Michael Wilmington

As solid as the earth, rich as a good meal and sometimes funny as hell.

A Selznick-produced Hitchcock: a courtroom melodrama of murder and romantic degradation for which Hitch wanted Laurence Olivier, Greta Garbo and Robert Newton, but had to settle for Gregory Peck, Alida Valli and Louis Jourdan. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

In the end, it's a heartening, rewarding experience to watch this journey--and, especially, its end.

Shines whenever we see the performances of Phoenix and Caan.

The movie's humor is engaging but odd. The script is pretentious but sweet. And the symbolic use of the flying machine-which pulls you back to "Brewster McCloud"-doesn't work very well. But a flawed film like "Arizona Dream," with its wistfulness and pain, is still twice as interesting as most of the bloated, slick, empty successes that tend to get released here, films that look as if they were dreamed up by used-car salesmen in a desert. [6 Jan 1995, p.L]

A classy supernatural lady-in-distress thriller.

This young writer-director's film seems more real and more moving than many recent political dramas from the Middle East - on either side.

Elaborately mounted, expensively produced and filmed with style and empathy, it's an adaptation of Paterson's Newbery Medal-winning book that manages to expand the original vision, yet preserve much of its intense emotion.

Ashley Judd as Agnes White, and a relative newcomer, the remarkable Michael Shannon, as Peter Evans. They're both spellbinding.

Strange and unsettling as it is, Noe's clarity of vision makes his film ignite. Like a slammed door or a scream of anger, it slaps you awake.

Like the moving 1999 American "A Walk on the Moon," with Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen, Hard Goodbyes juxtaposes a family crisis with the excitement of the period before and during Neil Armstrong's 1969 moonwalk.

Starter for 10 is cute and smart, just like its star triangle, and it's also well-written, acted and directed.

Extreme Measures is a suspense picture that should excite thinking audiences as well as thrill-crazy ones. One possible exception: fans of Michael Palmer's novel, who may wonder why his plot and people disappeared. But after all, in movies as in medicine, extreme measures may be necessary.

At its best, "Hollywood" has the breezy irreverence and easy, sunny L.A. atmosphere of Shelton's 1992 "White Men Can't Jump," a buddy-buddy basketball-hustle movie.

Red Dragon is very much a product, and a superior one, of our times. So is Anthony Hopkins' top-notch fiend, the bad doctor.

It's such a knowledgeable work and so pleasantly obsessed with its subject that it will interest even audiences whose attraction to wine is only casual.

It's fun, but not obvious fun.

Like all good popular entertainments, the best of it sings.

It's a sordid but expert shocker.

Though Day Watch seems less shocking and overwhelmingly strange than "Night Watch," it's another rocking mix of gritty thriller and glitzy sci-fi, once again in the vein of the director Bekmambetov's idols Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers.

One of the classic midnight movies of the Pink Flamingos -- Rocky Horror era, star-director Jodorowsky's metaphysical western about a violent wanderer plays like an especially gun-crazy Sergio Leone saga filtered through several layers of radical European/Latin American cinema and Christian and Buddhist mysticism. Zero cool in its day, it remains a striking film oddity. [16 Feb 2007, p.C4]

Fred meets Ginger in this goofy South American romance; they were secondary leads who stole the show. [03 Nov 2006, p.C5]

Doesn't really add up to much -- except a good time. But it's smart, funny and cute. With all that going for you, who needs to be money? [25 October 1996, Friday, p.H]

A daring, entertaining, but somewhat disappointing affair, something of an overreacher despite Lee's usual pyrotechnics and a brilliant cast.

The film has many strengths, but one of its major assets is its solid sight line. Though we might expect it to go sentimental - with its cute cat, torn families and sympathetic, pretty protagonists - it doesn't.

Fast and frenetic and so unvarnished that it can make you feel unclean watching it. The film rubs your face in glamour and filth. But in the midst of the blood and hysteria, Kilmer plays Holmes with the dirty-angelic looks and wheedling charm of a seedy golden boy on the brink of doom.

The sort of movie that both rewards and tries your patience.

The movie has a nasty, creepy edge that never lets up, and the characters are deliberately grating and alienating. This is a thriller that, like some classic noirs, glories in its own mean aura, its casual profanity and grotesque violence.

A beautifully tooled action thriller about love and terrorism.

Beside its major virtues, it contains a vice: that one flat lead performance. Who would have thought Kevin Spacey would ever go dull on us?

Sweeps us back into a terrifying and desperate string of events and makes us feel them - and, more crucially, understand them as well.

In the end, grips us precisely because its actors are so utterly absorbed in their roles, so unfettered and nakedly expressive. This is the kind of acting we always look for, but rarely see.

