Michael Wilmington

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

Typical tough '40s Walsh noir. [08 Aug 1997, p.M]

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

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

Slickly produced, well cast and very excitingly made, it's based on plot hooks so silly, most of them blow up in your face.

A smorgasbord of bad ideas, sumptuously over-realized.

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

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

Once "Backbeat" catches the beat, it keeps it up, drives right through to the last soul-shattering coda and fadeout. [22 Apr 1994, p.01]

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]

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]

No Holds Barred gets no points for originality. It's written with the subtlety of a body-slam and directed with the finesse of a hammerlock. But the movie never takes itself seriously and director Tom Wright has fun with the wrestling montages.

A real sentimental journey -- and luckily they've got both the right director (Darabont) and the right actor to squeeze our heartstrings.

This often entertaining movie mixes grand, epic effects and amazing visualizations of catastrophe with a sappy family-in-crisis plot that would look hackneyed in a '60s Disney TV movie.

Point Blank catches the feel of the late '60s and the sunshot, edgy atmosphere of Los Angeles then (the go-go clubs, the used-car lots, the penthouses and the storm drain tunnels) like few movies since. [07 Feb 1997, p.K]

The Fourth War doesn't make much sense, but it's powerfully acted and beautifully directed. [23 Mar 1990, p.F4]

It's a shining valentine to the movies--full of homages, collages and swooningly romantic Ennio Morricone music--and it gets right at the messy, impure, wondrous way they capture and enrapture us. [16 February 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

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

A fierce, brilliant film that breaks (and then mends) your heart.

This is a movie whose morality is as banal as its humor--and that's saying something. Basically, it's standard post '80s high-concept drivel, yet another marketing hook in search of comedy, tension, characters, atmosphere, compelling narrative drive--everything we used to see in movies before the hooks and the ad campaigns swallowed them up.

Phantoms may have sold like hotcakes as a book. But this movie version is a grotesque fiasco, a confoundingly senseless story told with unexciting visuals, cliched dialogue and ear-bashing sounds... Watching it is a truly hellish experience. [23 Jan 1998]

The Belly of an Architect has flaws, smudges and intense pleasures. Something like a clockwork orange, it’s an art machine that spurts juice and acid.

What many American movies do well these days -- action, violence, hell-for-leather street spectacle -- Darkman does better. That may be praise enough. [24 Aug. 1990, p.F10]

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

A mix of drag comedy and inspirational road movie, Wong Foo is surprisingly, sometimes exhilaratingly good. [10 Sep 1995, p.4C]

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

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

Like the movies its modeled after, it's shallow, frequently silly. But there's something about the mix--maybe something about Parillaud as the screechy, dangerous Nikita--that may make the movie a powerful engine of wish-fulfillment. [12 Apr 1991, Calendar, p.F-10]

For my taste, too much of the new Powers looks like bad TV and sounds like old burlesque.

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]

It degenerates into one more cliche-ridden revenge movie. [19 Sep 1987, p.9]

It’s cute and high-spirited, and it shows some talent and verve. Watching it, you feel that Beaird is capable of something really good; even when his material goes stale and tasteless, there’s a joie de vivre in his direction.

Lovingly designed, impeccably stylish and heartwarming.

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

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

It's beautifully shot on Cephallonian locations by superb landscape photographer John Toll.

This movie lets you feel something. Like George's house, if not his life, it's built well and full of heart.

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

It's not all that funny -- but fascinating in a weird, knockabout way. [28 Aug 1998, p.O]

This is a pro's movie, solid, taut and trim, done mostly with exemplary skill. That's its trouble, perhaps. This Getaway knows the score too well, entertains us too effectively, beguiles us too knowingly. [11 Feb 1994, p.A]

Director Lee has a true cinematic knack, but it's also nice to see a movie with its heart so thoroughly, unabashedly on its sleeve.

42nd Street is the quintessential '30s backstage song and dance movie-and one of the most influential and much-copied movie musicals ever. [09 Mar 2007, p.C6]

It's a harmless enough movie, and quite a good-looking one; Bettany and Dunst are an attractive enough couple, even if Lizzie has been written as a selfish little snip and he as a whining man-child.

The movie has an odd, queasy edge to it. It's cute. But, sometimes, it gets cold cute, ghastly cute. The effect is mixed--like a Norman Rockwell cover redrawn in Gahan Wilson's style by a computer.

