Michael Wilmington

Classic low-budget '50s sci-fi thriller, brilliantly scripted by Richard Matheson from his novel. [01 Sep 2006, p.C7]

Turns out to be a Hollywood sequel of surpassing silliness and wasted talent.

Species carries the whole idea of the erotic thriller--that '80s yuppie genre that mixed sex and slaughter--past cliche into howling absurdity.

Stolen Summer is no disaster, though. It's merely one more misfire fortunate enough to attract actors like Bonnie Hunt and Aidan Quinn, who almost make it work.

Forty years later, The Killing has lost little of its punch. It's both vintage '50s noir and a stunning introduction to a killer director. [22 Jul 1998, p.L]

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.

Unabashedly designed to blow its audience away.

A timeless romantic thriller that steeps us in one of those great artificial movie worlds that become more overpowering than reality itself.

Thornton and his excellent company summon up for us the long rides, dangerous companions, rites of passage, the mad love and, most of all, the special relationship between the man/boys that rode over the border and the horses that carried them there.

Skates over depravity when, like Crane, it should have dug down deeper.

It's just another failed movie: a loud, shallow fiasco that leaves you feeling used.

More an uninspired letdown than a flabbergasting turkey... One reason for this lack of bite lies in the werewolves themselves. They're a bit too teddy-bearish, even oddly cuddly, and the fright scenes work better when you don't see much of them.

Sometimes, you can use a smaller devil to catch the Devil, the movie suggests. But in this case, the entire movie goes to hell in record time.

It's a zippy melodrama for small-town America and small-towners at heart: well-executed kitsch for audiences that will still be amused at the notion that the bugs are getting so big, they'll drag us all down.

An expensive-looking new detective thriller that should have been much better.

A romance incandescent, a fiery pageant of l'amour fou. Whatever its historical transgressions, it opens up a vein and lets life and blood pour out.

Perhaps the most original movie fantasy creation of the year: an icon of tenderness and artistic alienation that clings, stickum-like, to your mind's eye and the softest, most woundable parts of your mass-culture heart. [7 Dec 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

One of the movie's most moving elements is the duo's famous prison correspondence, as eloquently read by Tony Shalhoub as Sacco and John Turturro as Vanzetti. But Miller's obvious passion and dedication shine throughout.

Movies about literary lives don't always catch fire, but Henry Fool is a glorious exception: an austerely funny, brilliantly written and acted serio-comic tale of two writers. [17 Jul 1998]

Walsh and producer Mark Hellinger's classic ultra-tough gangster opus about World War I, Prohibition and good-hearted mobster Jimmy Cagney's breezy rise and grim fall. [18 Feb 2005, p.C6]

Slender but surprisingly smart and pleasing.

Overall, King Arthur sinks into a grim, gray torpor - though it's an odd, not unentertaining movie. The approach is different, if not edifying or convincing.

The best of all cattle-drive westerns. [11 Oct 1998, p.16C]

Pseudo art can be fun, though, even if it doesn't quite awaken all your senses.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh at some of this--though it's not as funny as Laurel and Hardy as toddlers in "Brats." But I wanted to slap myself whenever I did.

So troubling and unflinchingly honest that watching it becomes a test of empathy and compassion.

Almost nothing new to offer -- despite its good actors, flashy visuals and well-textured New York gloss and grit. But there are teasing hints of another, better movie buried inside somewhere.

It’s an amazingly bald-faced copy of E. T. even though this is E. T. in a sticky wrapper, left under the heater two hours too long.

To say Young Guns is one of the best big Westerns of the '80s doesn't mean much: Westerns have been almost moribund since 1976. But it does hint at this movie's surprising vitality, bloody ebullience and violent impetuosity-qualities it shares with crazy little Billy. [12 Aug 1988, p.11]

Between the two Murphys, "Metro" is no waste of time. But it's no life-enhancing experience either -- unless you're into trolley-hopping, perp-snuffing and vows of vengeance. "The Nutty Professor" proved Eddie Murphy still has it, 10 times over.

Double Team is loony but likable, a would-be triple double that ends up eking out a victory over its own script. And while Tsui is the man who makes it work, Rodman, on his best bad behavior, does his bit, defers to his teammates. At the end, Rourke and Van Damme pull off their shirts, while Rodman keeps his on. And, wisely, The Worm leaves most of the kicking to his co-star.

It's a genuine shocker - a dazzler of a film - a hellishly funny picture.

The Theory of Flight is built from the kind of material that either soars or crashes with audiences. And here, it doesn't quite hold together. But if the film, as a whole, never takes flight, the actors do. Watching them bicker and sail up is so delightful, you only wish their vehicle could keep them aloft longer.

Tries for both civilized wit and primitive joy -- and mostly misses both.

Opulence almost interferes with the movie, weighing it down when it should seem lighter than air, surrounding the inarguably brilliant Carrey with too much frosting and frou-frou.

A dark subject certainly, but in Murray's bouquet-bearing hands, it can still hand us a laugh.

