C3]

Most of the jokes in Eddie Murphy Raw are the kind you regale buddies with to show off. Anyone as good as Eddie Murphy should have outgrown that years ago.

It's Whoopi Goldberg, however, who gives you something extraordinary. At the center of all this formula tongue-in-cheek thriller pablum, she keeps sending out weird curves and bent splinters of off-center energy. She's a remarkably empathic actress, and you only hope she'll get a few vehicles that push her to the limit.

Superb, vibrantly emotional drama. [27 Apr 2001, p.C1]

The movie's great end-title sequence redeems everything. Under the credits, we see and hear the real-life game veterans as they are now--including, movingly, ex-Lakers coach Riley.

Hollywood's great holiday musical is this sparkling adaptation of writer Sally Benson's memoir: a movie that takes us on a Currier and Ives 1903 holiday tour of St. Louis with the postcard-perfect Smith family. [08 Jan 2004, p.N1]

A modernized version of that great sentimental horse movie, 1943's "My Friend Flicka," and it comes with the shiny trappings, high professionalism and glamorous accessories you might expect...Something is missing though.

It's possible to admire or respect a movie without enjoying it too much, and that's partly the reaction I had to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. It's an incredibly ambitious film of sometimes thrilling visual achievement, but it didn't connect fully to my mind and nerves.

This movie offers four of the best -- and best-looking -- Hollywood stars cavorting together in material so slight and inconsequential it often seems ready to float away like a toy balloon. [16 Oct 1997, p.1]

A near-classic blend of mystery, personality, humor and terror, laced with one stunning shock after another. [18 August 1995, Friday, p.C]

It has ideas as well as jolts, themes as well as special effects, characters as well as gore. But, as adapted by writer W. D. Richter and director Fraser Heston, these Things seem disappointingly diminished, squeezed and stuffed into a box too small.

One of the most entertaining movies this year, and one of the few that shows real invention and audacity, along with big-studio technical flash. [8 June 1986, p.C27]

Too rich, too loaded, Maverick may have misplayed its cards, kept its eyes on the pot instead of the players. In movies, as in poker, you can't always trust a pat hand.

It’s not a bad film. Brightly designed, slickly paced, it has its cargo of youth elements: laughs, sexual tease, action and music. But, halfway through, you can almost feel everyone relaxing, waiting for the next bit of spiritless slapstick or car-chase to carry them through to the end.

This is a movie that rocks and socks you, and has a performance by Washington that's ruthless and scary. But in the end, it leaves you unmarked.

there's no joy in this movie. It's a safe, compromised, even preachy, fable; a wannabe hip romp that never gets going. [07 Jul 1995]

The two halves of Hiding Out--thriller and teen sex comedy--never meld, working against each other rather than together. Hiding Out never escapes its absurd hook, this mechanical collision of genres. After all, if someone really needs to hide out, isn't the best plan to simply . . . hide out?

A sports bio movie that I really enjoyed about a sport and sports hero I barely knew existed: the World Hour Record competition for bicyclists and its gutsy, tormented and most unusual champion, Graeme Obree.

Three Men strikes a funny chord. The audience seems to want to believe that these guys can be domesticated, but on another level, they don't want the trio broken. They want bachelor fathers, domesticated swingers.

Instead of an escape from Hollywood’s cookie-cutter plots, it’s a retreat back into them, only the sexes have been changed.

Two suggestions as you watch it: Never take anything for granted, and keep your hand on your wallet as you leave the theater.

Mystic River is classic Eastwood, classic noir. If there is still some doubt about whether this one-time macho star is actually a world-class moviemaker, Mystic River should end the argument for good. One of the best American movies of the year, crisply well-crafted and beautifully acted.

It's a real shame that most new boxing movies try to copy the crowd-pleasing, sentiment-choked tactics of "Rocky" rather than the stark drama of "Raging Bull" or the realistic grit of "On the Waterfront" and "The Harder They Fall." Against the Ropes is only the latest sorry example. The sad thing is that, with this real-life story and subject, it could have been a contender.

It's a movie of uncommon eloquence and elegance, acted by a truly gifted cast.

Cheerful but mind-numbing.

A cute, well-acted film that tries to mix tones sharply.

Everything about the movie is overscaled, overbrutal, overbroad, full of holes. Yet there's something cheerful and wacky about it; it's a light-hearted blood bath.

There's a zest and brilliance in Neil Jordan's racy heist thriller The Good Thief that makes it almost intoxicating to watch.

A film of almost paralyzing gravity and large ambitions that, almost inevitably, it can't quite meet.

Freaky Friday commits a lot of sins; luckily, it has Curtis and a few others to cover them up.

