Michael Wilmington

Soderbergh pretty much failed in trying to evoke a noir-like nightmare world in the 1919 Prague of "Kafka," his 1991 terror film. But here, he dazzlingly hews out a noir landscape in more unlikely territory: modern-day Austin, Texas. [28 April 1995]

Watching this movie has an almost hypnotic effect, like being carried along on a river past terrains both familiar and inexplicably, maddeningly odd.

Highly inventive, full of perverse touches and clever flourishes. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

Vast, riveting, madly audacious movie biography.

An incredibly silly film of great humor, brilliant design and epic insanity.

Blessed with one of the strongest casts of any American movie this year, this bravura film, with its radical structure, is full of risk and reward.

Ultimately, p.s. confirms Kidd's talent without expanding it or achieving the comic/dramatic heights of "Roger Dodger."

One of the best films ever about that game, one of the most exciting, instructive and sheerly entertaining of all chess films.

Panahi's simplicity accentuates the movie's power: its sense of life caught unobserved.

A finely written, superbly acted offbeat thriller.

A stirring, large-souled movie.

Based on an Elmore Leonard story: the classic suspense western in which a desperate farmer (Van Heflin), trying to save his spread, hires on to transport a sardonic outlaw chief (Glenn Ford) to Yuma. [25 Jul 2008, p.C8]

Lovely, heart-stirring film.

One of the year's best documentaries.

Mamet takes exactly those qualities that we most prize in genre movies -- characters, cleverness and high style -- and refines them to a high shine.

Though "Keys" is not Amelio's best, it has an emotional power almost equal to anything he's done.

This is a movie with every facet shining in place, every word charged and resonant. [23 Sept 1994]

It's fresh, funny, biting, fast-paced and reasonably perceptive about people and their problems.

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]

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

It's a thrillingly malicious visit, a gorgeous period drama. [06 Dec 1996, p.A]

(The film is) one of the most anguished, intense and weirdly brilliant of the year.

Starts out hilarious and then turns very, very grim.

The kind of movie some audiences are starved for, a comedy with a human face, warmth and spirit.

It's a horror movie for aficionados. But it's also for people who don't usually like horror movies at all, who regard them as cheap, crude and over-obvious.There's nothing cheap or crude in Pulse," a fine, shivery movie about the terror of solitude and emptiness.

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.

Close to perfect example of an expertly designed and executed thriller.

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.

A disturbingly frank look at people and relationships in contemporary Los Angeles and a thrilling dramatic showcase for a brilliant cast.

Action superstar Bruce Lee's consensus best movie and biggest international hit. Lee is a secret agent inflitrating a sinister island kung fu kingdom, battling John Saxton, Jim Kelly and the nefarious martial arts lord Shih Fien in famous set-pieces like the hall of mirror showdown.

If Hitchcock had kept the book's annihilating original ending, though, "Suspicion" might have been one of his three or four best films. As it is, it's a model domestic thriller that manages to survive a ridiculous turnabout climax. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

Has the resonance, eloquence and formal rigor of a piece of great literature.

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]

A shocker for devotees of stylish angst and psychological torment. You'll have to watch it with patience and great attention, but it richly rewards that patience.

Even if you think you've sampled all Jane Austen has to offer on screen, you still may jump at the chance to see Pride and Prejudice. [29 Aug 1996, p.7A]

The movie has a grotesque charm, a pie-eyed magic. With its crack-brained, spidery-limbed, Edward-Gorey-eyed crew of dashing skeletons, Frankenstein ladies, mad scientists with detachable brainpans, swivel-headed two-faced politicians and big bad bug-bag monsters, it comes at you like a Saturday afternoon kiddies' special gone pleasantly berserk.

Zbanic, who lived through the Bosnian war in Sarajevo, is an unusual talent. Here, she makes us feel the hell her characters once lived through as well as the leftover, stinging pain of today.

Called "Nuovomondo" in its native Italy, it's bittersweet, neither as comic and sentimental as Charlie Chaplin's 1917 great silent comedy "The Immigrant," nor as cynical and epic as Elia Kazan's 1963 "America, America," but close to both.

