Michael Wilmington

A blithe classic with Gershwin songs, Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. [03 Oct 1997, p.10]

Heavily influenced by Sternberg's "Underworld," this is one of Ozu's oddest, most enjoyable departures; it reveals him as a first-rate noir director. [09 Jan 2005, p.C11]

The star, again, is Mizoguchi's favorite actress, Kinuyo Tanaka, and the style is magisterial, exquisitely controlled--with Mizoguchi moving the story inexorably to an almost sublimely redemptive climax. [24 Mar 2006, p.C7]

The screen's most magical tale of the world of theater is this lush, intoxicating period epic: the summit of the collaboration of writer Jacques Prevert and director Carne. [12 Jan 2007, p.C3]

Most of the jokes in Eddie Murphy Raw are the kind you regale buddies with to show off. Anyone as good as Eddie Murphy should have outgrown that years ago.

It's Whoopi Goldberg, however, who gives you something extraordinary. At the center of all this formula tongue-in-cheek thriller pablum, she keeps sending out weird curves and bent splinters of off-center energy. She's a remarkably empathic actress, and you only hope she'll get a few vehicles that push her to the limit.

Superb, vibrantly emotional drama. [27 Apr 2001, p.C1]

The movie's great end-title sequence redeems everything. Under the credits, we see and hear the real-life game veterans as they are now--including, movingly, ex-Lakers coach Riley.

Hollywood's great holiday musical is this sparkling adaptation of writer Sally Benson's memoir: a movie that takes us on a Currier and Ives 1903 holiday tour of St. Louis with the postcard-perfect Smith family. [08 Jan 2004, p.N1]

A modernized version of that great sentimental horse movie, 1943's "My Friend Flicka," and it comes with the shiny trappings, high professionalism and glamorous accessories you might expect...Something is missing though.

It's possible to admire or respect a movie without enjoying it too much, and that's partly the reaction I had to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. It's an incredibly ambitious film of sometimes thrilling visual achievement, but it didn't connect fully to my mind and nerves.

This movie offers four of the best -- and best-looking -- Hollywood stars cavorting together in material so slight and inconsequential it often seems ready to float away like a toy balloon. [16 Oct 1997, p.1]

A near-classic blend of mystery, personality, humor and terror, laced with one stunning shock after another. [18 August 1995, Friday, p.C]

It has ideas as well as jolts, themes as well as special effects, characters as well as gore. But, as adapted by writer W. D. Richter and director Fraser Heston, these Things seem disappointingly diminished, squeezed and stuffed into a box too small.

One of the most entertaining movies this year, and one of the few that shows real invention and audacity, along with big-studio technical flash. [8 June 1986, p.C27]

Too rich, too loaded, Maverick may have misplayed its cards, kept its eyes on the pot instead of the players. In movies, as in poker, you can't always trust a pat hand.

It’s not a bad film. Brightly designed, slickly paced, it has its cargo of youth elements: laughs, sexual tease, action and music. But, halfway through, you can almost feel everyone relaxing, waiting for the next bit of spiritless slapstick or car-chase to carry them through to the end.

This is a movie that rocks and socks you, and has a performance by Washington that's ruthless and scary. But in the end, it leaves you unmarked.

there's no joy in this movie. It's a safe, compromised, even preachy, fable; a wannabe hip romp that never gets going. [07 Jul 1995]

The two halves of Hiding Out--thriller and teen sex comedy--never meld, working against each other rather than together. Hiding Out never escapes its absurd hook, this mechanical collision of genres. After all, if someone really needs to hide out, isn't the best plan to simply . . . hide out?

A sports bio movie that I really enjoyed about a sport and sports hero I barely knew existed: the World Hour Record competition for bicyclists and its gutsy, tormented and most unusual champion, Graeme Obree.

Three Men strikes a funny chord. The audience seems to want to believe that these guys can be domesticated, but on another level, they don't want the trio broken. They want bachelor fathers, domesticated swingers.

Instead of an escape from Hollywood’s cookie-cutter plots, it’s a retreat back into them, only the sexes have been changed.

Two suggestions as you watch it: Never take anything for granted, and keep your hand on your wallet as you leave the theater.

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

It's a real shame that most new boxing movies try to copy the crowd-pleasing, sentiment-choked tactics of "Rocky" rather than the stark drama of "Raging Bull" or the realistic grit of "On the Waterfront" and "The Harder They Fall." Against the Ropes is only the latest sorry example. The sad thing is that, with this real-life story and subject, it could have been a contender.