This magnificent 1974 sequel, the centerpiece of Coppola and writer Mario Puzo's 20th Century gangster saga, is still one of the most ambitious and brilliantly executed American films, a landmark work from one of Hollywood's top cinema eras.

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

One of those corny, lusciously mounted, almost predictably thrill-packed action movies you can't help but like.

It's lively but chaotic and evasive. The period re-creation switches on and off. We get a sense of what the silver-walled Factory was like, but not the rest of swinging Manhattan in the '60s.

When it enters the future, it's a new-fangled, old-fashioned jim-dandy of a show.

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]

Cleverly written by William and Tania Rose, it's become a cold-war curio. [28 May 1989, p.2]

Director H.S. Miller thinks he's made something broodingly visionary when you're more likely to be aesthetically shaken up by one of Mad magazine's Fold-Ins.

It's stylish, it's sort of smart, it's full of misplaced talent. But it's not funny enough, and maybe, in a way, not dark enough either.

In the end, it all can't help feeling a little slight, more a pleasant wade into a writer's neurotic playground than a satisfyingly deep dip.

American movies about childhood often have a spurious feel. They can be grandiosely phony or sentimental--or both, as in Home Alone. Unfortunately, Now and Then, despite massively good intentions, fits right into the program. [20 Oct 1995, p.J]

This movie, which aspires to be a Christmas movie classic on the "It's a Wonderful Life" level, is overwhelming, enjoyable and impressive, without being really entrancing.

The movie has bounce and bite, but it skitters around too much. Its needle is hip-hopping around between too many grooves.

Drop Dead Fred is an erratic stab at making madness sensible, a slapstick nightmare that goes too sane, that tries too hard to be both good and rotten.

A funny movie, but like "Josh" himself, it's too self-absorbed, and maybe too nice, for its own good.

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

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.

The Polish thriller that made Polanski world-famous, a taut psychological drama in which a bourgeois married couple invite a hitchhiking student for a weekend of sailing. The sea becomes an arena for desire, menace and deadly games. [19 Jan 2007, p.C3]

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

Delicately subversive, hypnotically sardonic, full of terror, banality and wafer-thin lyricism.

Sequels to big-budget popular hits usually end up super-slick, shallow and inflated. But this one isn't even super-slick; it's shallow and deflated...The overall effect is of a story atomized and dying before our eyes, collapsing into smashed pulp, ground down into big-budget Kryptonite ash. [27 July 1987, p.1]

It's a tribute to Penn's talent and guts that he manages to bring it off--even if the movie doesn't.

Hackman, Jones, Heard, Cassidy, Pam Grier and Dennis Franz -- in another of his greaseball cop roles -- are always interesting to watch. And Davis still suggests he might evolve into an action specialist in the Don Siegel-Phil Karlson class -- if he chooses less apocalyptic scenarios.

It's a risky movie, and an uneven one. But the impulses behind it are darker and stronger than in most of his previous comedies. Good or bad--and Life Stinks definitely has a weak, undeveloped side--I liked it.

In the third story, set in Asheville, N.C., that excellent actress Hunt guides us steadily through what could be a minefield of sentimentality.

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.

Jan Kounen, the maker of Darshan, is a French director with flashy credentials, including music videos, commercials, horror shorts, violent gangster movies ("Dobermann") and offbeat westerns ("Blueberry").

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

The jokes grate on you, the buoyancy seems feigned and none of the nonsense is lyrical. The talent involved seems misused. This film is conceived as a vehicle for Madonna and, even as such, it's a rattling failure. The movie diminishes her, the worst thing a vehicle can do. [10 Aug 1987, p.1]

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

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.

In Top Hat's all-time showstopper, to Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek," light-footed Fred and feathery Ginger dance us right into paradise. [23 Aug 2005, p.C3]

A well-researched and well-illustrated, if often facetious, record of the U.S. government's longtime war on cannabis. And while it's a little too single-minded, it's both fun to watch and quite informative.

Impure Chandler it may be, but it's pure Altman and one of his nose-thumbing '70s maverick classics. [25 May 2007, p.C5]

If its jolts were as strong as its chuckles, The Woman Chaser might really have turned into the cheap-thrill classic it pretends to be.

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

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

I laughed all the way through it.

