Michael Wilmington

Elegant, scary fun.

Like the cerebral palsy-stricken Irish artist Christy Brown of "My Left Foot," Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar-winning role, Ami is forced to fight such overwhelming odds to express himself that his very limitations become an aid to his vision.

Zbanic, who lived through the Bosnian war in Sarajevo, is an unusual talent. Here, she makes us feel the hell her characters once lived through as well as the leftover, stinging pain of today.

It's an extraordinary performance in an often brave and intelligent film that, unfortunately, tends to collapse around him in the end -- just as the world of Kline's character, tweedy but likable William Hundert, deconstructs around him.

There's nothing particularly original or striking about Ping Pong except its style. It's a breezy, likable story, and the director here, Fumihiko Sori, obviously enjoys his work.

Called "Nuovomondo" in its native Italy, it's bittersweet, neither as comic and sentimental as Charlie Chaplin's 1917 great silent comedy "The Immigrant," nor as cynical and epic as Elia Kazan's 1963 "America, America," but close to both.

A highly provocative documentary.

Kika is kind of a mess. But it's a charming, stimulating, talented and ingratiating mess, none-the-less.

Perhaps Bergman's most typical variation on one of his major themes: the clash between raffish theatrical artists and sober rulers. [10 Dec 2005, p.C4]

The power of art to redeem the pain and cruelty of life is demonstrated to enormous effect inShakespeare Behind Bars.

Ragged as some of it might have been, that old "Out-of-Towners" had a unified and surprisingly dark comic vision to go with its nifty one-liners. This big, glossy picture is set in movie-movie land, that shiny, peachy place where a celebrity -- like Mayor Rudy -- waits around every corner. [2 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

Anyone who thinks nothing is happening in The Scent of Green Papaya-in the absence of car chases, rapes, gunfights and whatever else we may now demand from our entertainment-is obviously not paying attention. [11 Mar 1994, p.D]

The best things about The Last Boy Scout are the editing, Bill Medley's singing, a few moments of Noble Willingham villainy and Willis--whose weary, exasperated style exactly suits this kind of material. But the worst things about Scout are its slickness and self-confidence. A story about lonely heroism in a sick age should be a little hipper to what's really heroic and what's really sick.

The movie overflows with action, slapstick and cliches, but the cliches never impede the action, and the slapstick is so expertly performed, it doesn't annoy you -- much.

Has what we usually want to see in movies like this: bravura action, tongue-in-cheek humor, but most of all attitude.

The men here are negligible, but all the actresses are good -- especially Dunst, who shows a previously unrevealed gift for blending cold conservative roots, starchy appearance, forgiveness and unexpected redemption.

Every scene in this cautionary tale about science running amok has spectacular views, unusual camera angles and moves, or dazzlingly outre computer effects. And every scene, story-wise, gets mushier and more outlandish or perfunctory--until the movie seems disengaged from itself.

Tries to blend old film noir and new high-tech thriller styles with only sporadic impact.

Democracy might not really come from a bottle of shampoo, but "Beauty Academy" teaches us that, sometimes, mascara really matters.

It's a misfire--but a fascinating, magnetic misfire, a film full of first-rate talents forced into absurdity, struggling to bring believability to nonsense. [22 September 1995, Friday, p. C]

An excellent, unforgettable film.

Something about baseball seems to bring out the silly side in moviemakers -- even in a movie like The Fan, which starts out well-crafted and deadly serious and seems to have good enough actors and a savvy enough director to stay that way. But halfway through this thriller things go haywire. [16 Aug 1996, p.D]

Funny Games is an intellectual's suspense film, which ultimately tries to critique and demystify violence. But, since our responses are never all cerebral, that's not entirely possible.

Is this the modern version of "Going My Way," with those squabbling, heart-warming Irish Catholic priests mixing up pop songs and hymns? Well, in a way it almost is, though its mood is far different and it's set in a far different world that moves to a different tempo and has graver and more troubling social crises.

The sum of all snores until the moviemakers start blowing up Baltimore halfway through. Then the special-effects people take over for about 20 breathless minutes.

It's a slick, ambitious movie that doesn't always nail all the many moods and themes it's after.

A visually sumptuous, bullet-train-paced thriller with a really provocative theme.

A grand ride. Sleek, beautiful and packed with emotion, not too flashy but full of heart, this is a movie worthy of its unlikely yet glorious subject: Depression-era America's best-loved racehorse and the two races that made him a legend.

This likable heavenly fantasy comedy was a big '40s crowd-pleaser. [14 Aug 1998, p.M]

Ferocious action saga about an old samurai (Mifune) taking a stand against his lord's cruelty and injustice. [03 Mar 2006, p.C5]

It's not a hasty, knocked-together promo job--though it is clearly pro-Kerry.

