Michael Wilmington

A wry romantic comedy set among Bruno's targets, the Grenoble bourgeois.

As a sheer ghostly thriller, it's mostly a spell-binder, but I was disappointed at the ending.

Mantel and Skrovan's documentary astutely reminds us of why we need the world's Naders. It's a reasonable movie about an often admirably unreasonable man.

One of the most hopeful movies I've seen recently--not just for its humane, realistic story line, but in its very being.

It's a film that is mystifying and haunting -- a cool, brotherly vision of the last day and the coming flood, of American dreams and the vanishing frontier.

It's a tasty but evasive treat, no matter what your taste in politics or movies.

A rare thriller - and a rare American film - that centers on both dramatic and moral issues, crises of conscience. And thanks to a superb central performance by Nicholson as detective Black, it's a film that compels, thrills and ends up coming very close to tragedy.

The musical evergreen, with Irene Dunne billed over Fred and Ginger. [03 Nov 2006, p.C5]

The diversity of the Beauty Shop ensemble is a large part of what makes it so much fun to watch;

Like Workman's other films, it's a time capsule that sings.

The elements don't quite jell here, and the ending doesn't work, but they all have a racy charm anyway. [19 Dec 1999, p.34]

Minghella's psychological redraft muffles the menace, squanders the tension, throws away the main character and plot engine and turns Ripley into something he never was or should be.

It's "Rear Window" with kids, and it's gorgeously shot with long, looming, twisted perspectives on actual New York locations, by cinematographer-turned-director Tetzlaff ("Notorious"). [27 Feb 2000, p.27C]

In a movie that dwells so wittily and movingly on forgiveness, you have to grant pardon. Clarkson alone makes "April" a feast.

Withering study of white-collar alcoholics.

A unique portrait of modern crime and punishment, gives us terror without filters, a tragic event captured in all its initial immediacy and anguished aftermath.

It has a good director, snazzy visuals and some really funny animals, and that's at least half the battle.

(Matthau's) is a truly magical performance: hilarious, unguarded and deeply touching.

It's an entertaining picture, classy and well executed, but as much as any film I've seen recently, this lush new version of the 1969 Michael Caine thriller tends to prove that, where thrillers are concerned, "more" is often less.

This subtle, beautifully shot film is a gently ironic study of the relationship between a Turkish filmmaker, who has returned to his country home to make an independent movie, and his elderly father, whom he has recruited as an actor. [13 Oct 2000, p.L]

This film carries us so touchingly into their world, it would take a heart of stone, finally, to ignore them.

Hannibal, riding the malicious wit of Hopkins' sophisticated fiend, is a gorgeous, wild, sometimes sick thriller, a feast for enraptured eyes and strong stomachs.

It's just another Williams and Crystal movie. But let's see a few more.

In The Haunting, the moviemakers succeed in something very difficult: creating a haunted house with real personality and terror. [23 July 1999, p.A]

It's a gleamingly cracked tale of romance gone mad played out on a moonlit ocean voyage that turns into a bizarre, floating nightmare of slapstick perversion. [08 Apr 1994, p.A]

One of the most lavish and entertaining of all Hollywood religious epics. [15 May 1998, p.M]

A delicately crafted, gently inflected, lovely little movie about the need for love, directed and co-written by Singapore's Eric Khoo ("Mee Pok Man").

Entertaining, surprisingly well-written and often rowdily amusing picture. It is predictable in many ways but also full of heart, humor and personality.

The movie has something of treasure to offer us: two great screen actors, connecting magically. Why show an unconvincing world of crime, incest and violence when, with Deneuve and Auteuil, you can open up a richer world of intellect and thwarted desire? [27 Dec 1996, p.C]

Few sports films catch their time, place and sport so well. For skateboard fans, this is a must. But it's also a great ride if you know nothing about the sport or what it meant. At the end of this movie, you will.

Perhaps the most typical of all the "Road" pictures: melodic, low-pressure, funny. [02 Apr 2000, p.C38]

The kind of smart, realistic indie family drama the movies should give us more often, just as they should more often offer performances as full-blooded and rich as Aiello's and Curtin's here.

The characters need more exploration, especially the killers. Yet this look at teen life and death chills you anyway.

This Universal sci-fi saga has little of the style or atmosphere of the studio's '30s horror classics; its stars are amiable Richard Carlson and Julia Adams. But it does have a unique monster: the Amazonian gill man, a lovelorn amphibian who spots Adams underwater and doesn't stop swimming after her until the very last minute. [30 Oct 1998, p.I]

A fine, taut, tough example of the realistic police drama.

Hilary Swank gives a powerhouse performance as a maverick high school teacher in Freedom Writers, an often gripping and sometimes even inspiring film drama taken from the real-life story of Erin Gruwell.