A recently resurfaced noir classic, in which an ex-con (Gene Nelson) is trapped between his criminal ex-buddies (Charles Bronson, Ted De Corsia and Timothy Carey), pulling him back into the underworld and the tough, toothpick-chewing L.A. cop (Sterling Hayden) who wants to make him a stoolie. Harsh, rough, sharp as a knife. [24 Oct 1997, p.L]

Even though the actors are good, their characters stay stock.

A seductive revisiting of an old classic - one that helps us see these lovers and their world with renewed passion.

It's one more example of minuscule ideas inflated to preposterous proportions: An Attack of the 50-Foot Marketing Hook. [17 Jul 1992, p.F10]

Fun to watch it may be, but it's shallow fun. Like the drugs and booze the characters keep using -- and even the sex -- it's a passing pleasure.

All the accolades Lyne got for "Fatal Attraction" -- and didn't really merit -- he deserves here.

The movie, in the end, is devastating because of the banality it reveals, and because its terseness and plainness cut a mass killer down to size.

Shallow, colorful adaptation of one of Hemingway's best short stories. [08 May 1998, p.M]

Wayne's World 2 may not be much of a movie, but at least it's funny. And, hey, what else does it have to be? What do you want from a movie? Blood? Rock on, Wayne. Party hearty, Garth. [10 Dec 1993, p.A]

It's just another case of mourning over what might have been.

On the movie's feeble plus side are Richard Gant's acting (as the coroner), Manfredini's music and one funny joke in the last half-minute. On the minus side: ludicrous characters. Garbled nonstop gore. Persistent loud, clanging noises that give you the impression of being trapped inside a malfunctioning radiator. Shadowy lighting that makes you feel as if you're staggering around in the dark. [16 Aug 1993, p.F3]

A tasteful, intelligent, well-acted film about one of the most ghoulish serial killers in American crime history - and I'm afraid that's a good part of what's wrong with it.

The movie has a large theme, even if it's unspoken. Old Joy is about a particular friendship, but it's also about how American society changed in the '90s and the new century.

But beware: "Hamburger" is the dregs of "Animal House" and "Police Academy" raked over again, with another passel of daffy, goofy, sex-crazed guys; bosomy, moaning sex-starved girls; screaming nerds; yowling dimwits and howling bullies... The script may set a record for misfiring gags and lewd puns. [3 Feb 1986, p.C7]

Swing Time, a Depression-era Manhattan ballad -- and best of the bunch by a hair over Top Hat -- has Fred as a threadbare gambler named Lucky, Ginger as a saucy dance teacher named Penny and a heart-stopping Kern-Dorothy Fields score that includes The Way You Look Tonight, A Fine Romance, Pick Yourself Up and their masterpiece farewell duet number, Never Gonna Dance. [23 Aug 2005, p.C3]

A sprightly fairy tale full of darkness and delight from seemingly unlikely movie collaborators: author Roald Dahl and director-star Danny DeVito.

Altman's great kaleidoscopic ensemble comedy-drama about a frenzied few days in country music's capital, with an unlikely, quirky, explosive crowd of musicians, hangers-on and politicos all converging on a fateful concert crossroads.

A cranky failure with brilliant moments.

So fast, sleek and riveting it almost makes you expect miracles -- which never materialize.

Total Eclipse is a biographical film steeped in ecstasy and despair, seething with madness and torment.

One of the best-liked backstage dramas, with Douglas shining as egotistical producer Jonathan Shields (said to be based on David O. Selznick) who ruthlessly sheds friends, lovers and colleagues on his way to the top, only to seek them after his fall. [25 Apr 2003, p.C1]

The film has a marvelous first half. All of Zinnemann's best qualities -- tact, taste, integrity, quiet intellect and idealism -- shine through in the convent scenes, as does the acting. However, good as Peter Finch is (as an agnostic doctor), the second half seems hurried, over-reticent. [25 Mar 1988, p.22]

It's a dry, fluky comedy about the perils of immigrant communities and bad health facilities -- shot in a style that's a clever pastiche of early '30s experimental talkies. The imagery is purposely deranged and the movie pumps it out in slow, deliberate rhythms that become daffy and excruciating. [11 Sep 1989, p.6]

The show has its moments-some funny scenes, some wild stop-motion Phil Tippett computer action, some of Torn's scenery-chewing. But they're only moments. RoboCop 3's main problem is that nobody fouled up its program. It's a RoboMovie. [05 Nov 1993, p.C]

The all-time great Stoller-Lieber title number, performed by The King in jailbird regalia, is just one highlight of this '50s rock-the-house classic. [04 Sep 1998, p.H]

Terrifying and darkly funny. [13 Jun 2004, p.C4]

Has its share of underthought or overwrought moments. The tone keeps shifting radically. It has some silly lines, plot lapses and goofball action scenes. But you can forgive the movie everything because of the sheer nasty pizazz of its central concept. [4 Nov 1988]

As an adventure movie, it makes good on its promise and its title. It carries us to the edge. [26 Sep 1997, p.A]

It's a jewel-like, minimalist film about a group of crisscrossing wanderers and outlaws on one lyrically strange day and night in Memphis--where haphazard-seeming events slowly merge into entrancingly complex figures and patterns.

Delighted me like few films I've seen recently. It's a sexy, sweet, sumptuously entertaining movie about the huge and wildly eventful wedding reception.

