Michael Wilmington

Fessenden cooks up a likably offbeat horror movie. But somehow, it never jells, never really scares us.

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

Almost as uncompromising, and sometimes as funny, as "Dollhouse" or "Happiness."

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

It's hard to believe how bad this movie is.

This pretty but witless movie is well-produced, slickly directed -- full of jokes about hot dudes and hot babes pitched right at the "American Pie" crowd.

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

The movie is a paean to outsiders and reckless love.

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

Packs so much hell-for-leather action, gorgeous Moroccan scenery and eye-popping Industrial Light and Magic visual effects into its two hours that, after a while, I began to get tired of it.

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

It's a fast, funny picture, and the worst thing you can say about it is that it's no "Toy Story," no "Shrek." That may be true, but one thing Ice Age proves is that the new digitized cartoons are a form whose time has come.

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

The movie, like Hitch, tries to be cool, funny and sweet but falls on its face without generating any real sympathy, smarts or humor.

Makes compromises itself, but only because of its small budget and its director's mixed dark-and-rosy vision, at once cynical and sentimental. Yet at least it has a vision -- of both life and cinema.

Nonstrously over-whimsical. It's a gigantic, fatuous whoopie-cushion of a movie-big, smiley and flabbergastingly dumb. Watching it, you may get an odd, overwhelmed feeling, as if you were being smothered to death by party balloons. [15 Oct 1993, p.N]

The new Walt Disney version of "The Three Musketeers"-plushly mounted, but ineptly written and cast-gallops along like a gargantuan tutti-frutti wagon running amok. [12 Nov 1993, p.C]

It's the material that's a problem, its sheer emptiness. Gottlieb and co-writer Ed Rugoff are clumsily trying to re-create something that's better if it's done cannily, with no illusions.

Fairly well done but deadly dull futuristic thriller.

The film mixes unashamed kitsch, thrilling airfight scenes and dark historical drama. But what gives it a special charge is its portrait of the Czech RAF group: what happened to them before, during and after the war.

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

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

There are good movies, bad movies and confoundingly bad movies. My Favorite Martian belongs to that rare third category. [12 Feb 1999, p.A]

A spectacular, engrossing, big-hearted film based on one of Korea's great national epics and made by that country's top filmmaker.

The movie is Rambo crossed with Fraternity Vacation and a bad cartoon version of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It's an amazingly senseless movie, done with blood-curdling confidence. Each jaw-dropping howler is staged with such rattling intensity and perfect, seamless idiocy that it becomes weirdly amusing.

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

Extraordinary film, one that, like the museum itself, captures and shows three centuries of Russian culture and history in all its beauty, confusion, terror and majesty.

The film is De Palma's tribute to film noir, to Paris and to the cinema itself.

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

Slick adaptation of Woody Allen's play.

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

A film masterpiece, restored more than three decades after its French release, "Army" remains a superb, coolly accurate portrait of a living hell recalled by two men who knew it well and record it truly, Melville and novelist Joseph Kessel.

Sam Firstenberg--a decent enough action director who's shepherded along three previous ninja movies--here has a story so preposterous that nothing short of a mutiny could make the movie work.

Sometimes one performance makes a film worthwhile, and Junebug has one: an astonishing, moving portrayal of down-home innocence and optimism by Amy Adams.

Has the air of a film and actor (Beatty)reaching clumsily for a golden past that's gone.

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

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

Strikes me as something of an elaborate mistake, a wasted opportunity and a script Hartley should have discarded. But I liked it anyway.

If that wistful, cleareyed melancholy were its primary mood, Gas Food Lodging might have been a little masterpiece. It isn't -- but it's good enough. Anders gets the externals of her vision of Laramie: a world of high skies, searing deserts, dusty stores and roads that vanish into a flat horizon. And the internals: the bickering, hurts, dreams and little everyday epiphanies. If many movies avoid or disguise the world, shining it up beyond recognition, Gas Food Lodging takes the opposite approach, a better one. It jumps right into life, faces it with careless affection, clarity and courage. [14 Aug 1982, p.F8]

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

There's the script -- and that's the problem.

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

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

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

A lively little Australian rock movie hamstrung and sunk by one of the least successful story ideas I've seen recently.