Material like this might have worked if the moviemakers had played it completely crazy and over-the-top, if they'd made it a true satire of the American upper class facing its worst nightmare. But the tone of Toy Soldiers suggests its makers might have tried to turn Animal House into a triumph of the spirit story, too. [26 Apr 1991, p.F10]

An odd premise for a Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn film--an anti-fascist melodrama with Tracy as the no-nonsense reporter investigating a beloved but tarnished American icon, Hepburn as the icon's wife--but they give it their trademark polish. [24 Feb 2006, p.C7]

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]

I.Q. has a commendable idea. Brains aren't everything. You should follow your heart. Fine. Agreed. But just like E=MC2, you gotta prove it. With brains and heart.

This is only a movie. But a good one. May Roddy Doyle give us many more.

An irritation, more fizzle than sizzle.

Like the frosty tropical drinks the people keep sipping here, it's refreshing and icy-cool, a sinful pleasure mixed by experts.

An Altman classic on a subject he knows well.

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

A fine French comedy-drama.

A limply derivative, disappointingly trivial and hokey fish-out-of-water crime comedy.

A horror movie with a Hitchcockian veneer of the everyday, a story that taps into our fear not only of the paranormal but also of insanity and the secret evil that may lie beneath ordinary lives.

Weighed down by the presence of Griffith. She plays her satiric part without much gusto or conviction - as if she were afraid we might believe she really is Honey.

Scientology or not, the movie is a battlefield bummer that makes you want to revolt.

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

But there's something missing, something tentative and uncertain. In order to pull off a magic trick, you often have to distract the audience with smooth patter, clever detail or indirection. And this movie tries to play it so pure and unabashed that we can see right up its sleeves. [21 Apr 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]

Jungle 2 Jungle, is a shallow, joyless show, whose family bonding comedy is as touching as its dead-bird jokes, as witty as a bowl of cat urine and as penetrating as its analysis of the Russian Mafia. [07 Mar 1997, p.F]

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

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.

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

Loach is a super-realist, and Sweet Sixteen has the disarming feel of a documentary. It's a film that miraculously catches life on the fly, without apparent embellishment, cliche or melodrama.

Pulp Fiction isn't just funny. It's outrageously funny. [14 Oct 1994]

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

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.

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.

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

The film manages to crack all its codes, and even when it sags a bit, it's never lacking grace and some wit. Not enigmatically at all, it pleases and teases us -- in high style.

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

No period of Italian history has produced more great movies than the WWII years . But, Malena romanticizes and even sentimentalizes those years.

Overall, The Brothers is glossy fun, but it should have given us more ideas and energy.

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

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]

Superb crime thriller. [07 Sep 1998, p.1N]

I've got to admit it's a stunner.

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]

Busby Berkeley's finest hour comes in this flabbergasting Warners musical, with James Cagney as a Berkeley-like choreographer who directs, for a string of Broadway theaters, a series of "preview" dance numbers that blow your socks off.

A movie of good intentions and awful results.

So stunningly shot and visualized--and scored so hauntingly well by Anja Garbarek, the daughter of saxophonist/composer Jan Garbarek--that it works even if you don't pay attention to the story. Maybe it works better that way.

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]

There’s a good movie buried in it, but it stays buried--and, by the end, the annoyances outweigh the pleasures.

The "Fallen" moviemaking team obviously want to make a thinking person's horror movie. Intermittently, they succeed. But this movie suffers the fate of many recent nightmare thrillers. [16 Jan 1998, p.A]

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

The whole grand tradition of the humor of movie stupidity, from Laurel and Hardy and Mortimer Snerd to Jerry Lewis and Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, seems to crash and burn in this movie, which ends with Payne's idiotic laugh wheezing away over the end-titles. It almost sounds like the beginning of a laugh track-which "Major Payne" could certainly use. [24 March 1995, p.H]

A collection of flat gags, spiritless action, cornball satire and overbroad or bored-looking performances, it sometimes resembles the draggle-end of a nightmare “Saturday Night Live” show, where the cast has come to despise their own skits.

A beautiful film, harrowing, tough and rife with grief.

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

Vast, riveting, madly audacious movie biography.

By translating the voluptuous Elizabethan sensibility to the drier post-Edwardian era, and then cutting much of the play's great rhetoric and poetry, McKellen and Loncraine actually flirt with ennui rather than excitement. [19 Jan 1996, p.C]

Haunts the conscience, troubles the spirit.

Instead of becoming bewitched, we're caught up in one more gallery of cliches and storytelling blunders. The Glitches of Eastwick. [03 May 1996, p.C2]

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."