It's a moving tale of love and destruction in unexpected places, unexamined lives.

Corny as it may sound though, it's all true-except, of course, for that mythical movie last-second championship bit.

I liked Flirt better than any of Hartley's films since "Trust." The playfulness he shows here seems better integrated, more meaningful, than the strange narrative whimsies of 1992's "Simple Men" or 1994's "Amateur." [08 Nov 1996]

One of my favorite U.S. fiction features at 1999's Sundance Festival.

Nenette and Boni, despite their plight, show us something small but vital about Marseilles, families, brothers, sisters, babies, pizza -- and even about the sensuous delights of kneading dough.

From A.I. Bezzerides' "The Long Haul," with George Raft and Bogie as tough trucking brothers and Ann Sheridan and Ida Lupino as the good woman and the bad.[06 Oct 2006, p.C8]

It's a pleasant movie, not quite up to its reputation. [06 Aug 2000, p.23C]

Not perfect, and neither are life or the movies. But you'd have to be blind yourself not to relish its qualities or laugh at its barbs.

May strike some audiences as even more real than Kiarostami's work, because the story is so luminously open. Watching it, we enter, without barriers, a world.

Weird attempt to turn Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories into a mini-Meet Me in St. Louis, co-starring Gordon MacRae and Leon Ames. [13 Apr 2007, p.C5]

Engrossing as it is, The Hunted is more a showcase for formidable talent than anything else. It's a brainy, exciting but shallow show -- an expert's action movie that almost runs out of breath.

The new Israeli movie Ushpizin, a film about man's clumsiness and God's grace, is a touching and amusing tale that expands our horizon and also should open our hearts.

It's an almost overwhelmingly professional picture, murderously fast, slick and full of outlandish notions, painstakingly realized. And it's also surprisingly satisfying -- thanks to Washington, a good cast, Tony Scott's swift direction and that unyielding professionalism.

If nothing else, The Cable Guy will make you think twice before trying to pick up a free movie channel. [14 June 1996, p.C]

The picture is written and acted as a lark and a romp.

A very Peckinpah-influenced film about the James Gang with four sets of real-life brothers playing the outlaw broods. [16 Jul 2004, p.C4]

A breezy, elegant charmer of a movie.

In Year of the Dog, there are dark moments that are both strangely poignant and bizarrely hilarious. The ending took me by surprise. In a way it's a cheat, a redemption that arrives out of nowhere. But it's also a cosmic joke, a perfectly funny, sincere salute to dog and pet-lovers everywhere.

This is a good movie, made by splendidly talented people-including Beatty, Annette Bening and Katharine Hepburn, co-writer Robert Towne, designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and composer Ennio Morricone-but it fumbles some gems, hearts and flowers on the way to the fadeout. [21 Oct 1994, p.C]

Throbbing with music, seething with anger and romance, The Lost City is a film that breaks your heart, bewilders, alienates and ravishes you by turns.

Reign works better much better than "Upside" because of the cast and because Sandler and Cheadle together keep it lighter. It's an easy film to watch, but less easy to be moved by.

One of the quintessential Hollywood shipboard romances, with William Powell and Kay Francis as the seemingly doomed lovers who meet on the high seas. [26 Mar 2000, p.35]

A physically gorgeous production with a strong, clear conflict at its center. It's grueling but also exhilarating. Perhaps its ambitiousness is the film's biggest problem. Trying for dramatic sensitivity, historical scope, touching romance and shocking violence and suspense, it gets stretched too thin.

The film's most memorable performance is in another supporting role, by Alan Cumming as hapless Frandsen, Olaf's sympathetic neighbor and a hopelessly inept farmer.

One of the most intriguing prison dramas ever put on film.

It's not a great movie, or one that should preoccupy you much afterwards, but it's certainly a good one. It's a fine debut for first-timer Mills.

Playing a role of almost Bergmanesque intensity -- a tough, lonely woman dying of cancer as she examines her past -- Bisset is both convincing and radiant.

Exquisitely designed, lovingly executed, beautifully scored and played, every hair and note in place, it's a movie full of irony, passion and bluesy riffs.

Solaris, an exploration of outer space and inner anguish, reminds us that science fiction can embrace adult ideas and human drama as well as technology and futuristic action.

If you liked El Topo, this is more of the same, with less violence. [02 Mar 2007, p.C5]

Girl 6 is a snappy, contemporary comedy about an aspiring New York actress who drifts into and out of the world of phone sex. It's an often sexy, funny show with interesting slants on modern New York culture and mores. [22 Mar 1996, p.F]

There's a shallowness about The Good Girl that can't always be excused as an accurate portrayal of a shallow milieu -- in the end, just like Justine, it's not as good as it could have been.

