Michael Wilmington

Amazingly cynical and howlingly funny. [13 Jan 1994, p.10]

It's a nail-biter and knuckle whitener of the first rank: a super real life techno thriller that reduces the fantasies of Tom Clancy and his clones to ground zero.

Sumptuously exciting, glowing with expertise, seething with life, gorgeously designed and thrillingly articulated.

One of the most remarkable English-language feature debuts of recent years.

It's a great film that, sadly, may be ignored by all but the most dedicated, knowledgable filmgoers.

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

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.

The movie, like Hitch, tries to be cool, funny and sweet but falls on its face without generating any real sympathy, smarts or humor.

So troubling and unflinchingly honest that watching it becomes a test of empathy and compassion.

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.

Harris and Harden have real on-screen sympatico, in their nasty battles and good times alike.

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.

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]

There isn't a moment in Shanghai Triad that celebrates or revels in violence, and by movie's end, Zhang has portrayed the Shanghai underworld as a place of irredeemable evil.

Few adventure movies have such a heightened atmosphere of beauty, excitement and fun. [18 Apr 1999, p.34C]

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

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.

Though it's a sad, somber, deeply questioning work, it's done with a light, loving spirit.

The sheer stark speed and measured violence of On the Run catch us up quickly--and the film becomes a searing portrait of a killer-idealist lost out of time.

That this bit of pustulence is based on a video game of the same name is no surprise. It explains the thin plot, characters and abundant gunplay.

The cast is tremendous; these actors work with Resnais like a well-oiled stock company that knows every trick and can communicate almost telepathically.

Slick adaptation of Woody Allen's play.

Though Majidi draws from familiar Iranian sources, he's made something unique and moving: a sweet tale with a stirring finish.

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

It's sensuality with a stinger, and Fat Girl is an adolescent sex drama that takes no prisoners.

A harsh, spellbinding tale.

A hip, funny, knowing romantic sports comedy that gets a little strained when it tries to expose its heart. [13 December 1996, Friday, p.A]

Showing us both Ruby and her Paradise in his loving, calm, unexaggerated way, Nunez gives us one of the warmest and most genuinely affirmative American movies of the year. [26 Nov 1993, p.C]

Though relatively little-known, this ingenious romantic chase thriller, based on Josephine Tey's "A Shilling for Candles," is one of Hitchcock's most inventive and charming '30s films. [22 Jan 1999, p.F]

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]

In the end, even in the howling high frequencies and the nihilistic night, this R-rated movie misses its best shot. It doesn't talk hard enough. [22 Aug 1990, p.5]

Disney's smashing new mythological feature cartoon, is one of funniest and most purely entertaining of all the recent Disney animated efforts.

It's hard to create snap-crackling languor or laid-back frenzy. And there's also something condescending in the entire conception of Mixed Nuts. [21 Dec 1994, p.7]

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.

Takes a potentially explosive subject and does it subtly and perceptively.

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

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

This is a movie that doesn't depend for its effects on star performers or stylized wish-fulfillment sexuality but on realism, sharp observation and honest humor.

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.

Delighted me like few films I've seen recently. It's a sexy, sweet, sumptuously entertaining movie about the huge and wildly eventful wedding reception.

The strength of “Harry” lies almost entirely in its unusual humanity, the depth of its social observations and its determination to draw everything--even the comic exaggerations--from life.

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.

Never really feels right.

A simple, eloquent drama.

So intense and warm are Leigh's feelings for his characters, that we may remember Hannah and Annie long afterward as old friends -- imperfect yet lovable, pals with whom we've suffered and laughed a lot.

Watching this film wakes you up; it is a window on an Iran and an Afghanistan we should have taken account of long ago -- seen though a master's eye, felt through a poet's touch.

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.

A Perfect World proves again, if it needs proving, that Eastwood's directorial signature is among the strongest and surest in American movies. [24 Nov 1993, p.1C]

Grosse Pointe Blank is covering the same kind of territory as that elephantine, if exciting, 1994 family man-killer thriller, "True Lies." But this time, the joke stings. [11 April 1997, Friday, p.A]

A fine, exciting film that makes a bloody historical event live all over again by showing it through the eyes of children on the edges of the conflict.

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.

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.

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]

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.

It's a magical film which manages to transport and rivet us in the same highly-imaginitive, breezily playful way "Amelie" did.

One of the finest, funniest and most civilized of all Hollywood domestic comedies. [01 Sep 2006, p.C5]

A love-hate poem to L.A., and when Mann takes in the streets, the freeways and LAX, he doesn't give us shiny "Lethal Weapon"-style travelogues. He shows us an L.A. that's grim, bare, a bit smoggy and ruled by street smarts. [15 Dec 1995]

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

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.

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]

This movie has a rhythm. It's exaggerated, loud and consciously vulgar, but the breezy self-assurance carries it along.

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.

In the years since he first played Drebin, Nielsen has deepened the role, made it more subtle, more universal, more paramount. He's brought out an almost preternatural mellowness in a character who began as a relatively uncomplicated dimwit. [2 Dec 1988]

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.

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]

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.

They're a witheringly beautiful couple; ex-cinematographer Stevens lavishes all his gifts of composition, lighting and texture on their closeups. [05 Apr 2007, p.C10]

Few adventure movies have such a heightened atmosphere of beauty, excitement and fun. [25 Jan 2002, p.C1]

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

Quite similar to the first film, but this is one time when a reprise is welcome. Ages 7-11, but actually, it's for everyone. [27 Oct 2006, p.C5]

The movie doesn't deserve any of the talent bestowed on it, from Reiner's amiable direction to the occasional grace notes in the performances of Hudson, Marceau and David Paymer.

There are misfires in Sucka, but there's also some funny stuff. Wayans shows a refreshing taste for self-mockery. [17 Feb 1989, p.8]

One of the best American Film Theatre production is a potent transcription of Eugene O'Neill's great barroom drama, set in 1912, with Lee Marvin as doomed gladhander Hickey--a role made famous on stage by Jason Robards--and a matchless supporting cast. [31 Oct 2003, p.C5]

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.

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.

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]

Not only is the wide screen black-and-white "Angels" Sirk's best movie -- dramatically richer than his more popular '50s romantic melodramas, but just as visually beautiful -- it is the only film from a Faulkner story that the novelist himself liked and praised. [05 Jun 1997, p.8]

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

A spellbinding piece of Japanese anime from one of the form's new masters, director-writer Satoshi Kon.

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

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.

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

John Wayne as the gutsiest sarge and top kick on Iwo Jima, in one of his most prototypical war yarns. Vintage Duke. [09 Jul 2000, p.23C]

The third and least of the three great Kelly-Donen MGM musicals--but that's no knock, considering the others were "On the Town" and "Singin' in the Rain." [27 Jan 2006, p.C7]

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

Made after Visconti's second paralyzing stroke, in darkly splendid Roman interiors, this is a somber, meditative, confessional work about corruption and mortality, the ways the world and desire batter down even the most protected doors. [17 Oct 1994, p.5C]

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.

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]

Beautifully shot and filled with gorgeous music.

Few Hollywood action pictures are half as exciting or ravishing.

A deliberately old-fashioned picture that succeeds in nearly everything it tries to do.

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

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.

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

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