An emotionally daring, subtly written, richly acted and very clever little movie. [09 Dec 1994, p.H]

A near-classic, "Woman" is let down only by Bacon's sluggish helming. [15 Aug 1996, p.9A]

Directed by Julian Jarrold and co-written by Tim Firth ("Calendar Girls"), the movie is quite enjoyable, effortlessly well-done on every level, even moving at times, but relatively light weight.

What Kasdan's "Earp" needed was more humor and better villains. "Wild Bill" has the humor and villains, the flash and energy, the fire and style. And when, at the end, Hill seems to throw it all away, it almost hurts. But you can say one thing about "Wild Bill": Unlike most movies, it has a lot to throw away. [01 Dec 1995, p.C]

Classic low-budget '50s sci-fi thriller, brilliantly scripted by Richard Matheson from his novel. [01 Sep 2006, p.C7]

Unabashedly designed to blow its audience away.

Skates over depravity when, like Crane, it should have dug down deeper.

One of the movie's most moving elements is the duo's famous prison correspondence, as eloquently read by Tony Shalhoub as Sacco and John Turturro as Vanzetti. But Miller's obvious passion and dedication shine throughout.

Double Team is loony but likable, a would-be triple double that ends up eking out a victory over its own script. And while Tsui is the man who makes it work, Rodman, on his best bad behavior, does his bit, defers to his teammates. At the end, Rourke and Van Damme pull off their shirts, while Rodman keeps his on. And, wisely, The Worm leaves most of the kicking to his co-star.

Opulence almost interferes with the movie, weighing it down when it should seem lighter than air, surrounding the inarguably brilliant Carrey with too much frosting and frou-frou.

Even though the actors are good, their characters stay stock.

The movie, in the end, is devastating because of the banality it reveals, and because its terseness and plainness cut a mass killer down to size.

Shallow, colorful adaptation of one of Hemingway's best short stories. [08 May 1998, p.M]

The movie has a large theme, even if it's unspoken. Old Joy is about a particular friendship, but it's also about how American society changed in the '90s and the new century.

A sprightly fairy tale full of darkness and delight from seemingly unlikely movie collaborators: author Roald Dahl and director-star Danny DeVito.

Total Eclipse is a biographical film steeped in ecstasy and despair, seething with madness and torment.

The all-time great Stoller-Lieber title number, performed by The King in jailbird regalia, is just one highlight of this '50s rock-the-house classic. [04 Sep 1998, p.H]

Usually American marital problems are left to the soap operas; it's nice to see them tackled by experts, piercing personas and peeling open hearts.

Lucidity, austerity and quiet compassion are peculiar virtues to ascribe to a movie about a horrific real-life murder case, but those are among the best qualities of Jean-Pierre Denis' Murderous Maids.

A realistic drama about life's uncertainties.

What I did like unreservedly was the acting. Enid, as enacted by the sometimes astonishing Birch, is one of the more convincing, no-nonsense teens in recent movies.

A work both rigorously stylized and deeply personal. Devotees of Kitano and Japanese cinema will admire Dolls.

The River Wild is more of a family movie, a thrill-ride where all the crazier dips and turns are straightened out by the ride's end. Hanson keeps the action clean, the tensions simmering. As a family movie, it's actually pretty good. [30 Sep 1994, p.C]

A movie that will act like a smack in the face to some audiences, while others may simply laugh in recognition.

It's a high-tech thriller that really works.

There's so much emotion and so many ideas in this film that it's both angering and exhilarating. The acting is fine, the writing superb, the production crisp.

The movie's gentle humor and offbeat whimsy prove that humanity trumps bureaucratic foolishness, in Norway or anywhere else.

Dercourt, a very fine filmmaker, is a musician himself, a music teacher and one-time solo viola player with the French Symphony Orchestra. And he directs, with a musician's precision and an insider's sly wit, the world of classical music performance.

A bomb? Not quite. Anyone who gets a kick of train thrillers should get knocked off the tracks by this one. [17 July 1995, p.N2]

A film driven by an elusive plot buried like a cryptogram under the action. It's a delightfully screwy ethnographic murder mystery, beautifully photographed in translucent naturalistic color.

There's just enough neurotic or sharp badinage and Rodeo Drive realism to make it all go down easy.

The film, like its lovers, is fond, giddy and poetic about love and death.

The ending of Waitress is so beguiling and whimsical that it makes you, like its diner's patrons, hungry for more--and it makes you miss that red-headed movie auteur/pastry chef/heart stealer Shelly even more.

It's intellectual without being dry, dramatic without bombast, smart without posturing. Its characters and milieu are very well drawn, and Andre is one of the more intriguing and convincing fictional creations in recent film.

