Michael Wilmington

A comedy of evil and strange redemption, Lady Vengeance makes sure that we feel the pain, that we know what it's like to unreasonably suffer, because those are the rules of its mad, wounding, vengeful world.

A masterpiece of wry violence and stylized mayhem, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi turns loose one of Japan's most brilliant film auteurs, Takeshi Kitano, on one of its most enduring pop legends.

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

Hitchcock's first thriller and the film that established him: A moody silent melodrama based on Marie Belloc Lowndes' tale of a mysterious lodger in fear-crazed London, who may be a modern Jack the Ripper. [04 Jan 2002, p.C1]

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.

It conveys a sense of moral quagmire, of sinking into squishily dangerous terrain, honeycombed with tunnels and traps, all hell exploding around it. That’s the imagery of the movie’s first battle scene, a taut prologue for a superb film.

A film that sweeps us away into a world of spectacle, beauty and excitement, a realm of fantasy unimaginable without the movies.

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?"

Here is a film of staggering technical and visual virtuosity, filled with utterly amazing images, that's also entertaining and engaging for children and adults on several levels.

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

An almost mystifyingly bad movie.

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

If Hollywood is really a dream factory, then it's the movie moguls and movie stars who live that dream to the hilt. In the late 1970s few lived quite as large as Robert Evans.

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

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.

A blithe classic with Gershwin songs, Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. [03 Oct 1997, p.10]

Brilliant performances by DiCaprio as Frank Jr. and Christopher Walken as his fallen father - and an enjoyable one by Tom Hanks.

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.

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]

Blast is as bleak as noir gets, packed with black-and-white images of '60s New York City that recall Jean-Pierre Melville's French thrillers, and a street-tough taste that suggests Cassavetes and points ahead to Scorsese. [29 Oct 2004, p.C2]

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

A beautifully acted and deeply compassionate study of ordinary people coping with the vicissitudes of life.

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.

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.

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

I don't think it's a great movie -- though Theron's is a near-great performance -- but it's not one you can easily forget.

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

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

Maxwell Anderson's poetic-political play about crime and fascism, set in a "Petrified Forest"-style ensemble during a Key West hurricane, was turned by Huston and co-writer Richard Brooks into a crackling thriller. [27 Nov 1998, p.Q]

About the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it treats war as a cosmic joke and its participants as hapless but recognizably human clowns.

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.

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

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

A powerful symbolic drama.

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

There are better holocaust dramas than Grey Zone -- "Schindler's List" for one, and due later this year, Roman Polanski's magnificent "The Pianist." But few will disturb you like The Grey Zone -- mostly because it won't try for tears.

Wrings honest emotion and riveting dramatics from its tale.

An adventure movie of extraordinary simplicity and power.

All but sweeps you away with its dazzling technique and shattering emotion. [27 November 1996, Tempo, p.1]

A wonderful, heart-breaking movie.

The sights, sounds and traffic in Red Lights are oppressively ordinary; the people are unnervingly real. That reality doubles the suspense we might feel in a more slickly made but thinly plotted thriller.

Good, expensive, easygoing fun. It's no masterpiece, but why should Soderbergh -- or anybody -- get three in a row?

An often-wondrous comedy, just as rich and surprising as "L.A. Confidential" but considerably less dark.

An absorbing story. Even though it takes you to places you may not want to go, the film never loses its human touch--that feel of skin on skin or of the past inescapably invading the present.

Whether Kundun is a perfect movie or not, it's an important and beautiful one. Scorsese's movie takes us into a world we've rarely seen with this kind of sympathy or detail: a magical-looking society built on Buddhism and centuries of art and tradition.

An extraordinarily truthful and piercing drama.

One of the more delightful and satisfying family movies.

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.

A gloriously giddy movie about theater, love and artifice, an unabashed art film.

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.

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]

The acting -- especially by Borrows, Ian Hart and Hackett -- is strong and transparent, utterly convincing. The whole movie has a seamless flow and an utterly convincing sense of time and place.

Capable of enthralling.