Perhaps Bergman's most typical variation on one of his major themes: the clash between raffish theatrical artists and sober rulers. [10 Dec 2005, p.C4]

The power of art to redeem the pain and cruelty of life is demonstrated to enormous effect inShakespeare Behind Bars.

An excellent, unforgettable film.

Funny Games is an intellectual's suspense film, which ultimately tries to critique and demystify violence. But, since our responses are never all cerebral, that's not entirely possible.

A visually sumptuous, bullet-train-paced thriller with a really provocative theme.

Ferocious action saga about an old samurai (Mifune) taking a stand against his lord's cruelty and injustice. [03 Mar 2006, p.C5]

It's not a hasty, knocked-together promo job--though it is clearly pro-Kerry.

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

A wonderful, heart-breaking movie.

The Zellweger-Firth-Grant triangle works as irresistibly as Hepburn-Grant-Stewart in "The Philadelphia Story."

Children and animals, if they're handled right, can be among the great natural movie actors, and in The Cave of the Yellow Dog, writer-director Byambasuren Davaa handles her cast of youngsters and creatures (and a few adults) heartwarmingly well.

A highly entertaining and visually breathtaking movie, capable at times of rocking and delighting you.

The movie is a delight in many ways: an unabashed romantic comedy and Capraesque fable that takes Spielberg into realms he's rarely traveled before.

Yang powerfully evokes a world of pervasive greed and brutality, where conventional moral values have gone dangerously awry and life is cheap. [21 Nov 1997, p.M]

Exciting, beautifully shot '60s political western. [10 Apr 1998, p.M]

One of the great movie family sagas, a fascinating revelation of both the dark and bright sides of the American dream. [05 Mar 2000, p.24C]

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.

Fredric March plays the split personality doctor/killer in this stylish early version of Robert Louis Stevenson's shivery classic. [06 Apr 2007, p.7]

The picture has such a sweet spirit, sly wit and buoyant energy that it seems to disarm potential rancor, fear or contentiousness. [16 Oct 1996, p.1]

What really makes Alias Betty stand out, even from good recent French ensemble films like "Eight Women" and "Venus Beauty Institute," is that ingenious, Rendell-derived story. To kidnap an old phrase, it's a corker.

It's a simple story with complex reverberations and undercurrents, as secrets keep being revealed.

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.

Good movie westerns these days may be too few and far between, but Ron Howard's The Missing is almost a great one.

A brilliant, giddy satiric romp with a discreetly moralistic viewpoint beneath its high-style wit.

Visually, the movie is a knockout. Craven-who, along with George Romero and David Cronenberg, was one of the real masters of post-'60s low-budget horror-never made a scarier picture than the original "Nightmare." But he's probably never made a better one than this-one that was more fun to watch or had a more satisfying conclusion, that slammed the door on hell with such panache.

It's very smart, very sleek and one of the great Hollywood romantic comedies. [04 Jul 2003, p.C2]

A family tale, in the best sense. [19 February 1999, Tempo, p.4]

An often brilliant, always revelatory, deeply interesting omnibus film.

It's a very classy, finely made film, and, as one watches it -- particularly those last sweeping scenes of political turbulence and escape -- one feels both pain at their (Merchant-Ivory) parting and grateful for what, together, they achieved.

As beautifully designed, swift and sleek as a classic sports car, throbbing with emotion and intelligence, it's a neat suspense film that's also dramatically and sociologically potent, with two supremely talented stars, Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, delivering beyond the emotional call of duty.

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

A humane and fantastic work, and it touches us precisely because Konchalovsky shows the reality of both the soldiers and the madhouse inmates. His movie is just what he intended: a nightmare that speaks the truth.

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

It's not often that you see the craft of cinema so perfectly executed--or a group of fancy scoundrels so ruthlessly caught and skewered. Comedy of Power, like all of Chabrol's Hitchcockian films, is dark, smart and delicious.

Wyatt Earp is a fascinating ride to a West where darkness and heroism mingle, a triumph for Kasdan, Costner, Quaid and the company. It shows how, in this frontier crucible, love and death, honor and slaughter, friendship and a walk toward doom, are all linked together as well. [24 Jun 1994, p.F]

It's one of the most ferociously convincing physical re-creations of warfare ever put on screen.