A masterpiece. Davis' great naughty Southern belle role, co-starring Henry Fonda and Fay Bainter. [07 Jul 2006, p.C7]

25th Hour struck me as one of the best movies of 2002, but it's also a film that will strike some of its audience as ethically dubious or threatening.

Despite a big budget, lots of technical flair and a good cast headed by Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames, it's mostly a bloody mess.

A hard-core movie with a soft, light-hearted center and an edge like a knife.

The second film never has the hardness or urgency of the first. Its best moments, perhaps happily, tend to come from the actors rather than the story or Richard Edlund's effects: especially newcomers Geraldine Fitzgerald and Julian Beck. [23 May 1986]

Despite the final escape of star Steve Guttenberg, and the loss, long since, of the original director and writers, this is almost a good movie. It's an incremental, heavily qualified success, but "PA 5" is an improvement on the elephantine, witless "2," "3" and "4."

Other than Shaw's turn, which gets dampened in the determinedly frolicsome finale, there's little to like in Three Men and a Little Lady. Selleck is charming. Danson, aided by latex and a Carmen Miranda outfit, has two funny scenes. Travis has a lovely smile, which she overuses.

An essential Carole Lombard film, it's her one screen pairing with her eventual husband Clark Gable. To call their scenes electric is putting it mildly. [30 Dec 1993, p.9A]

La Cava was famous for improvising his scenes; My Man Godfrey is the most brilliant, unbuttoned example. It's a champagne farce, sparkling and bubbling from the depths of the Depression. [08 Jun 2007, p.C9]

A classic of realistic terror, in which passion and murder can't lie buried.

American Pie 2, which brings back the same cast for more of the same, is just another by-the-numbers, money-hungry sequel with a lot of recycled shaggy-sex jokes and gross-out gags.

Usually American marital problems are left to the soap operas; it's nice to see them tackled by experts, piercing personas and peeling open hearts.

The sociopolitical issues are lost in the action, but it's quite some action. [11 Jan 2002, p.C1]

It's an intelligent and informed look at the preposterous ways our leaders are often picked and sabotaged.

Lucidity, austerity and quiet compassion are peculiar virtues to ascribe to a movie about a horrific real-life murder case, but those are among the best qualities of Jean-Pierre Denis' Murderous Maids.

A fine, exciting film that makes a bloody historical event live all over again by showing it through the eyes of children on the edges of the conflict.

While it's done well enough here - written smartly, staged crisply and acted to the hilt - it doesn't last, except as a brief virtuoso piece for three players.

The most purely enjoyable of all the great Ford films. [18 Sep 1998, p.J]

A somewhat bewildering and unsatisfying film that nevertheless contains more inspired moments and brilliant scenes than many movies we call successes.

For all its crashes and flash, this is a movie that drifts away as we watch it. Muscle cars and all, it's often a waste of gas.

A realistic drama about life's uncertainties.

I loved this movie madly, and so will many of you.

Georgia, written with rare honesty and economy by Leigh's mother, Barbara Turner, and very sensitively directed by Ulu Grosbard, is a tough-minded look at show business and families. [10 Jan 1996]

What I did like unreservedly was the acting. Enid, as enacted by the sometimes astonishing Birch, is one of the more convincing, no-nonsense teens in recent movies.

A work both rigorously stylized and deeply personal. Devotees of Kitano and Japanese cinema will admire Dolls.

A wildly improbable story that neither Newman nor co-stars Fiorentino and Mulroney, for all their panache and chemistry, can make much sense of it.

I don't think it will seriously disappoint longtime fans, but it made me itchy as I watched it unfold in ways that the comics never did when I read them in the '60s.

Still seems close to the pinnacle of film noir. [Director's Cut]

Beyond some well-observed sibling interaction, the mutual effort of four writers is mutually uninspired. Whoever wrote the episodes between hot-to-trot Jojo (Taylor) and her balky boyfriend Bill (D'Onofrio) should be ashamed. [21 Oct 1988]

Hickox, the son of Douglas (Theatre of Blood) Hickox, shows a derivative, choppy, jagged style in his feature debut. He makes an uneasy stew of this mix of hip, flip teen-slasher gore and movie-buff aestheticism, of callous black humor and smarmy sentimentality. There’s a big problem here: too much waxy buildup.

Vice Versa may be a better film than Like Father, Like Son, largely because of the direction and Savage’s performance, but it’s still a disappointment.

Miller's quiet artistry is at its peak, and though "Lili" is not as subtle, profound or moving a work as Chekhov's play, it's an intelligent, first-rate piece of cinema.

Packed with keening witchery and wild delight, Into the West should delight the susceptible, even as, perhaps, it annoys the jaded.

Not up to one of the greatest of all novels, of course, but a terrific movie romance with a great ballroom scene. [16 Mar 2007, p.C4]

It conveys a sense of moral quagmire, of sinking into squishily dangerous terrain, honeycombed with tunnels and traps, all hell exploding around it. That’s the imagery of the movie’s first battle scene, a taut prologue for a superb film.

This is a movie where you can get drunk on the B2], sloshed on the scenery. But perhaps not quite drunk enough. [11 Aug 1995, p.C2]

Scene after scene in Calle 54 just knocks you out.

