Michael Wilmington

Larger Than Life is far closer to Murray's worst than his best. It's a truly senseless, erratic, if occasionally charming comedy that manages to waste Murray, a fine cast, good location photography and a terrific actor: Tai, the 8,000-pound trained pachyderm whose considerable stuff was strutted in 1995's Operation Dumbo Drop. [03 Nov 1996, p.11C]

You probably won't find two more fascinating camera subjects, two livelier conversationalists or two richer, more rewarding, more engaging and inspiring companions in any movie, fiction or non-fiction, this year.

May show both director and star working at their professional peaks, but I don't think it's as good as that underappreciated masterwork "A.I." It's not as resonant and daring, not as full of magic and marvel. Spielberg stretches himself technically here but not emotionally.

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

I loved this movie madly, and so will many of you.

Capable of enthralling.

Movies about moviemaking usually fall into one of two categories: ones that satirize or debunk the film industry or ones that celebrate it. Irma Vep, a sometimes dazzling French film by writer-director Olivier Assayas, does both. [13 June 1997, p.I]

Justly renowned as the most realistic movie on pro football, this is the iconoclastic portrait of savvy, rebellious receiver Phil Elliott (Nick Nolte) who finds himself a target for coaches, owners, players and fate itself. [14 May 2000, p.33]

Somber, meditative and visually magnificent, this film, about a famous Greek author ruminating on his past, is a piece of cinematic poetry: calm, beautiful and chilling as the eternal sea against which much of it is set. [22 Oct 1998, p.2]

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

The movie itself, defying all odds, comes close to a knockout.

A noir with a smile, and after all these years, its deft mixture of darkness and light still makes us smile.

A promising film rather than a fully realized one.

A rich, shining valentine to the British theater and the eternal joys of Shakespeare,

The greatest rock concert movie ever made -- and maybe the best rock movie, period.

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]

It's a movie that literally makes your mouth water. A smart, sprightly, lip-smacking comedy about a Taipei master chef who's lost his sense of taste and his tangled family problems with three romantically troubled daughters. It crackles with iridescent style and wit.

You will not forget The Piano Teacher. Nor will you forget Isabelle Huppert, a brave, brilliant actress who here plays her masterpiece.

The British hated it (because their soldiers took Burma), but this is a rock-solid Walsh actioner, with Errol Flynn, James Brown and Henry Hull. [06 Apr 2007, p.C7]

Not too many actors last year bettered or equaled Beatty and Schreiber here, separately or (better yet) together. It's a pleasure and a privilege to watch them work.

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.

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.

Brilliant adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's 20th Century comic-erotic classic. [08 Jul 2005, p.C2]

Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It is a joyfully idiosyncratic little jazz-burst of a film, full of sensuous melody, witty chops and hot licks

Not a striking film visually. It's deliberately plain looking, focused on the appalling events with an almost documentary immediacy.

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

It's an ode to heroism, idealism and romance that still sweeps us away.

A film that uses beautiful tableaux and convincingly raw actors to build to a climax of shatteringly understated poignancy and power.

A spectacular, engrossing, big-hearted film based on one of Korea's great national epics and made by that country's top filmmaker.

From Vicki Baum's novel, scrumptiously directed by Goulding, with a constellation of a cast that includes Greta Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore and Joan Crawford. [28 Nov 1999, p.35]

This hip, highly partisan biography of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey is a surprisingly entertaining movie about the perils of studying sexual behavior in a sexually uptight culture--our own.

If all this potent drama recalls Bergman, the beautifully articulated staging and setting suggest that master of operatic social-sexual drama, Luchino Visconti ("The Leopard").

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?

A dark subject certainly, but in Murray's bouquet-bearing hands, it can still hand us a laugh.

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

A witty and psychologically perceptive look at the Parisian literary scene.

This is a Wenders masterwork--a chilling tale of painting, crime and forgery. [19 Jan 2007, p.C5]

One of the most beautiful and profound films to emerge from Japan during the past decade.

Impudent, grandiose, a multilevel crowd-pleaser--almost returns the Disney animated features to their glory traditions of the '30s and '40s.

The atmosphere is unremittingly tense, the undercurrents poignant and grim. It's the best movie ever made by pastoralist Henry King. [26 July 1988, p.21]

There's a gentleness and open-mindedness in that touch and throughout the film that's a little at odds with the shallower script. But, in the end, that humanity pays. [27 Dec 1996]

The third film, After the Life, much like "On the Run," mixes a hard-edged, relentless and stripped-down crime tale with a compassionate overview.

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]

Commands respect and affection. [2 June 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]

82-year-old Ingmar Bergman takes one of the most painful, shameful episodes of his own life and, writing for director Liv Ullmann, transmutes it into magical, brilliant artistry.

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.

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]

The best thing about High Heels are the performances - [Victoria Abril]'s tense, voracious daughter, Parades' star-turn mother, the sinister Bose, the arrogant Atkine - and the lucidity of Almodovar's narrative style, which by now seems as natural as breathing. [20 Dec 1991]

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.

Hobbled with pedestrian direction, a dull visual style and a last act awash in obvious bang-bang melodrama.

It may be the most serene and optimistic film Rivette has made in France. Yet even the art-house audience may undervalue it, miss the beauty, style and wit.

After "Ninotchka," this is the best Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett script filmed by somebody else: a terrific romantic swindle comedy set in Paris, starring Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche and John Barrymore. [26 Sep 2003, p.C5]

The movie itself is as slick, fast and terrifyingly violent as a top-grade American crime thriller, but a lot smarter than most.