In compositions lustrously lit and creamily colorful as an elegant piece of soft-core porno, the moviemakers guide us through Veronica’s life, from virginity to bawdy fame to sainthood. Reality never intrudes — even though the script obviously wants to set us straight about gender, femininity and political power in 16th Century Venice.

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

A comedy that seems to have most everything going for it but the ability to make us laugh.

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

As bizarre, provocative and almost deliberately off-putting an indie picture as anything that's popped up in theaters recently.

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

Unlike many “adult” moviemakers, Henson believed his core audience capable of appreciating wit, irony, topical humor, idealism, intense emotion and bemused reflections on real life and all its complexity. All these, and more, are present in The Witches.

The King simply unsettles and bothers us -- and it finally misses both the true terror and the twisted redemption it needs for its wicked song, a would-be "Heartbreak Hotel" of horror, to really chill our spines.

The Nativity Story surprised me. I didn't expect such an obvious art film approach. Yet the Bible, in the King James version, is great English literature.

While some of the second-generation road movies are interesting, few have retained the hypnotic force of Two Lane Blacktop, an intense curio of a troubled era.

A gripping, very intelligent British thriller. Slowly, inexorably, it ties you in knots.

Great direction, script (A.I. Bezzerides), score (Bernard Herrmann). [25 Aug 2006, p.C7]

Certainly Crocodile Dundee is nothing you can examine deeply or mull over afterward. It's simply an expert crowd-pleaser. It has such a sure, easy, confident touch that it's almost failure-proof--like a tip of the hat, a sip of beer, a quick, golden G'day.

It's an ensemble piece with a dark, salty mood that reminded me of Robert Altman and Robert Aldrich, with a touch of Francis Ford Coppola. It's notably non-"gung ho."

An Oscar winner for best foreign-language film, its ideas were later perfected in the masterly "Playtime." [27 Aug 2004, p.C3]

Trains are perfect settings for murder mysteries and thrillers. The best of them -- surpassing Murder on the Orient Express, The Narrow Margin, Runaway Train and dozens of others -- is Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

Based on Richard Llewellyn's stirring memoir of his Welsh boyhood, this is one of the great John Ford films, a multiple Oscar winner (it beat out Citizen Kane) and a strong, lyrical, deeply moving family saga set during a time of labor turbulence and social change. [11 Sep 1998, p.K]

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

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

An unashamed art picture, the kind of film where extreme aestheticism mixes with nightmare dread, where the story resembles a bad dream and where Freudian symbols cluster around the events like a swarm of insects. It's a very pretty film, but it's also lean, enigmatic and so obscure.

82-year-old Ingmar Bergman takes one of the most painful, shameful episodes of his own life and, writing for director Liv Ullmann, transmutes it into magical, brilliant artistry.

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

Tries to take us from heaven to hell but winds up leaving us in limbo: exasperated and dumfounded.

Attack of the Clones celebrates a certain youthful spirit in both moviemaking and movie watching; because it's as much phenomenon as movie, audiences will either ride with or reject it. I was happy to take the ride.

Probing... haunting.

Badlands is about a landscape as much as the couple fleeing across it. Watching it, you sense that Malick finds his outlaw lovers beautiful and terrible, pathetic and monstrous, funny and overwhelmingly sad. [27 March 1998]

This hip, highly partisan biography of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey is a surprisingly entertaining movie about the perils of studying sexual behavior in a sexually uptight culture--our own.

It's a nice little film, likable but not exceptional, and it will probably appeal most strongly to actors, would be-actors, wannabes and ex-actors.

Beautifully remastered and containing Cocteau's long-unseen special prologue and credits -- is as much a feat of feverish delight as it was in the dark days of Vichy and WWII.

Won't make your day, but it won't kill it either.

Another masterpiece from one of the world's more neglected great directors, a master artist who here reveals the soul of another.

A stark, painful drama about pregnancy--a subject rarely treated this fully, candidly or tragically.

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

It's an easygoing epic -- and John Wayne, as the one-eyed, booze-swilling bounty hunter who tracks the baddies down, gives a lusty, amusingly overripe performance. [08 Oct 2000, p.49]

The Gate, whatever minor triumphs it dredges up, is too hopelessly copycat. It's basically powdered Speilberg on Zwieback toast and Stephen King on a stick. [19 May 1987, p.3]

Kieslowski's beautiful, sad and clear-eyed The Decalogue -- an overwhelming psychological and spiritual epic for our times -- faces the darkness, sends out a song against the storm.