Avoid it if you object to seeing people devoured by wolves, but see it if you want to howl at the moon.

Probably the best thing you can say about We Were Soldiers is that it does justice to an awful conflict.

First of the classic Fred and Ginger plots. [03 Nov 2006, p.C5]

The images are lustrous, the cutting is brisk and the acting of the two leads is right on the money.

In many ways, it's a painful story, but it's also full of curious triumphs and outlandish redemptions.

Immersed here in both the fair, dreamy air and chilly, deeper waters, Rampling and Sagnier make Swimming Pool a fine sunlit noir, oozing sensuality and menace.

Demme's movie is just as sophisticated and knowing as Frankenheimer's, but it isn't as hip or daring. It doesn't haunt your mind or stir your sense of dread the way the '62 movie did--and it lacks almost totally the earlier film's piercing, oddball satire and humor.

One of the sharper, funnier, better-cast, better-written movies around right now. But there's something about it that, well, comes up short. [20 October 1995, Friday, p.C]

It looks like a TV ad, or 200 of them strung together, with the same kind of gaudy virtuosity, lavish technique and expensive self-mockery tinging every shot.

The film does succeed in making the story universal, giving us the drama as well as the history, the fire as well as cool examination. It's a movie that haunts you afterward.

The movie--while it doesn't knock you out--doesn't self-destruct either. Besson may never rise to the level of his best American models here, but it's fun watching him try.

There's no denying that Undisputed delivers the action-movie goods, and so do Snipes and Rhames. It should have been more memorable, but at least it doesn't stumble in the ring.

A charming confection, set on an ocean liner. [13 Apr 2007, p.C5]

It's by far the best cast Burns has assembled -- so much so that, unlike his other films, he doesn't come near dominating it.

That conscious absurdity is at the core of The Quick and the Dead. It's a rousingly grotesque, often wildly entertaining western horror-comedy, with co-producer and star Sharon Stone as a sexy lady gunslinger taking on all comers in the gunfight tournament from hell. [10 Feb 1995, p.C]

The acting is primo and the cinematography, on high-definition video by the gifted M. David Mullen, is striking.

This movie might be better-maybe even a classic-if it were less urbane, if the New York tiger that Nicolas Cage and Richard Price unleashed could bare all his fangs, and not just fill the theater with his magnetic growl. Then Kiss of Death might really be a killer. [21 Apr 1995, p.C]

Two advantages of the British version: It's tauter and much faster. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

A nostalgia movie that doesn't get sticky with false sentiment.

Despite script collaboration by his friend William Faulkner, this is Hawks' hokiest movie, a stilted Egyptian period piece about pyramid-building and sexual intrigue with Jack Hawkins as the Pharaoh and Joan Collins a conniving temptress with a jeweled navel. Yet the director gives it real spectacle; it looks great. [13 Feb 1998, p.N]

The talk is witty, the twists are ingenious, the look and the mood are drop-dead.

This fourth entry is still full of sophisticated charm and slick thrills. [01 Jul 2005, p.C7]

This "Ice Age" is still a good movie (especially for kids) with top-of-the-tech CGI.

Zeta-Jones can belt out her numbers, Zellweger can purr hers, and Gere-a musician who played his own cornet solos in "The Cotton Club"-can sell his songs and even dance a spiffy little tap dance. They're better than you'd expect-and so is the movie.

Director Guy Ferland, who has made one previous feature, handles this material smoothly and well, aided by the juke-box bright colors caught by cinematographer Reynaldo Villalobos. And Eszterhas, who has never shown much flair for comedy - except for the mother lode of unintentional laughs in "Showgirls" - puts humor into this story of surprising warmth and bite. [24 Oct 1997]

Isn't all it could have been. But the filmmakers catch the right glittery look and paranoid intensity, and they make gutsy speculations about the story beneath the story.

A very flashy Hong Kong variation on Mean Streets. [19 Dec 1996, p.7]

Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds and Charles Bronson -- the '70s' three reigning American action movie superstars -- had their thunder stolen when top action director Siegel cast rumpled, baleful-eyed comic sourpuss Walter Matthau in this classic '70s thriller. [09 May 1999, p.C9]

It's a corker of a story - a polished yarn full of desire, desperation and despair.

The movie is funny, but it's also touching and poetic -- and Bertin's scenes are devastating.

Nothing in the movie is quite up to Scofield's Danforth. But what a mighty performance that is.

I liked The Claim -- as much for its stark visual beauty and impassioned performances as its intelligent script and willingness to probe the tragic side of life.

A clever, amiably low-key mix of family drama and romantic comedy.[18 August 1995, Friday, p.C]

Time to Leave may not have made me cry, but it's affecting nonetheless.