It's a movie of uncommon eloquence and elegance, acted by a truly gifted cast.

Cheerful but mind-numbing.

A cute, well-acted film that tries to mix tones sharply.

Everything about the movie is overscaled, overbrutal, overbroad, full of holes. Yet there's something cheerful and wacky about it; it's a light-hearted blood bath.

There's a zest and brilliance in Neil Jordan's racy heist thriller The Good Thief that makes it almost intoxicating to watch.

A film of almost paralyzing gravity and large ambitions that, almost inevitably, it can't quite meet.

Freaky Friday commits a lot of sins; luckily, it has Curtis and a few others to cover them up.

Altman's dreamy, snowy northwestern about wily operator McCabe (Warren Beatty), sexy Madame Miller (Julie Christie) and a bittersweet tale of how the West was unzipped. [04 May 2007, p.C2]

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

There's something a little absurd about this story, but for me, it's endearingly goofy.

A flashy, splashy and violent chase thriller.

Has some of the wit, sass and sexual candor of an "Annie Hall." But it covers the same kind of territory with more bite and bile.

Despite intelligent, sympathetic direction by Gordon, a brilliant lead performance by Robert Downey Jr. and an adapted script written by Potter himself before his 1991 death, this "Detective" pales next to its predecessor.

Trespass has its bloody ups and teeth-rattling downs, but it also has a clutch of humorous in-your-face performances and a core theme that explosively carries it along: When the factory breaks down, the rats will kill each other for the gold.

It lives on its action and dies on its gab. It also would have been better without all those songs about catching the thunder and grabbing the lightning and going for the glory. They sound like a rejected ad campaign for Old Milwaukee. In movies like this, action is often enough--but here, it's just not radical.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles never rises above its marketing-hook origins. It's a product, a commodity, a toy tie-in, a trailer for the comics, an advertisement for the cereal. It's a naked sell.

The movie has an absurd script, fueled by that current B-movie staple, the idiot plot--a plot that proceeds only because all, or most, of the characters, act like idiots.

When you piece it all together, it becomes mildly fascinating.

An uninspired misfire of a TV-series knockoff that, despite its great cast and smart filmmakers, never manages to scare up much magic.

The new movie, like its predecessor, is a crime thriller with a moral viewpoint, an eye and ear for street color and a taste for macho movie fantasy.

A pumped-up, flag-waving, outrageously hokey and ridiculous -- but sometimes incredibly exciting -- war movie.

To say this movie's premise is bonkers is putting it mildly.

Cradle Will Rock is the masterpiece that wasn't, a magnificent opportunity blown to hell.

It only works about half the time, but it's an interesting half.

It's a fairly well-written piece and an even better acted one. And these days, when independent films are increasingly the salvation of the serious American dramatic movie, it's heartening to see something like The Architect, which tries to reawaken a major American dramatic tradition and sometimes succeeds.

A classic, mythic portrayal of African history, religion and politics by the great Senegalese novelist-filmmaker Sembene, centering on a princess' kidnapping and its aftermath. [18 Sep 1998, p.J]

This is one more "yuppie-in-peril" movie, just as slick and empty, manipulative and crude, as most of the rest: all those paranoid pictures bent on scaring us with insane roommates, murderous baby-sitters and killer temps. [5 Apr 1993, p.F3]

In movies as in life, superior technology doesn't necessarily trump humor, magic or really shaggy dogs.

Unlike other current D.C. types, Elle would never misplace or misidentify her own weapons of mass destruction. They're all in her wardrobe closet and makeup kit.

It's a brutally convincing movie about two hell-bent young Turkish-German lovers dancing on the edge of destruction in a Hamburg underworld of drugs and casual sex. Yet it's also compassionate and even tender.

There's a muscular sincerity to this movie, a power and spread to its imagery that triumphs over the occasional candied purple patches or strained plot twists. [16 Jul 1993 Pg. F1]

A romantic comedy/social satire that, on a modest budget, manages to be hip, charming, funny and dressed to kill.

Twins starts with an overblown fairy-tale quality that seems as if it should work. But, by the finish, the movie collapses on the shoulders of the stars. It works because they both showed up and delivered the goods and kept their end of the deal. [9 Dec 1988, p.1]

A masterpiece of wry violence and stylized mayhem, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi turns loose one of Japan's most brilliant film auteurs, Takeshi Kitano, on one of its most enduring pop legends.