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]

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

A classy but over-contrived topical thriller about bomb plots and anti-government groups.

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

It's arguably one of the emptiest, feeblest, most derivative scripts ever made as a major studio movie. There's no need to do a Mad magazine movie parody of this; it's already on the screen.

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

Broken Arrow is much better than the average big-time action movie because Woo has blazing style and a unique, even eccentric viewpoint. [9 Feb 1996, p.C]

It's full of cinematic invention, rich verbal and visual poetry, packed with raw life and nonpareil acting. [Dirctor's Cut]

Has a remote feel. It sometimes impresses but never soars.

Strong, hard, dirty, funny, moving atmospheric and laced with scabrously musical street dialogue.

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

The results aren't gothic and bloody, as they were in the Lauren Bacall film "The Fan," or elegant and ironic as in the Bette Davis classic "All About Eve"--though the plot suggests a bit of both.

Captain Ron is a movie about trapped suburbanites who break out into romantic seas, but it never really leaves suburbia. Its spiritual home is in the shopping mall. Like the Cap'n himself, this movie guzzles up its dreams and ignores the busted engine.

This is a superb film and one of Nicholson's great performances, tamped down but magnetic.

In Rocky V, the fifth and presumably last episode of Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa saga, the writer-star once again contrives a way to make his hulking, sad-eyed gladiator the underdog. And we get whiffs of funkiness and humanity stirring around for the first time since the original Rocky. [16 Nov 1990, p.1]

A finely written, superbly acted offbeat thriller.

The movie doesn't really jell. Glossy, good-looking and well-produced, it affects you and even sometimes moves you, but it doesn't really convincingly connect.

The Last Days, despite its great subject, is not quite a great non-fiction film. It's too reserved and careful in tone to reach the heights of Alain Resnais' Night and Fog or Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. [12 Feb 1999, p.I]

Addams Family Values is another big opportunistic, pre-marketed studio show, but it has laughs, flair. At its best, it's a valentine of venom, sent with mirth and malice aforethought.

A stirring, large-souled movie.

It's a joy. Altman does Dallas the way he did "Nashville" in Nashville or Hollywood in "The Player."

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]

May be the most fascinating, richly accomplished screw-up you'll see all year. Von Trier, who has always had a talent for provocation, nails another heroine to the cross while playing his role to the hilt - a moviemaking rebel in his own dog days.

Inspirational biographical movie that really works.

Lovely, heart-stirring film.

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.

The Little Rascals is a nice-looking movie-shot in a nostalgic childhood haze by Richard Bowen-but watching it is almost numbing. It's the kind of empty gaudy show the misfit characters in Spheeris' good comedies might waste their time with.

The film, both light-hearted and serious, suggests that freedom comes more easily within restrictions--and that's true of Albou's approach as well.

One of the most beautiful of all recent films on the problems of old age -- and on the interplay of theater and life.

This movie is glum, murky, dour, takes place mostly in the dark, doesn't make much sense and has a surprise climax so ridiculous you may watch it with perverse, astonished respect - the kind you might grant the Joint Chiefs of Staff if they showed up for a press conference wearing lampshades on their heads and yodeling. [17 Sept 1993, p.F]

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

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]

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

Martin Lawrence and Ashton Kutcher may seem like an odd-sounding comedy team, but in some weird way, they click as voice-actors and cartoon buddies in Open Season.

One of the more intelligent, better-made new movies around right now, but, despite everything, it doesn't really connect with the nerves and heart. It's a romance without anguish, although the pain of love is really what it's all about.

The kind of movie that gives sequels a bad name, even though, strangely enough, it's better than the 1995 hit that spawned it.

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]

One of the year's best documentaries.

A wild, wanton and wasteful western farce that's so overblown and underwritten it almost makes you cringe to watch it.

Of all the movies that try to take us into the mind and viewpoint of a child, Carol Reed's 1948 The Fallen Idol, adapted by Graham Greene from his short story, is one of the most ingenious.

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

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]

An odd mix itself, of contemporary sexual realism and unabashed romantic fantasy. If "Days" works, it's mostly on a sheer fantasy level.

It's not Maddin's best work -- it may even be the least of his four features to date -- but there's something mesmerizing about it all the same, a quality of perverse wit and unbuttoned imagination you see too rarely.