A simple, eloquent drama.

A Christmas perennial: a witty, polished, lushly sentimental and amusingly sexless romantic comedy in which suave angel Cary Grant mixes in the affairs of troubled bishop David Niven and his lovely wife Loretta Young. [24 Dec 2004, p.C10]

A relaxed-looking expert piece that immerses us in another world. At the end, Hanson has a bonus. He and his producers hired Bob Dylan for the Oscar-winning "Things Have Changed" in "Wonder Boys," and Hanson brings Dylan back here, for a folky, bluesy number called "Huck's Tune."

A "Chekhovian" movie that's closer to the master's mood than many, it's also a jazzy, rainy day film that makes serious and amusing points about life and people in the midst of its downpour.

It's surprising how much of the old mood Leconte manages to recapture, how sumptuous he makes the black-and-white cinematography and timeless Parisian and Mediterranean settings look.

The movie is a journey into a land of wonders beneath the surface of consciousness -- but it's also a sexual ride of unabated heat. You may be confused by Sex and Lucia, but you won't be unmoved.

It's good, hard-edged stuff, violent and a bit exploitative but also nicely done, morally alert and street-smart.

It's ludicrous, but it's fun. Besson is a filmmaker so in love with his own daffy excesses that he's able to pull us, laughing, right into his world of loony pop. [9 May 1997]

The movie -- simple, pure and powerful -- makes us feel the intensity of both life in transit and life lived, if only for a moment, in another's skin.

Self-absorption is the vice of all these characters. That, not sex, is their sin--and Michell, Kureishi and their fine cast show this with a lucidity that cuts to the bone, a candor that draws blood.

Surprises with its intensity and grip.

This smart, hardscrabble, very likable film has a heart and spirit all its own: a rollicking, earthy flair and lusty intelligence.

It's good stuff: a non-fiction film on weighty issues that also manages to entertain.

You may not want to accept what you see here; you may be unable to accept it. But it's doubtful you'll leave this film unmoved.

A movie that's underwritten, overdirected, overproduced and almost constantly over-the-top. But it's also, at its best, a big tongue-in-cheek extravaganza.

It's the kind of copycat movie that becomes original through its cast and treatment.

Chic, shallow stuff, but there's one hell of a car chase. [22 Jan 1999, p.F]

Quite affecting, even if it doesn't rank with classics like "Open City" or "Forbidden Games."

Celebrated cinema verite chronicle of a quartet of door-to-door bible salesman, pitching their wares with slick expertise or threadbare urgency. [03 Dec 1999, p.L]

Sirens is a brazen, luscious Australian sex comedy full of nature and nudity, flesh, food and fantasy. With its theme of erotic awakening on a painter's sunny Blue Mountains estate, and its frequent scenes of lush female models scampering around naked, it's often a pretty silly film. But it's also an immensely enjoyable one: a fairy tale in which everything-fashions, scenery, badinage, music, even moments of angst-becomes a kind of goofy aphrodisiac. [11 March 1994, p.C2]

A movie about love, friendship and finding oneself, and it takes all its subjects very seriously while seeming to treat them with the lightest and most piquant of touches. Like its bizarre heroine, it irrigates our souls.

Unlike almost every other sexy modern thriller (especially most recent studio blockbusters), this one gives you a lot to think about.

Beautifully shot and filled with gorgeous music.

A genre movie with an agenda that's too packed. Inevitably, some of the many balls it's juggling get dropped -- (but it's) one of the most entertaining and original actioners in several years.

For all its craft and achievement, The Gift -- which has a script that may have needed more rewriting and deepening -- is a good, minor effort; it has some real conviction, even anguish. And it has Blanchett, whose gift as an actress is sometimes transcendent.

The film, despite some over-obvious stretches, is mostly sad, lovely, moving, haunting. It's a striking and promising debut from a fine new filmmaker. [21 Aug 1998]

The sights, sounds and traffic in Red Lights are oppressively ordinary; the people are unnervingly real. That reality doubles the suspense we might feel in a more slickly made but thinly plotted thriller.

The writing isn't always up to the actors, who all give the kind of expert, theatrically ingenious performances that often seem director-proof.

Typical tough '40s Walsh noir. [08 Aug 1997, p.M]

Once "Backbeat" catches the beat, it keeps it up, drives right through to the last soul-shattering coda and fadeout. [22 Apr 1994, p.01]

A mix of drag comedy and inspirational road movie, Wong Foo is surprisingly, sometimes exhilaratingly good. [10 Sep 1995, p.4C]

It's beautifully shot on Cephallonian locations by superb landscape photographer John Toll.

This movie lets you feel something. Like George's house, if not his life, it's built well and full of heart.