The first 10 minutes of Lodge Kerrigan's Keane have a raw, hurtling reality that's as painfully engrossing as anything you'll see in a recent non-fiction movie, a searing portrait of one man's hell, from inside and outside.

A curiously cool, but very intelligent movie. [02 Jan 2000, p.19C]

Though Haynes' methods are austere and his style dry, the terror of his narrative becomes more palpable as the film unwinds. The picture's eerie delicacy, meticulous technique and rapt formality may distance us, but they also steadily strip bare the panic at its core.

The artifice may be ancient, but the thought and emotions -- and especially Sorvino -- are beautifully, refreshingly modern.

The best things about The Thing Called Love are its cast, style and mood. It has a snap, pace and rhythm we don't ordinarily see in today's movies. The dialogue scenes have a headlong pace and crackling self-confidence reminiscent of Howard Hawks, and the three- and four-way love combats recall Ernst Lubitsch.

Never feels inflated -- and it builds to an ending of unusual power.

A fairy tale comedy with the Holocaust as the background, a collision of terror and community, death and beauty.

Doesn't always sizzle, but its stars do.

People who love Lennon will almost certainly like the film; his detractors will almost certainly howl "bias!" Even so, it's a movie that, at its best, makes you ache with the memory of an anguished era and its fallen pop culture hero.

Weird to the max, smart, sneaky as a Wall Street pickpocket and revved up with cruel wit and brazen imagination, Being John Malkovich is a dark movie comedy that you couldn't forget if you tried.

Surviving Picasso is an intelligent, beautifully crafted and engrossing Ismail Merchant-James Ivory biographical portrait of the century's most famous and successful painter. [4 Oct 1996]

The movie, a keen look at the way passion unravels and obsession destroys, creates a black mood, a sense of truth and an enduring chill that stay with you.

Though the film falls short of its aspirations, there's something magical about it. It's a poetic look at transience, betrayal, loss and doom.

Another of his (McElwee) beguiling "personal chronicle" movies.

Erotic, poetic and light on its feet. It's a portrayal of a runaway teenager's sexual initiation, and though it comes close to being exploitive, it keeps dancing away.

Hitchcock's first talkie, begun as a silent film and then converted midstream, alternates stiff dramatic scenes with brilliant, highly visual suspense sequences. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

With the exception of Amelie's voiceover narration in French, Fear and Trembling is entirely in Japanese. And the Japanese cast is superb.

Finally, the film answers a question that obviously haunts Nachtwey: Is it immoral, callous or irresponsible to win fame and recognition from images of the terror, death and suffering of others?

May fall short of its great model, "Seven Samurai" (almost all action movies do), but it's miles ahead of most of the gadget-ridden adventure epics around now.

Though "Caterina" is unusually well-acted and crafted for this kind of movie--and both more than casually insightful and irreverent about modern Italian school life, teenage mores and politics--Giancarlo is the one character who makes the movie special.

This is a quiet thriller and a middle-aged romance, and it's full of desperation and oozing anxiety.

Mrs. Winterbourne doesn't amount to much. But it's such a professional job, done with such glow and verve -- and the people making it seem to be having such an infectiously good time -- that it's hard to resist. Good comedies are easy to love anyway. [19 Apr 1996, p.C]

A children's movie done with genuinely youthful spirit and an easy self-kidding mastery of its own high-tech gadgetry.

The acting is terrific, understated and pungent, especially Quaid's and Ryan's performances. [05 Nov 1993, p.I]

It's good, but not great -- despite the heights to which Dench and Broadbent drive it. But those heights are lofty, the pain still stings.

Magnificently sensuous and macabre.

If one judged movies purely on the basis of photography and sets, Restoration would deserve a place near the top. [26 Jan 1996, p.C]

It's only a mild disappointment. The talent is still there, the film better than most. It just needs less crime, more love.

Sometimes thrilling, sometimes suffocatingly tasteful adaptation of Stephen King's 1999 novel.

It's a work for specialized tastes: for audiences who adore old movies, dark jokes and some high camp.

Why should we keep seeing Austen fresh, through our own, modern eyes? Because she's a writer who has never really left our field of vision. And, as this new Mansfield Park proves again, she never will.

In French Kiss--a picture that isn't unusually funny or original but that has expert actors, smooth direction and ravishing French locales--we can get pleasure from the sheer, relaxed polish of it all, the effortless swing. It's a good time passer. [5 May 1995, p.C]

Capable of enthralling.

A colorful version of Bram Stoker's deathless tale of the bloodsucking count has Christopher Lee as a suave Dracula and Peter Cushing as his nemesis Von Helsing. [02 Oct 1998, p.J]

It's crazy, dangerous and sometimes gorgeous: a feast of nuttiness that takes you, for a while, over the edge.