Life can be funny, sad, conventional, unpredictable -- or a pain in the tail. And so can Life, the new Eddie Murphy movie. [16 April 1999, Tempo, p.4]

It's hard to create snap-crackling languor or laid-back frenzy. And there's also something condescending in the entire conception of Mixed Nuts. [21 Dec 1994, p.7]

Told with such sadness and exaltation, such mastery of image and sound, that watching it makes you feel renewed and hopeful.

Brighton Beach Memoirs may be one of Simon’s best plays, but the film’s heart seems to be beating in a plastic wrapper. There’s a kind of glace over everything, a sugary show-biz coat that dulls your taste buds. Everything is bigger, brighter and broader than it should be--though remnants of that simpler, more honest story often peek through.

Sayles accomplishes another of his coups here. Eschewing all sentiment, avoiding all pathos, keeping his film and most of the women hard as nails, he manages to tell a compelling story.

Some movies delight you. Some stimulate and provoke. Some enlighten and inform. And some simply hand you a rousing good time-- does all of that and more.

A grotesque slumgullion of kung fu, studio schlock and pseudo-Dumas swashbuckling that leaves you longing for Doug Fairbanks --or even Don Ameche and The Ritz Brothers.

It's not that the movie is bad; it's merely uninspired and relatively clueless about Kaufman.

Happily was begun as an old-fashioned 2-D "flat" cartoon and then switched by producer John Williams (of "Shrek") and director Paul J. Bolger to 3-D during production. The style finally is an uncomfortable amalgam of both.

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

A wry romantic comedy set among Bruno's targets, the Grenoble bourgeois.

Townsend seemed to me ill-matched as a romantic hero: way too moony-eyed and mushy to cope with the likes of the towering Theron and torchy Cruz.

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

John Wayne's Ethan is his all-time top performance: funny, romantic, hard-bitten, scary, the personification of machismo.

Rambo is an inane sequel to a fairly good melodrama; another example of an attempt to repeat an earlier success that goes wildly out of scale.

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

Justly renowned as the most realistic movie on pro football, this is the iconoclastic portrait of savvy, rebellious receiver Phil Elliott (Nick Nolte) who finds himself a target for coaches, owners, players and fate itself. [14 May 2000, p.33]

As a sheer ghostly thriller, it's mostly a spell-binder, but I was disappointed at the ending.

Though it's somewhat better than its predecessor, largely through sheer directorial and photographic panache, it's still pretty disreputable and mindless. [29 Apr 1988, p.4]

Mantel and Skrovan's documentary astutely reminds us of why we need the world's Naders. It's a reasonable movie about an often admirably unreasonable man.

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

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

One of the most ingenious, amusing and oddly affectionate horror movies of the year -- a bloody bonbon that you chew with relish. [22 May 1987, p.6]

Bigelow gets a scary poetry out of these landscapes--and though the film is erratic, it has force and passion...It works on your nerves--not necessarily through its big shock scenes, but through the atmosphere it creates: the sense of dread, no exit, lives plunging out of control, the secret mad pull of murder and outlawry.

Ozu's informal '50s-set remake of "I Was Born, But . . . ." Not as lyrical as its model, but just as penetrating, this one, made in bright colors and flat surfaces that suggest the era's television dramas, has another obstreperous brother-combo who stage gas-expelling contests and wage a war to get, coincidentally, a family TV. [25 Nov 2005, p.C4]

Mind-numbing sequel to "Pokemon the First Movie."

The Statement is an older man's film, and compassion is one of its strengths; Jewison and Caine make us feel pity and terror for the victims as well.

This is the best of all the Tracy-Hepburn comedies--and one whose unabashedly feminist screenplay seems more incisive with each passing year. [10 Mar 2006, p.C7]

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

Shot in Chicago, this is a picture that looks better than it sounds and is made much better than it deserves to be.

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

There isn't a single performance in Midnight Run that doesn't have a pulse, that doesn't show the actors at their best or near-best, especially De Niro. [20 July 1988]

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

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

One of the most hopeful movies I've seen recently--not just for its humane, realistic story line, but in its very being.

It's a film that is mystifying and haunting -- a cool, brotherly vision of the last day and the coming flood, of American dreams and the vanishing frontier.

There isn't a moment in Shanghai Triad that celebrates or revels in violence, and by movie's end, Zhang has portrayed the Shanghai underworld as a place of irredeemable evil.

