Michael Wilmington

Few directors are more adept at playing with all this anguish and exhilaration than Mike Nichols.

The poetry of Last Days has a stoned grandeur.

It's a film for specialized tastes, quiet, delicate. But it suits those tastes beautifully.

The Sea isn't just brooding Scandinavian domestic tragedy, a lesser Bergman-Ibsen pastiche. It's also hilarious and rowdy, and it plays with our sympathies and expectations in such surprising ways, with such brilliant actors, it's easy to see why it won the equivalent of eight Icelandic Oscars.

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

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

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.

A beautiful, intensely moving film.

It's a nice mix, an elegantly smoky and dangerous cocktail -- just like the old noirs, but in a more modern, shinier glass. And since the basic brew is Elmore Leonard's, it tickles as it goes down. [26 June 1998]

This is a first-class muckraking melodrama: an admirable picture.

To cop a phrase, it's a knockout. [05 Sep 1999, p.32C]

German emigre Dupont directs all this with the style, flair and tension he brought to his 1925 Emil Jannings classic, "Variety." But it is Wong, shimmering with charisma, who gives Piccadilly its unforgettable center.

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

It's a thriller that comes at you with gut-clutching ferocity, spewing blood and sex, shaking you up and scrambling your responses.

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.

This is an old-fashioned movie done with wit, grace, smarts and style. [19 March 1999, Friday, p.A]

My Sex Life . . .," one of the best and smartest French comedies in several years, is an epic voyage into paralysis and confusion among the educated young: a witty, brilliantly observed descent into the maelstrom of the modern Groves of Academe.

This richly remembered tale of Christmas past, with writer Jean Shepherd recalling the days when a Red Ryder BB gun really meant something, is already something of a Christmas perennial.

Prototypical DeMille extravaganza about a circus tour beset with colorful crises, romance, train wrecks and spectacular melodrama from beginning to end. [21 Aug 1998, p.H]

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]

This is perhaps the quintessential stiff-upper-lip homefront drama, with Minivers Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon at their noblest, Teresa Wright at her most adolescently angelic and assorted English-Hollywood expatriates (Dame May Whitty, Reginald Owen, Peter Lawford) at their hardiest. [11 Oct 1996, p.J]

As much fun as anything director/co-writer Jane Campion has ever filmed. Holy Smoke lets it all hang out.

The writer-director doesn't raise her voice, even as she firmly condemns the injustice. Water seduces us with its beauty and sorrow.

A bittersweet comedy about the great sleuth's great love and the one case he couldn't handle. [07 Jan 2000, p.L]

It's a twisty, hell-for-leather crime thriller, and director Carl Franklin gives it all the slick, modern trimmings.

One of the more delightful and satisfying family movies.

Ends up working like a charm.

Works better and cuts deeper than the mostly fictionalized "Hoosiers."

At its worst, Limbo is ersatz Conrad. But at its best, the film makes us feel that uncertainty and darkness, casting us into the cul-de-sac of modern life and love. [04 Jun 1999, p.A]

Something to Talk About, which is something to see, makes us a delectable present of its own bright, brawling little world: wisecracks, venomous Charity Leagues, horse shows, last dances, skeleton-filled closets and all. [4 Aug 1995, p.C2]

In The Hudsucker Proxy, the filmmaking Coen brothers make dark, startling, wittily extravagant sport of the American Dream. The movie is opulent and wry, a bitingly intelligent fable about business and romance. [25 Mar 1994, p.A]

Like a Bach toccata or a frosty drink on a sunlit veranda, a first-class movie spy thriller can offer one of life's cooler, more elegant treats. The Tailor of Panama fits that category.

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

An oddity: an adaptation of a popular novel co-written and directed by the novelist himself. It's also a fine, gentle film love story and a cinematic tribute to the power and manifold benefits of communications between different cultures and nations.