A combination of toughness and sentimentality with John Wayne. [21 May 2000, p.38C]

Best of all though, we get to experience the whole fest itself, over four turbulent decades-an era from which Glastonbury, like Woodstock in its day, offers a halcyon "timeout."

Ozpetek brings a straight love story and world politics into the mix, but it's his brilliant cast which completes the connection.

As a ride, this Tarzan succeeds. As a pop myth, it needs more jungle fever. [18 June 1999, Friday, p.A]

It's "knowingly" off-the-rails--and if you're in a tolerant or adventurous mood, very entertaining.

A delightful concert documentary that proves once more what a neglected masterpiece the Coen Brothers gave us last year in their Depression chain-gang odyssey, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

There's a lot of beauty and excitement in Legends of the Fall - not least from the actors. [13 Jan 1995]

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.

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.

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]

Fascinating documentary.

Red Heat is directed in a fiery, muscular, pop-graphic style. And it has a James Horner score that puckishly mixes Prokofiev and rhythm and blues. But it's also a movie with a cramped interior. The action scenes seem to be squeezing out everything else, pressing the characters against the wall. [17 Jun 1988, p.1]

The wrong crowd will find these antics infantile and offensive. The right one will have a howling good time.

A jaundiced look at the CIA, bolstered by a terrific cast. [14 Sep 1986, p.6]

Passion, obsession, mad love, the violent clash of insider and outsider-all these themes, plus the performances, are rich enough to carry us past that wounded climax, if not to carry the movie past the fatal attractions of the big box-office cliche. [18 Sep 1987, p.1]

A splashingly pleasant little surprise.

A good, solid, admirable, deeply felt movie.

Good as much of John Schlesinger’s The Believers is--and it’s one of the better-produced, more exciting and intelligent thrillers of the year--it’s hard to keep from wondering, as you watch, why he wanted to do it in the first place.

Imagine Steven Spielberg gone existentialist, Carne and Prevert making rock videos, a punk "Diva" and Jean Cocteau crossed with the Clash, and you may get an idea of the peculiar charms awaiting you in the cavernous, fluorescent interiors of Subway. [Nov 16, 1985, p.16]

And, though the 1953 “Invaders” was an effective movie, it’s not really the classic that people remember. Except for Menzies’ superb production designs, everything in the remake is better: the acting, the camera work, definitely the Martians. It may not grip audiences in the same way, but that’s because Hooper is trying something harder, a conscious campiness that’s tough to bring off.

The film itself is playful, weird, unpredictable and a bit tasteless. [10 Apr 1992]

Earth Girls Are Easy may be a classic case of a director getting more out of his material than it really deserves. Temple has spectacular gifts for making musical movies. He is a witty formalist, a light-hearted virtuoso, and, like all the best movie-musical directors, he's able to create images that breathe in tempo with the songs or cut against them jaggedly, exhilaratingly.

At first, Something Special looks like it's going to be an appalling little stinker, one of those tasteless travesties whose manufacture and release makes you wonder at the sanity of the movie industry. Then, unexpectedly, you begin to get caught up in the rhythms, characters and storytelling.

But it entertained me more than Seagal's first three movies. There's more verbal energy and atmosphere, more humor: in-your-face, scabrous, wise-guy macho humor.

If you take it on its own terms -- as a summer teen exploitation film locked into an adolescent vision of life, with no particular ambitions to step out of its class -- it's a movie that works just fine. [14 Aug 1987, p.26]

In Black Rain, director Ridley Scott and his team pump in so much pyrotechnic razzle-dazzle that the movie becomes a triumph of matter over mind. It's a blast of pure sensation, shallow but scintillating, like a great rock melody, superbly produced, where the music pumps you up even as the lyrics drag you down.

Light Sleeper, with its cool, critical view of life on the edge, is no film to dismiss or ignore. It's a failure perhaps, but an honorable failure. If it isn't saved by grace, it has many saving graces.

It's an unambitious, derivative but engaging little comedy...It's hardly original. It's hardly deep. But, in contrast with much of its genre ("Porky's" and its progeny), it's a model of sophistication, decorum and even taste. It has crass moments and cheap shots, but it's still good: cleverly thought out and gracefully filmed by first-time film director Michael Dinner, who directed the PBS "Miss Lonelyhearts."

Branagh's expertly cut and reshaped Henry V gives us the grimy face of war, yet he also gives us the guts - and the soul and poetry that animate them both. [8 Nov 1989]

In the end, Switch isn’t a top-grade Edwards movie--though it shares with his best, a sparkling directorial panache and charm, a charge of risque humanism, a wizardly delight in body language.