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

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

It's a tasty but evasive treat, no matter what your taste in politics or movies.

It's one of those movies where talented filmmakers waste time with stale, phony material.

What makes Eraserhead great-and still, perhaps the best of all Lynch's films? Intensity. Nightmare clarity. And perhaps also it's the single-mindedness of its vision; Lynch's complete control over this material, where, working on a shoestring, he served as director, producer, writer, editor and sound designer.

Even if you enjoyed the mean, funny 1995 John Travolta-Elmore Leonard crime comedy "Get Shorty"-and many of us did-this forced sequel isn't likely to help you repeat the experience.

Should have worked on our emotions like a scalpel, made us cry and bleed. But, though it's an affecting, polished film, it's not satisfying. [12 March 1999, Friday, p.A]

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

When Side Out gets to its “meat"--intercutting the beach with the law firm, intercutting frantic lovemaking with a tough volleyball loss, intercutting the beach with life, intercutting bikinis with more bikinis--we know we’re dealing with shameless button-pressers.

There's something light and insubstantial about this movie. It almost floats away as you watch it.

A rare thriller - and a rare American film - that centers on both dramatic and moral issues, crises of conscience. And thanks to a superb central performance by Nicholson as detective Black, it's a film that compels, thrills and ends up coming very close to tragedy.

Though they're a good pair (Hopkins and Rock), this isn't a very good movie. It's slick but hollow.

Has the worst happy ending I've seen in a while.

Kansas City is a wonderful film, done with all Altman's offbeat virtuosity, maverick humor and creative daring -- plus the acid nip that runs through all his recent works.

The musical evergreen, with Irene Dunne billed over Fred and Ginger. [03 Nov 2006, p.C5]

The diversity of the Beauty Shop ensemble is a large part of what makes it so much fun to watch;

Like Workman's other films, it's a time capsule that sings.

Robin Williams is such a great comic virtuoso that it can almost hurt to see him straining to pump life into a conventional, uninspired, sometimes-goofy big-studio comedy such as RV.

If you haven't gotten hooked already on Michael Apted's series--collectively, one of the great documentaries in the history of the cinema--you should prepare yourself for the latest installment, 49 Up.

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

M. Butterfly, David Cronenberg's visually stunning but oddly cold and sparkless adaptation of the much-prized David Henry Hwang play. [08 Oct 1993]

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

The elements don't quite jell here, and the ending doesn't work, but they all have a racy charm anyway. [19 Dec 1999, p.34]

Minghella's psychological redraft muffles the menace, squanders the tension, throws away the main character and plot engine and turns Ripley into something he never was or should be.

It's "Rear Window" with kids, and it's gorgeously shot with long, looming, twisted perspectives on actual New York locations, by cinematographer-turned-director Tetzlaff ("Notorious"). [27 Feb 2000, p.27C]

In a movie that dwells so wittily and movingly on forgiveness, you have to grant pardon. Clarkson alone makes "April" a feast.

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

Like an episode of "Friends" where the entire cast has been given aphrodisiacs and locked up.

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

Bad as the overall design remains, individual scenes keep sparking alive, partly because the dialogue, or delivery, seems fresh, and improvisatory; partly because Van Peebles, in his directorial debut, figures out unusual or athletic camera designs for every scene. It's obvious he has talent, equally obvious there's no way this story can work right, no matter how strenuous the staging.

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

Withering study of white-collar alcoholics.

A flabbergasting waste of time and talent.

Great Balls of Fire would be an entertaining evening even if it preserved nothing more than Lewis' songs -- rerecorded by Lewis with all the soul and groin-stirring fury that he has preserved during three decades. It also has an often-dazzling comic impersonation of Lewis by Dennis Quaid, a goofy ballet of awesomely confident struts and brags. [30 June 1989, p.1]

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

It's still strangely remote, only fitfully romantic, never really convincing.

The first half hour of Hot Chick, before the switch, plays like soft-core porno from the '60s. The rest plays like a bad "Saturday Night Live" sketch stretched to the breaking point.

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

This is a better movie than the vacuous "Insurrection," thanks largely to a sympathetic screenwriter, longtime "Trek" fanatic John Logan ("Gladiator"), and a crew (headed by Patrick Stewart's Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and Brent Spiner's android Data) determined to go out in glory.