It's not all that funny -- but fascinating in a weird, knockabout way. [28 Aug 1998, p.O]

This is a pro's movie, solid, taut and trim, done mostly with exemplary skill. That's its trouble, perhaps. This Getaway knows the score too well, entertains us too effectively, beguiles us too knowingly. [11 Feb 1994, p.A]

Director Lee has a true cinematic knack, but it's also nice to see a movie with its heart so thoroughly, unabashedly on its sleeve.

One of those corny, lusciously mounted, almost predictably thrill-packed action movies you can't help but like.

When it enters the future, it's a new-fangled, old-fashioned jim-dandy of a show.

This movie, which aspires to be a Christmas movie classic on the "It's a Wonderful Life" level, is overwhelming, enjoyable and impressive, without being really entrancing.

Brilliant performances by DiCaprio as Frank Jr. and Christopher Walken as his fallen father - and an enjoyable one by Tom Hanks.

Jan Kounen, the maker of Darshan, is a French director with flashy credentials, including music videos, commercials, horror shorts, violent gangster movies ("Dobermann") and offbeat westerns ("Blueberry").

I laughed all the way through it.

An odd premise for a Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn film--an anti-fascist melodrama with Tracy as the no-nonsense reporter investigating a beloved but tarnished American icon, Hepburn as the icon's wife--but they give it their trademark polish. [24 Feb 2006, p.C7]

This is only a movie. But a good one. May Roddy Doyle give us many more.

Like the frosty tropical drinks the people keep sipping here, it's refreshing and icy-cool, a sinful pleasure mixed by experts.

A horror movie with a Hitchcockian veneer of the everyday, a story that taps into our fear not only of the paranormal but also of insanity and the secret evil that may lie beneath ordinary lives.

Here is a film of staggering technical and visual virtuosity, filled with utterly amazing images, that's also entertaining and engaging for children and adults on several levels.

A prime example of advocacy journalism--a form often criticized but perfectly honorable. Most importantly, it gives you a chance to ruminate on some crucial questions of human error, justice and life-and-death.

Really two movies: a taut, terrific, realistic crime drama, and, by the end, an over-the top, high-tech extravaganza which tries to out-Woo John Woo and turn Cruise into another Terminator.

The film manages to crack all its codes, and even when it sags a bit, it's never lacking grace and some wit. Not enigmatically at all, it pleases and teases us -- in high style.

Among the finest hours of horror star Boris Karloff. [18 Oct 2005, p.C3]

Haunts the conscience, troubles the spirit.

A gloriously giddy movie about theater, love and artifice, an unabashed art film.

It's a warmly realistic comedy-drama that pulls you right into its lively, well-drawn L.A. milieu.

Broken Arrow is much better than the average big-time action movie because Woo has blazing style and a unique, even eccentric viewpoint. [9 Feb 1996, p.C]

The Last Days, despite its great subject, is not quite a great non-fiction film. It's too reserved and careful in tone to reach the heights of Alain Resnais' Night and Fog or Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. [12 Feb 1999, p.I]

Addams Family Values is another big opportunistic, pre-marketed studio show, but it has laughs, flair. At its best, it's a valentine of venom, sent with mirth and malice aforethought.

May be the most fascinating, richly accomplished screw-up you'll see all year. Von Trier, who has always had a talent for provocation, nails another heroine to the cross while playing his role to the hilt - a moviemaking rebel in his own dog days.

Inspirational biographical movie that really works.

An absorbing story. Even though it takes you to places you may not want to go, the film never loses its human touch--that feel of skin on skin or of the past inescapably invading the present.

The film, both light-hearted and serious, suggests that freedom comes more easily within restrictions--and that's true of Albou's approach as well.

Good, expensive, easygoing fun. It's no masterpiece, but why should Soderbergh -- or anybody -- get three in a row?

Lewis Milestone preserves more of the original play than Hawks in His Girl Friday, but it's a much thinner movie: more mechanical, less chilling or ripe in its cynicism, the pace less nimble and charged. Still, the dialogue is gritty, magical, top-flight. Modern screenwriters, see this and weep. [25 Jul 1999, p.43C]

Martin Lawrence and Ashton Kutcher may seem like an odd-sounding comedy team, but in some weird way, they click as voice-actors and cartoon buddies in Open Season.

One of the more intelligent, better-made new movies around right now, but, despite everything, it doesn't really connect with the nerves and heart. It's a romance without anguish, although the pain of love is really what it's all about.