The movie is exciting, richly textured. But, despite its high quality, there’s something unformed about it, like a poem that doesn’t quite sing, a painting with a color missing...Even if Someone to Watch Over Me is flawed, it’s the kind of film that offers you many subsidiary pleasures.

Haynes says the theme of his movie is deviance, which seems right. It's also clear that the poison of the title is, partially, society's attitudes toward the three deviant characters -- whom it beats up, imprisons, hunts down. That's what makes the reaction to Poison so ironic. The foes of the movie -- and the people who want to take down the NEA because of it -- seem bent on proving that its paranoia isn't a fantasy. [03 Apr 1991, p.F1]

The Belly of an Architect has flaws, smudges and intense pleasures. Something like a clockwork orange, it’s an art machine that spurts juice and acid.

What many American movies do well these days -- action, violence, hell-for-leather street spectacle -- Darkman does better. That may be praise enough. [24 Aug. 1990, p.F10]

Lethal Weapon 2 has the brain-rattling pace of a terminal speed freak going the wrong way down an expressway. [7 Jul 1989, p.1]

Cleverly written by William and Tania Rose, it's become a cold-war curio. [28 May 1989, p.2]

It's a risky movie, and an uneven one. But the impulses behind it are darker and stronger than in most of his previous comedies. Good or bad--and Life Stinks definitely has a weak, undeveloped side--I liked it.

But there's something missing, something tentative and uncertain. In order to pull off a magic trick, you often have to distract the audience with smooth patter, clever detail or indirection. And this movie tries to play it so pure and unabashed that we can see right up its sleeves. [21 Apr 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]

A good, rock 'em, shock 'em political thriller, done in the best imitation Costa-Gavras style by director Roger Spottiswoode. [08 Oct 1989, p.5]

In Rocky V, the fifth and presumably last episode of Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa saga, the writer-star once again contrives a way to make his hulking, sad-eyed gladiator the underdog. And we get whiffs of funkiness and humanity stirring around for the first time since the original Rocky. [16 Nov 1990, p.1]

At its best, it's about madness disguised as utter rationalism, utter dispassion, noblesse oblige. As such, in odd moments, it chills through to the bone and beyond.

The duo carry automatic glamour and nobility and the movie is an elaborate star turn, a chance to see them strutting their stuff one more time.

If Spaceballs disappoints you, it isn't because it's unfunny or not entertaining. Brooks at medium pressure is still more amusing than most movie makers. [25 Jun 1987, p.1]

There's an urgency about "Star Trek VI" that comes from its deliberate topicality. [6 Dec. 1991, p.F1]

Gremlins 2 is better than the original, though it lacks the same archetypal horror-movie drive.

Godfrey Reggio’s Powaqqatsi, like his earlier “Koyaanisqatsi,” is a lyrical documentary that turns the instruments of technology against it. In some ways, the new film is less effective, but it’s also more visually spectacular: a mesmerizing cascade of sensuous sights and sounds.

The film itself--a dramatic comedy based on the 1965 Saigon gig of irreverent Armed Forces disc jockey Adrian Cronauer--is good-hearted but shallow. It's a piece of programmed irreverence, photogenic torpor, prefab compassion. But Williams, as Cronauer, is so blazingly brilliant that he detonates the center, exploding it in berserk blasts of electronic-age surreality.

Nichols gives the piece a funny, fragile somber mood that works almost completely.

Writer L. M. Kit Carson and director Hooper have made Chainsaw 2 a grisly hoot: a wild satire on modern Texas and horror movies themselves. [31 Aug 1986, p.15]

There's a lot of low-key poetry and nicely casual tension in Hunter's direction and in Frederick Elmes' cinematography--and the acting ensemble is fine. For all its flaws and the revulsion it may induce, River's Edge has something valuable: a dark, harrowing but moral perspective.

One of the most ingenious, amusing and oddly affectionate horror movies of the year -- a bloody bonbon that you chew with relish. [22 May 1987, p.6]

Great Balls of Fire would be an entertaining evening even if it preserved nothing more than Lewis' songs -- rerecorded by Lewis with all the soul and groin-stirring fury that he has preserved during three decades. It also has an often-dazzling comic impersonation of Lewis by Dennis Quaid, a goofy ballet of awesomely confident struts and brags. [30 June 1989, p.1]

As a horror show, it's a cut--or a slash or a bloody whack--above most movies of this type: cleverly written, cleverly cast.