Just as Zhao uses his comic gifts to create an affecting human, so Dong's performance as Wu is a triumph of honesty and tact.

A picture about America with the blinders off, a film about heroism that makes you chuckle and feel sad - and a film about childhood that lets us reenter that lost world and see the grass, sky and sunlight the way they once looked, in the golden hours.

iIt's a film for art- and foreign-movie devotees. But it's also a movie for audiences who simply want to get turned on.

This is a film precisely constructed, brilliantly imagined.

A ridiculous but exciting action movie.

The sense of the unknown that "Padgett" created are largely absent. And the movie fails to supply us with an antagonist to work up some dramatic conflict. Nor are the toys themselves very interesting and Mimzy is a toy bunny of no distinction.

One of the most remarkable and moving love stories the movies have recently given us.

One of the best-loved of all the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation special effects extravaganzas, this kitschy version of the mythic tale of Jason's quest for the golden fleece stars Todd Armstrong as Medea's eventual betrayer and is graced with a nerve-rending Bernard Herrmann score, plus such classic visual tricks as the dueling skeletons. [01 Oct 1999, p.J]

Less a movie than a loud, heavy, money machine, a think tank where nobody thinks. The movie seems intended to extract maximum profit with minimum artistry -- and if you like having your pockets picked by experts, this is probably the show to see. [15 Mar 1996, p.C]

Downfall, whatever its shortcomings, bears strong witness to great evil. That is its triumph as a film.

A beautiful, almost defiant film on an unusual subject: love among the elderly.

Has heart, but lacks bite.

It's a genteel film with a gun in its pocket, but it's also a film with a universal chord of feeling that keeps welling up from the dark surfaces and violent byways of the plot-and a final confession that both warms the heart and chills the blood.

In the remarkable, ferociously intelligent new film No Man's Land, Bosnian writer-director Danis Tanovic gives us a movie portrait of the Bosnian War, a conflict that has devastated his country, friends and neighbors -- and found in it both shocking humor and searing, relentless tragedy.

Witherspoon goes further, pouring so much humor and pizzazz into Elle that she lifts up the whole movie.

I don't see how you can get away from calling Cage’s performance a great one. [10 November 1995, Friday, p.C]

A beautifully acted and deeply compassionate study of ordinary people coping with the vicissitudes of life.

The film tries to mix the two 1930s movie comedy strains: screwball romance and populist fable. But there's something nerveless and thin about it. Hawn and Russell are good, but their scenes together have a calculated spontaneity--overcute, obvious. Director Garry Marshall keeps the lines slamming off each other briskly but with a shallow, hectoring energy. And he doesn't have much visual flair.

This film has so many good ideas, it tends to seem better after you've left the theater. But the mock TV stuff is just too faux to be funny.

A big, hearty fantasy-adventure with spectacular fire-breathing effects and a fizzling story. [31 May 1996, p.C]

Frederick is the key to the movie and she's definitely an impressive new talent, someone who can really hold the screen and who delivers something striking or memorable in every scene.

By creating a kind of politically correct version of Andy Griffith's "Mayberry," director Bezucha has drained the movie not only of bigotry but also of dramatic conflict.

Has the unfortunate effect of overtipping the dramatic scales in favor of the Southern generals and turning almost everybody into waxen idols who spout flowery rhetoric.

One of the most gorgeous science-fiction movies ever - and probably also one of the most realistic in detail and scientific extrapolation

The trajectory of the film -- despite its excellent cast and intelligent mounting -- is too preordained.

A wildly expensive movie full of computers, nonsense and violence, a film where wit, romance, elegance -- everything -- is sacrificed on the altar of giganticism, cliche and over-the-top action.

Most of Frailty is so good -- done in a low-key, realistic mood of genuine creepiness and dread -- that it doesn't need formula shocks.

Boyle's new movie is mostly a zombie fiasco, closer to the vacuities of "The Beach" than the scintillating social satire of "Trainspotting."

This movie is a model of technique, beautifully crafted, often brilliantly acted by Cage and the others, but it's a bit hollow at the center.

A racily entertaining, wonderfully sly and goofy comic film noir with more twists than a mountain road-or, to darken the metaphor, than a cartrunk full of rattlesnakes.

An unpretentious, rowdy, lecherous good show. [28 Nov 1999, p.35]

Boasts a really spectacular cast to voice those reasonably funny jokes.

Bravo!