It's permeated with a sweetness and vulnerability unusual for any crime movie. [29 May 1998, p.N]

Though the story is potentially fascinating and the visuals sometimes spellbinding, the movie itself is stranded in the purgatory of the second-rate.

Jam-packed mishmash of wall-to-wall music, trenchant character study, slick sociology and sly witty-Brit comedy.

An almost terminally sappy youth romance.

In this bizarre tale of man among the apes and a psychiatrist among madmen -- an over-emotional hybrid of "Gorillas in the Mist" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" -- style buries substance.

Has great themes and great actors.

One of the great movie horror tales, with one of the greatest of all movie villains, appeared to relatively little fanfare in 1955 when actor Charles Laughton released his sole movie directorial effort: a startlingly Gothic visualization of Davis Grubb's Southern nightmare novel The Night of the Hunter.[23 Nov 2001, p.C5]

A deliberately old-fashioned picture that succeeds in nearly everything it tries to do.

A wonderful, heart-breaking movie.

Without Lemmon and Matthau, it's doubtful either "Grumpy" movie would be worth watching -- or even thinking about. But, because these two get much of their humor from reactions, the magnificent friction they create, they can say ridiculous things -- or even make up ridiculous lines (which they seem to be doing here) -- and make the scenes play. [22 Dec 1995, p.P]

Most of the rest of this Hamlet effective or lovely as parts of it may be, just keeps sawing at the air in a drafty hall and pouring all its light on Mel Gibson and his angelic stubble. [18 Jan 1991]

A cautionary tale of paranoia and prejudice. [25 Jul 2003, p.C1]

The imagination, energy, chutzpah and sheer affection shown for Darin by director-writer-star Spacey, who plays the singer, are admirable, kicky. This is a movie, that, like Darin himself, takes a lot of chances and delivers on many of them.

A bad, bad movie...It's loud and dumb and it wastes a good cast on a ludicrous script.

Sunset Blvd. remains one of the best, truest, funniest, saddest and scariest of all movies about Hollywood. [09 Jun 2006, p.C8]

Becket, now richly restored, is one of those '60s British theatrical spectaculars that we always imagine as a bit better than they were.

One of the screen's great portrayals of the hell-raising and malaise of young men in their 20s, hit Italy like a comic thunderbolt when it was released there in 1953 -- and it struck the American art-house audience in much the same way when it premiered here in 1956. Now it returns, and unlike its five aging-boy protagonists, this movie hasn't lost its first youth.

One of the screen's supreme works and perhaps Ingmar Bergman's finest film, "Persona" is also his most radical in form and technique.

For all Ricci's zingers, the actress who gets the most laughs here is Kudrow, who has an amazingly right-on offbeat comic sense and rhythm. Playing a bright, sexually repressed Indiana teacher, she displays priceless timing. [19 June 1998]

Critters is a dumb, but sometimes likable little movie: maybe an odd comment, since it contains savage killings, mutilations and general bloodshed and evisceration. [25 Apr 1986, p.8]

In Color Me Kubrick, John Malkovich has one of the roles of his life, and he acts it up like a haughty gourmet who's just picked up a succulent treat.

Smith's story is a charmer: touching, funny, romantic, perceptive, absorbing and full of color and character. And the movie, which has been respectfully and affectionately handled by people who obviously love their source, captures most of those qualities.

The Zellweger-Firth-Grant triangle works as irresistibly as Hepburn-Grant-Stewart in "The Philadelphia Story."

Los Angeles has always been the capital city of film noir..., but few movies present a darker, bleaker view of the city than Roman Polanski's 1974 Chinatown. [17 Oct 1997, p.o]

Children and animals, if they're handled right, can be among the great natural movie actors, and in The Cave of the Yellow Dog, writer-director Byambasuren Davaa handles her cast of youngsters and creatures (and a few adults) heartwarmingly well.

Some movies are a joy. Some are a chore. And some are sheer torture. A good example of the latter is Virus. [17 January 1999, Metro Chicago, p.8]

The role sounds like a sentimental trap, but Penn doesn't fall into it. It's a sensational performance, and he illumines a movie that sometimes seems in danger of descending into modish Hollywood political correctness.

Most of the original play's magical speeches are preserved here, and however far this film may seem to stray from the original text, the delights remain. [14 May 1999, Friday, p.A]

Pearce and Bonham Carter are remarkably photogenic, but the movie is fitful and mannered to a fault, full of watery allusions and stormy scares.

Achieves a mellowness and melancholy that recalls the jazzy dissonance of director (and here, composer) Eastwood's best work: "The Outlaw Josey Wales," "Bird," "Unforgiven" and "Mystic River."

Melodrama triumphs. But here's at least some muted applause for a fine cast and filmmakers trying to confront the real world and its shadows.

I can't imagine a better actress for this part than Australian-born Cate Blanchett. Blanchett, who can be regal ("Elizabeth") or slutty ("The Shipping News"), manages to catch the feel of Guerin.