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.

The ending is a stunner. Like those '30 classics it suggests, Gilles' Wife seduces us with true cinematic magic: rich characters, great acting and that rapturous old French blend of realism and theatricality.

A true original: a film that stands apart from the crowd, goes its own way and all but dares you not to like it.

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

A lavish and sometimes lusty version of the French hit musical, minus the songs but with lots of Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon. [17 Jan 2000, p.Q]

Wistful Depression-era Bonnie and Clyde romantic noir. [04 May 2007, p.C2]

Should hold you spellbound.

Graced with Nair's loving direction, Witherspoon's radiance and that great cast, it is a treat, if somewhat less so than the novel.

It's a wonderful movie and a credit to all of Ireland and all of its people and pubs. The movie deserves a supreme compliment: It's so good it makes you want to go out at once and start a family of your own. [17 Dec 1993, p.B]

It Could Happen to You is the movie that "Sleepless in Seattle" wanted to be, an old-fashioned Hollywood romantic comedy for the '90s, brought candidly up to date for the post-sexual revolution era, yet shimmering with all the cockeyed satin-and-popcorn glamor of the past.

It's a movie full of bewitching images and timeless fun and beauty.

That great ex-Berliner Wilder's cynical, darkly funny look at postwar Berlin--a hive of bombed-out buildings, desperate citizens and black-market morality, run by the U.S. military with a slightly blind eye. [02 Jun 2006, p.C4]

Kidman crafts a characterization of breathtakingly controlled artifice, dead-on timing, dizzyingly precise humor. Her part is a knockout--in every sense of the word. [6 Oct 1995]

Slick adaptation of Woody Allen's play.

Peter O'Toole, still a British cinematic lion at 74, performs another movie miracle in the Roger Michell-Hanif Kureishi film Venus.

Of all the many documentaries that take you along on a movie shoot, one of my all-time favorites is this delightfully scrappy, sometimes poignant, often hilarious show.

Everything in the movie is excessive, and if you have no taste for flamboyant or violent genre pieces, you may find much of it--and especially the amazingly protracted climax--a little ridiculous. But what's fascinating about "Strange Days" is both its sheer kinetic energy, the vitality of the actors and the density and detail of its crazy little world. [13 Oct 1995, p.C2]

It's a work that sears the heart and conscience. The events are annihilating, the way they're told both beautiful and terrifying.

A stylish remake of Michael Curtiz' shocker "Mystery of the Wax Museum"--about a museum-art gallery filled with wax-dipped murder victims, run by the fiendish Vincent Price. [25 Jul 2003, p.C1]

Scott is able to make it fresh and lyrical, as well as give us rousingly exciting scenes of nature in eruption. [02 Feb 1996]

Robust safari movie, partly remade from "Red Dust," co-starring Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly. [23 Jun 2006, p.C2]

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

Watching Jonathan Caouette's amazing autobiographical documentary Tarnation is like descending into a pop-music, underground-movie hell and heaven, the shattered and shattering landscape of a living body and mind.

Volcanically funny. [23 Dec 2005, p.C7]

It's an unabashed pacifist movie that really works, emotionally and dramatically.

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.

Joseph Cotten as a killer, Monroe as his adulterous wife slithering under the sheets and Jean Peters as the unfortunate witness in this taut Niagara Falls thriller. [09 Jun 2006, p.C7]

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]

Moretti weaves us in and out of high seriousness, crazy satire or sarcasm, political commentary, melancholy reverie and goofball japes. And though Moretti lacks the cartoonish physical presence of a Benigni or a Nichetti (or a Woody Allen) his unextraordinary demeanor-tall, bespectacled, lightly athletic, trim-bearded-fools you again. [25 Nov 1994, p.L]

The masterpiece of the bunch is the last, wonderful piece by Alexander Payne ("14eme Arrondissement").

The acting in All or Nothing is superb. Everyone creates a character we can immediately register and recognize as true.

