Michael Wilmington

Mystic River is classic Eastwood, classic noir. If there is still some doubt about whether this one-time macho star is actually a world-class moviemaker, Mystic River should end the argument for good. One of the best American movies of the year, crisply well-crafted and beautifully acted.

The film's mood and style are pitched somewhere between '60s American indie and French New Wave and, as you watch these people, they seem painfully, amusingly on-target. They may irritate you a little, but that's the right response.

Magnificently sensuous and macabre.

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

This jolting tale of a 12-year-old girl possessed by the devil, her desperate movie actress mother and the two priests called in to exorcise the demon, actually seems a deeper movie now -- more intense, less formulaic or shallow. Yet it's also retained all its original hypnotic narrative grip. [2000 re-release]

This is a picture that may sound sappy but probably will enrapture audiences lucky enough to catch it. [19 May 1995, p.L]

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.

Baby Doll failed because it was stigmatized as dirty. Watching it now, it seems fresh and witty, knowing but not lewd. [26 May 2006, p.C1]

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]

Heroin may be a downer, but Trainspotting definitely takes you up…a series of roaring, provocative, outrageous highs. [26 July 1996, Friday, p.C]

All the "Star Wars" movies will continue to entertain us for many years to come. They were grand fun, and this last one's a corker.

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.

A stunner: a fiercely brilliant film of such wrenching impact, nonstop drive and unpredictability that watching it becomes an exhilarating ride.

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

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]

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

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

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 tone and feel of Wild Reeds keeps shifting between irony and sentimentality, violence and tenderness, rebellion and acceptance. And those oscillations fit the volatile nature of its subject: young love and friendship. Together with his attractive and excellent cast, Techine recalls and invokes the mood swings of youth, the intensity and bursts of near-delirious passion.

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]

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

A shocker for devotees of stylish angst and psychological torment. You'll have to watch it with patience and great attention, but it richly rewards that patience.

It is a movie about the gradual erosion of life's seeming certainties, and it's also about the destructive immorality that may lie beneath the most exquisitely composed veneer. As we watch "Chocolat," this great director and his great actress, Huppert, convince us: Evil is.

What's remarkable as we watch Lilya's plunge (and the brief, false rays of light that illuminate it) is how real Moodysson makes her plight, how intensely he makes us empathize with Lilya.

Action superstar Bruce Lee's consensus best movie and biggest international hit. Lee is a secret agent inflitrating a sinister island kung fu kingdom, battling John Saxton, Jim Kelly and the nefarious martial arts lord Shih Fien in famous set-pieces like the hall of mirror showdown.

Fuller amusingly mixes up his usual hard-knuckled muck-raking melodrama with a sort of soap opera, all done in raw, awesome black-and-white images. In its day, this was the locus classicus B-Movie American auteur thriller. [12 Feb 1999, p.R]