This dingy, drab, pointless little movie -- a would-be shamrock shocker about four teen-agers menaced by the Irish super-scamp while renovating a North Dakota farmhouse -- is made without flair or imagination, seemingly enervated by its own bad taste and low intentions. [11 Jan 1993, p.F3]

The thrilling sequel-return of Mifune's hip samurai from Yojimbo. [01 Nov 2002, p.C9]

It's a movie of elegant surfaces, great background music (by both the Mahlers), gossipy underpinnings and pretensions to romantic grandeur.

One of the quintessential '60s foreign art films, a bizarre melange of pop music, revolution, sex, movie allusions and poetry. It's a masterpiece of sorts by one of the most important European filmmakers of that era. But it's also a movie that can drive you crazy.

Freeman gives his overwrought, over-familiar scenes an unlikely shot of intelligence and dignity that cuts through the formulas and almost makes them work.

Wonderful spirit, humanity and humor.

Fascinating documentary.

Keith -- a consistent hit-maker who wrote the controversial 9/11 song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" -- has a future in movies if he wants it. Hopefully, they'll be better ones than this.

I can't think of much that might happen on a date evening that could be more annoying than this movie.

Somber, meditative and visually magnificent, this film, about a famous Greek author ruminating on his past, is a piece of cinematic poetry: calm, beautiful and chilling as the eternal sea against which much of it is set. [22 Oct 1998, p.2]

Falls flat on its face.

Rivets and amazes, even if it falls just frustratingly short of the mind-expanding grandeur it could have had.

If you're looking for purple romance with a social conscience, it doesn't get much more purple than God's Sandbox.

It's still a disappointment: a well-mounted and well-acted suspense movie that, thanks to its illogical script, falls off a cliff midway through.

A singularly cheerless trip, explicit but sterile, racy but dull.

This Pink Panther really doesn't have to achieve the heights of the original; it just has to be funny on its own terms. But it pales there too. Kline, a master of comic hypocrisy, deserves more screen time, Emily Mortimer is wasted as Clouseau's adoring assistant Nicole and Knowles is over indulged as Xania.

The movie knocks your eyes out, at the same time it dulls the mind’s eye. Ultimately, it’s one more stop in the arcade, beckoning, waiting to soak up time and money.

It may be the most serene and optimistic film Rivette has made in France. Yet even the art-house audience may undervalue it, miss the beauty, style and wit.

What the movie doesn't have, besides too many laughs, is either the pungent style and sociology of true film noir, or the sheer yuppie desperation of the hard-core erotic thriller. Instead of being hard-boiled, it's over easy.

Pugach's selfishness, his inability to detach love from gratification, is the key to this crazy story.

A breakthrough for karate comedy king Chan, but not necessarily the kind we've all been waiting and hoping for. It's an ultra-digitized DreamWorks show crammed with elaborate special effects, the kind that physical-stunt specialist Chan has always avoided.

It's a cool breeze of a comedy, with a slant on things that's dark but compassionate. Watching Bottle Rocket doesn't just make you laugh. It makes you smile between the laughs, think beneath the smiles.

One of the great American social films: strong, ribald, deeply compassionate. [30 Sep 2005, p.C6]

A fit tribute to an entertainer who, no matter what hate or hardship threw in his way or how many mistakes he made, we can't stop loving.

In The Lion King, the savannas gleam and the meerkats swing. And when the animators click, their lions sing tonight. [24 June 1994, p.C]

Hallstrom gives us a genial interpretation and a supremely good-humored film.

One of those movies that starts like a house afire, catches you firmly in its narrative grip and then suddenly blows itself out, not really going out with a whimper but with a big, bad, ludicrous bang.

Technically clever but emotionally bankrupt...it's an almost laughably opportunistic movie.

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

It may entertain you if you don't mind senseless stories and screaming soundtracks.

Much-loved 1942 piece of super-romantic schmaltz. [19 Jul 2005, p.C3]

Such a triumph of simplicity, subtlety and tact--and of the eroticism in words, looks and glances--that the actors ravish us with sheer talent and intelligence.

The whole movie plays like an improbable blend of "Repulsion," "High Noon" and the archetypal low-budget rape/revenge shocker "I Spit on Your Grave." Queasy audiences beware, but midnight-movie bookers take note.

Few recent movie romances have a more chilling and peculiar feel -- and a more sobering aftertaste -- than Neil Jordan's heart-rendingly cold adaptation of Affair.