Another of those excellent foreign films that sometimes slip though cracks, considered too strange or eccentric for domestic tastes. Strange it is, but delightfully so

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 rarity -- an intelligent and moving drama of ideas that becomes increasingly thrilling as the ideas unfold.

For anyone who likes classic, offbeat American moviemaking, in the rural-thriller genre from "Moonrise" to "Macon County Jail," Undertow is one to check. Seething with violence, bleeding with lyricism, it's a poem from the junk heap, a cry from the swamp.

The simplicity and idealism of The Color of Paradise are part of what makes it so attractive to near-jaded palates here. There are no evil characters in the film.

At its best, it's an exhilaratingly grandiose Highland fling. [24 May 1995, Tempo, p.1]

A bizarre, thrilling, warmly funny spoof of the WWII Steve McQueen prison camp thriller, "The Great Escape" remade for a near all-chicken cast.

It's a good transcription, though sadly bowdlerized. [02 Jul 2000, p.29]

The story is spellbinding, the acting lusty and the spectacle everything you could expect from a Golden Age MGM production--though sometimes it's a bit too much on the monumental side.

An incredibly ambitious film and one of the most highly accomplished of the year.

The results are spine-tingling. There's only one thing to say about this movie and its rescuers, recovered from the dead--and the Dead: Rock on.

Six Degrees is the next best thing to a great play; a fantastically clever, verbally scintillating, consistently amusing one.

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]

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]

A vivifying film, though it's done in such a strange style that it takes a while to get used to it.

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

Mrs. Parker is a comedy even though it's sad, and a sort of tragedy even though it's funny, with such foggy borders between the two that pathos and humor seem to smear all over each other, like makeup running with tears. [23 Dec 1994, p.N]

Step by step, Yakin and the 13-year-old Nelson-who plays his part with a beautifully wary, quiet calm-take you into Fresh's harsh world, accustom you to its murderous routines, ways and lingo, its boredom and sudden violence. Seeing it through Fresh's relatively innocent eyes gives it harrowing edge and clarity. [31 Aug 1994, p.1C]

A Christmas season evergreen.

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

Sharp, funny, sad and daring as it may be, Happiness is missing something. Its points are often too obvious, its shocks too juvenile. It's impressive but not transcendent. [23 Oct 1998]

This is a meaty, well-crafted thriller that absorbs and disturbs you from first frame to last.

The movie, done in a classic measured style, finally moves you almost as much as if it had stayed in Kurosawa's hands. Filled with love and melancholy, it's a fitting, fond epilogue to the "sensei" (the master).

With Maura delivering an explosive performance, Almodovar presents Pepa's tale with real gusto--with vibrant colors, gaudy personality, mad jokes and a sexiness that erupts off the screen.

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]

While Last Kiss may strike some as a calculated crowd-pleaser, it's cleverly calculated, perceptive and often quite funny -- and a bit darker than it may first appear.

The well-loved science fiction tale of the brainy extraterrestrial Klaatu (Michael Rennie), who comes to Earth to warn the planet against its self-destructive nuclear pursuits; he winds up observing humanity close up. [06 Oct 2006, p.C6]

A stark, lyrical and affecting portrait of war's aftermath.

One of the best-loved '50s sci-fi movies, with a plot boldly cribbed from Shakespeare's The Tempest. [30 Jun 2006, p.C7]

It's a Rafael Sabatini pirate movie with almost everything: galleons, high seas, Olivia de Havilland and a fantastic Errol Flynn-Basil Rathbone swordfight. [15 Aug 1996, p.9A]

Sin City is an evil place, full of awful people, an obsessive movie full of monomaniacal tough guys. Yet when Miller and Rodriguez move it into gear, noir lives.

Forty years later, The Killing has lost little of its punch. It's both vintage '50s noir and a stunning introduction to a killer director. [22 Jul 1998, p.L]

Thornton and his excellent company summon up for us the long rides, dangerous companions, rites of passage, the mad love and, most of all, the special relationship between the man/boys that rode over the border and the horses that carried them there.

A romance incandescent, a fiery pageant of l'amour fou. Whatever its historical transgressions, it opens up a vein and lets life and blood pour out.