One of the more sophisticated of Disney's early '80s offerings; the direction by Jack Clayton ("The Innocents") is high-style, convulsively screamy. [16 Jun 1993, p.F8]

Clive Barker's Hellraiser is one of the more original and memorable horror movies of the year: a genuinely scary, but also nearly stomach-turning experience by a genre specialist who seemingly wallows in excess and loves pushing conventions to their ghastly limits. [18 Sep 1987, p.18]

It's a zippy melodrama for small-town America and small-towners at heart: well-executed kitsch for audiences that will still be amused at the notion that the bugs are getting so big, they'll drag us all down.

To say Young Guns is one of the best big Westerns of the '80s doesn't mean much: Westerns have been almost moribund since 1976. But it does hint at this movie's surprising vitality, bloody ebullience and violent impetuosity-qualities it shares with crazy little Billy. [12 Aug 1988, p.11]

The film has a marvelous first half. All of Zinnemann's best qualities -- tact, taste, integrity, quiet intellect and idealism -- shine through in the convent scenes, as does the acting. However, good as Peter Finch is (as an agnostic doctor), the second half seems hurried, over-reticent. [25 Mar 1988, p.22]

It's a dry, fluky comedy about the perils of immigrant communities and bad health facilities -- shot in a style that's a clever pastiche of early '30s experimental talkies. The imagery is purposely deranged and the movie pumps it out in slow, deliberate rhythms that become daffy and excruciating. [11 Sep 1989, p.6]

Long considered one of the ultimate drive-in movies, the granddaddy of both "The Last American Hero" and "Smokey and the Bandit," this black-and-white drama is still entertaining if you take it in the raffish, off-slant, what-the-hell spirit with which star-producer Robert Mitchum obviously intended it. [09 Dec 1988, p.24]

For a film that first seems a throwaway, it has unusual intensity and grip. It’s not another over-reaching, under-financed “Terminator” or “Total Recall” wanna-be.

Oddly enough, it's as black comedy and social history, far more than thriller or human drama, that Patty Hearst works best.

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.

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.

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

A flashy, splashy and violent chase thriller.

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.

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

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.

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.

A ridiculous but exciting action movie.

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.

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.

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

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

If you're looking for purple romance with a social conscience, it doesn't get much more purple than God's Sandbox.

It's still a disappointment: a well-mounted and well-acted suspense movie that, thanks to its illogical script, falls off a cliff midway through.

A singularly cheerless trip, explicit but sterile, racy but dull.

This Pink Panther really doesn't have to achieve the heights of the original; it just has to be funny on its own terms. But it pales there too. Kline, a master of comic hypocrisy, deserves more screen time, Emily Mortimer is wasted as Clouseau's adoring assistant Nicole and Knowles is over indulged as Xania.

Pugach's selfishness, his inability to detach love from gratification, is the key to this crazy story.

One of those movies that starts like a house afire, catches you firmly in its narrative grip and then suddenly blows itself out, not really going out with a whimper but with a big, bad, ludicrous bang.

The whole movie plays like an improbable blend of "Repulsion," "High Noon" and the archetypal low-budget rape/revenge shocker "I Spit on Your Grave." Queasy audiences beware, but midnight-movie bookers take note.

As a whole, though, the movie is much less magnetic or believable than its star.

It's a weird little movie that's amusing enough while you watch it, offering fine acting moments and pungent insights into modern L.A.'s show-biz and media subcultures. But it doesn't leave you with much.

Songwriter bio on Gus Kahn (Danny Thomas); Day is his long-suffering mainstay. [13 Apr 2007, p.C5]

The film's mood and style are pitched somewhere between '60s American indie and French New Wave and, as you watch these people, they seem painfully, amusingly on-target. They may irritate you a little, but that's the right response.

All these good actors and all Crystal's sass and witty candor can't bring back the heyday of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges. Or even, most of the time, their off-days.

Highway Courtesans carries a feeling of truth, of bravely facing problems that are pressing and real. It's a good, informative piece on the oldest profession--and on how the world differs from what we usually see in the movies.

By turns brilliant and simplistic, moving and preposterous, the movie takes one of the ultimate hot-button American issues -- the morality of capital punishment -- and dissolves it into a volatile mix of psychological thriller and socio-political fable.

Despite the actors, the visuals and Forster's directorial swagger, the movie lacks impact.

A blend of the classical and the trite, the beautiful and tawdry, the genuinely moving and the cornball. Oddly, producer-director-star Costner often can't seem to tell the difference.

It suddenly morphs into one more overly slick, empty show.

It's a real disappointment: too hasty, too scattered and superficial, and, in the end, disappointingly sappy and sentimental.

Russian Dolls, like "L'Auberge," has an excellent cast (mostly the same one, in fact) and an impish style and speed that gives it more obvious audience appeal than the average French film.