All Center of the World has is the double entendre of its title, some unremarkable dramatic and sex scenes, and some embarrassing moments for its very game co-stars.

Brilliant adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's 20th Century comic-erotic classic. [08 Jul 2005, p.C2]

Disappointingly, X-Men: The Last Stand slides back between the first two episodes. It's not stuporous, and it's not super.

A highly entertaining and visually breathtaking movie, capable at times of rocking and delighting you.

All too obvious, all too easy, the sort of tongue-in-chic L.A. comedy that mistakes glibness for high style, heartfelt pop choruses for wisdom.

There's an urgency about "Star Trek VI" that comes from its deliberate topicality. [6 Dec. 1991, p.F1]

One of the greatest films--Akira Kurosawa's poignant 1952 masterpiece Ikiru...is both a tragicomedy about how our best intentions are misinterpreted and a profound meditation on an old man's reactions to impending death. [26 Sep 2003, p.C2]

A soft-core sex comedy that keeps throwing out comic variations on the idea of the line between gay and straight sexuality.

Takes a fascinating true story and turns it into a conventional cop thriller, hoking up the provocative three-generation saga of the LaMarca family.

One Hour Photo is a piece of often masterly image-making, a half-brilliant film with a revelatory lead performance by Williams. But it's also a thriller that gets trapped in surfaces: shiny, exciting, full of dread but often only tricks of the camera.

More than "Natural Born Killers," it's a real deconstruction of the whole love-on-the-run crime genre: drab, grim but effective.

The movie is a delight in many ways: an unabashed romantic comedy and Capraesque fable that takes Spielberg into realms he's rarely traveled before.

Director Otto Preminger excelled at intellectual thrillers and he's at his peak here. [07 Feb 2007, p.C12]

Yang powerfully evokes a world of pervasive greed and brutality, where conventional moral values have gone dangerously awry and life is cheap. [21 Nov 1997, p.M]

There's a sass and bite to Winger's acting, a grinning intelligence, unabashed sexiness and total immersion that make her one of the movies' few hipster female stars.

Exciting, beautifully shot '60s political western. [10 Apr 1998, p.M]

Gives us a lot to enjoy and something most studio movies don't even try for: an attempt at the richness, density and sheer contrariness of life.

One of the great movie family sagas, a fascinating revelation of both the dark and bright sides of the American dream. [05 Mar 2000, p.24C]

Written with such murderous gravity, certainty and gloomy solemnity - such an absence of real life or feeling - that it tends to kill our interest.

A landmark movie that becomes a priceless entryway into a distant land and its people, few of whom will ever seem as foreign and far away again.

There are nice things in Medicine Man but it only works perfectly when it leaves its characters up a tree. [07 Feb 1992, p.F10]

Egypt's foremost filmmaker Chahine directs and stars in the movie most beloved by Egyptian audiences: a vibrant, lower-depths saga of the working community at a Cairo train station: concessionaires, porters and baggage-handlers, beset by bosses and torn by inner conflicts. [09 Jul 1999, p.L]

It's a movie of such jaw-dropping violence, wild improbability and dazzling style it overpowers all resistance.

City Slickers II, perhaps, isn't really special. But it's the kind of movie Hollywood should churn out more often: a professional, ebullient, formula entertainment that doesn't insult your intelligence and hits its marks with ease, wit and good humor. Unlike most current mega-movies, it's classy, smart, sometimes gaudily tasteless fun-done with such zest and skill that it often makes you smile. And laugh. And maybe even smirk.

This is Hollywood expertise and Hollywood civic idealism at high levels.

Eisenstein's incandescent creativity remains strikingly obvious. The most brilliant of all Soviet silent films. [30 Jan 1998, p.N]

A movie bull's-eye: noir with an attitude, a thriller packing punches. It gives up its evil secrets with a smile.

Howard has a wonderful touch with actors, and almost all of them here have their moments. [26 March 1999, Friday, p.A]

It's an exciting but brainy, cross-cultural thriller about modern London and life in a contemporary urban pressure cooker, and it depends more on plot, character and atmosphere than it does on chases and gunfire.

A deeply moving blend of cold terror and rapturous hilarity. Lovingly crafted by Italy's top comedian and most popular filmmaker, it's that rare comedy that takes on a daring and ambitious subject and proves worthy of it.

Fredric March plays the split personality doctor/killer in this stylish early version of Robert Louis Stevenson's shivery classic. [06 Apr 2007, p.7]

Sweet-tempered, good-looking, goofy and not too sharp. The movie doesn't make much sense and neither does Danny, played by Welsh heartthrob Rhys Ifans.