Ozu is often wrongly characterized as a "soft" director preoccupied with middle-class home life, but this late film tackles extreme subject matter--spousal abuse and abortion--with unflinching skill. [18 Nov 2005, p.C6]

As a bunch, the film makers have created the sort of mystery story that might well puzzle a 12-year-old who had never read a mystery story before and wasn't paying attention anyway, and the sort of love story that 12-year-olds might throw away to read the mystery story, along with the sort of dog story many dogs would actually enjoy--if the pages were edible...Luckily the team of Hanks and Beasley are around to save the show, tell a few snappy stories, dance a few licks, chase a few crooks, make you laugh, make you cry. Who needs writers?

There is a thrill in seeing them wooing and pursuing each other through the streets of New York, a city that here again, for a while, becomes a movie isle of joy.

Long considered one of the ultimate drive-in movies, the granddaddy of both "The Last American Hero" and "Smokey and the Bandit," this black-and-white drama is still entertaining if you take it in the raffish, off-slant, what-the-hell spirit with which star-producer Robert Mitchum obviously intended it. [09 Dec 1988, p.24]

The River Wild is more of a family movie, a thrill-ride where all the crazier dips and turns are straightened out by the ride's end. Hanson keeps the action clean, the tensions simmering. As a family movie, it's actually pretty good. [30 Sep 1994, p.C]

When the crashing chords and defiant lyrics of "Be the Rain" close things out, there's a burst of idealism and energy that redeems everything. If you see Greendale, treat the movie charitably and dig the music.

Devotees of awful filmmaking can't go wrong with this one.

To say Enemy of the State is senseless is an understatement. This is a movie where logic is the enemy.

A movie that will act like a smack in the face to some audiences, while others may simply laugh in recognition.

So clearly derived from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that you might begin to wonder when Jack Nicholson will show up. The Dream Team isn't unusual, but it's funnier than, say, Twins or Fletch Lives. It can't really hit any classic highs, perhaps because it regards rebellion as cute and paranoia as a running gag. The jokes, to stick, need grittier, sawtooth edges.

A funny valentine by an old master, woos us into the dance.

Kill Me Again doesn't look like the noir classics; instead of black-and-white, it's shot in slightly muddy color with vagrant green tints. But it feels like them. It has that nerve-jangling mix of pungent cynicism and thick gobs of pseudo-Expressionist style. It's not brilliant or original, but it's still a lean, fast, wide-awake sleeper.

It's a high-tech thriller that really works.

A horror-comedy about cute little Christmas toy/pets who turn into murderous monsters wreaking havoc on a Norman Rockwellian town. There's a moral there someplace.

Though it's not the great film "Grand Illusion" is, and though it may strike some as a little schmaltzy, it still has some of that earlier film's deep feeling and empathy for soldiers trapped in the jaws of war and for the joys of Christmas--for believers and non-believers alike.

Like its black anti-hero, the mapantsula (Zulu for small-time crook ) of the title, the movie makers do their job with swiftness, guile and gall. It’s a moral drama in disguise.

There's so much emotion and so many ideas in this film that it's both angering and exhilarating. The acting is fine, the writing superb, the production crisp.

Drably shot, unimaginatively written and shallowly acted, it's a poor example of the "daffy, goofy, sex-crazed guys" occupational comedies that flourished throughout the job-obsessed '80s. [19 Feb 1999]

Like most Godard, it can be watched repeatedly, always yielding new secrets and beauties. Most profound of all, perhaps, are those incredible black-and-white images of Paris.

For a film that first seems a throwaway, it has unusual intensity and grip. It’s not another over-reaching, under-financed “Terminator” or “Total Recall” wanna-be.

The movie's gentle humor and offbeat whimsy prove that humanity trumps bureaucratic foolishness, in Norway or anywhere else.

It has an irresistibly sure touch, an easy command of its audience. It hits the right buttons, strikes the right chords, plays with our expectations with the right blend of savvy, guile and imagination. [26 Nov. 1986]

Moviegoers should be almost as entranced by the teeming, glorious landscapes and dark, bloody battlegrounds of Two Towers: astonishing midpoint of an epic movie fantasy journey for the ages.

Dercourt, a very fine filmmaker, is a musician himself, a music teacher and one-time solo viola player with the French Symphony Orchestra. And he directs, with a musician's precision and an insider's sly wit, the world of classical music performance.

A bomb? Not quite. Anyone who gets a kick of train thrillers should get knocked off the tracks by this one. [17 July 1995, p.N2]

A film driven by an elusive plot buried like a cryptogram under the action. It's a delightfully screwy ethnographic murder mystery, beautifully photographed in translucent naturalistic color.

Fantastic, exciting, a real cinematic/theatrical feast. [15 Oct 1993, p.I]

Trying to be more antic and cuttingly funny, it misses the premise's shivery tension. The story loses us at precisely the moment it should put us in the vise.

It remains an anti-war masterpiece. [09 Feb 2007, p.C6]

John Wayne as the gutsiest sarge and top kick on Iwo Jima, in one of his most prototypical war yarns. Vintage Duke. [09 Jul 2000, p.23C]

I found nothing likable or funny about either of these characters, who both deserve a pie in the face. (One of them even gets it.)