Altman's dreamy, snowy northwestern about wily operator McCabe (Warren Beatty), sexy Madame Miller (Julie Christie) and a bittersweet tale of how the West was unzipped. [04 May 2007, p.C2]

Fuller amusingly mixes up his usual hard-knuckled muck-raking melodrama with a sort of soap opera, all done in raw, awesome black-and-white images. In its day, this was the locus classicus B-Movie American auteur thriller. [12 Feb 1999, p.R]

There's something a little absurd about this story, but for me, it's endearingly goofy.

A flashy, splashy and violent chase thriller.

Has some of the wit, sass and sexual candor of an "Annie Hall." But it covers the same kind of territory with more bite and bile.

Despite intelligent, sympathetic direction by Gordon, a brilliant lead performance by Robert Downey Jr. and an adapted script written by Potter himself before his 1991 death, this "Detective" pales next to its predecessor.

Trespass has its bloody ups and teeth-rattling downs, but it also has a clutch of humorous in-your-face performances and a core theme that explosively carries it along: When the factory breaks down, the rats will kill each other for the gold.

It lives on its action and dies on its gab. It also would have been better without all those songs about catching the thunder and grabbing the lightning and going for the glory. They sound like a rejected ad campaign for Old Milwaukee. In movies like this, action is often enough--but here, it's just not radical.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles never rises above its marketing-hook origins. It's a product, a commodity, a toy tie-in, a trailer for the comics, an advertisement for the cereal. It's a naked sell.

The movie has an absurd script, fueled by that current B-movie staple, the idiot plot--a plot that proceeds only because all, or most, of the characters, act like idiots.

When you piece it all together, it becomes mildly fascinating.

An uninspired misfire of a TV-series knockoff that, despite its great cast and smart filmmakers, never manages to scare up much magic.

The new movie, like its predecessor, is a crime thriller with a moral viewpoint, an eye and ear for street color and a taste for macho movie fantasy.

A pumped-up, flag-waving, outrageously hokey and ridiculous -- but sometimes incredibly exciting -- war movie.

To say this movie's premise is bonkers is putting it mildly.

Cradle Will Rock is the masterpiece that wasn't, a magnificent opportunity blown to hell.

It only works about half the time, but it's an interesting half.

It's a fairly well-written piece and an even better acted one. And these days, when independent films are increasingly the salvation of the serious American dramatic movie, it's heartening to see something like The Architect, which tries to reawaken a major American dramatic tradition and sometimes succeeds.

A classic, mythic portrayal of African history, religion and politics by the great Senegalese novelist-filmmaker Sembene, centering on a princess' kidnapping and its aftermath. [18 Sep 1998, p.J]

This is one more "yuppie-in-peril" movie, just as slick and empty, manipulative and crude, as most of the rest: all those paranoid pictures bent on scaring us with insane roommates, murderous baby-sitters and killer temps. [5 Apr 1993, p.F3]

In movies as in life, superior technology doesn't necessarily trump humor, magic or really shaggy dogs.

Unlike other current D.C. types, Elle would never misplace or misidentify her own weapons of mass destruction. They're all in her wardrobe closet and makeup kit.

It's a brutally convincing movie about two hell-bent young Turkish-German lovers dancing on the edge of destruction in a Hamburg underworld of drugs and casual sex. Yet it's also compassionate and even tender.

There's a muscular sincerity to this movie, a power and spread to its imagery that triumphs over the occasional candied purple patches or strained plot twists. [16 Jul 1993 Pg. F1]

A romantic comedy/social satire that, on a modest budget, manages to be hip, charming, funny and dressed to kill.

Twins starts with an overblown fairy-tale quality that seems as if it should work. But, by the finish, the movie collapses on the shoulders of the stars. It works because they both showed up and delivered the goods and kept their end of the deal. [9 Dec 1988, p.1]

A masterpiece of wry violence and stylized mayhem, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi turns loose one of Japan's most brilliant film auteurs, Takeshi Kitano, on one of its most enduring pop legends.

Just as Zhao uses his comic gifts to create an affecting human, so Dong's performance as Wu is a triumph of honesty and tact.

A picture about America with the blinders off, a film about heroism that makes you chuckle and feel sad - and a film about childhood that lets us reenter that lost world and see the grass, sky and sunlight the way they once looked, in the golden hours.

iIt's a film for art- and foreign-movie devotees. But it's also a movie for audiences who simply want to get turned on.

This is a film precisely constructed, brilliantly imagined.

A ridiculous but exciting action movie.

The sense of the unknown that "Padgett" created are largely absent. And the movie fails to supply us with an antagonist to work up some dramatic conflict. Nor are the toys themselves very interesting and Mimzy is a toy bunny of no distinction.

