Michael Wilmington

This seems to be a movie made by people who love the old classic movie swashbucklers but don't have a clue how to make or modernize them.

A great movie on a powerful, essential subject -- the Holocaust years in Poland -- directed with such artistry and skill that, as we watch, the barriers of the screen seem to melt away.

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.

Ashley Judd as Agnes White, and a relative newcomer, the remarkable Michael Shannon, as Peter Evans. They're both spellbinding.

This is the same dopey save-the-princess-and-kill-everybody revenge plot we always get. The Return of Swamp Thing is enough to drive you back to the comic book stand. Or even the swamp.

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.

An extraordinary work, grandly conceived, brilliantly executed and wildly entertaining. It's a hobbit's dream, a wizard's delight. And, of course, it's only the beginning.

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.

Sometimes cinema's highest achievements become clear only in retrospect. Days of Being Wild--now clearly revealed as one of the peaks of Hong Kong filmmaking and a masterwork of contemporary cinema giant Wong.

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.

Like the moving 1999 American "A Walk on the Moon," with Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen, Hard Goodbyes juxtaposes a family crisis with the excitement of the period before and during Neil Armstrong's 1969 moonwalk.

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

Showing us a world through a child's eyes, A Time for Drunken Horses speaks so truthfully and well that it breaks the heart and scars the conscience.

Starter for 10 is cute and smart, just like its star triangle, and it's also well-written, acted and directed.

Admirers of Rambo III will probably point out that it moves fast. But then, so does a gazelle-and a gazelle has better dialogue and more personality. [25 May 1988, p.1]

Extreme Measures is a suspense picture that should excite thinking audiences as well as thrill-crazy ones. One possible exception: fans of Michael Palmer's novel, who may wonder why his plot and people disappeared. But after all, in movies as in medicine, extreme measures may be necessary.

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

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

From the very first images of Saul Bass' credit sequence, the whorls and patterns revolving in darkness, the huge eye bathed in red, the movie lets us feel the heartbeat and divided soul of its hero. And its creator. It is a movie about desire, darkness and the pull toward destruction. Most of all, it is about impossible love and overwhelming fear--conveyed with consummate control and art. Watching it, we feel the fear, suffer the desire. [Restored version; 18 Oct 1996, p.1]

Shot with a Peter Greenaway-like austere impudence and edited brilliantly (by Jed Parker), this is an entertaining movie, and a moving one--even if, like me, you're not especially fond of these paintings or that scene.

The best thing about star and co-writer David Spade's Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star is the end-title sequence, a big, sassy sing-along in which dozens of old TV child stars spew out defiant jokes about their old careers and fame's fickle fingers.

Astonishing, crazily delightful.

This is a Wenders masterwork--a chilling tale of painting, crime and forgery. [19 Jan 2007, p.C5]

This cautionary thriller about an unjustly imprisoned airline mechanic has a chance to be a canny blend of gutsy melodrama and J'Accuse against the prison system. But, by the end, it has gone as slick and corrupt as the crafty old con (F. Murray Abraham) who advises Tom Selleck's framed Jimmie Rainwood on jail survival. On a fundamental moral level, An Innocent Man is guilty as hell.

A deceptively simple French film about teaching that keeps enlarging as you watch it, becoming beautiful and inspiring in a way most films never touch.

Norman Jewison directed, but overall it's surprisingly labored, with that cheesy, set-bound look of a lot of many early '60s Universal pictures. [25 Mar 1988, p.22]

Sad excuse for a movie. [4 Aug 1986, p.C6]

Unfortunately, the humans only have scripts to support them. So for every bear triumph, Country Bears also features cliched jokes, corny sentiment, ludicrous shtick and the most flabbergasting set of star cameos since Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson wandered into "Men in Black II."

At its best, "Hollywood" has the breezy irreverence and easy, sunny L.A. atmosphere of Shelton's 1992 "White Men Can't Jump," a buddy-buddy basketball-hustle movie.

It's a movie that literally makes your mouth water. A smart, sprightly, lip-smacking comedy about a Taipei master chef who's lost his sense of taste and his tangled family problems with three romantically troubled daughters. It crackles with iridescent style and wit.

Red Dragon is very much a product, and a superior one, of our times. So is Anthony Hopkins' top-notch fiend, the bad doctor.