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

Should please its core audience, which includes anyone who might actually want to win a date with Tad Hamilton. Others may opt to wait for another date with Kate Bosworth -- or Nathan Lane.

Despite Fiennes' splendid moodiness and Tyler's radiant vulnerability, despite lovely settings... this movie is dull.

Hoodwinked treats "Red Riding Hood" as a detective story we've never really understood until now, with nuttier motivations, more complex characters and a screwier climax.

An offbeat, poetic piece that eschews the terse, hard-boiled style of the standard cop movie or TV show for something softer-centered and more nakedly emotional.

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

Sometimes funny, often strained comedy.

Showing us both Ruby and her Paradise in his loving, calm, unexaggerated way, Nunez gives us one of the warmest and most genuinely affirmative American movies of the year. [26 Nov 1993, p.C]

A unique portrait of modern crime and punishment, gives us terror without filters, a tragic event captured in all its initial immediacy and anguished aftermath.

It's a Hitchockian "wrong man" story, but there's a twist.

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

It has a good director, snazzy visuals and some really funny animals, and that's at least half the battle.

An amazing film, still a shocker after all these years. [07 Sep 2001, p.C1]

Carrera's style is hard-hitting, lucid and technically superior (if unimaginative). El Crimen del Padre Amaro eventually moves and stirs you, even if it often resembles those steamy Mexican TV dramas/soap operas called telenovelas.

The British hated it (because their soldiers took Burma), but this is a rock-solid Walsh actioner, with Errol Flynn, James Brown and Henry Hull. [06 Apr 2007, p.C7]

The script isn't really good enough to worry about whether it's being over-directed; in fact, E. Elias Merhige's over-direction is one of the best things about this movie--along with Ben Kingsley's grimly unstoppable killer-of-killers, Benjamin O'Ryan.

The movie holds up far better than its detractors guessed - splendidly, in fact - not only thanks to Scott's spellbinding acting, but to the epic imagery, Coppola's (and Edmund North's) highly intelligent script and Schaffner's lucid, perfectly controlled direction.

(Matthau's) is a truly magical performance: hilarious, unguarded and deeply touching.

Two gifted co-stars, Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, and the highly imaginative thriller specialist Phillip Noyce lend some luster and credibility to another borderline-absurd scenario.

A dark comedy that blows up like an exploding cigar, leaving nothing much behind but smoke, noise and a bad taste.

In some ways it's not a film that surprises us much. But it's a notable directorial debut anyway -- smartly written, very well cast and skillfully done.

It's an entertaining picture, classy and well executed, but as much as any film I've seen recently, this lush new version of the 1969 Michael Caine thriller tends to prove that, where thrillers are concerned, "more" is often less.

Blue City has exactly one thing to recommend it: Ry Cooder’s typically funky, steely, hard-edged score. Overall, it’s such a flabbergasting turkey--misfiring in every conceivable direction--that it may actually improve if you watch it with your eyes shut.

This subtle, beautifully shot film is a gently ironic study of the relationship between a Turkish filmmaker, who has returned to his country home to make an independent movie, and his elderly father, whom he has recruited as an actor. [13 Oct 2000, p.L]

This film carries us so touchingly into their world, it would take a heart of stone, finally, to ignore them.

One funny movie - for at least half the time.

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

Hannibal, riding the malicious wit of Hopkins' sophisticated fiend, is a gorgeous, wild, sometimes sick thriller, a feast for enraptured eyes and strong stomachs.

It’s not the gem it wants to be, but it’s good in comparison to many of the sensation-hungry pictures around it; it’s not just a movie only a mother could love.

As a horror show, it's a cut--or a slash or a bloody whack--above most movies of this type: cleverly written, cleverly cast.

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

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

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

If you ignore the script--a good strategy for most recent major studio movies--there’s a lot of talent here. But Cimino’s Hours, instead of getting desperate, gets desperately pretty.

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

Another of many recent Hollywood plotless wonders.

It's just another Williams and Crystal movie. But let's see a few more.

In The Haunting, the moviemakers succeed in something very difficult: creating a haunted house with real personality and terror. [23 July 1999, p.A]

A Christmas season evergreen.

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

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

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

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

The movie isn't quite spry, warm or hip enough to carry out its very ambitious serio-comic agenda. Even for an ace like Levinson, Belfast is a long way from Baltimore.