It's a distraction: a buzz in your head that won't go away. [31 March 1995, p.HI]

Michael Caine became a front rank star -- and actor -- when he played the title role in this smart, salty, subtly moving adaptation of Bill Naughton's play about a Cockney Casanova on the loose in Swinging London. [30 Jan 2000, p.41C]

The movie A Good Man in Africa contains the book's funniest, saltiest scenes, but it's less controlled and assured. [09 Sep 1994, p.C]

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

What gives the movie real flesh and fantasy is the actress playing this part, the incandescent Morton.

At bottom, Lethal Weapon isn't much. It's a big, shallow, flashy, buddy-buddy cop thriller; it attacks you like a stereophonic steamroller, flattening everything behind it. Snatches of "Hustle" "Magnum Force" and "48 HRS." float above this plot like scum on a polluted lake, and the holes in logic and mindless climax are (or should be) embarrassing. [6 Mar 1987, p.4]

The picture has such a sweet spirit, sly wit and buoyant energy that it seems to disarm potential rancor, fear or contentiousness. [16 Oct 1996, p.1]

Larger Than Life is far closer to Murray's worst than his best. It's a truly senseless, erratic, if occasionally charming comedy that manages to waste Murray, a fine cast, good location photography and a terrific actor: Tai, the 8,000-pound trained pachyderm whose considerable stuff was strutted in 1995's Operation Dumbo Drop. [03 Nov 1996, p.11C]

What really makes Alias Betty stand out, even from good recent French ensemble films like "Eight Women" and "Venus Beauty Institute," is that ingenious, Rendell-derived story. To kidnap an old phrase, it's a corker.

At least Reno is around -- and he's the only spice in this stale, slick stew

It's a simple story with complex reverberations and undercurrents, as secrets keep being revealed.

It's a good small film for intelligent audiences who like to watch the movie camera explore other regions and other communities -- something all our movies should do more often.

The film is an epic treatment of a childhood curio. It's also the kind of elaborate movie stunt you can't imagine someone really pulling off. [26 May 1995, p.C]

Signs -- though Shyamalan's most visually beautiful work -- seems thinner, barely more than a sketch for a movie, with characters trapped in formulas. Beautifully trapped perhaps -- but paralyzed nonetheless.

It stays in your memory, will not leave you in peace.

Bigelow gives this film edge, tension and something you aren't expecting: a woman's touch for teasing out the buried emotion beneath those stoic surfaces.

Though one can question the movie's quality as a documentary -- Broomfield is a dogged but often annoying interviewer, and Churchill's photography is sometimes slapdash -- Aileen raises such troubling issues that it stays, hellishly, in your mind.

As these three rowdies carouse, bond and then break apart, Towne and Ashby give us an indelible portrait of the moral chaos and bitterness of the Vietnam years, true to the last detail. [14 Aug 1998, p.M]

Takes the raw truth and makes it jubilantly, terrifically entertaining.

The second, and some say best, of the "Road" series. Paramount's patty-caking pals, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, invade Lightest Africa for some songs, dances and snappy patter. [02 Apr 2000, p.38C]

A contemporary teen summer romance with a modern sexual twist--though in many ways, it's just the same old malarkey.

The acting has the bravura stage eloquence of Broadway Shakespeare and the movie is narrated, beautifully, by John Hurt.

A comedy of evil and strange redemption, Lady Vengeance makes sure that we feel the pain, that we know what it's like to unreasonably suffer, because those are the rules of its mad, wounding, vengeful world.

Elaborate misfire, which misuses an unusually good cast.

On many levels, it hits its marks -- but it still misses the impact of some shorter, less-ambitious movies that play with our emotions more deftly or deeply, walk their miles, deadly or not, with a lighter, faster, more confident tread.

This is a movie that doesn't depend for its effects on star performers or stylized wish-fulfillment sexuality but on realism, sharp observation and honest humor.

It never cuts loose. No matter how much come-hither villainy Gere generates, or how much envy and menace Garcia throws back at him, they're still trapped there in that bare, empty story, waiting for the dry ice and the steam to arrive.

The sheer stark speed and measured violence of On the Run catch us up quickly--and the film becomes a searing portrait of a killer-idealist lost out of time.

Kobayashi's great, laceratingly exciting 1962 Japanese samurai revenge saga, once voted by Japanese critics their country's all-time best film. [03 Mar 2006, p.C5]

Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It is a joyfully idiosyncratic little jazz-burst of a film, full of sensuous melody, witty chops and hot licks

Nobody Knows, by the often excellent Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, is one of those special movies that can give us a new way of seeing.

Brimming over with affection and humanity, this memory drama about the destruction of one family and the birth of another is nostalgic in a good sense: funny, bittersweet, poignant.

A movie best suited for a lazy afternoon or a languorous night, particularly if you're a Francophile. Charming, glamorous, emotionally suggestive but slight, it's full of beautiful and colorful people.

Brims with intelligence, compassion and sensuous delight in the textures, sights and sounds of life--all the way from the Taj Mahal to Pearl Jam.

Gremlins 2 is better than the original, though it lacks the same archetypal horror-movie drive.