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.

It's such a knowledgeable work and so pleasantly obsessed with its subject that it will interest even audiences whose attraction to wine is only casual.

It's worth seeing simply to make the acquaintance of Tobias, a really extraordinary old guy.

It's fun, but not obvious fun.

The kind of brilliantly weirdo picture that, by all rights, shouldn't have gotten made at all but this time, miraculously, was.

After "Ninotchka," this is the best Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett script filmed by somebody else: a terrific romantic swindle comedy set in Paris, starring Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche and John Barrymore. [26 Sep 2003, p.C5]

Bening shines, and the film shines too.

It's an intellectual family film for literate parents and children, immensely pleasing if not perfect, perhaps a smidgen too brightly evasive and determinedly charming.

Like all good popular entertainments, the best of it sings.

Like Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," it is an all-star fresco, but the stars--none of whom carries the movie--get to play the kind of morally ambivalent, sometimes unlikable parts that big-name actors usually avoid.

It's like a class reunion in purgatory. All the familiar faces are there, but the air is sulfurous and murky, and hell is just an elevator ride away. [10 Dec 1993, p.A2]

Slick but forgettable. [01 Oct 1993, p.C]

Watching Le Cercle Rouge, we're caught up in a world that, however improbable some of its twists and turns seem, strikes us as a perfect, imaginative creation.

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]

Madhouse grabs you by the lapels and tries to shake the laughs out of you. But it’s never very funny, despite the best efforts of that facile TV farceur Larroquette and the sexiest contortions of Kirstie Alley.

Sumptuous and beautiful, suffused with a serene melancholy and deeply ambivalent love for a long-vanished past, Luchino Visconti's 1963 The Leopard is one of the greatest of all historical costume epics.

A paper-thin wish-fulfillment comedy about escaping small-town repressions and blasting conformity.

It's a sordid but expert shocker.

Simply calling Surf Nazis Must Die a bad movie doesn't do it justice. This is a horror-action movie with dull action and horror, feebly done on every level: leaden satire, a repulsive romance, a revenge saga of zero intensity. The actors are often upstaged by the beach graffiti.

Wedding Date is neither good art, good entertainment nor even good trash.

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

Though Day Watch seems less shocking and overwhelmingly strange than "Night Watch," it's another rocking mix of gritty thriller and glitzy sci-fi, once again in the vein of the director Bekmambetov's idols Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers.

Louiso has a confident touch and a good eye, and there isn't a scene in the film that wasn't intelligently done. Besides Hoffman's near-great performance as Joel, there isn't a bad or mediocre acting job on view either.

Another Universal classic, based on H.G. Wells' tale of an invisible madman. [13 Aug 2007, p.C6]

One of the classic midnight movies of the Pink Flamingos -- Rocky Horror era, star-director Jodorowsky's metaphysical western about a violent wanderer plays like an especially gun-crazy Sergio Leone saga filtered through several layers of radical European/Latin American cinema and Christian and Buddhist mysticism. Zero cool in its day, it remains a striking film oddity. [16 Feb 2007, p.C4]

Both sides of the story -- the larger context and the intense and intimate drama -- are painted with an absolutely unswerving sense of truth. And, as we watch this movie, full of violence, injustice and compassion, there is barely a moment that seems calculated or contrived.

A flashy-looking low-budget indie about drugs, love and crime in small-town Iowa. But, speaking as an ex-small-town Midwesterner, I found it hard to buy.

Its social impact is part of what makes this movie memorable. But as with almost any exceptional, truthful war picture, Days of Glory moves us because we know the soldiers -- because we share their fear, triumph and pain.

Considering how good "Puccini's" middle often is, it's a shame it falls down fore and aft. But Maggenti, who loves Carole Lombard and William Powell in "My Man Godfrey," is tapping a likable vein here. She should open it up again.

For anyone who wants to see pure cinema, it should be an experience both wrenching and inspiring. [22 Jan 1999, p.H]

Jingle All the Way has been well shot and imaginatively designed. But somehow that makes it worse. So does the fact that all the actors, Schwarzenegger included, are skilled enough to make you watch them. [22 Nov 1996, p.C]

In Faraway, So Close we watch a city being reborn, an angel trapped in melodrama and a dream dying. All are moving. [23 Dec 1993, p.10N]

A good, solid, admirable, deeply felt movie.