Blast is as bleak as noir gets, packed with black-and-white images of '60s New York City that recall Jean-Pierre Melville's French thrillers, and a street-tough taste that suggests Cassavetes and points ahead to Scorsese. [29 Oct 2004, p.C2]

Luckily, Wilde has style to spare -- as well as the perfect player to impersonate the flamboyant Irish writer: actor-writer Stephen Fry. [12 Jun 1998, p.H]

It's not Maddin's best work -- it may even be the least of his four features to date -- but there's something mesmerizing about it all the same, a quality of perverse wit and unbuttoned imagination you see too rarely.

Factotum, starring Matt Dillon and Lili Taylor in two of their best film performances, is a good movie about the L.A. underbelly, as recalled by an expert: Charles Bukowski.

The first hit movie western of the new century - wins us with a wink. It leaves you in a bright, happily cross-cultural mood. Adios, amigos. And vaya con Jackie Chan.

Little Odessa is a portrait of New York subcultures, the Russian immigrant community itself and the orginizatsya, or Russian mafia, that employs Joshua. The cityscapes are wintry and menacing. The characters have a strong pulse.

The value of Romantico is that it lets us experience vicariously what Carmelo and others like him go through.

A sometimes-sharp, sometimes-shallow, cunningly crafted thriller that tries to rely more on ideas and character than carnage and crashes. [30 Aug 1996, p.C]

It's an intricate, sometimes implausible ideological thriller that might be better as a smaller-scaled, less% preachy psychological drama. Still, "Paradise" catches and keeps your attention because of its daring subject, real-life backdrops and the intensity of its actors.

Creating a mood that suggests an unholy mix of Czech novelist Franz Kafka, American pulp fictionist Jim Thompson and French heist moviemaker Jean-Pierre Melville, Babluani's story is about the perils of get-rich-quick schemes.

A thrilling ride but also a thoughtful one, it's a movie that does manage to do more good than bad by the end of the day.

Shimmers and glows. But it also stings a little -- like the lovely flame that dies and the smoke that, in yet another Cole song, gets in your eyes.

Shows us a filmmaker, unafraid of her emotions, unafraid to mine her past, someone clear-eyed, non-egoistic, full of life and warmth.

Playing a deranged, possibly homicidal babysitter going bonkers in a hotel, Monroe steals the show in this efficient, vaguely creepy little thriller--despite the presence of both Richard Widmark (as her airline pilot target) and Anne Bancroft (as the hotel's pert lounge singer). [09 Dec 2005, p.C6]

Big and violent, dark and operatic, both stingingly real and maddeningly overblown. But what gives it resonance is Pacino's performance.

A slick, bloody thriller, but it's also, to its credit, a genuine whodunit.

May be corny, but it's also absorbing, sweet and powerfully acted. It's a film about falling in love and looking back on it, and it avoids many of the genre's syrupy dangers.

Though not as good or as massively innovative as its predecessor, is still a mountainous undertaking.

Swedish cinema has been famous for a number of things: beautiful actresses, fine sexy psychological dramas, natural settings, cinematic bawdiness and a touch of melancholy. Under the Sun fits that profile well.

I don't think it's a great movie -- though Theron's is a near-great performance -- but it's not one you can easily forget.

Hitch's most plausible, least suspenseful spy thriller, based on Leon Uris' reality-inspired novel of intrigue in Cuba and France. [23 Jun 2006, p.C2]

Like the work of an expert tailor, it's done with unobtrusive skill, essential warmth and seamless grace.

Macabre, oddly gripping.

Suggests a raunchier, cruder version of a Coen brothers comedy, but it's also a kind of honky-tonk "Rashomon."

It's a fervent, topical political drama of extraordinary impact and ferocity.

Nolan is a fascinating, offbeat choice for a huge movie franchise such as this. Just as Bale turns Batman into a near-tragic obsessive -- a Scarlet Pimpernel with the soul of a Hamlet and Monte Cristo -- Nolan turns Batman Begins into something much closer to Miller's "Dark Knight" interpretation.

Elegant, scary fun.

There's nothing particularly original or striking about Ping Pong except its style. It's a breezy, likable story, and the director here, Fumihiko Sori, obviously enjoys his work.

A highly provocative documentary.

Has what we usually want to see in movies like this: bravura action, tongue-in-cheek humor, but most of all attitude.

This likable heavenly fantasy comedy was a big '40s crowd-pleaser. [14 Aug 1998, p.M]

Jam-packed mishmash of wall-to-wall music, trenchant character study, slick sociology and sly witty-Brit comedy.

Has great themes and great actors.

A cautionary tale of paranoia and prejudice. [25 Jul 2003, p.C1]

The imagination, energy, chutzpah and sheer affection shown for Darin by director-writer-star Spacey, who plays the singer, are admirable, kicky. This is a movie, that, like Darin himself, takes a lot of chances and delivers on many of them.

