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."