There's only one proper Hollywood ending to this story. Next year, Charlie and the surreal "Donald" Kaufman (listed as co-writers in the playful credits) should win twin Oscars for best adapted screenplay. They've earned it -- really.

Good as much of John Schlesinger’s The Believers is--and it’s one of the better-produced, more exciting and intelligent thrillers of the year--it’s hard to keep from wondering, as you watch, why he wanted to do it in the first place.

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

Bewilderingly bad.

Fast, funny, big-hearted.

It's hard to remember when actors have stepped into such a no-win situation and mustered up such panache: Turturro may be on a sinking ship, but he manages to drown brilliantly.

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]

Some movies should never have been made, and high on that list is the addled new remake of Rollerball.

A movie for people with time to waste, Sniper is about as compelling as a Soldier of Fortune magazine cover set to music.

As he was dying, Tarkovsky fashioned this great valedictory about a family in the first stages of nuclear apocalypse and a father's ultimate sacrifice. [31 Jan 2003, p.C4]

Like too many movies these days, takes a clever little idea and all but pounds it into the ground.

A near-masterpiece, it is one of the most effective and convincing studies of a criminal ever put on screen. [22 Jan 1999, p.A]

A highly exciting, visually alive thriller.

A modern digitized lollapalooza concocted out of old-fashioned slam-bang space opera elements.

Whimsy and wit are the saving graces of much British movie comedy, and Saving Grace has a decent measure of both.

Masterpiece is the right word for The Sweet Hereafter. It is extraordinary: a poem of familial pain, a song of broken embraces. [25 December 1997, Tempo, p.1]

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.

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

Imagine Steven Spielberg gone existentialist, Carne and Prevert making rock videos, a punk "Diva" and Jean Cocteau crossed with the Clash, and you may get an idea of the peculiar charms awaiting you in the cavernous, fluorescent interiors of Subway. [Nov 16, 1985, p.16]

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.

The movie, beautifully written, photographed and acted, remains Bergman's most characteristic work, alternating between terror and charm, sentiment and humor. It has one of the loveliest last scenes in any Bergman film. [10 Dec 2004, p.C5]

In a league with Hollywood's top historical epics, ancient or otherwise. It's stunningly handsome film, with an equally stunning cast and engrossing story.

An almost mystifyingly bad movie.

One of the great screwball comedies. [23 Jan 1998, p.N]

A daring, entertaining, but somewhat disappointing affair, something of an overreacher despite Lee's usual pyrotechnics and a brilliant cast.

The film has many strengths, but one of its major assets is its solid sight line. Though we might expect it to go sentimental - with its cute cat, torn families and sympathetic, pretty protagonists - it doesn't.

The movie takes paranoia to a far edge. And some audiences will admire it simply because it doesn't waste time on the normality it's going to end up subverting-because it's more fixated on its pods than its people. [25 Feb 1994, p.C]

It's fairly safe to predict that Silent Night, Deadly Night will start making "Worst Movies of All Time" lists almost immediately. It has all the prerequisites. A roaringly bad idea. Derivative scriptwriting. Tastelessness. Naked opportunism. A cast full of actors who mug, gesticulate and savor every rotten line. A general "we're only in this for the money" attitude, visible in every sloppy frame. And, to top it off, that most crucial quality: enough conscious or unconscious humor to keep you watching, and insulting, it. [11 March 1986, p.C5]

West Side Story has a nonpareil set of songs and dances, with ecstatic, exuberant, wonderful music by Leonard Bernstein and witty or heart-tearing lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. [Sing-a-long]

An epic unhinged, and while its best sections suggest a Loony Tune done by Sam Peckinpah and Emilio Fernandez, "Mexico" needs to be even crazier than it is.

Fast and frenetic and so unvarnished that it can make you feel unclean watching it. The film rubs your face in glamour and filth. But in the midst of the blood and hysteria, Kilmer plays Holmes with the dirty-angelic looks and wheedling charm of a seedy golden boy on the brink of doom.

Most movingly, Monsieur Ibrahim takes a provocative subject -- friendship and love between a Jew and a Muslim -- and makes it seem natural and wondrous.