Becket, now richly restored, is one of those '60s British theatrical spectaculars that we always imagine as a bit better than they were.

In Color Me Kubrick, John Malkovich has one of the roles of his life, and he acts it up like a haughty gourmet who's just picked up a succulent treat.

Smith's story is a charmer: touching, funny, romantic, perceptive, absorbing and full of color and character. And the movie, which has been respectfully and affectionately handled by people who obviously love their source, captures most of those qualities.

Most of the original play's magical speeches are preserved here, and however far this film may seem to stray from the original text, the delights remain. [14 May 1999, Friday, p.A]

I can't imagine a better actress for this part than Australian-born Cate Blanchett. Blanchett, who can be regal ("Elizabeth") or slutty ("The Shipping News"), manages to catch the feel of Guerin.

One Hour Photo is a piece of often masterly image-making, a half-brilliant film with a revelatory lead performance by Williams. But it's also a thriller that gets trapped in surfaces: shiny, exciting, full of dread but often only tricks of the camera.

There's a sass and bite to Winger's acting, a grinning intelligence, unabashed sexiness and total immersion that make her one of the movies' few hipster female stars.

City Slickers II, perhaps, isn't really special. But it's the kind of movie Hollywood should churn out more often: a professional, ebullient, formula entertainment that doesn't insult your intelligence and hits its marks with ease, wit and good humor. Unlike most current mega-movies, it's classy, smart, sometimes gaudily tasteless fun-done with such zest and skill that it often makes you smile. And laugh. And maybe even smirk.

This is Hollywood expertise and Hollywood civic idealism at high levels.

Howard has a wonderful touch with actors, and almost all of them here have their moments. [26 March 1999, Friday, p.A]

Michael Caine became a front rank star -- and actor -- when he played the title role in this smart, salty, subtly moving adaptation of Bill Naughton's play about a Cockney Casanova on the loose in Swinging London. [30 Jan 2000, p.41C]

What gives the movie real flesh and fantasy is the actress playing this part, the incandescent Morton.

It's a good small film for intelligent audiences who like to watch the movie camera explore other regions and other communities -- something all our movies should do more often.

The film is an epic treatment of a childhood curio. It's also the kind of elaborate movie stunt you can't imagine someone really pulling off. [26 May 1995, p.C]

Signs -- though Shyamalan's most visually beautiful work -- seems thinner, barely more than a sketch for a movie, with characters trapped in formulas. Beautifully trapped perhaps -- but paralyzed nonetheless.

It stays in your memory, will not leave you in peace.

Bigelow gives this film edge, tension and something you aren't expecting: a woman's touch for teasing out the buried emotion beneath those stoic surfaces.

The second, and some say best, of the "Road" series. Paramount's patty-caking pals, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, invade Lightest Africa for some songs, dances and snappy patter. [02 Apr 2000, p.38C]

The acting has the bravura stage eloquence of Broadway Shakespeare and the movie is narrated, beautifully, by John Hurt.

A comedy of evil and strange redemption, Lady Vengeance makes sure that we feel the pain, that we know what it's like to unreasonably suffer, because those are the rules of its mad, wounding, vengeful world.

On many levels, it hits its marks -- but it still misses the impact of some shorter, less-ambitious movies that play with our emotions more deftly or deeply, walk their miles, deadly or not, with a lighter, faster, more confident tread.

Brimming over with affection and humanity, this memory drama about the destruction of one family and the birth of another is nostalgic in a good sense: funny, bittersweet, poignant.

The movie is an odd mix of tones and styles, and the thriller plot is casually introduced, shoved aside and reintroduced. But, like all Duvall's work, Assassination Tango breathes with humanity.

Copying Beethoven, at its best, is a sort of grand cinema opera of the composer's life and music.

This toweringly ambitious picture confronts a brilliant director, Atom Egoyan, with a major historical event and a profound theme.

The movie rips and roars.

A movie that celebrates and mourns heroism and friendship, while reminding us how seldom we truly see either on our big screens.

The new Bad News Bears may not make you cheer, but it should provide laughs and a good time. Isn't that what some movies are all about?

Maybe the problem with Analyze This is that it isn't enough of a Ramis movie. [5 Mar 1999]

On a direct line with the whimsical small-town comedies of the '40s and '50s.

Wrings honest emotion and riveting dramatics from its tale.

Fascinating as Buzz often is, the film obviously was made with limited resources, transferred to film from DV, with grainy clips from the trailers for Bezzerides-scripted movies rather than snippets of the movies themselves.

A flawed film but an admirable one that tries to immerse us in a world of artistic abandon and political madness and very nearly succeeds.

Pictorially sumptuous and sexually provocative.