May be the only movie in recent memory unworthy of its own genuinely hilarious Web site, www.finemanfilms.com.

The movie is an odd mix of tones and styles, and the thriller plot is casually introduced, shoved aside and reintroduced. But, like all Duvall's work, Assassination Tango breathes with humanity.

If you have any taste for film noir -- that Chandler-esque American style that had its heyday in the '40s and '50s -- this film is a must: one of the classics of the genre. [02 Jun 1987, p.8]

Mighty Joe Young is a mighty big movie about a mighty big gorilla. And a lot of it is mighty bad -- unless you're a devotee of high tech and low camp, elephantine effects and mouse-sized stories, politically correct nostalgia and/or Charlize Theron and Bill Paxton in jungle outfits.

Clean up the language, and this little roach of a movie could play the bottom half of a double bill with Rowan and Martin's “The Maltese Bippy.” [26 March 1999, Life, p.9E]

Good movie westerns these days may be too few and far between, but Ron Howard's The Missing is almost a great one.

A brilliant, giddy satiric romp with a discreetly moralistic viewpoint beneath its high-style wit.

Ernest Saves Christmas is an improvement on Ernest Goes to Camp, mostly because of Seale. But basically it's another TV ad, a chestnut roasting on an open fire, exploding in your face every so often with another Ya know what I mean? [15 Nov 1988, p.7]

Compared to many movies of this kind, this Beaver is an enjoyable but mixed bag. [22 Aug 1997, p.C]

Just another self-absorbed teen chronicle, with the added twist of a little time travel and a surprise ending.

Still packs a wallop. It's also a movie with no easy passage to its dark heart.

Visually, the movie is a knockout. Craven-who, along with George Romero and David Cronenberg, was one of the real masters of post-'60s low-budget horror-never made a scarier picture than the original "Nightmare." But he's probably never made a better one than this-one that was more fun to watch or had a more satisfying conclusion, that slammed the door on hell with such panache.

Copying Beethoven, at its best, is a sort of grand cinema opera of the composer's life and music.

It's very smart, very sleek and one of the great Hollywood romantic comedies. [04 Jul 2003, p.C2]

Like a Visconti epic gone mad, explosive, beautiful, unforgettable. [08 Dec 2006, p.C8]

Isn't good satire or good slapstick. It does have those lyrical, catchy Menken tunes, and the film perks up whenever Raitt or lang sing one of them. But much of this movie is deadly.

Imamura, like many older directors, has evolved a style of wonderful simplicity, lucidity and economy, cutting to the marrow of events, switching moods with effortless ease. [11 Sep 1998, p.F]

Irwin Winkler's The Net, which should have worked a lot better than it does, is a glossy, intricately plotted, mostly implausible suspense movie about a woman on the run.

In this movie, Auteuil ("Jean de Florette") and Binoche ("Chocolat") are such marvelous actors, they can shift us in almost any emotional direction with a speech or a glance.

A family tale, in the best sense. [19 February 1999, Tempo, p.4]

This toweringly ambitious picture confronts a brilliant director, Atom Egoyan, with a major historical event and a profound theme.

An often brilliant, always revelatory, deeply interesting omnibus film.

The movie rips and roars.

A movie that celebrates and mourns heroism and friendship, while reminding us how seldom we truly see either on our big screens.

The new Bad News Bears may not make you cheer, but it should provide laughs and a good time. Isn't that what some movies are all about?

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]

Mary Reilly is a thinking person's horror movie, done with such obvious intelligence and artistry that it feels strange to watch it and be so unmoved. [23 Feb 1996]

Unfortunately, after watching Paycheck, you may wish you had the picture's gimmickry at your disposal, so you could erase your own memory of it.

Following in the footsteps of "Thelma & Louise" and all the other fugitive comedy-drama-romances, "Manny & Lo" can't quite convince us it really belongs. Paradoxically, it's because much of the movie rings so true, that some crucial parts of the story ring so false. [30 Aug 1996, p.J]

Maybe the problem with Analyze This is that it isn't enough of a Ramis movie. [5 Mar 1999]

Not only is the wide screen black-and-white "Angels" Sirk's best movie -- dramatically richer than his more popular '50s romantic melodramas, but just as visually beautiful -- it is the only film from a Faulkner story that the novelist himself liked and praised. [05 Jun 1997, p.8]

On a direct line with the whimsical small-town comedies of the '40s and '50s.

It's a very classy, finely made film, and, as one watches it -- particularly those last sweeping scenes of political turbulence and escape -- one feels both pain at their (Merchant-Ivory) parting and grateful for what, together, they achieved.

Wrings honest emotion and riveting dramatics from its tale.

A masterpiece that can still leave you dizzy with wonder. As much as any movie ever made, this visionary science-fiction tale of space travel and first contact with extraterrestrial life is a spellbinding experience.