The kind of fascinatingly bad film only a really gifted and fearless moviemaker could make: a 92-minute long raggedy-raunchy vision of sex, transit and alienation in which Gallo focuses on himself so obsessively, it's as if he'd become his own stalker.

There's a moral to the new teen movie Can't Buy Me Love: Money can't buy popularity. But it seems to have been lost on the movie makers themselves. What are they doing here but trying to spend their way to audience approval, success and glory? The plot is another one-sentence gimmick, the jokes juvenile, the morality a sham.

The sort of movie that both rewards and tries your patience.

Chirpy, bland, slightly maudlin Christmas musical comedy. [21 Dec 2001, p.C5]

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

Works beautifully, both as a social and psychological drama and as a taut, tightly wired thriller.

It’s one of those movies that seem fabricated for a shopping mall: decorative, pretty, vacuous.

The movie makers try to revive another day’s genre--the early ’70’s “road” pictures--in today’s terms. And it doesn’t work. The looser, more anarchic feelings they’re going after don’t jibe with the modern packaging, and they wind up with something slicked-up, streamlined and hollow--like “Blowing in the Wind” rearranged as elevator music.

The movie has a nasty, creepy edge that never lets up, and the characters are deliberately grating and alienating. This is a thriller that, like some classic noirs, glories in its own mean aura, its casual profanity and grotesque violence.

A rich, shining valentine to the British theater and the eternal joys of Shakespeare,

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

Eddie Murphy's latest is a flabby disappointment. The jokes die, the action curdles. Much of it falls as flat as smashed tinsel.

A beautifully tooled action thriller about love and terrorism.

Once again, Ozu's script, co-written with constant colleague Kogo Noda, is a marvel of organic detail and deceptive naturalism. Ozu's late style -- the serene, easy flow, the smooth succession of floor-level interior shots, the quietly restrained acting, the mastery of intimate psychology and the subtle portrayal of Japanese society in transition -- are all in place. [24 Mar 1989, p.23]

Beside its major virtues, it contains a vice: that one flat lead performance. Who would have thought Kevin Spacey would ever go dull on us?

Done with an enticing mixture of lacerating comedy, lush Roger Deakins cinematography, robust acting and juicy lines, the Coens' Ladykillers is often glorious fun to watch. It won't please everyone, of course.

Seemingly a simple comedy, it actually -- like all Allen's "simple" comedies -- has a lot to say. Will the audience listen or just dismiss it as minor, out-of-date Woody? If they do, it's their loss.

One of the cinema's imperishable visions of faith against injustice. [20 Feb 1997, p.9E]

Such a sour, mindlessly inflated experience that seeing it may temporarily put you off historical movies.

As we watch, we can sense, once again, the eye of a painter, the dreams of a poet and, tying them together, the vision of a master.

Sweeps us back into a terrifying and desperate string of events and makes us feel them - and, more crucially, understand them as well.

This landmark movie's madcap humor and terrifying suspense remain undiminished by time.

This new heist movie by the great thriller director John Frankenheimer flails around like its own dysfunctional gang of casino robbers.

It's a movie that's almost all style, all technique. It doesn't seem to be inhabited by people, thoughts or feelings, but by great coruscating patterns of light crashing over and over us, repeatedly--almost, but not quite, drowning out a constant buzz of cliches.

This is an intoxicatingly amusing blend of cynical urbane comedy, slick detection and breezy romance. [24 Jun 2005, p.C6]

One of the cinema's true classics.

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

An overblown, overspectacular, oversold movie without an original idea in its head.

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.

In the end, grips us precisely because its actors are so utterly absorbed in their roles, so unfettered and nakedly expressive. This is the kind of acting we always look for, but rarely see.

A fitfully funny retread of "48 Hours," "Fled" and dozens of others.

An exquisitely realized film; a little gem, it keeps its conflicting or varying themes of tranquility and violence, sacred and profane love, recklessness and wisdom, in almost perfect balance.

It's an ultra-slick, ultra-flat movie that cuts like a cellophane knife. No edge, no blood.

A short film with a unique subject matter. But you won't soon forget its people, its places or its sad, surprising revelations about all the sexes.

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]

Despite some impressive technical achievements, it too looks like a movie with little reason for being.