Movies about literary lives don't always catch fire, but Henry Fool is a glorious exception: an austerely funny, brilliantly written and acted serio-comic tale of two writers. [17 Jul 1998]

Walsh and producer Mark Hellinger's classic ultra-tough gangster opus about World War I, Prohibition and good-hearted mobster Jimmy Cagney's breezy rise and grim fall. [18 Feb 2005, p.C6]

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

It's a genuine shocker - a dazzler of a film - a hellishly funny picture.

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

A recently resurfaced noir classic, in which an ex-con (Gene Nelson) is trapped between his criminal ex-buddies (Charles Bronson, Ted De Corsia and Timothy Carey), pulling him back into the underworld and the tough, toothpick-chewing L.A. cop (Sterling Hayden) who wants to make him a stoolie. Harsh, rough, sharp as a knife. [24 Oct 1997, p.L]

A seductive revisiting of an old classic - one that helps us see these lovers and their world with renewed passion.

All the accolades Lyne got for "Fatal Attraction" -- and didn't really merit -- he deserves here.

One of the best-liked backstage dramas, with Douglas shining as egotistical producer Jonathan Shields (said to be based on David O. Selznick) who ruthlessly sheds friends, lovers and colleagues on his way to the top, only to seek them after his fall. [25 Apr 2003, p.C1]

Terrifying and darkly funny. [13 Jun 2004, p.C4]

As an adventure movie, it makes good on its promise and its title. It carries us to the edge. [26 Sep 1997, p.A]

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.

An essential Carole Lombard film, it's her one screen pairing with her eventual husband Clark Gable. To call their scenes electric is putting it mildly. [30 Dec 1993, p.9A]

La Cava was famous for improvising his scenes; My Man Godfrey is the most brilliant, unbuttoned example. It's a champagne farce, sparkling and bubbling from the depths of the Depression. [08 Jun 2007, p.C9]

A classic of realistic terror, in which passion and murder can't lie buried.

The sociopolitical issues are lost in the action, but it's quite some action. [11 Jan 2002, p.C1]

It's an intelligent and informed look at the preposterous ways our leaders are often picked and sabotaged.

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.

Miller's quiet artistry is at its peak, and though "Lili" is not as subtle, profound or moving a work as Chekhov's play, it's an intelligent, first-rate piece of cinema.

Not up to one of the greatest of all novels, of course, but a terrific movie romance with a great ballroom scene. [16 Mar 2007, p.C4]

Scene after scene in Calle 54 just knocks you out.

Ozu is often wrongly characterized as a "soft" director preoccupied with middle-class home life, but this late film tackles extreme subject matter--spousal abuse and abortion--with unflinching skill. [18 Nov 2005, p.C6]

A funny valentine by an old master, woos us into the dance.

A horror-comedy about cute little Christmas toy/pets who turn into murderous monsters wreaking havoc on a Norman Rockwellian town. There's a moral there someplace.

Though it's not the great film "Grand Illusion" is, and though it may strike some as a little schmaltzy, it still has some of that earlier film's deep feeling and empathy for soldiers trapped in the jaws of war and for the joys of Christmas--for believers and non-believers alike.

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]

These girls can cook, and Yamashita captures them with an austere, unhurried visual style that has been rightly compared to rock aficionado/filmmakers Aki Kaurismaki ("Ariel") and Jim Jarmusch ("Mystery Train"). [8 Dec 2006, p.2]

Thanks to Echer, Nettelbeck and this delicious movie, I was able to hear "Country" and the other Jarrett tunes in scene after scene - heightening moods, lyricizing action and making Hamburg seem like a wintry love song. Predictable or not, that's often as good as it gets.

One of those sweet, intelligent, nicely made films.

A harsh, spellbinding tale.

A movie likely to rally huge audiences who want to take another roller coaster ride. And though it may disappoint a few of them, it's also a film that gives you something to think and feel sad about. It smashes you -- gently.

An extraordinarily truthful and piercing drama.

One of the year's most thought-provoking, hard-hitting films, gutsily opening up a subject rarely done with this kind of all-out chutzpah.