As beautifully designed, swift and sleek as a classic sports car, throbbing with emotion and intelligence, it's a neat suspense film that's also dramatically and sociologically potent, with two supremely talented stars, Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, delivering beyond the emotional call of duty.

It's sensuality with a stinger, and Fat Girl is an adolescent sex drama that takes no prisoners.

Fascinating as Buzz often is, the film obviously was made with limited resources, transferred to film from DV, with grainy clips from the trailers for Bezzerides-scripted movies rather than snippets of the movies themselves.

A flawed film but an admirable one that tries to immerse us in a world of artistic abandon and political madness and very nearly succeeds.

Here is a satire about government and business corruption that's as empty, corrupt and manipulative as everything it attacks: a frantic, jokeless comedy about selling out, that sells out itself constantly. This is another big, dumb, pointless picture, a "high concept" movie that's all concept and no movie.

A ravishing crock. Like its title character, a computer-generated movie star programmed to resemble a cross between Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Kim Basinger, it's beautiful but empty, gorgeous but spurious.

A magnificent throwback to an almost vanished era of epic filmmaking by great filmmakers in thrall to their own passions, rather than to the studio bookkeepers.

Godfrey Reggio’s Powaqqatsi, like his earlier “Koyaanisqatsi,” is a lyrical documentary that turns the instruments of technology against it. In some ways, the new film is less effective, but it’s also more visually spectacular: a mesmerizing cascade of sensuous sights and sounds.

Pictorially sumptuous and sexually provocative.

It would be tempting to say that inside “Slamdance” is a remarkable movie struggling to free itself from conventional trappings. But the opposite is true. The trappings are what dazzle you; the interior of “Slamdance” is exactly what isn’t remarkable.

Vibrating with humanity, it's a potent portrait of love, ranging from the purely carnal to the impurely sublime.

With rich irony, The World juxtaposes the teasing, grand images of the outside world's wonders with the insular community and the mundane lives of the park employees.

Being able to kick people in the head, at least while they’re standing up, is no negligible talent--though Lionheart is a pretty negligible movie. It has that grotesquely off-scale exaggeration of many post-'80s action movies.

Though it's sweet and likable to a fault, it's also a movie that never seems heartfelt or deep.

Right in the "Rebel Without a Cause" vein, of course, but grittier and less romantic. [16 Jun 2006, p.C8]

Much of this movie seems a crock.

The Cats of Mirikitani seems all too short; it has enough meat to be turned into an excellent dramatic film.

Like "Memento," Mulholland Drive is an amnesiac noir in the tradition that goes back to "Spellbound" and "Somewhere in the Night."

Writer-director Kouf often comes up with seemingly sure-fire ideas and then fails to develop them. "Gang Related" takes some chances. But, while trying to shift the moral center and avoid cliches, it keeps floundering and stumbling back into them. Like the accumulating corpses on Divinci and Rodriguez's beat, it seems a victim of greed, confusion, mistaken identity and a mixed-up system that turns good guys bad. [8 Oct 1997, p.1]

A humane and fantastic work, and it touches us precisely because Konchalovsky shows the reality of both the soldiers and the madhouse inmates. His movie is just what he intended: a nightmare that speaks the truth.

A film that uses beautiful tableaux and convincingly raw actors to build to a climax of shatteringly understated poignancy and power.

Think about the worst movie ideas you've had in your life, the ones so embarrassing they make you wince. Now imagine this: a modernized version of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" titled Scotland, Pa.

The racial and sexual politics of Heading South may trouble some audiences; Cantet is definitely not a moralist in the usual sense.

This movie lets the characters and tropes borrowed from the original Stan Lee comic live and breathe.

This overrated backstage TV nostalgia comedy, set in 1954, does boast standout performances by Peter O'Toole and Joseph Bologna as characters modeled on Erroll Flynn and Sid Caesar. [07 Nov 1997]

It's the equivalent of our "Gone With the Wind," Russia's "War and Peace" or, to take a more modest example, South Korea's "Chunhyang." Sheer ambition and grandiose make the film interesting -- up to a point.

In the new wave of kiddie animal movies -- "Babe," "Black Beauty," "Gordy," "Fluke," "Roan Inish" and all the rest -- Dunston Checks In is valuable only as a new standard of screenwriting ineptitude. Don't play it again, Sam, at least not with this bunch.

A misfiring, underdone epic that takes its inspiration not from life or literature, but from a toy line and the cartoon series it inspired.

This movie, the subject of controversy, is a defiantly personal statement on what the war really is--laced with that now-familiar "Roger and Me" mix of homespun wit, pop culture playfulness, populist heart twisting and "gotcha" guerilla film-making tactics.

A major cinema event of the year, a masterpiece of Italian film traditions in social/political realism and historical family epic.

