Michael Wilmington

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

Strange and unsettling as it is, Noe's clarity of vision makes his film ignite. Like a slammed door or a scream of anger, it slaps you awake.

Never really feels right.

A simple, eloquent drama.

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

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

A movie about love, friendship and finding oneself, and it takes all its subjects very seriously while seeming to treat them with the lightest and most piquant of touches. Like its bizarre heroine, it irrigates our souls.

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

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

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

May strike some audiences as even more real than Kiarostami's work, because the story is so luminously open. Watching it, we enter, without barriers, a world.

Few sports films catch their time, place and sport so well. For skateboard fans, this is a must. But it's also a great ride if you know nothing about the sport or what it meant. At the end of this movie, you will.

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

Playing a role of almost Bergmanesque intensity -- a tough, lonely woman dying of cancer as she examines her past -- Bisset is both convincing and radiant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Though Haynes' methods are austere and his style dry, the terror of his narrative becomes more palpable as the film unwinds. The picture's eerie delicacy, meticulous technique and rapt formality may distance us, but they also steadily strip bare the panic at its core.

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

It's good, but not great -- despite the heights to which Dench and Broadbent drive it. But those heights are lofty, the pain still stings.

Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds and Charles Bronson -- the '70s' three reigning American action movie superstars -- had their thunder stolen when top action director Siegel cast rumpled, baleful-eyed comic sourpuss Walter Matthau in this classic '70s thriller. [09 May 1999, p.C9]

Self-absorption is the vice of all these characters. That, not sex, is their sin--and Michell, Kureishi and their fine cast show this with a lucidity that cuts to the bone, a candor that draws blood.

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

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