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

Corny as it may sound though, it's all true-except, of course, for that mythical movie last-second championship bit.

The actors in Nadja seem to be having such a good time that it's a shame the movie doesn't give them more room, and get even wilder and more eccentric.

The film now seems less urbane and innovative, more coldly flashy and bluntly affected -- full of sound and Furie, signifying little. [2 June 1987, p.Cal-1]

El Dorado is essentially a darker remake of Rio Bravo, with Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Hunnicutt and James Caan as the now archetypal quartet. But, though the situation is the same, the mood is crisper, tenser, with a heightened sense of pain, loss and death underlying the humor and action.

Campbell and her character are willing to take chances. But Toback's tangled noirish plot, with Vera as a post-feminist femme fatale, isn't particularly clever or original.

It's a bizarre but engaging fling.

Totally original and personal, this is a vast modern comic/poetic epic, lyrical, austere and strange. Despite its failure, Playtime is now regarded by many critics as one of the century's film masterpieces. [09 Jan 1998, p.M]

Chungking Express is a breezy little Hong Kong movie that has more life, energy, humanity and sheer visual zing than most other shows you'll see in a month or so. And, an hour after watching it, you may indeed be hungry for more. Not necessarily because the show is shallow or unsatisfying, or doesn't leave a strong impression, but because the spontaneity and high energy of it is what's so much fun.

Casual moviegoers may enjoy it, too, if they follow a simple rule: Stop looking for the way out and let yourself get lost.

Carpenter writes his own scripts -- here with past collaborator Larry Sulkis -- and their "Ghosts" screenplay lacks the density, character and humor of a Hollywood genre classic.

It's a comedy about maniacs: a tasteful murder-comedy, which isn't that laudable a goal.

But even if Hitchcock’s chase thrillers were the inspiration, with their falsely accused heroes fleeing police through exotic landscapes, the master wouldn’t have approved of this tribute. Logic, character, coherence, psychology--all those vital thriller elements disappear as quickly as the Iowa corn.

Possession needs a sharp eye, a wicked tongue, less reverence and much more of its author's voice.

I liked Flirt better than any of Hartley's films since "Trust." The playfulness he shows here seems better integrated, more meaningful, than the strange narrative whimsies of 1992's "Simple Men" or 1994's "Amateur." [08 Nov 1996]

Slick, expensive and filled with good-looking actors flexing muscles, but once it grabs our attention it doesn't really reward it...this movie doesn't have fear -- or sheer wonder and marvel -- enough.

This is not an inspirational drama about finding yourself; it's a Hitchcockian comedy about adultery, murder and losing a corpse.

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

It’s a low-budget production with major-league acting by Mary Steenburgen, Holly Hunter and Alfre Woodard. It’s not directed sharply enough; Thomas Schlamme is particularly weak on the fight scenes.

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.

The movie is full of phallic gags about little-bitty guns and crude jokes at physical or emotional infirmities. [17 Nov 1989, p.6]

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]

The things that make me love the movie are the mood, the hardboiled but good-hearted morality, Hawks' consummately professional eye-level style and those wonderful characters. [28 Jul 2006, p.C7]

Light of Day is a sympathetic, intelligent movie, with one great performance, but it suffers from the malaise rock 'n' roll is supposed to cure: inhibitions, a lack of spontaneity. [06 Feb 1987, p.4]

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]

There's barely a scene in this movie that taps his (Murphy) special brilliance.

Kurosawa's 1958 classic samurai comedy adventure; George Lucas used it as the model for Star Wars, in which Mifune and the two squabbling farmers are transformed into Han Solo, C-3PO and R2-D2. [03 Mar 2006, p.C5]

Magnificent to look at, thrilling, ingenious, spellbinding and superbly done on every level, this is not just one of the best films of the year or the decade, but of all time.

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

The content may be dubious, but the execution is hypnotic.

Though definitely one of the best American movies of the year--a work of high ensemble talent and intelligence, gorgeously mounted and crafted, artistically audacious in ways that most American movies don't even attempt--it's still a disappointment… It's not the capstone we might have wanted Coppola to make. [23 Dec 1990, Calendar, p.9]

Overbroad, underdone.

Not perfect, and neither are life or the movies. But you'd have to be blind yourself not to relish its qualities or laugh at its barbs.