Elaborately mounted, expensively produced and filmed with style and empathy, it's an adaptation of Paterson's Newbery Medal-winning book that manages to expand the original vision, yet preserve much of its intense emotion.

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

Perfect for anyone with a youthful heart and a rich imagination.

Both the movie and Denzel Washington are knockouts.

Two suggestions as you watch it: Never take anything for granted, and keep your hand on your wallet as you leave the theater.

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

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.

Withering study of white-collar alcoholics.

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

Among the finest hours of horror star Boris Karloff. [18 Oct 2005, p.C3]

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

Perhaps the most original movie fantasy creation of the year: an icon of tenderness and artistic alienation that clings, stickum-like, to your mind's eye and the softest, most woundable parts of your mass-culture heart. [7 Dec 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

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.

The subject of Iraq haunts and divides us so much these days that a film like Laura Poitras' documentary My Country My Country is valuable, no matter its level of achievement.

The beauties of Shower lie in its human observation, in its funny interplay, candor, lusty acting and hearty simplicity - and also in its warm imagery and the fascinating symbolic use it makes of water.

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]

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]

Superb, vibrantly emotional drama. [27 Apr 2001, p.C1]

A movie with surprises, some of which you should discover for yourself. But its main surprises may be the power of Collette's performance and the beautifully controlled mood and atmosphere Brooks creates.

Boyle's new movie is mostly a zombie fiasco, closer to the vacuities of "The Beach" than the scintillating social satire of "Trainspotting."

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

A great, velvety, beautiful anachronism. It's a movie almost drunk on romance, literature and cinema, a splendid period picture that keeps rashly breaking rules and boundaries [17 Sept 1993, Friday, p.A]

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 quintessential Hollywood shipboard romances, with William Powell and Kay Francis as the seemingly doomed lovers who meet on the high seas. [26 Mar 2000, p.35]

It's so thoroughly engaging, so beautifully made, strikingly shot and chock-full of humor and humanity, I can't imagine any intelligent audience not falling in love with it - if only they take the leap of faith to see it.

Intoxicatingly well-crafted entertainment about hunting down your enemy.

A light, breezy, often charming little film, with a good cast playing mostly shallow characters.

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

A cautionary tale of paranoia and prejudice. [25 Jul 2003, p.C1]

The Brady Bunch Movie, which was directed and written by at least five people whom we prefer not to embarrass, looks bad, sounds bad and doesn't make any sense. There's even something nightmarish about it. All these bad jokes and vacant sets become almost horrifying, as if the film were on the verge of proving that life itself is a bad joke on a vacant set. [17 Feb 1995, p.J]

It's a terrific, kinetic experience, and it's also a brilliant showcase for a crackerjack ensemble of great actors.

Moretti gives us something different but very important. He shows us how life goes on.

Like all the Coens' movies, "Man" is supremely self-aware and darkly, hellishly funny. It's also brilliantly written and acted to a fare-thee-well by an outrageously good cast.

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

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.

One of my favorite U.S. fiction features at 1999's Sundance Festival.

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.

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

A clever, amiably low-key mix of family drama and romantic comedy.[18 August 1995, Friday, p.C]

Lovely, heart-stirring film.

Astonishing, crazily delightful.

Hitchcock's most disturbing film. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

Writer-director-star Takeshi Kitano's 1993 Sonatine, a brutal, brilliant crime thriller about an aging gangster at the center of a maze of double-crosses and vendettas, gives us another look at a remarkable Japanese film artist. [17 Apr 1998, p.N]

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.

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

You can't praise highly enough the contributions of the ensemble--De Niro and Pesci especially--but it's Scorsese's triumph. [22 November 1995, Tempo, p.1]

These two actors have a kind of genius for dark comedy: Stiller for suffering through crises and De Niro for creating them.

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.

A highly provocative documentary.

The racial and sexual politics of Heading South may trouble some audiences; Cantet is definitely not a moralist in the usual sense.