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

The wild L.A. romance of a museum curator and a parking lot attendant. [09 Jan 1998, p.C]

It's a lovely, terrifying sight.

It's the best new battle film since "Black Hawk Down," a movie it surpasses in sheer feeling and bravura style, if not in nightmarish panic and suspense.

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

Thompson clearly loves this story, and, even though, she's playing the less spontaneous of the older Dashwood sisters, responsible Elinor, you can feel her spirit rising out to embrace the part. It makes her beautiful to watch. [13 December 1995]

Blithely sophisticated, would-be French naughtiness, sleek as a bolt of silk. [08 Jan 2004, p.N1]

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

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]

A lovely film with a deeply humane perspective.

The new Lassie is faithful to Knight's story, capturing its sweep, Dickensian social contrasts and high emotion. All that is enhanced by a splendid cast.

The tone and feel of Wild Reeds keeps shifting between irony and sentimentality, violence and tenderness, rebellion and acceptance. And those oscillations fit the volatile nature of its subject: young love and friendship. Together with his attractive and excellent cast, Techine recalls and invokes the mood swings of youth, the intensity and bursts of near-delirious passion.

Twilight is a great samurai film in the way that "Unforgiven," "The Gunfighter" or "Will Penny"--all muted, somber films about aging gunfighters--are great westerns.

Varda's touching day-in-the-life of a Parisian pop star. [12 Jan 2007, p.C3]

With his usual consummate visual skills and his flair for the nauseatingly audacious, David Cronenberg’s written (spottily) and directed (stunningly) a movie that often makes you feel as if you'd lost contact with reality: a twisted, nightmarish tale of futuristic reality games and a couple on the run. [23 April 1999, Friday, p.D]

Yet the film, no more than the novel, shouldn't be described as depressing. Both of them shine with heightened vision and poetics. [01 Nov 1996]

Quiz Show becomes not just a nostalgic tale of a Camelot warrior and two Faustian eggheads, or a flashy social message drama like the "Golden Age" TV plays of that same era, but a scary precursor of our own time, when the power of TV-and its influence over national and personal life-has grown. [16 Sept 1994, p.C]

Salles' movie isn't fiery or didactic. It doesn't rage or storm. Salles romanticizes the youthful Ernesto.

A very fine and strongly acted, if somewhat stagebound, adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's great, moving African-American family drama. [06 Apr 2007, p.C8]

It has a jokey irreverence that keeps it from teetering over the edge to absurdity.

An adventure movie of extraordinary simplicity and power.

Though the role might seem a real stretch for an actor who just won an Oscar for his Charlton Heston turn as Maximus in "Gladiator," he and the movie ace the test.

Visually, even compared to Sayles' own best work, it's somewhat prosaic - and dramatically, it suffers from the fact that its two main characters are kept so far apart. But the screenwriting and the cast redeem this film.

He (Puri) is one of the most consistently excellent film actors that his country - or the world - has produced. And East is East, a grand cultural hybrid, is a real movie, too - raw, funny and wonderfully mixed up.

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

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.

There has been a glut of animal movies in the last few years. But, of them all, The Bear -- sympathetically imagined, meticulously organized and grandly executed -- is easily the period's epic. [25 Oct 1989, p.F1]

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.

If the movie sometimes seems overwhelmed by its budget and its legendary third-act problems, it's still entertainingly raw and brutal, full of whiplash pace and juicy exaggeration. [1 June 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

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.

Despite a level of lurid violence that may offend many, this movie has a motor humming inside. It's been assembled with ferocious, gleeful expertise, crammed with humor, cynicism and jolts of energy. In many ways, it's the best action movie of the year. [17 Jul 1987]

Young Guns II generates more sheer visual excitement than any Western since Peckinpah and Leone were in their last '70s prime.

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

What makes Monkey Shines special--beyond Romero's cinematic lucidity and sheer storytelling ability and the talent of his cast and crew--is the ambivalent responses aroused by monkey Boo as Ella.

The movie sparkles with playful tension, bubbles with amiability. The plot is formula, unsurprising, but the film makers and cast seem to be enjoying themselves; their sheer ribald exhilaration becomes infectious.