The movie, one of Sirk's most popular, is impeccably designed and shot but also gaudy, garish, full of jukebox colors and feverish emotions. It's about the "broken" screen characters Sirk says he loves most--and it really gets to you. [14 Apr 2006, p.C6]

A lyrical work of sporadic great power, Neon Bible captures both the neon and the spirit, the heaven and hell.

Flaws and all, it really does show a star being born.

There's an incongruous but ravishing beauty in Far From Heaven, and in its three excellent central performances, that counteracts the seeming kitschiness of the story.

The Russian film The Return is a stunning contemporary fable about a divided family in the wilderness - a simple, riveting film that almost achieves greatness.

A gentle film, not very controversial despite its gay content, Chop Sue is valuable as a record of beauty and obsession, much less interesting as a human document.

This is a comedy made for people who think, who like smart talk and who, like the Perelmans, know the score.

It's not often that you see the craft of cinema so perfectly executed--or a group of fancy scoundrels so ruthlessly caught and skewered. Comedy of Power, like all of Chabrol's Hitchcockian films, is dark, smart and delicious.

Wyatt Earp is a fascinating ride to a West where darkness and heroism mingle, a triumph for Kasdan, Costner, Quaid and the company. It shows how, in this frontier crucible, love and death, honor and slaughter, friendship and a walk toward doom, are all linked together as well. [24 Jun 1994, p.F]

It's another slick-and-quick muscle car of a movie, racing along for a couple of hours, taking you nowhere as fast as it can.

A film that lets life flood into our souls.

It's a murky, empty-headed dive into the depths of the Antarctic and the heart of monster movie cliches that leaves you praying for most of the cast to get killed off fast, to put them (and us) out of our misery.

Seems small in subject and scope, but it's large in spirit and implication.

It's one of the most ferociously convincing physical re-creations of warfare ever put on screen.

It's one of those movies that are unfortunately so technically well done, it's hard to tune out on the senseless story.

Watching this film wakes you up; it is a window on an Iran and an Afghanistan we should have taken account of long ago -- seen though a master's eye, felt through a poet's touch.

Is it cute? Yes. Is it a crowd-pleaser? Yup. Is it classic? Nope. (Though it could have been.)

The film itself--a dramatic comedy based on the 1965 Saigon gig of irreverent Armed Forces disc jockey Adrian Cronauer--is good-hearted but shallow. It's a piece of programmed irreverence, photogenic torpor, prefab compassion. But Williams, as Cronauer, is so blazingly brilliant that he detonates the center, exploding it in berserk blasts of electronic-age surreality.

A scathing, ingeniously funny 1960 portrayal of corporate corruption and backstairs sex. [18 March 1988, p.C24]

A town where tourists and hapless visitors are murdered, and the dead are revived by a big band-loving mortician, descends into gore and madness. [16 Mar 2007, p.C5]

Loony, but spellbinding. [28 Apr 2006, p.C9]

An inspirational movie about a inspiring figure: Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah of Ghana.

The ending is a stunner. Like those '30 classics it suggests, Gilles' Wife seduces us with true cinematic magic: rich characters, great acting and that rapturous old French blend of realism and theatricality.

The result is something so old it's new, so corny it's funny. And while Tears of the Black Tiger is nothing more than entertaining, at least it's that.

Nichols gives the piece a funny, fragile somber mood that works almost completely.

We've gotten perhaps too used to the computerized wizardry of our own cartoon features; Kon, like Miyazaki shows us some older ways that can still transfix us.

An unusual subject for Ozu, white-collar adultery, handled with his customary deep observation. [28 Jan 2005, p.C2]

Koepp, an often ingenious writer, should have followed King's example and covered his tracks better. If he had, Secret Window might have been as good as "Stir of Echoes," and not simply a mini "Misery" and a not-quite "Shining."

It's a glossy, well-mounted, slickly done but almost stuporously predictable affair, both formula-bound and utterly illogical.

It's a winner with flaws.

Writer L. M. Kit Carson and director Hooper have made Chainsaw 2 a grisly hoot: a wild satire on modern Texas and horror movies themselves. [31 Aug 1986, p.15]

There's nothing classic about Surviving Eden, even if it is better than reality TV.

Though I would agree it's original -- it's the first aboveground romance movie I've seen in which the heroine is repeatedly spanked, verbally tormented and tied to a chair by her lover--- it's not an experience I much enjoyed.

A wish fulfillment fantasy of staggering silliness, both smirkingly cutesy and gratingly offensive, this is one for the movie ash heap.

Seethes with cruel lust and brainy fancy.

This movie is soooo bad (How bad is it?) that it makes "Caddyshack I" look like "Godfather II."

Barker, who wasn't involved with the earlier Candyman, has never yet matched his stunning 1987 writer-director debut Hellraiser-and he never will if he keeps coming up with projects like this. [17 Mar 1995, p.J]

What charmed me most about the movie was the interaction of the dogs themselves. [02 Jun 1995, p.J]

Proves, unhappily enough, how U.S.-style media politics is spreading around the world.