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

The second, and some say best, of the "Road" series. Paramount's patty-caking pals, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, invade Lightest Africa for some songs, dances and snappy patter. [02 Apr 2000, p.38C]

A ravishing portrait of Shanghai brothel life in the late 19th Century, shot entirely in one-take scenes in luxuriant red-and-gold interior sets. [02 Oct 1998, p.J]

A peach of a story delightfully imagined by Dahl and lushly realized by Burton. It's full of witty or awesome scenes, flights of fancy and characters either totally, lovably sweet or outrageously, humorously rotten.

It's good stuff: a non-fiction film on weighty issues that also manages to entertain.

A beautiful and genuinely spirit-lifting film about poverty and education.

Ends up working like a charm.

As solid as the earth, rich as a good meal and sometimes funny as hell.

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.

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.

Pictorially sumptuous and sexually provocative.

The show has its moments-some funny scenes, some wild stop-motion Phil Tippett computer action, some of Torn's scenery-chewing. But they're only moments. RoboCop 3's main problem is that nobody fouled up its program. It's a RoboMovie. [05 Nov 1993, p.C]

Takes the raw truth and makes it jubilantly, terrifically entertaining.

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.

From A.I. Bezzerides' "The Long Haul," with George Raft and Bogie as tough trucking brothers and Ann Sheridan and Ida Lupino as the good woman and the bad.[06 Oct 2006, p.C8]

Love in the Afternoon is a 1957 romantic comedy by writer-director Billy Wilder that fondly re-created the atmosphere--the brio, wit, star personality and sardonic joie de vivre--of the great Hollywood-continental comic romances of the 1930s. And there's an obvious reason: It's a tribute from one movie comic master to the man who taught him how to do it. [15 Oct 1997, p.1]

One of the cinema's supreme, most outrageously eccentric and audacious technical experiments: the legendary single shot movie.

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.

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

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

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

A fit tribute to an entertainer who, no matter what hate or hardship threw in his way or how many mistakes he made, we can't stop loving.

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

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]

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

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

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]

The Cats of Mirikitani seems all too short; it has enough meat to be turned into an excellent dramatic film.

One funny movie - for at least half the time.

A beautiful, almost defiant film on an unusual subject: love among the elderly.

A weird, funny, melancholy tribute to movies and movie-going, an opus for film geeks that rang my personal bell. A bizarre minimalist epic that will either transport or infuriate, it's defiantly, exquisitely eccentric.

This is a movie for all cultures and all people, for families and especially for those who have lost them.

Rivets and amazes, even if it falls just frustratingly short of the mind-expanding grandeur it could have had.

This movie is soooo bad (How bad is it?) that it makes "Caddyshack I" look like "Godfather II."

This remarkable movie is really one-of-a-kind. [15 Dec 1995]

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]

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

Viveka Seldahl and Sven Wollter will touch you to the core in a film you will never forget -- that you should never forget.

It's a genteel film with a gun in its pocket, but it's also a film with a universal chord of feeling that keeps welling up from the dark surfaces and violent byways of the plot-and a final confession that both warms the heart and chills the blood.

A Christmas perennial: a witty, polished, lushly sentimental and amusingly sexless romantic comedy in which suave angel Cary Grant mixes in the affairs of troubled bishop David Niven and his lovely wife Loretta Young. [24 Dec 2004, p.C10]

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

Most of all, it's a film for moviegoers who love powerful stories and ravishing imagery: timeless, eternal, the kind of tales handed from one generation and culture to the next -- and alive in all of them.

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

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]

Soft and predictable -- which might be OK if there were more laughs and insight.

Good in many ways, full of talent and intelligence, and marks the debut of a promising young American writer-director, Dan Harris.

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

Moore's best movie, and one of the most blisteringly effective polemics and documentaries ever.

The first 15 minutes have some funny bits, but the movie winds up sapping you. It's a kind of whoopee-cushion nightmare, as if you woke up one morning and noticed that everyone on the street was drooling on his or her tie.

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]

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

A grand ride. Sleek, beautiful and packed with emotion, not too flashy but full of heart, this is a movie worthy of its unlikely yet glorious subject: Depression-era America's best-loved racehorse and the two races that made him a legend.