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

Paths of Glory is an antidote to false movies about the glories of war, nonsensical fantasies like John Wayne's The Green Berets or Sylvester Stallone's Rambo. [25 Feb 2005, p.C2]

It's overwhelming and, in a curious way, it's charming, but at the center, even though you see it in the right place, you detect not a heart, or a mind, but something like a hot, roasted marshmallow beating and burbling within a thickened, ursine breast.

Anyone who goes to Halloween 4 deserves what they get: stale, sordid tricks and no treats. [25 Oct 1988, p.C6]

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.

Kirk Douglas' performance...is so strong and inspiring it's a shame there isn't a better movie around it.

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 sappy, often absurd disappointment, another would-be inspirational romance that, like Costner's overwrought "Message in a Bottle," is impossible to swallow.

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

Among its many excellences, Vera Drake functions superbly as a pure thriller; the last half is reminiscent in structure and detail of Hitchcock's "The Wrong Man."

At its best, it's about madness disguised as utter rationalism, utter dispassion, noblesse oblige. As such, in odd moments, it chills through to the bone and beyond.

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.

Little Odessa is a portrait of New York subcultures, the Russian immigrant community itself and the orginizatsya, or Russian mafia, that employs Joshua. The cityscapes are wintry and menacing. The characters have a strong pulse.

An independent American art film that seems to be masquerading as Victorian-era pornography--and it's not quite as interesting or provocative as that description might make it sound.

The value of Romantico is that it lets us experience vicariously what Carmelo and others like him go through.

The duo carry automatic glamour and nobility and the movie is an elaborate star turn, a chance to see them strutting their stuff one more time.

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

No other film has a final effect quite like "Rules." One walks away from it drained and exhilarated, after experiencing a whole world and seemingly every possible emotion in a few swift golden hours.

A sometimes-sharp, sometimes-shallow, cunningly crafted thriller that tries to rely more on ideas and character than carnage and crashes. [30 Aug 1996, p.C]

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

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

With his brazen gifts for mimicry, Eddie Murphy may now be the Peter Sellers of blockbuster toilet comedy movies.

Starts out hilarious and then turns very, very grim.

A lot of this horrific Little Shop is not only sweet, melodic, funny and oddly idealistic, it's even, well, tasty. [19 Dec 1986, p.1]

Decline's redeeming grace is its jocular, damn-the-proprieties air and, for the first half, its staccato editing rhythm. It's damnation is most of the music and its relative avoidance of heavy metal's darker corners: the pith and point that Alex Cox gave punk in Sid and Nancy.

Trumbo's aim was a kind of proletarian poetry, but McKenzie's broad emoting has the deadly earnestness of a school play.

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.

Creating a mood that suggests an unholy mix of Czech novelist Franz Kafka, American pulp fictionist Jim Thompson and French heist moviemaker Jean-Pierre Melville, Babluani's story is about the perils of get-rich-quick schemes.

A thrilling ride but also a thoughtful one, it's a movie that does manage to do more good than bad by the end of the day.

The movie has the same problem as Davis' Chuck Norris vehicle, Code of Silence. Starting in the semi-realistic framework of the '70s cop movies, it veers off into '80s action movie cloud-cuckoo land: the paranoid one-against-a-hundred cliches of the average Schwarzenegger-Stallone heavy-pectoral snow job. [08 Apr 1988, p.14]

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

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.

Shimmers and glows. But it also stings a little -- like the lovely flame that dies and the smoke that, in yet another Cole song, gets in your eyes.

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

Playing a deranged, possibly homicidal babysitter going bonkers in a hotel, Monroe steals the show in this efficient, vaguely creepy little thriller--despite the presence of both Richard Widmark (as her airline pilot target) and Anne Bancroft (as the hotel's pert lounge singer). [09 Dec 2005, p.C6]

The movie contains its moments, charms and felicities-even its sharp stings of pleasure and pain. [20 May 1994]

A landmark musical movie -- controversial, mercurial, even cheeky. It's the kind of film that wildly divides audiences and critics -- people tend to either love or hate it. I loved it.

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.

Big and violent, dark and operatic, both stingingly real and maddeningly overblown. But what gives it resonance is Pacino's performance.

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.

It's a spree of a movie, one of the most impishly entertaining of Altman's career. Smart, sparkling, almost sinfully amusing.

Completely successful or not, films like Saudade do Futuro are needed. And we need people like the Nordestinos.

Three Times is great cinema, pop romance that carries a special charge.

As beautiful as all the film's technology is, it needs more real human beings around - to pull the switches, man the pumps and scuttle through those corridors.