The French filmmakers lend it their special aesthetic/dramatic sense, and the Masai actors ground the story in everyday realism and humanity. Together, they create a film and a legend to remember.

A movie meant to explode off the screen -- and it's at its best when those explosions are going full blast.

A true original: a film that stands apart from the crowd, goes its own way and all but dares you not to like it.

One of the most discouraging things about many big studio movies is the way they waste resources, mainly talent and money. Pushing Tin manages to waste an excellent cast, a glossy production and what initially seems to be a bright, funny script. [23 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

Waterworld is often entertaining because it's screwy. Could even Ed Wood Jr. have come up with those cigarette-puffing villains, in a world with hardly enough dirt for a tobacco plant? [28 July 1995]

For anyone who knew and loved the 1950s TV series The Phil Silvers Show -- in which Silvers played the peerless motormouth Army con artist, Master Sgt. Ernie Bilko -- Sgt. Bilko, starring Steve Martin, will probably be a disappointment. [29 Mar 1996, p.C]

Writer-director Gary David Goldberg's script is full of complex and lively love patter, which Cusack especially rattles off with sometimes breakneck speed.

The movie itself is as slick, fast and terrifyingly violent as a top-grade American crime thriller, but a lot smarter than most.

There's a lot of low-key poetry and nicely casual tension in Hunter's direction and in Frederick Elmes' cinematography--and the acting ensemble is fine. For all its flaws and the revulsion it may induce, River's Edge has something valuable: a dark, harrowing but moral perspective.

As a director, Buscemi is drier than he is as a performer: more quietly funny, less intense and sometimes weirdly compassionate.

Be forewarned: Dog Days, like many of Seidel's films, will drive some moviegoers to rage and walkouts with its unrelentingly depressing tone. But it also a remarkable, deeply disturbing work by a brilliant filmmaker.

It just doesn't swing (or bop), but the stars always click. [15 Jul 2005, p.C8]

A lavish and sometimes lusty version of the French hit musical, minus the songs but with lots of Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon. [17 Jan 2000, p.Q]

The movie, one of those surprise-twist detective stories, doesn't really stand up to scrutiny in the cold light of the theater lobby.

Wistful Depression-era Bonnie and Clyde romantic noir. [04 May 2007, p.C2]

The series has been with us since 1962 and, like many another old timer, tends to repeat itself. Yet, every once in a while, it pulls in its stomach, pops the gun from its cummerbund, arches its eyebrow and gets off another bull's-eye. The newest, Licence to Kill, is probably one of the five or six best of Bond.

At a time when new westerns are in short supply, Devil a sight for sore eyes.

Watching actors this good handle material this dopey is like waiting for Itzhak Perlman to pick up his violin and start playing variations on My Baby Does the Hanky Panky. It's funny. But it's also sad. The movie suggests we get the government we deserve, but do we really deserve this movie?

Movies like First Snow rise or fall on characters and atmosphere, and Fergus gets them both. But though the story's resolution does have irony and even a certain power, it lacks the charge, the Serlingesque "gotcha," that it needs.

What we get, while rarely boring, is a succession of senseless scenes bathed in formula-thriller blue light, full of blazing Uzis, exploding helicopters and sentimental male bonding.

Airheads loses its guts and spark halfway through.

No revelation, but it’s a more honorable, interesting effort than many of the crass, dopey recent big-studio schlockfests like "Say It Isn’t So" or "Tomcats" that tell similar coming-of-age tales.

It still soars, but now it seems richer, more expansive. Amadeus reminds us that movies can be lyrical as well as vulgar, ambitious as well as playful, brilliant as well as down and dirty -- just like Amadeus himself.

At its best, this new film does mix grandeur with skepticism, excitement with reflection. In the end, like Harry, it redeems itself.

Kazan does have his father's fierce erotic curiosity, that sense that once you unravel a story's real lusts and greeds, you've solved it.

The quintessential Wertmuller couple--sad-eyed Giancarlo Giannini and maneater Mariangela Melato--rev up this lively, devilish Faustian comedy about a hapless industrial worker caught in the Mafia's universal machine. [17 Oct 1995, p.3C]

A Chekhovian tale of major artistic power.

A successful lifestyle journalist, Elizabeth (Barbara Stanwyck) is lauded by her readers as the sweetest, most efficient homemaker in the countryside. Problem is, she is a chain-smoking urbanite in a city apartment. [05 Dec 2014, p.C2]

Should hold you spellbound.

A bloody strange movie--and a surprise. Who would have thought that you could put together an anthology of "extreme" Asian horror featurettes by three cutting-edge Asian directors where the most tasteful, restrained contribution was the one by Japanese mad dog moviemaker Takashi Miike?

It's a bit too muddy, dismal-looking and smoky to beguile us, too fixated on filth and too dreary-looking to really shock us.