One of the most remarkable and moving love stories the movies have recently given us.

One of the best-loved of all the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation special effects extravaganzas, this kitschy version of the mythic tale of Jason's quest for the golden fleece stars Todd Armstrong as Medea's eventual betrayer and is graced with a nerve-rending Bernard Herrmann score, plus such classic visual tricks as the dueling skeletons. [01 Oct 1999, p.J]

Less a movie than a loud, heavy, money machine, a think tank where nobody thinks. The movie seems intended to extract maximum profit with minimum artistry -- and if you like having your pockets picked by experts, this is probably the show to see. [15 Mar 1996, p.C]

Downfall, whatever its shortcomings, bears strong witness to great evil. That is its triumph as a film.

A beautiful, almost defiant film on an unusual subject: love among the elderly.

Has heart, but lacks bite.

It's a genteel film with a gun in its pocket, but it's also a film with a universal chord of feeling that keeps welling up from the dark surfaces and violent byways of the plot-and a final confession that both warms the heart and chills the blood.

In the remarkable, ferociously intelligent new film No Man's Land, Bosnian writer-director Danis Tanovic gives us a movie portrait of the Bosnian War, a conflict that has devastated his country, friends and neighbors -- and found in it both shocking humor and searing, relentless tragedy.

Witherspoon goes further, pouring so much humor and pizzazz into Elle that she lifts up the whole movie.

I don't see how you can get away from calling Cage’s performance a great one. [10 November 1995, Friday, p.C]

A beautifully acted and deeply compassionate study of ordinary people coping with the vicissitudes of life.

The film tries to mix the two 1930s movie comedy strains: screwball romance and populist fable. But there's something nerveless and thin about it. Hawn and Russell are good, but their scenes together have a calculated spontaneity--overcute, obvious. Director Garry Marshall keeps the lines slamming off each other briskly but with a shallow, hectoring energy. And he doesn't have much visual flair.

This film has so many good ideas, it tends to seem better after you've left the theater. But the mock TV stuff is just too faux to be funny.

A big, hearty fantasy-adventure with spectacular fire-breathing effects and a fizzling story. [31 May 1996, p.C]

Frederick is the key to the movie and she's definitely an impressive new talent, someone who can really hold the screen and who delivers something striking or memorable in every scene.

By creating a kind of politically correct version of Andy Griffith's "Mayberry," director Bezucha has drained the movie not only of bigotry but also of dramatic conflict.

Has the unfortunate effect of overtipping the dramatic scales in favor of the Southern generals and turning almost everybody into waxen idols who spout flowery rhetoric.

One of the most gorgeous science-fiction movies ever - and probably also one of the most realistic in detail and scientific extrapolation

The trajectory of the film -- despite its excellent cast and intelligent mounting -- is too preordained.

A wildly expensive movie full of computers, nonsense and violence, a film where wit, romance, elegance -- everything -- is sacrificed on the altar of giganticism, cliche and over-the-top action.

Most of Frailty is so good -- done in a low-key, realistic mood of genuine creepiness and dread -- that it doesn't need formula shocks.

Boyle's new movie is mostly a zombie fiasco, closer to the vacuities of "The Beach" than the scintillating social satire of "Trainspotting."

This movie is a model of technique, beautifully crafted, often brilliantly acted by Cage and the others, but it's a bit hollow at the center.

A racily entertaining, wonderfully sly and goofy comic film noir with more twists than a mountain road-or, to darken the metaphor, than a cartrunk full of rattlesnakes.

An unpretentious, rowdy, lecherous good show. [28 Nov 1999, p.35]

Boasts a really spectacular cast to voice those reasonably funny jokes.

Bravo!

This dingy, drab, pointless little movie -- a would-be shamrock shocker about four teen-agers menaced by the Irish super-scamp while renovating a North Dakota farmhouse -- is made without flair or imagination, seemingly enervated by its own bad taste and low intentions. [11 Jan 1993, p.F3]

The thrilling sequel-return of Mifune's hip samurai from Yojimbo. [01 Nov 2002, p.C9]

It's a movie of elegant surfaces, great background music (by both the Mahlers), gossipy underpinnings and pretensions to romantic grandeur.

One of the quintessential '60s foreign art films, a bizarre melange of pop music, revolution, sex, movie allusions and poetry. It's a masterpiece of sorts by one of the most important European filmmakers of that era. But it's also a movie that can drive you crazy.

Freeman gives his overwrought, over-familiar scenes an unlikely shot of intelligence and dignity that cuts through the formulas and almost makes them work.