Michael Wilmington

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]