As a concert film, judged from the music, Sign O' the Times is near the top. As a movie -- carrying inside it the embryo of other movies -- it's not fully satisfying. But you sense it could be; however he stumbles, Prince gives you the impression he'll always, catlike, leap back. [20 Nov 1987, p.4]

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

Chicago-bred Haskell is such an intense, contentious, prickly figure, he would tend to take over any film portrait, and he definitely dominates here.

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]

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 '80s "road" film -- in the '70s vein of "Five Easy Pieces" or "Two Lane Blacktop" (which Wurlitzer wrote) -- and it's almost a little masterpiece: morally brave, beautifully measured, funny, sad and powerful. With quiet skill, it tears open and subverts some glittery fantasies of the American dream. [11 Mar 1988, p.27]

The splendid new documentary Crumb, a sympathetic yet woundingly candid portrait, catches the artist with much the same skill. [26 May 1995]

Bening shines, and the film shines too.

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]

It's an almost overwhelmingly professional picture, murderously fast, slick and full of outlandish notions, painstakingly realized. And it's also surprisingly satisfying -- thanks to Washington, a good cast, Tony Scott's swift direction and that unyielding professionalism.

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.

Fred meets Ginger in this goofy South American romance; they were secondary leads who stole the show. [03 Nov 2006, p.C5]

It's a slick, ambitious movie that doesn't always nail all the many moods and themes it's after.

A magnificent throwback to an almost vanished era of epic filmmaking by great filmmakers in thrall to their own passions, rather than to the studio bookkeepers.

A rare example of a literary film that preserves the best of its source while creatively filling up on it.

A lovely film with a deeply humane perspective.

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

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.

A ridiculous but exciting action movie.

The Crow imbues its comic brutalism with emotion and satire. Too raw and pulpy, it probably shouldn't be regarded as a memorial to Brandon Lee. But as an obsessive rock 'n' roll comic book movie shocker of loony intensity, it stands, or flies, by itself.

Melodrama triumphs. But here's at least some muted applause for a fine cast and filmmakers trying to confront the real world and its shadows.

The late U.S. Rep. Sonny Bono and his widow and successor Mary Bono have spent a good deal of time trying to save it. It's a hard task, but the film does suggest there's more to the sea than meets the eye.

Blazes up constantly with a stunning, off-kilter brilliance, an incandescent force that sometimes explodes the space between us and the screen.

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.

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

A highly exciting, visually alive thriller.

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

This movie might be better-maybe even a classic-if it were less urbane, if the New York tiger that Nicolas Cage and Richard Price unleashed could bare all his fangs, and not just fill the theater with his magnetic growl. Then Kiss of Death might really be a killer. [21 Apr 1995, p.C]

It's an intricate, sometimes implausible ideological thriller that might be better as a smaller-scaled, less% preachy psychological drama. Still, "Paradise" catches and keeps your attention because of its daring subject, real-life backdrops and the intensity of its actors.

A town where tourists and hapless visitors are murdered, and the dead are revived by a big band-loving mortician, descends into gore and madness. [16 Mar 2007, p.C5]

Romero's newest is a horror movie for hard-core fans of the gory and the gruesome and a classic genre film for genre aficionados.

A boisterous, brilliant, heart-warming comedy--strikes me as just about perfect.

A realistic drama about life's uncertainties.

One of the best realistic dramas of the year.

It's a pleasant movie, not quite up to its reputation. [06 Aug 2000, p.23C]

An absolute delight, one of the most sheerly pleasurable movies Altman has ever made. It's wry, jokey and sexy, a tart and delectable entertainment. And, like most of Altman's best work, it's graced with a top-notch ensemble of first-class [9 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

It put a smile on my face that never left for 117 minutes.

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.