Hitchcock's glossier and more complex remake of his classic 1934 spy thriller, with James Stewart and Doris Day as the average American couple caught in a whirlwind of intrigue and terror. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

It's a powerhouse, demanding film that sometimes stretches the limits of credibility. But it's done with such consistent technical brilliance--and with such a first-rate cast and company.

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]

A violent, improbable movie done in tersely elegant style, and it may be the last action movie for one of the cinema's great action stars, Clint Eastwood.

This 1955 Todd-AO blockbuster, made from the landmark American stage musical, faithfully preserves the play's robust spirit and extroverted charm, while resetting it among vast golden and green outdoor vistas. [15 Nov 2005, p.C3]

Anne Bancroft won the Oscar playing Helen Keller's teacher, Annie Sullivan, in this intelligent adaptation of William Gibson's Broadway hit, and it's a fierce, moving job, highlighted by the incredibly savage battles between teacher Annie and pupil Helen (fellow Oscar winner Patty Duke). It's a model serious bio-drama.

The result is both engrossing and moving, a poem about a love that breaks barriers and passes understanding.

The movie has a deliberately screw-loose feel.

It's one of the most faithful movie adaptations of any Dick story to date, and it comes from the scariest of all his books, as well as the truest.

One of the best realistic dramas of the year.

Elizabeth Taylor, at 12 already a raging beauty, plays Velvet Brown -- the passionate girl who loves horses and wants to win the Grand National; it's perhaps her most perfect performance and one of her best-loved. [16 Nov 2001, p.C1]

A socially conscious prison picture (written by Richard Brooks) that sometimes deliriously suggests a Brooklynesque mating of Jean Genet and Warner Bros. [20 Apr 2007, p.C8]

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

Mamet is a writer who turns off some audiences, and almost everything that might bother them is in Edmond: foul language, raging machismo, violence and seemingly bigoted tirades. But almost everything audiences like about him is there too: candor, suspense, ideas, crackling slang, vivid characters.

Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney out West at a boys school/dude ranch. Their best movie musical, adapted from the Ginger Rogers-Ethel Merman stage show, with that great George and Ira Gershwin score. [13 Apr 2007, p.C6]

A real gem: a deadpan fantasy that turns into one of the best pictures ever about the post-"Star Wars" studio moviemaking era.

There's scarcely a scene in which the actors, action and sound track aren't cranked up to maximum intensity.

Duma, at its best, reminded me exactly why we loved movies as children: because they told stories like this, with images just as rhapsodically colorful and exciting.

In their cockeyed prime, the Marx Brothers dismantle higher education by taking over Huxley College and setting it on a collision course with football arch-rival Darwin. [30 Dec 2005, p.C4]

The great Christmas western with Duke Wayne, Pedro Armendariz and Harry Carey Jr. as three fugitive outlaws, who, by caring for an abandoned baby, unwittingly become sagebrush equivalents for the Three Wise Men. [04 May 2001, p.C1]

Be forewarned: The movie lasts three hours and 16 minutes, and nearly all of it deals with subjects that polite society (and even rude society) tends to ignore or evade.

You could say that Seraphim Falls, was no better than the typical Westerns of the 1950s and '60s--which I think underrates it. But those typical Westerns were pretty darn good, and so is Seraphim Falls.

Elegant, cheerfully cynical fun of the kind we used to get regularly from Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks and other masters of the classic Hollywood screwball comedy -- all those '30s-'40s movies about rich people sloshed, or acting crazy and running romantically amok.

An Altman classic on a subject he knows well.

Rossen treats the jousts at the pool tables here like mythic battles waged by legendary knights on a playing field composed of nicotine, dirty felt and wasted dreams.

A fine French comedy-drama.

A word of warning. Big Fish is so strange and so literary that audiences seeking conventional fare may get impatient with it. But it always takes effort to catch the big ones. This one is worth it.

Allen gives us at least half a classic comedy - more than we usually get at the movies these days - while having some elegant fun with an idea that has intrigued poets and smart alecks through the ages: the interchangeability of comedy and tragedy.