These girls can cook, and Yamashita captures them with an austere, unhurried visual style that has been rightly compared to rock aficionado/filmmakers Aki Kaurismaki ("Ariel") and Jim Jarmusch ("Mystery Train"). [8 Dec 2006, p.2]

Thanks to Echer, Nettelbeck and this delicious movie, I was able to hear "Country" and the other Jarrett tunes in scene after scene - heightening moods, lyricizing action and making Hamburg seem like a wintry love song. Predictable or not, that's often as good as it gets.

One of those sweet, intelligent, nicely made films.

The movie is a triumph on almost every level-of artistry, technique, humanity, entertainment and spirit.

A harsh, spellbinding tale.

Fast-moving shocker, but it's a dull shocker, so morally dead that it deadens you to watch it. After a while you couldn't care less if anyone is slaughtered or raped -- including the heroines.

There's almost no reason to see the movie, unless you have no qualms about wasting your time.

As is often the case in Loach's films, all the acting is exemplary. Padilla, who learned English only shortly before making the film, is a natural actress, a smoldering presence.

A movie likely to rally huge audiences who want to take another roller coaster ride. And though it may disappoint a few of them, it's also a film that gives you something to think and feel sad about. It smashes you -- gently.

It's as thrilling and lushly beautiful a movie as has been released all year, matched only by Zhang's epic "Hero." And I think this film is the more powerful.

There's just enough neurotic or sharp badinage and Rodeo Drive realism to make it all go down easy.

An extraordinarily truthful and piercing drama.

Psycho III--better in most respects than II--lets you down with the same swampy thud at the end. It's not a catastrophe. It has some good writing, and some better-than-good acting (Perkins, Diana Scarwid, Jeff Fahey), directing (Perkins again) and camera work (Bruce Surtees). But it fails any sequel's acid test: It feeds off the original without deepening it.

There's something too slickly contrived and hollow about this film. It's a yuppified wish-fulfillment piece dangling between real world and fairy tale, and it's mostly the actors --especially Lindsay and Elaine Hendrix (as the conniving publicist who is trying to marry Hallie and Annie's dad) -- who manage to bring it off. [29 July 1998]

The film, like its lovers, is fond, giddy and poetic about love and death.

We're reminded of Police Academy because this is another story about outcasts and rejects banding together to beat the odds in a macho profession. And we're reminded of The Sting because that's how we feel after the movie is over. Stung.

Hool directs all this so lethargically you might suspect he’s gone missing in action himself.

An improbable masterpiece -- a bizarre mixture of grandly operatic visuals, grim brutality and sordid violence that keeps wrenching you from one extreme to the other.

A movie about the passions of simple people, and it's done with such extraordinary empathy and commitment that it all but pulls you under. [29 November 1996, Friday, p.A]

Turturro is the one thing that's right with the movie. Perhaps the weakest thing about the new "Deeds" is its utter lack of a strong viewpoint and real emotion.

To give the movie its due, it's been directed, at least on the visual level, with unusual elegance: filled with graceful, gliding tracking shots, and icily precise Hitchcockian setups of the bleak decor and scary effects.

Good action movies live on style and excitement. But they also need credibility, and in Hostage, ALMOST a good genre piece, plausibility keeps getting slaughtered.

Don't expect a lot, and you'll probably enjoy Happy, Texas, as I did -- mostly. At the very least, Steve Zahn will make you laugh.

The ending of Waitress is so beguiling and whimsical that it makes you, like its diner's patrons, hungry for more--and it makes you miss that red-headed movie auteur/pastry chef/heart stealer Shelly even more.

It's intellectual without being dry, dramatic without bombast, smart without posturing. Its characters and milieu are very well drawn, and Andre is one of the more intriguing and convincing fictional creations in recent film.

One of the year's most thought-provoking, hard-hitting films, gutsily opening up a subject rarely done with this kind of all-out chutzpah.

1966 French masterpiece -- the finest, most deeply personal work of a filmmaker who has been compared, justifiably, to both Dostoyevsky and Bach.

Oddly enough, it's as black comedy and social history, far more than thriller or human drama, that Patty Hearst works best.

The film may be bad-and mad-but it's not predictable.

Though Stealth's strengths are obvious -- high-tech marvels and a good cast -- so are its flaws. At its worst moments, a mad robot seems to have taken over the movie, too.

The first 10 minutes of Lodge Kerrigan's Keane have a raw, hurtling reality that's as painfully engrossing as anything you'll see in a recent non-fiction movie, a searing portrait of one man's hell, from inside and outside.

In Roman Polanski's Frantic--an elegant, icy thriller about an American doctor chasing his wife's kidnapers through the deadlier byways of Paris--we can tell after 10 minutes that we're in the hands of a superb craftsman.

The film's triple thesis is that elections are run badly, Democrats are often clueless and Republicans are clever. Maybe--but that still leaves too many unanswered questions.

A brilliant work of the imagination capable of truly seizing and igniting our fantasies.