Ward's "Map" is a wildly ambitious film and, often, a wildly beautiful one--and if it isn't quite a masterpiece, if we sense that Ward's resources aren't enough for the World War II London scenes, in the end, any flaws or lapses simply may not matter. Movies, especially ones with a broad epic canvas and international logistics, don't often get this intimate. They don't give you such a sense of nerves stripped raw, joy or misery nakedly expressed.

Spectacular, fast, never boring. But it's also one of the more disappointing movies I've seen recently.

Factotum, starring Matt Dillon and Lili Taylor in two of their best film performances, is a good movie about the L.A. underbelly, as recalled by an expert: Charles Bukowski.

There's a shallowness about The Good Girl that can't always be excused as an accurate portrayal of a shallow milieu -- in the end, just like Justine, it's not as good as it could have been.

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.

Such a triumph of simplicity, subtlety and tact--and of the eroticism in words, looks and glances--that the actors ravish us with sheer talent and intelligence.

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

It closes the trilogy like a lightning blast followed by the ominous, resonant drone of thunder. Great action sequences crop up frequently today, but great action movies are always few and far between. Beyond Thunderdome is one, every bit as much as its two predecessors.

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

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.

It's an engrossing peek at an era that now seems as meteoric, crazy and distant as the Roaring Twenties.

A perfectly balanced blend of romance in exotic settings (shipboard, in Italy) and the trauma-drama of accident and heartbreak. [08 Aug 1999, p.23]

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

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.

It's a warmly realistic comedy-drama that pulls you right into its lively, well-drawn L.A. milieu.

Though one can question the movie's quality as a documentary -- Broomfield is a dogged but often annoying interviewer, and Churchill's photography is sometimes slapdash -- Aileen raises such troubling issues that it stays, hellishly, in your mind.

It's a summit meeting between three brilliant leading men from three generations with three striking on-screen personas.

A great love story and a deeply moving celebration of simple lives.

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.

More than "Natural Born Killers," it's a real deconstruction of the whole love-on-the-run crime genre: drab, grim but effective.

Doesn't really add up to much -- except a good time. But it's smart, funny and cute. With all that going for you, who needs to be money? [25 October 1996, Friday, p.H]

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.

A prime example of advocacy journalism--a form often criticized but perfectly honorable. Most importantly, it gives you a chance to ruminate on some crucial questions of human error, justice and life-and-death.

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]

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]

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]

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.

The writing isn't always up to the actors, who all give the kind of expert, theatrically ingenious performances that often seem director-proof.

A prison movie of unusual richness and jarring power.

Moves us now because it's so playful and the players are so young - and because later, when Godard tried to play for keeps, in his self-consciously radical films of the late '60s and '70s, he began to lose his game.

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.

Really two movies: a taut, terrific, realistic crime drama, and, by the end, an over-the top, high-tech extravaganza which tries to out-Woo John Woo and turn Cruise into another Terminator.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

It's a funny-sad portrait of fame and its junkies, and of an era and its music.

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

The movie scrambles our responses and covers so much ground, with such zest, that its two and a half hours race past like a firestorm.

A nostalgia movie that doesn't get sticky with false sentiment.

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

You either go for a movie like this or you don't. But though I didn't like it much, I've got to admit that The Descent is a nerve-jangler.

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]

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

Just another self-absorbed teen chronicle, with the added twist of a little time travel and a surprise ending.

Proves, unhappily enough, how U.S.-style media politics is spreading around the world.

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]

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

Much-loved 1942 piece of super-romantic schmaltz. [19 Jul 2005, p.C3]

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.

In Year of the Dog, there are dark moments that are both strangely poignant and bizarrely hilarious. The ending took me by surprise. In a way it's a cheat, a redemption that arrives out of nowhere. But it's also a cosmic joke, a perfectly funny, sincere salute to dog and pet-lovers everywhere.

Nolan is a fascinating, offbeat choice for a huge movie franchise such as this. Just as Bale turns Batman into a near-tragic obsessive -- a Scarlet Pimpernel with the soul of a Hamlet and Monte Cristo -- Nolan turns Batman Begins into something much closer to Miller's "Dark Knight" interpretation.