Whether you're won over depends on your own taste for ineptitude. Like the others in the Worrell saga, Ernest Goes to Jail is a movie with couch-potato stylistics and switching-channel logic. Watching it is like sitting with a lukewarm TV dinner for an hour or so, while somebody tries to pound you into a Smurf. [09 Apr 1990, p.F12]

Teen Wolf Too embellishes its inane, cookie-cutter plot with remote direction, witless dialogue and charmless characters.

A commendably brave piece, but less focused and powerful than you'd like. In the end, Garapedian might have been better off concentrating her energy on the 1915 Armenian story--which has been told on film various times (for example, in "Forty Days of Musa Dagh" and Atom Egoyan's "Ararat"), but never with the power of, say, "The Pianist" or "Schindler's List."

It's a gleamingly cracked tale of romance gone mad played out on a moonlit ocean voyage that turns into a bizarre, floating nightmare of slapstick perversion. [08 Apr 1994, p.A]

No matter how many heists you've seen, how many gangs you've watched fall apart or how many aging crooks you've seen walk up a mean street to a violent destiny, Rififi never loses its ruthless grace and force.

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

One of the more sophisticated of Disney's early '80s offerings; the direction by Jack Clayton ("The Innocents") is high-style, convulsively screamy. [16 Jun 1993, p.F8]

A powerful film made with minimal means, it's a story of poor people on the fringes of society, done without sentimentality or condescension but with wicked humor.

This movie makes sexual adventurism seems so ludicrous, that it might have been made by Puritans in disguise, trying to portray hedonists as a pack of fatheads.

The third film, After the Life, much like "On the Run," mixes a hard-edged, relentless and stripped-down crime tale with a compassionate overview.

A big, empty picture full of star turns, artificial energy and jokes that don't quite work, even if stars Willis and Perry do their best to slam them across.

Though relatively little-known, this ingenious romantic chase thriller, based on Josephine Tey's "A Shilling for Candles," is one of Hitchcock's most inventive and charming '30s films. [22 Jan 1999, p.F]

While the movie is never dull, its romantic fodder doesn't do justice to any period at all.

even in the notable ranks of Leigh's movie, TV and theater work-an oeuvre embracing high comedy, biting comment and shivering pathos-Naked is extraordinary. In the hands of Leigh and his magnificently gifted, gutsy cast, these days and nights on London's streets burn themselves on our minds.

A classic comedy. [25 May 2007, p.C7]

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

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

Begins like a house afire and then fizzles out into a quasi-supernatural dead end.

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

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

Top Gun is a male bonding adventure movie that's both exciting and disturbing, mind-boggling and vacuous...Measuring this movie against its model -- Hawks' air films -- you can see the difference between a great director making his movies breathe, and a superproduction that depends on action and hardware. Top Gun is an empty-headed technological marvel. The actors -- especially Anthony Edwards, Val Kilmer and Meg Ryan -- are good, but they only connect as archetypes. The emotion heats up only when the planes are flying. [16 May 1986, p.C1]

When it's just roaring along through a kaleidoscope of Los Angeles locations, the camera perched behind, above or below the skateboarding heroes and villains, the movie can be fun. It's shot in an extravagant, try-anything, music-video style. It's rattlingly paced, vibrant and splashy. Then we get to the story. Stop me if you've heard this one: Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl. Sound familiar? Try this for extra spice. Two warring teen-age gangs clash--the free-and-breezy Valley Guy "Ramp Locals" and the swaggering, black leather, bone-in-the-nose "Daggers."

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

What makes "Ladybird, Ladybird" work so well-what enables Loach's actors, especially Crissy Rock and Vladimir Vega, to bring off such extraordinary, deeply moving scenes-is the film's strange mixture of compassion and an unsparing eye. [20 Jan 1995, p.C2]

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

A delicately crafted, gently inflected, lovely little movie about the need for love, directed and co-written by Singapore's Eric Khoo ("Mee Pok Man").

Entertaining, surprisingly well-written and often rowdily amusing picture. It is predictable in many ways but also full of heart, humor and personality.

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]

Pure magic, a three-act movie fantasy that transports us -- as the best films do -- to a world of its own, a place of ambiguous joy and delirious terror.