Johnny Suede has an astonishingly consistent tone and a remarkably talented and cohesive cast. [21 Aug 1992]

A curiously cool, but very intelligent movie. [02 Jan 2000, p.19C]

This is one of the great alternative masterpieces of the American cinema. In many ways, Cassavetes' most important film.

To work, it has to make us feel crazy with love, like "Vertigo" did. Instead, it often just makes us feel crazy for believing any of it.

An erratic but enjoyable sci-fi action movie with an extremely bent sense of humor. [09 Aug 1996, p.F]

Amazingly cynical and howlingly funny. [13 Jan 1994, p.10]

The wild L.A. romance of a museum curator and a parking lot attendant. [09 Jan 1998, p.C]

It's a lovely, terrifying sight.

Tati's fabulous comedy about a bumbling French vacationer in Brittany -- the first appearance of his hilarious pipe-smoking alter-ego Hulot -- is almost a silent movie done in sound, with spare dialogue, affectionate characterizations, sunny beach scenes and complex sight gags that recall the genius of Chaplin and Keaton. [19 Dec 1997, p.T]

It's one of those fast, slick, half-smart shows that can't decide whether to pay its debts to action or reality -- and winds up cheating both.

A second-rate nightmare: the Reagan generation meets Leatherhead with flickers of brilliance drowned in blood and snobbery, a corpse dressed by Bloomingdale's.

The Favor is a sex comedy without sex-and pretty much without comedy. [29 Apr 1994]

Though Haynes' methods are austere and his style dry, the terror of his narrative becomes more palpable as the film unwinds. The picture's eerie delicacy, meticulous technique and rapt formality may distance us, but they also steadily strip bare the panic at its core.

Kubrick's beautiful adaptation of the William Thackeray novel follows a young Irish gambler, rogue and romantic adventurer (Ryan O'Neal) though a painterly 18th Century English landscape of frozen elegance and upper-class hypocrisy.

The artifice may be ancient, but the thought and emotions -- and especially Sorvino -- are beautifully, refreshingly modern.

Acted with transparent subtlety and grace, brilliantly written and beautifully shot from Ozu's customary low camera angles, this superb film is one of cinema history's now universally accepted masterpieces. [14 Jan 2005, p.C6]

Violent and over-sexy as this movie may be, offensive as some may find it, it never loses its grinning good humor, its revisionist drive, its shoot-the-works spirit. It’s a killer entertainment--with an accent on “kill.”

The best things about The Thing Called Love are its cast, style and mood. It has a snap, pace and rhythm we don't ordinarily see in today's movies. The dialogue scenes have a headlong pace and crackling self-confidence reminiscent of Howard Hawks, and the three- and four-way love combats recall Ernst Lubitsch.

Though the movie is pretty stereotypical and sometimes crude, it also has a sweet laid-back temper. It has amusing moments.

It's the best new battle film since "Black Hawk Down," a movie it surpasses in sheer feeling and bravura style, if not in nightmarish panic and suspense.

Never feels inflated -- and it builds to an ending of unusual power.

Dark as it is, the humor makes it work, especially Greene's typically witty and compassionate portrayal of Mogie.

It's a generic action movie with more guns than brains, more car crashes than coherence and more opportunism than originality. [12 Feb 1988, p.21]

Curtiz holds you in his master grip, creating one of those WW II-era California noirs that keeps swinging you from darkness to sunlight, love to hatred, happiness to the pits of despair and death. [18 Nov 2005, p.C6]

Based on Reginald Rose's legendary TV play, under Sidney Lumet's sympathetic hand, this is one of the great '50s actors' showcases. [16 May 1999, p.27]

A rare example of a literary film that preserves the best of its source while creatively filling up on it.

The Third Man is a film where everything works: script, direction, the performances of Welles, Cotten, Trevor Howard (the cynical police major) and Alida Valli (the enigmatic traveler), Robert Krasker's flamboyantly tilted black-and-white cinematography and the unforgettably spare and haunting zither score by Anton Karas. [5 Sept 1996, p.6]

Stirred by the winds of nostalgia, lapped by its ocean of dreams, "The Secret of Roan Inish" is one of the loveliest surprises of the year. [03 Mar 1995, p.C]

A fairy tale comedy with the Holocaust as the background, a collision of terror and community, death and beauty.

Harsh Times, is almost a good, salty urban thriller.

However gaudy its credits, it is one more--and one of the worst written--in an endless line of clenched-up, crashed-out, buddy-buddy L.A. cop star vehicles. A waste of talent and energy on all levels.

May try to revive the eerie spirit of the Gothic novel, but, unless you're suffering from amnesia yourself, it probably won't surprise or thrill you.

Doesn't always sizzle, but its stars do.

Nobody ever gathered together a sharper, more pungent international "Golden Age" cast (including Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, S.Z. Sakall, Marcel Dalio, Leonid Kinskey, John Qualen and Curt Bois) in a more imperishable exotic movieland cabaret (Rick's) than Warner Bros. producer Hal Wallis and director Michael Curtiz did in this greatest of all Hollywood World War II adventure romances.

It's a great film that, sadly, may be ignored by all but the most dedicated, knowledgable filmgoers.