This is a movie that, for all its often high intelligence and skill, seems emotionally underdone, bogged down in tony literary and cinematic cliches.

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

Kaufman's startling Quills gives us an anatomy of fear, images both silken swift and molten hot, scenes that disrupt and inflame the imagination.

This is the Paris -- and the mad, beautiful young Parisienne -- we look for in dreams.

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]

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

The new Israeli movie Ushpizin, a film about man's clumsiness and God's grace, is a touching and amusing tale that expands our horizon and also should open our hearts.

A brilliant entertainment, full of bemused skepticism and reckless, prodigal love -- for these people and their vanishing era and lives.

It would be a lie to suggest that there aren't some crudely effective moments in Ghost and the Darkness. After all, this is a movie where two man-eating lions pop up every 10 minutes or so, growl and drag off another fresh corpse or two. But crude effectiveness is all the movie has to offer -- and even that is a mark it doesn't always hit.

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]

Immersed here in both the fair, dreamy air and chilly, deeper waters, Rampling and Sagnier make Swimming Pool a fine sunlit noir, oozing sensuality and menace.

Exquisitely designed, lovingly executed, beautifully scored and played, every hair and note in place, it's a movie full of irony, passion and bluesy riffs.

Like a Visconti epic gone mad, explosive, beautiful, unforgettable. [08 Dec 2006, p.C8]

Michael Caine became a front rank star -- and actor -- when he played the title role in this smart, salty, subtly moving adaptation of Bill Naughton's play about a Cockney Casanova on the loose in Swinging London. [30 Jan 2000, p.41C]

Anyone who thinks nothing is happening in The Scent of Green Papaya-in the absence of car chases, rapes, gunfights and whatever else we may now demand from our entertainment-is obviously not paying attention. [11 Mar 1994, p.D]

Seems small in subject and scope, but it's large in spirit and implication.

Luckily, Wilde has style to spare -- as well as the perfect player to impersonate the flamboyant Irish writer: actor-writer Stephen Fry. [12 Jun 1998, p.H]

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

Girlfight, for its skill and theme, will please many. It's a shame it's no knockout.

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

there are times when Grease really kicks in. I'm fond of Channing singing "Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, rotten with virginity" and then telling an imaginary Troy Donahue, "I know what you wanna do." And most of the big musical numbers work, especially the showstopper: the sunlit Danny-Sandy duet to "Summer Dreams." Greasy kid stuff it all may be, but just like rock 'n' roll, it'll probably never die. [27 Mar 1998, p.A]

A classic, mythic portrayal of African history, religion and politics by the great Senegalese novelist-filmmaker Sembene, centering on a princess' kidnapping and its aftermath. [18 Sep 1998, p.J]

This seedy Barfly is beautifully written, acted and directed. It may be full of dank desire, wasted love and jesting misery--but it blooms. Whatever its flaws, it does something more films should do: It opens up territory, opens up a human being.

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.

It's a winner with flaws.

A bright and zippy, but alarmingly over-campy and lighter-than-fluff cartoon feature.

Freaky Friday commits a lot of sins; luckily, it has Curtis and a few others to cover them up.

An excellent, unforgettable film.

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.

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.

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]

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]

It's a work by cinematic geniuses that reveals beauty and terror in a long-ago time with a virtuoso intensity. You won't soon forget its mad, lovely sights and sounds.

Mankiewicz's classic Hollywood backstage tale of a tragic sex goddess/superstar (Ava Gardner), her gloomy, intellectual director (Humphrey Bogart) and the retinue of glamorous and/or exploitive movie types around them. [05 Nov 2004, p.C6]

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

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

Nenette and Boni, despite their plight, show us something small but vital about Marseilles, families, brothers, sisters, babies, pizza -- and even about the sensuous delights of kneading dough.

Isn't all it could have been. But the filmmakers catch the right glittery look and paranoid intensity, and they make gutsy speculations about the story beneath the story.

Fascinating documentary.

It's a moving tale of love and destruction in unexpected places, unexamined lives.

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

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]

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.

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.

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]