A mind-numbing, bloody, ridiculous experience.

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.

A powerful symbolic drama.

One of the year's finest documentaries, a remarkable example of the conjunction of a burningly topical and newsworthy subject with a brilliant filmmaker.

It’s a big, frothy, high-tech, cutesy-poo musical comedy.

Some scholars may scowl, some lowbrows may scoff. But, like wordwise Will, these filmmakers know how to win a crowd -- from the queen down to the groundlings, from the sky above to the stage below. Bravo! [5 December 1998, Friday, p.A]

It sneaks up on you and shakes you: a tale of the cold hell surging up beneath that windy, sensuous Wyeth landscape.

It's outrageously stereotypical and weirdly personal, so loonily exaggerated it keeps surprising you.

Despite the movie's ruinous cliches, Neeson puts some genuine anguish into his phonily written scenes as the '60s burnout. Bateman plays to him well, and Phillips, making her feature debut, has some funny moments in the flashy kook role.

A voluptuously shot horror movie, with Piper Laurie (as Carrie's fanatically religious mom) and some nasty teens played by Amy Irving, Nancy Allen and John Travolta.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter just keeps growing up. So do the Potter movies, in size, in ambition and in visual splendor - and with increasingly stunning results.

In many respects, Forgiving Dr. Mengele is an ordinary documentary, stylistically and technically unexceptional. But its subject enobles the work. So does Kor : determined, indomitable, and by the end of the movie, a symbol herself of both survival and mercy.

Weird attempt to turn Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories into a mini-Meet Me in St. Louis, co-starring Gordon MacRae and Leon Ames. [13 Apr 2007, p.C5]

Engrossing as it is, The Hunted is more a showcase for formidable talent than anything else. It's a brainy, exciting but shallow show -- an expert's action movie that almost runs out of breath.

Hardware isn’t long on ideas, emotions or character; it degenerates into a mindless slaughterhouse crescendo.

This is a romance with minimal physical contact and sex--and that's part of what makes it work so well as a love story.

The protracted scenes of eating, cooking and cleaning carry neo-realism to its end point -- and to a violent climax which emerges logically and terrifyingly from the welter of daily trivia preceding it. [24 Oct 1997, p.L]

People always complain that movies aren't as entertaining, entrancing or outrageous as the best of the old Golden Age. Yet, memorably and magically, here's one that is. Don't let it dance away unseen. [22 Jul 1994, p.C]

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.

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.

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

You have to have faith that kids will recognize a bad movie when it's foisted on them -- and they don't get much worse than The New Guy.

The Human Stain has those qualities we often want but rarely see in our films: intelligence and ambition, decency and humanity, poetry and pity, fire and ice. Watch it and weep.

If nothing else, The Cable Guy will make you think twice before trying to pick up a free movie channel. [14 June 1996, p.C]

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

Funny Farm --a weak-fish-out-of-water comedy about a New York City couple who see their rural paradise turned into a rustic hell--is a movie with a doubly deceptive title. This movie isn't about a farm, and it isn't very funny, either.

Just because it's true to life doesn't mean it can sing.

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]

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

The film is truly special, truly different -- a wondrous talky roundelay about and for people who love life.

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

The film seems a mad mix of staid PBS bio-drama, flamboyant musical comedy and surreal cartoon nightmare.

The usual bad movie sometimes gives a few chuckles, amuses audiences by making them feel superior. But young director Leonard makes a different kind of bomb. Fascinated with technology, Leonard makes cutting-edge techno-turkeys, with wildly elaborate visuals and ridiculous plots. [4 Aug 1995, pg. I]

Starts like a house afire and then suffers an imagination burnout.

The picture is written and acted as a lark and a romp.

An amazing celluloid poem by a filmmaker whom Ingmar Bergman called "the greatest." He very nearly was. He was also, perhaps, too pure a creator and reckless a citizen to survive unscathed.

A stark, minimalist near-masterpiece about the creation of a murderer in modern Iran.

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]

Chevy Chase has not been on a roll lately, and to say that in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation he's funnier than in his last six movies combined may sound like high praise, until you remember those six movies. "Caddyshack II" alone almost throws them into the "minus" laugh range. But here, he does what he does best: flat-out slapstick and subversive tear-downs of his own smooth image. This sweet, goofball, manic middle-class daddy brings out his sharpest reflexes and he gets good support from D'Angelo, the bulging-eyed slob-in-excelsis Quaid, and from Questel and Hickey as his dottiest relations.