Thompson clearly loves this story, and, even though, she's playing the less spontaneous of the older Dashwood sisters, responsible Elinor, you can feel her spirit rising out to embrace the part. It makes her beautiful to watch. [13 December 1995]

Among the finest hours of horror star Boris Karloff. [18 Oct 2005, p.C3]

Blithely sophisticated, would-be French naughtiness, sleek as a bolt of silk. [08 Jan 2004, p.N1]

Truly original and unique: genuine film poetry, full of spellbinding images and sequences. [20 Mar 1998, p.L]

Often ridiculous, mostly poorly written and, surprisingly poorly acted too. No matter how many flashy scenes the filmmakers shoot, the bad lines just keep dripping down. [21 Aug 1998]

This French documentary gives us unprecedented intimacy and sweep.

For the right audience, it'll be fun. It's for action movie fans with a taste for something off the beaten track -- but not too far. And for people who like to rail and spew against the vulgarity and stupidity of TV -- but keep watching it all anyway.

No one who sees the last half-hour of this movie will ever forget it--though quite a few may want to.

People who love Lennon will almost certainly like the film; his detractors will almost certainly howl "bias!" Even so, it's a movie that, at its best, makes you ache with the memory of an anguished era and its fallen pop culture hero.

Few adventure movies have such a heightened atmosphere of beauty, excitement and fun. [18 Apr 1999, p.34C]

The Seventh Continent is a calm chronicle of hell, a clinical look at how commonplace people can erupt into despair or violence. Bleak, cool, beautifully controlled, liberatingly intelligent, it chills our hearts as it opens our minds. And it establishes Haneke as one of the more remarkable young contemporary filmmakers.

For sheer laughs, Willard and Piddock take the trophy.

Lawrence and Zahn generate enough comic tension and mayhem to jump-start this mass of action-comedy cliches into a fairly amusing show.

Weird to the max, smart, sneaky as a Wall Street pickpocket and revved up with cruel wit and brazen imagination, Being John Malkovich is a dark movie comedy that you couldn't forget if you tried.

Quite similar to the first film, but this is one time when a reprise is welcome. Ages 7-11, but actually, it's for everyone. [27 Oct 2006, p.C5]

Surviving Picasso is an intelligent, beautifully crafted and engrossing Ismail Merchant-James Ivory biographical portrait of the century's most famous and successful painter. [4 Oct 1996]

Newsies becomes a string of set-pieces, some of which work, some of which don't, all barreling full-speed ahead toward its Teddy Roosevelt deus ex machina. [10 Apr 1992]

With its stylized story-line and almost styleless direction, it sometimes resembles a juggling act with sledgehammers. [13 Jul 1988, p.1]

A lovely film with a deeply humane perspective.

The movie, a keen look at the way passion unravels and obsession destroys, creates a black mood, a sense of truth and an enduring chill that stay with you.

Though the film falls short of its aspirations, there's something magical about it. It's a poetic look at transience, betrayal, loss and doom.

Stylish, ingenious and gleaming with charm, wit and malice, it's another expert blend of domestic drama and crime thriller, a vivisection of the bourgeoisie.

As magnificent as a high-masted 19th-century British warship, as explosive as a Napoleonic-era ocean battle seen above the cannon's mouth... probably the best movie of its kind ever made.

Another of his (McElwee) beguiling "personal chronicle" movies.

Some of LaGravenese's dialogue crackles, but it's a dry crackle, a hollow cough. And that's despite Leary-and in spite of Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey, two of the best actors around these days.

A misfiring comic fantasia on business success in the Reagan era. [10 Apr 1987, p.1]

The stars are at their best and most rambunctious and so is Walsh. If you have any taste for Warner Brothers Golden Age studio classics--and want to catch a gem you may have missed--this one hits the spot. [17 Nov 2006, p.C6]

Erotic, poetic and light on its feet. It's a portrayal of a runaway teenager's sexual initiation, and though it comes close to being exploitive, it keeps dancing away.

The movie is dedicated, in a nice touch, to early Farrelly fan Gene Siskel. And Gene was right: The Farrellys are often very funny filmmakers. .

One of the most excitingly contemporary musicals ever made.

I liked the idea of the movie more than the movie itself -- though sections of it are mind-blowing.

Gangster classic. [21 Jan 2005, p.C6]

Thanks to the actors and the way the movie lets them loose, it's often funny or moving at all the right moments.

The atmosphere is unremittingly tense, the undercurrents poignant and grim. It's the best movie ever made by pastoralist Henry King. [26 July 1988, p.21]

The new Lassie is faithful to Knight's story, capturing its sweep, Dickensian social contrasts and high emotion. All that is enhanced by a splendid cast.

Although Alien 3 is stylish--and ambitious--the movie doesn't have the soul or guts to sustain that ambition. It gets swallowed up in its own technology and genre expectations. And Fincher gets stalled in the drama, trapped in too many scenes of talking heads looming out of the gloom.