Right in the "Rebel Without a Cause" vein, of course, but grittier and less romantic. [16 Jun 2006, p.C8]

The Cats of Mirikitani seems all too short; it has enough meat to be turned into an excellent dramatic film.

The racial and sexual politics of Heading South may trouble some audiences; Cantet is definitely not a moralist in the usual sense.

This movie lets the characters and tropes borrowed from the original Stan Lee comic live and breathe.

A lyrical work of sporadic great power, Neon Bible captures both the neon and the spirit, the heaven and hell.

Flaws and all, it really does show a star being born.

This is a comedy made for people who think, who like smart talk and who, like the Perelmans, know the score.

Seems small in subject and scope, but it's large in spirit and implication.

It's one of those movies that are unfortunately so technically well done, it's hard to tune out on the senseless story.

Is it cute? Yes. Is it a crowd-pleaser? Yup. Is it classic? Nope. (Though it could have been.)

A town where tourists and hapless visitors are murdered, and the dead are revived by a big band-loving mortician, descends into gore and madness. [16 Mar 2007, p.C5]

Loony, but spellbinding. [28 Apr 2006, p.C9]

An inspirational movie about a inspiring figure: Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah of Ghana.

The result is something so old it's new, so corny it's funny. And while Tears of the Black Tiger is nothing more than entertaining, at least it's that.

We've gotten perhaps too used to the computerized wizardry of our own cartoon features; Kon, like Miyazaki shows us some older ways that can still transfix us.

It's a winner with flaws.

What charmed me most about the movie was the interaction of the dogs themselves. [02 Jun 1995, p.J]

The French filmmakers lend it their special aesthetic/dramatic sense, and the Masai actors ground the story in everyday realism and humanity. Together, they create a film and a legend to remember.

Waterworld is often entertaining because it's screwy. Could even Ed Wood Jr. have come up with those cigarette-puffing villains, in a world with hardly enough dirt for a tobacco plant? [28 July 1995]

Writer-director Gary David Goldberg's script is full of complex and lively love patter, which Cusack especially rattles off with sometimes breakneck speed.

At a time when new westerns are in short supply, Devil a sight for sore eyes.

Movies like First Snow rise or fall on characters and atmosphere, and Fergus gets them both. But though the story's resolution does have irony and even a certain power, it lacks the charge, the Serlingesque "gotcha," that it needs.

At its best, this new film does mix grandeur with skepticism, excitement with reflection. In the end, like Harry, it redeems itself.

The quintessential Wertmuller couple--sad-eyed Giancarlo Giannini and maneater Mariangela Melato--rev up this lively, devilish Faustian comedy about a hapless industrial worker caught in the Mafia's universal machine. [17 Oct 1995, p.3C]

A successful lifestyle journalist, Elizabeth (Barbara Stanwyck) is lauded by her readers as the sweetest, most efficient homemaker in the countryside. Problem is, she is a chain-smoking urbanite in a city apartment. [05 Dec 2014, p.C2]

You'll find heartbreakingly star-crossed lovers, a heartless villain (Wilson) and a dazzling backdrop of aristocratic life before and after the Russian Revolution.

These two actors have a kind of genius for dark comedy: Stiller for suffering through crises and De Niro for creating them.

It's a fast, funny picture, and the worst thing you can say about it is that it's no "Toy Story," no "Shrek." That may be true, but one thing Ice Age proves is that the new digitized cartoons are a form whose time has come.

The film mixes unashamed kitsch, thrilling airfight scenes and dark historical drama. But what gives it a special charge is its portrait of the Czech RAF group: what happened to them before, during and after the war.

There's the script -- and that's the problem.

It's a funny-sad portrait of fame and its junkies, and of an era and its music.

The Nativity Story surprised me. I didn't expect such an obvious art film approach. Yet the Bible, in the King James version, is great English literature.

A gripping, very intelligent British thriller. Slowly, inexorably, it ties you in knots.

It's an ensemble piece with a dark, salty mood that reminded me of Robert Altman and Robert Aldrich, with a touch of Francis Ford Coppola. It's notably non-"gung ho."

An unashamed art picture, the kind of film where extreme aestheticism mixes with nightmare dread, where the story resembles a bad dream and where Freudian symbols cluster around the events like a swarm of insects. It's a very pretty film, but it's also lean, enigmatic and so obscure.

A stark, painful drama about pregnancy--a subject rarely treated this fully, candidly or tragically.

Chicago-bred Haskell is such an intense, contentious, prickly figure, he would tend to take over any film portrait, and he definitely dominates here.

Life can be funny, sad, conventional, unpredictable -- or a pain in the tail. And so can Life, the new Eddie Murphy movie. [16 April 1999, Tempo, p.4]