A slick, bloody thriller, but it's also, to its credit, a genuine whodunit.

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.

Superhero comic book movie with a script so feeble it might have been written with crayons.

It’s a dazzlingly filmed and acted synopsis.

It’s not really a bad movie. In some ways, it’s a better directed farce than the current hits “Back to School” or “Legal Eagles.” But it’s erratic, and often weightless or uncentered; the pieces keep flying apart.

May be corny, but it's also absorbing, sweet and powerfully acted. It's a film about falling in love and looking back on it, and it avoids many of the genre's syrupy dangers.

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.

Though not as good or as massively innovative as its predecessor, is still a mountainous undertaking.

A bawdy comedy that convincingly celebrates the resilience of the urban poor and the power of friendship in the teeth of despair.

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

Serial Mom is a typically funny and cheerfully outrageous John Waters' comedy about the conjunction of suburbia and hell, perfect families and serial killers. [15 Apr 1994, p.C]

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

This one's worth the ticket price only if you are a showbiz-aholic.

Not a picture that makes you think very much -- except to wonder why the studios keep making movies like this.

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]

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.

In White Noise, Hollywood and Michael Keaton try to make a decent thriller out of ghosts in the machine but come up with lousy reception and static.

Swedish cinema has been famous for a number of things: beautiful actresses, fine sexy psychological dramas, natural settings, cinematic bawdiness and a touch of melancholy. Under the Sun fits that profile well.

Though I wouldn't call He Loves Me a total success, it's smart, intriguing and quite ambitious, a first film by a talented young filmmaker that displays superstar Tautou's gifts in an eerie new light.

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.

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]

Hitch's most plausible, least suspenseful spy thriller, based on Leon Uris' reality-inspired novel of intrigue in Cuba and France. [23 Jun 2006, p.C2]

It's a big, smiley, free-floating blimp of a comedy: a farce about reluctant fatherhood that could use some parental guidance. [12 July 1995, p.N16]

Based on Leonard Gardner's California-set novel, full of brilliant low-key acting, accurate vernacular and precise low-life observation, it stars Stacy Keach as a nearly over-the-hill old pro and Jeff Bridges as a young pug starting out. [19 May 2006, p.C7]

Jones lets it all loose here. It's the performance of a lifetime: full of menace and venom, eloquence and fire, rot and pathos, crackling rawness and realism.

It sounds slightly absurd, but McCarey was a master of on-set improvisation, and Going My Way has the easy-going rhythm, humanity and warmth of life itself. [09 Feb 2007, p.C6]

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

A dumb movie, but it's also a knowing one: a cheap castle of lewd trivia and corny excitement built on The Rock.

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

Like the work of an expert tailor, it's done with unobtrusive skill, essential warmth and seamless grace.

Bravo shines with humor and character. [28 Jul 2006, p.C10]

Macabre, oddly gripping.

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]

Just because a movie was inspired by real life and has good intentions doesn't mean it can't wind up as phony as a three-dollar bill.

In this defiantly ridiculous movie, David Zucker, of the old Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker Airplane! movies, once again unleashes on the world the sexiest (and dumbest) 66-year-old accident-prone cop in the history of the movies, Leslie Nielsen's Lt. Frank Drebin. The jokes still come at you in a dense Hellzapoppin' blizzard. But more of them seem crude, mean-spirited, a little sour.

In a weird way, what happens to the kids is what happens to the movie. The humans shrivel to crawling piffles or get deformed into caterwauling robots; the super-tall grass and the giant cookies and insects take over.

Suggests a raunchier, cruder version of a Coen brothers comedy, but it's also a kind of honky-tonk "Rashomon."

It's a fervent, topical political drama of extraordinary impact and ferocity.

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]

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.

Director Richard Rush is one of the more talented and mysterious figures in American filmmaking. But though it has been 14 years since his last feature (the 1980 live-wire classic "The Stunt Man"), his new movie, The Color of Night, is sometimes just as hip, lively and blast-your-eyes funny as ever.

Great, bittersweet family drama.

If Spaceballs disappoints you, it isn't because it's unfunny or not entertaining. Brooks at medium pressure is still more amusing than most movie makers. [25 Jun 1987, p.1]

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.

Great filmmakers push their ideas and characters to the limit, unafraid of consequences - which is what Pedro Almodovar has done in Talk To Her, his latest film and, I think, his best.