One of the great film noirs and a quintessential heist movie, a classic of American hard-boiled storytelling that, though endlessly copied, hasn't been bettered. [27 May 2005, p.C6]

Is this a bad movie? Is the sky blue? Short of repeating all 237 or so of its incredibly limp jokes there's no way to convey how completely Repossessed goes awry. On and on they come, endlessly: like a blizzard of stale pork rinds. [17 Sep 1990, p.F2]

Hitchcock's first talkie, begun as a silent film and then converted midstream, alternates stiff dramatic scenes with brilliant, highly visual suspense sequences. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

With the exception of Amelie's voiceover narration in French, Fear and Trembling is entirely in Japanese. And the Japanese cast is superb.

Finally, the film answers a question that obviously haunts Nachtwey: Is it immoral, callous or irresponsible to win fame and recognition from images of the terror, death and suffering of others?

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.

A wildly original movie with astonishingly varied moods and influences.

An outrageously unlikely prison action movie made with lots of eye-catching pizzazz and undeserved expertise.

Airborne is a fairly shameless little picture, but at least it follows the First Rule of Cinema. It gives us something interesting to watch: the climactic hill race, with the largely unidentifiable racers zooming and hurdling one another on hairpin hillside curves...Unfortunately, Airborne also follows the First Rule of Bad Movies. Instead of telling a story, the filmmakers follow an outline (or, in this case, an in-line).

It's one hell of a ride and a real, roaring rock movie. [01 Mar 1991]

Bopha!, a movie about emotional and political turbulence tearing apart the family of a black South African police officer, is good, but a little disheartening. Not because of the injustice and misery it reveals-but because you want it to be better.

May fall short of its great model, "Seven Samurai" (almost all action movies do), but it's miles ahead of most of the gadget-ridden adventure epics around now.

It's fairly entertaining--but not the second coming of indie comedy some notices might lead you to expect.

This is a movie that really has little to offer but performances and ideas. For a while, that's enough.

It's got the smoothest, glossiest finish imaginable, but something inside it doesn't jell. [15 July 1988, p.26]

How can one dislike this movie? It has wit, romance, gentle rebellion, idyllic landscapes and fine actors savoring luscious lines. Only the undercurrent may bother a few: the hints of feminist revolt, beneath the sparkly surface. Enchanted April--based on a 1923 novel by Elizabeth Von Arnim--is a pure wish-fulfillment story, but there's an acid edge to it.

Though "Caterina" is unusually well-acted and crafted for this kind of movie--and both more than casually insightful and irreverent about modern Italian school life, teenage mores and politics--Giancarlo is the one character who makes the movie special.

This is a quiet thriller and a middle-aged romance, and it's full of desperation and oozing anxiety.

A stylish, nasty, very well-done Belgian horror movie.

Leigh is an artist not at all blind to the world's darkness and pain. But the generosity and togetherness he and his company show in Secrets and Lies is something the movies -- and the world -- truly need. [25 October 1996, Friday, p.A]

Its fascination may be limited to those already very familiar with his works and collaborators - and his sensual, highly subjective style.

Jersey Girl is an oddity, hard to dislike but impossible to buy.

Twilight is a great samurai film in the way that "Unforgiven," "The Gunfighter" or "Will Penny"--all muted, somber films about aging gunfighters--are great westerns.

Varda's touching day-in-the-life of a Parisian pop star. [12 Jan 2007, p.C3]

With his usual consummate visual skills and his flair for the nauseatingly audacious, David Cronenberg’s written (spottily) and directed (stunningly) a movie that often makes you feel as if you'd lost contact with reality: a twisted, nightmarish tale of futuristic reality games and a couple on the run. [23 April 1999, Friday, p.D]

Jade, like many another recent erotic or techno thriller, is packed with talent, polished and technically dazzling. But, daring as it might seem in its sexual content and exposure of bad behavior among the mighty, it's curiously soft at conveying what these characters really believe. [13 Oct 1995, p.J2]

Mrs. Winterbourne doesn't amount to much. But it's such a professional job, done with such glow and verve -- and the people making it seem to be having such an infectiously good time -- that it's hard to resist. Good comedies are easy to love anyway. [19 Apr 1996, p.C]

Yet the film, no more than the novel, shouldn't be described as depressing. Both of them shine with heightened vision and poetics. [01 Nov 1996]

It's interesting - in its own let-it-all-hang-out, shaky-camera way.

This version not only doesn’t surpass or match Brook’s, it makes the material look bad.

A children's movie done with genuinely youthful spirit and an easy self-kidding mastery of its own high-tech gadgetry.

Band of the Hand is a formula 1986 revenge thriller, and, though it hooks you frequently into its thin plot, it never gets far past formula. It’s a bad movie with saving graces-- Dylan’s song among them--which is better than a bad movie that just lies there and rots.

Does have heart and enthusiasm. But it might have worked better if it had been glitzed up and energized the way "Fame" was. It's not a script that can survive this kind of minimal, earnest, self-congratulatory treatment.

Underneath, it's a flashy crock-another piece of self-congratulatory formula wish-fulfillment masquerading as hip. This would-be "inside" comedy about not selling out sells out in virtually every scene.

Johnny Be Good, a would-be satire on the excesses of big-time college football recruiting, is so bad that the NCAA might consider using it as punishment for coaches who violate regulations.

A shiny bauble full of dead weight, gloppy good feeling and airless cliches. And every time you try to grab onto "Bride's" characters, they run away. [30 July 1999]