Gregg Toland's cinematography here makes you yearn for what he might have done on a Ford Western. [17 Oct 1996, 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]

If that wistful, cleareyed melancholy were its primary mood, Gas Food Lodging might have been a little masterpiece. It isn't -- but it's good enough. Anders gets the externals of her vision of Laramie: a world of high skies, searing deserts, dusty stores and roads that vanish into a flat horizon. And the internals: the bickering, hurts, dreams and little everyday epiphanies. If many movies avoid or disguise the world, shining it up beyond recognition, Gas Food Lodging takes the opposite approach, a better one. It jumps right into life, faces it with careless affection, clarity and courage. [14 Aug 1982, p.F8]

The suspense is pulse tearing, but Hitchcock, in a movie made explicitly for the war effort, gives it an extra edge. Also, in his favorite and most ingenious cameo role, Hitch solves the problem of appearing in a film with no extras -- the cast consists only of the other shipwreck survivors -- by having himself photographed before and after losing 100 pounds on a special crash diet. [15 Nov 2005, p.C3]

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.

Unlike many “adult” moviemakers, Henson believed his core audience capable of appreciating wit, irony, topical humor, idealism, intense emotion and bemused reflections on real life and all its complexity. All these, and more, are present in The Witches.

A movie which, like all the best blues, makes good times out of bad times, makes smiles out of hurt, makes tears taste like honey.

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.

His (Dafoe's) re-creation of Schreck is an Oscar-level performance, but more than that, it's an unforgettable one: great, scary, horrifically funny.

A film of great spiritual intensity and haunting minimalism that enlarges your concepts of movies and of life. Like the monks of the Carthusian order, it distills something intoxicating through a style that's pure and rigorous.

Another masterpiece from one of the world's more neglected great directors, a master artist who here reveals the soul of another.

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.

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

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]

Bigelow gets a scary poetry out of these landscapes--and though the film is erratic, it has force and passion...It works on your nerves--not necessarily through its big shock scenes, but through the atmosphere it creates: the sense of dread, no exit, lives plunging out of control, the secret mad pull of murder and outlawry.

Told with such sadness and exaltation, such mastery of image and sound, that watching it makes you feel renewed and hopeful.

It's an exciting but brainy, cross-cultural thriller about modern London and life in a contemporary urban pressure cooker, and it depends more on plot, character and atmosphere than it does on chases and gunfire.

An Adam Sandler movie with class, and if that sounds like an oxymoron, so be it. The movie is a happy nightmare of silly-smart movie comedy that defies category - and challenges expectations involving Sandler and his pictures.

Chungking Express is a breezy little Hong Kong movie that has more life, energy, humanity and sheer visual zing than most other shows you'll see in a month or so. And, an hour after watching it, you may indeed be hungry for more. Not necessarily because the show is shallow or unsatisfying, or doesn't leave a strong impression, but because the spontaneity and high energy of it is what's so much fun.

One of the most curious and perversely brilliant films ever made in the American studio system. It's a shining example of qualities we don't normally see in our big theatrical pictures: vast ambition, huge resources and technical genius mated to a unique and compelling vision of life.

Based on Francis Beeding's The House of Dr. Edwardes, scripted by Ben Hecht, and with Salvador Dali's notorious surreal dream sequence as a shocking interlude, this was one of Hitchcock's most romantic and popular '40s movies; it's also the source of most of Mel Brooks' parody High Anxiety. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

Showing us a world through a child's eyes, A Time for Drunken Horses speaks so truthfully and well that it breaks the heart and scars the conscience.

One of the most appealing, beautifully made and well-loved of all the classic children's animal movies. [21 Sep 2001, p.C1]

Great direction, script (A.I. Bezzerides), score (Bernard Herrmann). [25 Aug 2006, p.C7]

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]

It's a movie of such jaw-dropping violence, wild improbability and dazzling style it overpowers all resistance.

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

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

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.

For sheer laughs, Willard and Piddock take the trophy.

Mantegna and Nussbaum are so good as the con artists that their reading of Mamet's dialogue--and often Crouse's reading as well--justifies the movie. These actors have worked many times on stage with Mamet, as have J. T. Walsh, and cardsharp Ricky Jay (as a Las Vegas gambler), and when they latch onto these lines, they're like seasoned pitchers palming and scuffing the ball. Oozing confidence, they, and Mamet, put on a coldly skillful, killingly well - calculated show.

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

The first-rate cast, Lee Garmes' camerawork and the tense, excellent script (by Phil Yordan and, uncredited, Dashiell Hammett), all help build toward an unsurprising but memorable climax. [16 Oct 1996, p.2]

A classic comedy. [25 May 2007, p.C7]

One of the cinema's imperishable visions of faith against injustice. [20 Feb 1997, p.9E]

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]

So much of Ruthless People goes so far that maybe it was inevitable that the film makers would pull up short and make this half-sappy compromise--cynicism with a smile--as compensation for their previous audacity. A pity. A lot of the rest gives you something better: full-bore, shameless, gut-clutching laughter.

How can one dislike this movie? It has wit, romance, gentle rebellion, idyllic landscapes and fine actors savoring luscious lines. Only the undercurrent may bother a few: the hints of feminist revolt, beneath the sparkly surface. Enchanted April--based on a 1923 novel by Elizabeth Von Arnim--is a pure wish-fulfillment story, but there's an acid edge to it.

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

The kind of brilliantly weirdo picture that, by all rights, shouldn't have gotten made at all but this time, miraculously, was.

There isn't a single performance in Midnight Run that doesn't have a pulse, that doesn't show the actors at their best or near-best, especially De Niro. [20 July 1988]

Somewhat illogical but full of terrifyingly sustained sado-masochistic emotion. [05 Dec 1997, p.L]

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 movie I loved on first sight and, even more important, love in remembrance. Taken all in all, there's only one last thing to say about it. Go.

Darin is an actor who's really consummate at suggesting two simultaneous levels of character.