Notoriety, they won. The revolution, they didn't. That perhaps is the secret message of the film. Dylan was right. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

It's worth seeing simply to make the acquaintance of Tobias, a really extraordinary old guy.

A paper-thin wish-fulfillment comedy about escaping small-town repressions and blasting conformity.

Louiso has a confident touch and a good eye, and there isn't a scene in the film that wasn't intelligently done. Besides Hoffman's near-great performance as Joel, there isn't a bad or mediocre acting job on view either.

Considering how good "Puccini's" middle often is, it's a shame it falls down fore and aft. But Maggenti, who loves Carole Lombard and William Powell in "My Man Godfrey," is tapping a likable vein here. She should open it up again.

Whimsy and wit are the saving graces of much British movie comedy, and Saving Grace has a decent measure of both.

The movie takes paranoia to a far edge. And some audiences will admire it simply because it doesn't waste time on the normality it's going to end up subverting-because it's more fixated on its pods than its people. [25 Feb 1994, p.C]

An epic unhinged, and while its best sections suggest a Loony Tune done by Sam Peckinpah and Emilio Fernandez, "Mexico" needs to be even crazier than it is.

Chirpy, bland, slightly maudlin Christmas musical comedy. [21 Dec 2001, p.C5]

This new heist movie by the great thriller director John Frankenheimer flails around like its own dysfunctional gang of casino robbers.

Code Unknown is a film you think more than feel. Though each scene is executed close to flawlessly, the cumulative effect is often oppressive. But at the center of the film -- the real reason it was made -- is Binoche, one of the genuinely radiant presences in movies today.

A short film with a unique subject matter. But you won't soon forget its people, its places or its sad, surprising revelations about all the sexes.

The actors in Nadja seem to be having such a good time that it's a shame the movie doesn't give them more room, and get even wilder and more eccentric.

Campbell and her character are willing to take chances. But Toback's tangled noirish plot, with Vera as a post-feminist femme fatale, isn't particularly clever or original.

Carpenter writes his own scripts -- here with past collaborator Larry Sulkis -- and their "Ghosts" screenplay lacks the density, character and humor of a Hollywood genre classic.

Possession needs a sharp eye, a wicked tongue, less reverence and much more of its author's voice.

The content may be dubious, but the execution is hypnotic.

In many respects, Forgiving Dr. Mengele is an ordinary documentary, stylistically and technically unexceptional. But its subject enobles the work. So does Kor : determined, indomitable, and by the end of the movie, a symbol herself of both survival and mercy.

If you're in the mood for something strange, this film may please you, twice over.

Just because it's true to life doesn't mean it can sing.

It suffers from stilted Vista Vision staging and a lack of gloss -- but has some sparkling Cole Porter musical numbers. [26 Sep 1999, p.26C]

The movie, like Smith, is breezy, fun and keeps comin' at ya. [22 Dec 2006, p.5]

Starts like a house afire and then suffers an imagination burnout.

Though the new "Sabrina" has been updated to include micro-chips and corporate raiders, French fashion shoots and the Concorde, it doesn't transcend its time the way the old screwball comedies did. It doesn't even illustrate its own time memorably. Instead, the movie leaves us peeking through the trees like Sabrina, while trying to tell us that old movie fairy tales like this one are eternal, as relevant in our day as in their own. It's doubtful the people who made "Sabrina" themselves really believe that -- though they'd obviously like to. [15 Dec 1995, p.C]

A smart, sprightly little movie with beguiling actors and few inhibitions. Though there's nothing startlingly new here, there's a freshness and vigor to the acting, and the crisscrossing love affairs hold your interest.

A confessional film that's almost too confessional--is like getting buttonholed by a casual acquaintance at a party and then subjected to a flood of highly intimate revelations that just don't stop.

Fairly entertaining and often exciting, expertly done in a way, but not especially engaging or new, and not as emotionally involving as its title suggests.

Director Suri Krishnamma, depends on Finney for its power. His great performance carries the film over its shallow spots, its wish fulfillment, its pull toward caricature. [03 Feb 1995]

A movie of such cheerful craziness and nonstop ferocity that you can't take it seriously for a second.

Violent and cynical on the surface, impassioned and celebratory below, Last Man Standing is such a carefully stylized film that sometimes it's hard to respond to it. [20 Sep 1996, p.C]

What pulls us along through the inky shoals of The Way of the Gun? Sheer style, plus the movie's refusal to play nice.

Too loud, bright and shallow for its subject: a movie that pushes too many obvious buttons to build naturally to the big, heartbreaking climax it obviously wants.

Never really feels right.

A comedy of bad manners with many punchy moments and many irritatingly glib ones.

This movie gives us mostly the "what" when we need a bit of the "why" as well. In her other, better work, Denis always supplies it.