When this movie stumbles, it stumbles honestly and sympathetically, but, when it succeeds, it makes history sing. [11 Sep 1987]

Things Change is a coldly controlled, immaculately mounted show, with a softly beating heart. Everything--the dialogue, the performances, Ruiz Anchia's jewel-like lighting, Michael Merritt's wittily elegant production designs and Alaric Jans' haunting, spare score--contributes to the final effect.

When the film stays simple, and concentrates on the actors--as in Juano Hernandez's withering bit as the old man who wants to talk--it's almost great. [28 July 1996, p.74]

Notable for its on-screen vigor and two off-screen bits of drama: star John Wayne's recovery from lung cancer and supporting player Dennis Hopper's reunion with Hathaway after their legendary 78-take standoff in the 1958 From Hell to Texas. [23 Jul 1989, p.2]

If you have any taste for film noir -- that Chandler-esque American style that had its heyday in the '40s and '50s -- this film is a must: one of the classics of the genre. [02 Jun 1987, p.8]

The series has been with us since 1962 and, like many another old timer, tends to repeat itself. Yet, every once in a while, it pulls in its stomach, pops the gun from its cummerbund, arches its eyebrow and gets off another bull's-eye. The newest, Licence to Kill, is probably one of the five or six best of Bond.

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.

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.

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]

The Man in the Moon, a gently scary ballad of a movie, is about how love can open your eyes and then blind them with tears. Perhaps that sounds overly sentimental. But this deeply moving film, directed by Robert Mulligan and produced by Mark Rydell, from a script by first-time scenarist Jenny Wingfield, never strays into bathos.

There's something delightfully pure and fresh about the children's film The Adventures of Milo & Otis. [25 Aug 1989, p.C8]

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]

Has its share of underthought or overwrought moments. The tone keeps shifting radically. It has some silly lines, plot lapses and goofball action scenes. But you can forgive the movie everything because of the sheer nasty pizazz of its central concept. [4 Nov 1988]

Packed with keening witchery and wild delight, Into the West should delight the susceptible, even as, perhaps, it annoys the jaded.

It has an irresistibly sure touch, an easy command of its audience. It hits the right buttons, strikes the right chords, plays with our expectations with the right blend of savvy, guile and imagination. [26 Nov. 1986]

In Roman Polanski's Frantic--an elegant, icy thriller about an American doctor chasing his wife's kidnapers through the deadlier byways of Paris--we can tell after 10 minutes that we're in the hands of a superb craftsman.

Johnny Suede has an astonishingly consistent tone and a remarkably talented and cohesive cast. [21 Aug 1992]

Violent and over-sexy as this movie may be, offensive as some may find it, it never loses its grinning good humor, its revisionist drive, its shoot-the-works spirit. It’s a killer entertainment--with an accent on “kill.”

It's one hell of a ride and a real, roaring rock movie. [01 Mar 1991]

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 swift and mean--a little empty perhaps, but not enough to distract you from its pleasures: the stark, brilliantly metallic gleam cinematographer Misha Suslov puts on his images, the psycho-electric jabs of the Lalo Schifrin score, the clean thrust of the plot, the furiously lucid action and the canny, almost stylized, minimalist performances of the actors (Jones, Hamilton, Vaughn, Richard Jaeckel, Keenan Wynn, Ving, Smith and the others). The movie may be shallow, but it’s also trim. It has that easy virtue of the old-line Hollywood B film: little visible excess fat.

Throw Momma is another Hitchcock pastiche or parody, but--taken from Stu Silver's coldly clever, verbally intricate script--it has more depth and humor than usual.

We don't make those kind of Lubitsch-Wilder-Capra movies anymore, because it's hard to kid about what goes on behind bedroom walls when the bedroom doors have long since been flung open. So Ephron invents strategies to keep us, teased, outside the boudoir. [25 Jun 1993 Pg.F1]

King and Romero are a natural match, and though this isn't the best of the King-derived horror movies--The Shining and The Dead Zone probably are--it's close.

The movie's great end-title sequence redeems everything. Under the credits, we see and hear the real-life game veterans as they are now--including, movingly, ex-Lakers coach Riley.