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.

A very Peckinpah-influenced film about the James Gang with four sets of real-life brothers playing the outlaw broods. [16 Jul 2004, p.C4]

A breezy, elegant charmer of a movie.

The suspense is pulse tearing, but Hitchcock, in a movie made explicitly for the war effort, gives it an extra edge. Also, in his favorite and most ingenious cameo role, Hitch solves the problem of appearing in a film with no extras -- the cast consists only of the other shipwreck survivors -- by having himself photographed before and after losing 100 pounds on a special crash diet. [15 Nov 2005, p.C3]

Though the new "Sabrina" has been updated to include micro-chips and corporate raiders, French fashion shoots and the Concorde, it doesn't transcend its time the way the old screwball comedies did. It doesn't even illustrate its own time memorably. Instead, the movie leaves us peeking through the trees like Sabrina, while trying to tell us that old movie fairy tales like this one are eternal, as relevant in our day as in their own. It's doubtful the people who made "Sabrina" themselves really believe that -- though they'd obviously like to. [15 Dec 1995, p.C]

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.

One of the best of its streamlined, over-produced, double-clutch kind: a high-speed, slicker-than-slick car-chase movie with unexpected deposits of character and comedy.

So much of Ruthless People goes so far that maybe it was inevitable that the film makers would pull up short and make this half-sappy compromise--cynicism with a smile--as compensation for their previous audacity. A pity. A lot of the rest gives you something better: full-bore, shameless, gut-clutching laughter.

This is a good movie, made by splendidly talented people-including Beatty, Annette Bening and Katharine Hepburn, co-writer Robert Towne, designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and composer Ennio Morricone-but it fumbles some gems, hearts and flowers on the way to the fadeout. [21 Oct 1994, p.C]

A mad, resplendent peacock of a film, a cinematographic riot of color and sensuality that evokes its era -- the swinging mid-'60s -- as much as any movie made during those giddy years.

Throbbing with music, seething with anger and romance, The Lost City is a film that breaks your heart, bewilders, alienates and ravishes you by turns.

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

Reign works better much better than "Upside" because of the cast and because Sandler and Cheadle together keep it lighter. It's an easy film to watch, but less easy to be moved by.

And, though the 1953 “Invaders” was an effective movie, it’s not really the classic that people remember. Except for Menzies’ superb production designs, everything in the remake is better: the acting, the camera work, definitely the Martians. It may not grip audiences in the same way, but that’s because Hooper is trying something harder, a conscious campiness that’s tough to bring off.

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]

Romance and comedy are dumped in favor of carnage: a self-sabotaging decision for what might have been a cute, enjoyable movie.

It is a story of eerie beauty, overpowering fear and almost no solace at all -- save perhaps for a few jazzy chords on the night club piano and the chirp of the bullfinch in that empty, empty room. [06 Jun 1997, p.C]

A smart, sprightly little movie with beguiling actors and few inhibitions. Though there's nothing startlingly new here, there's a freshness and vigor to the acting, and the crisscrossing love affairs hold your interest.

You may not like Beau Travail - which is, after all, a quintessential "critic's film" - but I think you'll have to admit it's been almost perfectly executed.

The most visually spectacular, action-packed and surreal of the adventures of Capt. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp).

A physically gorgeous production with a strong, clear conflict at its center. It's grueling but also exhilarating. Perhaps its ambitiousness is the film's biggest problem. Trying for dramatic sensitivity, historical scope, touching romance and shocking violence and suspense, it gets stretched too thin.

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.

The script is by Anthony Shaffer (Sleuth) and the mixture of dry wit and terror is expert. Hitchcock, who was 73 when he directed, demonstrates all his old skill and romantic pessimism. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

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

A confessional film that's almost too confessional--is like getting buttonholed by a casual acquaintance at a party and then subjected to a flood of highly intimate revelations that just don't stop.

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

The film's most memorable performance is in another supporting role, by Alan Cumming as hapless Frandsen, Olaf's sympathetic neighbor and a hopelessly inept farmer.