But the film disappoints, partly because it inspires such large expectations.

Bond, like rock 'n' roll -- or Tomorrow -- may never die. Even so, watching the movie explode and crash its way toward its climax, I could only keep thinking: Come back, Richard Maibaum.

Energetic but unusually foolish "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!" high-school musical, redeemed by the exuberantly talented Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland combo, as a couple of kids preparing jaw-dropping numbers (choreographed by Berkeley) for a Paul Whiteman radio contest. [12 Dec 1997]

Thanks to director Howard's casual grace and humanism and the cast's talent and agility, The Paper is an entertaining show. But, maybe the reason it looks so real and sounds so phony is that, while it's set in the world of today, it really wants the kick of the old movies, and it never hits the right fluctuating tone between drama and farce. It may have tabloid ambitions and a tabloid look-even a tabloid soul. But it doesn't have tabloid reflexes. [18 March 1994, p.A]

Most novels can't be encapsulated well enough in a conventional two-hour movie format, and Dreamcatcher may be one of them -- a miniseries gone wrong.

What's wrong is the decision to let all the actors improvise their lines...At the end, Irreversible looks less like captured or even distorted life than an acting class.

Probably the last movie to carry a credit for the late Christopher Reeve--as well as the last credit for Reeve's late wife, Dana.

One of those lurid, macabre, amusingly exaggerated B-horror movies beloved by the psychotronic/Joe Bob Briggs crowds.

The movie -- even though it's based on real events -- seems unsatisfying and unconvincing.

Despite greater resources and high-tech whiz bang than the first movie, has a lot more turkey than dinner.

It's a good film but an over-obvious one. I wish I'd liked it more.

Musical bio of the early 20th Century dance team; their weakest. [03 Nov 2006, p.C5]

Far too self-absorbed a picture.

There's something in Shallow Grave that is admirable, beyond its obvious display of youthful talent. [24 Feb 1995]

It's a shapeless, derivative-but-funny show with another loony parody plot about super-villain Dr. Evil.

Very much a looking-back movie; its most obvious model is "American Graffiti." But if you know that particular slice of early '80s Manhattan, you may be as amused as I was. [26 Feb 1999]

It's dispiriting to see Jolie wasting herself (and a good supporting cast) on a story that requires little more than an average pretty actress who can wear clothes well and laugh and cry on cue.

As Almereyda unrolled his modern Gotham version, the story became gripping, the characters fascinating, the events mesmerizing, the resolution shocking and piteous.

If you were forced to judge it simply on its action-movie visual and technical elements, you'd have to count it a roaring success... . But if you lay aside that action and watch the people instead, it's a morass of dimwitted family crises and hack action-movie cliches.

There's something so charged and beautiful about Jodie Foster's performance as a Smoky Mountains wild child in Nell that it carries you past a lot of glossy bumps in the movie. [23 Dec 1994, p.C]

As for Ramis, he's no Stanley Donen. He can make us laugh, but he can't make a movie dance.

Doesn't have the negative qualities of many big-studio romantic comedies, but it doesn't quite take flight.

Heartbreakers itself is something of a con game: an expensive imitation of older, better films from older, often better times.

Too expensive for its own good, too chic for comfort.

Fghting your heart out at the end of this movie can't win the prize or the crowd.

At least the movie Pirates of the Caribbean is fun -- but only as long as you don't expect much. Take it from me: The ride is better.

Love can be a battleground, and, despite its homey-sounding title and gentle, almost nonchalant air, Jeff Lipsky's Flannel Pajamas gives us a series of messages from the front.

A sometimes stirring, sometimes preposterous movie.

Man on Fire, which starts off as a good example of super-glitz moviemaking, gradually turns into a movie on fire -- another helter-skelter, big-studio spending spree. Too bad. It could use a lot more of Walken, Fanning and some more honest drama.

A real sentimental journey -- and luckily they've got both the right director (Darabont) and the right actor to squeeze our heartstrings.

This often entertaining movie mixes grand, epic effects and amazing visualizations of catastrophe with a sappy family-in-crisis plot that would look hackneyed in a '60s Disney TV movie.

For my taste, too much of the new Powers looks like bad TV and sounds like old burlesque.

It's stylish, it's sort of smart, it's full of misplaced talent. But it's not funny enough, and maybe, in a way, not dark enough either.

It's a tribute to Penn's talent and guts that he manages to bring it off--even if the movie doesn't.

In the third story, set in Asheville, N.C., that excellent actress Hunt guides us steadily through what could be a minefield of sentimentality.

A well-researched and well-illustrated, if often facetious, record of the U.S. government's longtime war on cannabis. And while it's a little too single-minded, it's both fun to watch and quite informative.