This movie offers four of the best -- and best-looking -- Hollywood stars cavorting together in material so slight and inconsequential it often seems ready to float away like a toy balloon. [16 Oct 1997, p.1]

This is a movie that rocks and socks you, and has a performance by Washington that's ruthless and scary. But in the end, it leaves you unmarked.

A sports bio movie that I really enjoyed about a sport and sports hero I barely knew existed: the World Hour Record competition for bicyclists and its gutsy, tormented and most unusual champion, Graeme Obree.

Fuller amusingly mixes up his usual hard-knuckled muck-raking melodrama with a sort of soap opera, all done in raw, awesome black-and-white images. In its day, this was the locus classicus B-Movie American auteur thriller. [12 Feb 1999, p.R]

There's something a little absurd about this story, but for me, it's endearingly goofy.

When you piece it all together, it becomes mildly fascinating.

The new movie, like its predecessor, is a crime thriller with a moral viewpoint, an eye and ear for street color and a taste for macho movie fantasy.

It only works about half the time, but it's an interesting half.

A romantic comedy/social satire that, on a modest budget, manages to be hip, charming, funny and dressed to kill.

One of the best-loved of all the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation special effects extravaganzas, this kitschy version of the mythic tale of Jason's quest for the golden fleece stars Todd Armstrong as Medea's eventual betrayer and is graced with a nerve-rending Bernard Herrmann score, plus such classic visual tricks as the dueling skeletons. [01 Oct 1999, p.J]

Witherspoon goes further, pouring so much humor and pizzazz into Elle that she lifts up the whole movie.

Frederick is the key to the movie and she's definitely an impressive new talent, someone who can really hold the screen and who delivers something striking or memorable in every scene.

One of the most gorgeous science-fiction movies ever - and probably also one of the most realistic in detail and scientific extrapolation

This movie is a model of technique, beautifully crafted, often brilliantly acted by Cage and the others, but it's a bit hollow at the center.

An unpretentious, rowdy, lecherous good show. [28 Nov 1999, p.35]

Boasts a really spectacular cast to voice those reasonably funny jokes.

It's a cool breeze of a comedy, with a slant on things that's dark but compassionate. Watching Bottle Rocket doesn't just make you laugh. It makes you smile between the laughs, think beneath the smiles.

Few recent movie romances have a more chilling and peculiar feel -- and a more sobering aftertaste -- than Neil Jordan's heart-rendingly cold adaptation of Affair.

Beautifully produced: a moving film with a fascinating story and exemplary acting.

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

A smart shocker, scripted by Twilight Zone regulars Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont.

A tender, visually stunning comedy-drama.

Proyas' movie lacks a truly rich or compelling story -- although the city secret is certainly a rich and compelling idea. All too often, Dark City seems a great production design in search of a movie, an ultimate modern film noir pastiche, in which the images are so strong they overpower the drama. [27 Feb 1998]

This one features the heartbreaking young Vivien Leigh with her flower-like face, flashing eyes and seductive fragility; Robert Taylor is a little stiff as the hero. (isn't he always?), but it's a nice lush MGM production. [31 Oct 1999, p.34]

At once proudly conservative, passionately idealistic and beautifully assured.

Chan is so good, so much fun to watch, that he often transcends his vehicles. And that's the case with Rumble in the Bronx, his big bid to crack the American market. [23 Feb 1996, p.C]

Often, Requiem for a Dream is as technically inventive and daring as the Scottish heroin film "Trainspotting," but it has more resonance and feeling. And when Burstyn is on screen, it often becomes heartbreaking.

One of the best and funniest things that Martin, as writer and actor, has ever done.

Kline, though, does give one of the great movie performances of the year so far.

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]

Frank Sinatra and his Clan knock over Vegas. [07 Dec 2001, p.C1]

Tape may not be a great movie, but it's a great demonstration of creativity within severe limitations.

Exactly the sort of personalized, non-assembly line treat some audiences are always trying, in vain, to find.

There's something ridiculous in the picture, but something sublime as well. It would be a shame to miss either, a pity not to open your eyes as well as your heart. [25 May 1994, p.1C]