Despite studio indifference, this was perhaps the one time in his career Sam Peckinpah enjoyed an uncomplicated, nearly universal critical response: The movie was instantly hailed as a modern Western classic. [18 May 1997, p.81]

The movie has something of treasure to offer us: two great screen actors, connecting magically. Why show an unconvincing world of crime, incest and violence when, with Deneuve and Auteuil, you can open up a richer world of intellect and thwarted desire? [27 Dec 1996, p.C]

Both a great concert movie and an amazing documentary of mid-'60s cutting-edge pop culture, this cinema verite record of Bob Dylan's pre-electric, pre-Band 1965 British tour was such a candid and unsparing look at stardom's inner sanctums and Dylan's caustic personality, audiences were shocked. [29 Oct 1999, p.M]

Final Destination 3 is a gorefest that should either slake your worst appetites or drive you to the exits.

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

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.

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

Clive Barker's Hellraiser is one of the more original and memorable horror movies of the year: a genuinely scary, but also nearly stomach-turning experience by a genre specialist who seemingly wallows in excess and loves pushing conventions to their ghastly limits. [18 Sep 1987, p.18]

It's a simple-seeming but luminous movie, an intelligent, very funny and dead-on small-town comedy-drama adapted and directed by Robert Benton from Richard Russo's gently humorous 1993 novel. [13 Jan 1995, p.C]

This time around, the razors are a little duller, the clicks not as slick, the patter not as snappy.

After a fairly good, tense opening, it keeps rolling up one preposterous scene after another.

Perhaps the most typical of all the "Road" pictures: melodic, low-pressure, funny. [02 Apr 2000, p.C38]

The kind of smart, realistic indie family drama the movies should give us more often, just as they should more often offer performances as full-blooded and rich as Aiello's and Curtin's here.

There's too much hardware, too little sense. Too much blood, too little flesh. Too much program, too little mind. That's the virus of the contemporary movie techno-thriller.

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

This Universal sci-fi saga has little of the style or atmosphere of the studio's '30s horror classics; its stars are amiable Richard Carlson and Julia Adams. But it does have a unique monster: the Amazonian gill man, a lovelorn amphibian who spots Adams underwater and doesn't stop swimming after her until the very last minute. [30 Oct 1998, p.I]

Something that gets your motor racing briefly, but which you've seen all too often.

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

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, the co-stars of Out to Sea, keep fooling, beguiling and surprising us. Nothing can sink or ruffle them. Even with substandard scripts or dubious projects, they remain one of the greatest comedy actor teams the American movies have had: two longtime stars with formidable talents who complement each other perfectly. [02 July 1997, p.2]

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

Few Alfred Hitchcock movies are more fun to watch than To Catch a Thief. [15 Jun 2007, p.C7]

You know the drill: Seven gates of hell. The walking dead. Blood and spurting eyeballs. Strictly for horror mavens hungry for kitsch. [03 Jul 1998]

The film is not exactly a documentary, and not quite a period horror movie either. But it has elements of both. At its best, it's hypnotic and provocative.

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

Hilary Swank gives a powerhouse performance as a maverick high school teacher in Freedom Writers, an often gripping and sometimes even inspiring film drama taken from the real-life story of Erin Gruwell.

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

Jafar Panahi of Iran is one of his country's great filmmakers, and Offside is his best movie to date.

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

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

You’d have to stretch hard to call this movie--a young-love-on-the-run chase thriller with political undercurrents--a success. The story often lacks credibility or a mainspring; its heart sticks too hard to its sleeve. But there are compensating factors: warmth, guts, ambition.

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

Serves up horrendous lead acting, murky cinematography, bland atmosphere, unengaging romance, mug-crazy cameo performances, bash-on-the-head satire and ill-timed slapstick gags that look like outtakes from a Bozo the Clown show gone berserk. [20 Oct 1995]

An oppressively cute Manhattan time-travel romantic comedy that’s lost in time, space and cliches.

The movie loses its magic by the time the solution is revealed.

Directed by Julian Jarrold and co-written by Tim Firth ("Calendar Girls"), the movie is quite enjoyable, effortlessly well-done on every level, even moving at times, but relatively light weight.

Erratically acted and, at times, clumsily written.

It's a movie that's so personal, naked and vulnerable that you can understand why some of its humor seems rough, some of its visuals excessive. But Crooklyn has a quality not as obvious in any Lee film since "Do the Right Thing": the sense of a whole world opening, rich and real, before your eyes. [13 May 1994, p.A]