A comedy murder mystery gone seriously astray, boasts an immensely talented cast .

Fairly entertaining and often exciting, expertly done in a way, but not especially engaging or new, and not as emotionally involving as its title suggests.

Director Suri Krishnamma, depends on Finney for its power. His great performance carries the film over its shallow spots, its wish fulfillment, its pull toward caricature. [03 Feb 1995]

Jennifer 8 is smarter than most of the swanky scare machines, but it’s also too hemmed-in by convention and programmed scares. The game is too rigid: the player’s skills are being wasted. The movie, perhaps, should have been built entirely around those Garcia-Malkovich scenes--because it’s in the exchange of glances between those two, the scraped wariness of Garcia, the quiet, almost lazy sadism of Malkovich, that it really chills the blood.

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

One of the most intriguing prison dramas ever put on film.

Sometimes, it's exciting to watch a movie formula jell on screen-and that's what you can see happening in The Client, the latest, and best, of three successive films adapted from legal thrillers by John Grisham.

It's not a great movie, or one that should preoccupy you much afterwards, but it's certainly a good one. It's a fine debut for first-timer Mills.

One of the great, outrageously irreverent American movie comedies. [27 Sep 2005, p.C3]

Days of Heaven is the grand climax of the whole "Bonnie and Clyde"-"Badlands" tradition of outlaw-lovers-on-the-run movies. Shot by Nestor Almendros and the uncredited Haskell Wexler, it's a cinematographic masterpiece. [20 March 1998]

A movie of such cheerful craziness and nonstop ferocity that you can't take it seriously for a second.

Thompson has always had an evil sense of humor, and the movie repeatedly crosses the line between dramatizing a situation and exploiting it, exposing racism or moral rot and almost indulging in it. But the disturbance you feel in watching Kinjite doesn’t just come because it has a sordid subject, some bad scenes or a heavy cargo of shock and sleaze, but because it leaves us, much of the time, with no moral anchor.

An adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's tale of the follies of adventure--beautifully directed and shot (by Oswald Morris) and perfectly cast. [11 July 2003, p.C5]

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.

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.

Violent and cynical on the surface, impassioned and celebratory below, Last Man Standing is such a carefully stylized film that sometimes it's hard to respond to it. [20 Sep 1996, p.C]

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.

In the end, you can’t have much movie fun with freakiness if you aren’t willing to freak the movie out a little.

A movie I loved on first sight and, even more important, love in remembrance. Taken all in all, there's only one last thing to say about it. Go.

One of those movies that promises much but doesn't deliver. Despite a lot of misplaced talent, this movie is as silly and forced as its title.

Whatever its flaws, Funny Girl is one star vehicle that works perfectly for its subject.

Mantegna and Nussbaum are so good as the con artists that their reading of Mamet's dialogue--and often Crouse's reading as well--justifies the movie. These actors have worked many times on stage with Mamet, as have J. T. Walsh, and cardsharp Ricky Jay (as a Las Vegas gambler), and when they latch onto these lines, they're like seasoned pitchers palming and scuffing the ball. Oozing confidence, they, and Mamet, put on a coldly skillful, killingly well - calculated show.

A great, haunting film; it affects us in ways we're not used to...it is capable of both lifting our hearts and chilling us to the bone.

Just withers compared with many older, better movies about teen alienation and nihilism, from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "River's Edge."

Brando made Don Vito something we rarely see in movies: a tragicomic villain-hero, a vulnerable hood. The don is so close to a comic character -- the movie itself is so close to comedy -- that Brando's capacity to move us in the role is doubly impressive. At the end, it is the older Godfather's tenderness and sagacity we recall. [21 Mar 1997, Friday, p.A]

Solaris, an exploration of outer space and inner anguish, reminds us that science fiction can embrace adult ideas and human drama as well as technology and futuristic action.

It's the film for which Albright painted a series of progressively decaying portraits of Dorian, climaxing in a ghastly vision of venereal rot and putrescence. [27 Feb 1997, p.11B]

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]

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

A film that can tear you apart emotionally; it's both one of the great movie soap operas and a powerful indictment of racism. Sirk's cool, elegant style--smooth as silk on top, jagged and hot with feeling below--has rarely been joined to a more perfect subject. [05 May 2006, p.C9]