Blazes up constantly with a stunning, off-kilter brilliance, an incandescent force that sometimes explodes the space between us and the screen.

Beautifully produced: a moving film with a fascinating story and exemplary acting.

A likable little movie without much to offer but cute tots, recycled gags and a talented cast amiably wasting their time and ours.

Outrageously vapid and overdone movie.

The movie is like the bikers; it's best and freest when it's just racing ahead. Whenever it stops, you ask too many questions.

As a whole, though, the movie is much less magnetic or believable than its star.

A classy triple shot of film erotica from three brilliant writer-directors.

The movie itself, defying all odds, comes close to a knockout.

If the uncut Fanny and Alexander is Bergman's greatest work, as I think, it's because it's his most inclusive. He shows almost everything: all his moods, conflicts, styles and many of his favorite actors.

It's a weird little movie that's amusing enough while you watch it, offering fine acting moments and pungent insights into modern L.A.'s show-biz and media subcultures. But it doesn't leave you with much.

Songwriter bio on Gus Kahn (Danny Thomas); Day is his long-suffering mainstay. [13 Apr 2007, p.C5]

Some movies can lay claim to being the best thing around in a week, a month, a year. Robert Altman's Short Cuts is closer to being one of the all-time bests, among the finest American films since the advent of sound. [22 Oct 1993]

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

Intoxicatingly well-crafted entertainment about hunting down your enemy.

A smart shocker, scripted by Twilight Zone regulars Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont.

A tender, visually stunning comedy-drama.

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

All these good actors and all Crystal's sass and witty candor can't bring back the heyday of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges. Or even, most of the time, their off-days.

The acting -- especially by Borrows, Ian Hart and Hackett -- is strong and transparent, utterly convincing. The whole movie has a seamless flow and an utterly convincing sense of time and place.

It's a movie drama with a surface so bleak and an interior so hot with eroticism that it twists your guts to watch it.

Whatever magic the first two movies may have had -- and it wasn't always that apparent to anyone over the age of 10 -- has long since congealed, like stale pizza. Or mock turtle soup. [22 Mar 1993, p.F9]

Highway Courtesans carries a feeling of truth, of bravely facing problems that are pressing and real. It's a good, informative piece on the oldest profession--and on how the world differs from what we usually see in the movies.

A bizarre, bloody adventure movie.

Proyas' movie lacks a truly rich or compelling story -- although the city secret is certainly a rich and compelling idea. All too often, Dark City seems a great production design in search of a movie, an ultimate modern film noir pastiche, in which the images are so strong they overpower the drama. [27 Feb 1998]

Pink Cadillac has a strong visual design and lots of juicy, self-confident acting. But it doesn’t transcend its star vehicle trappings or chemistry. The construction of the story is so soft, you get the impression that if the driver and navigator were replaced, the movie might turn rattletrap and fall apart.

In Nightbreed neither the coyly horrible killers nor the horribly coy monsters register strongly enough. It's a dark beast with a flabby hide.

The talk and plot twists both have a flavorless, perfunctory quality.

This one features the heartbreaking young Vivien Leigh with her flower-like face, flashing eyes and seductive fragility; Robert Taylor is a little stiff as the hero. (isn't he always?), but it's a nice lush MGM production. [31 Oct 1999, p.34]

No movie car ride quite matches the horrific pursuit of salesman Dennis Weaver by that implacable smoke-belching truck in Spielberg's made-for-TV classic. [12 Apr 2002, p.C1]

At once proudly conservative, passionately idealistic and beautifully assured.

Chan is so good, so much fun to watch, that he often transcends his vehicles. And that's the case with Rumble in the Bronx, his big bid to crack the American market. [23 Feb 1996, p.C]

The Neverending Story 2 is a story you may want desperately to end. Soon. [11 Feb 1991, p.F10]

It's a thriller that really thrills, a drama that really engages, a portrait of a world and system out of joint that is painfully convincing and totally engrossing from the first simmering minute to the last explosive second.

Often, Requiem for a Dream is as technically inventive and daring as the Scottish heroin film "Trainspotting," but it has more resonance and feeling. And when Burstyn is on screen, it often becomes heartbreaking.

By turns brilliant and simplistic, moving and preposterous, the movie takes one of the ultimate hot-button American issues -- the morality of capital punishment -- and dissolves it into a volatile mix of psychological thriller and socio-political fable.

This film--one of the best and most memorable documentaries of the year so far--brings that truth-teller to us once again.

One of the best and funniest things that Martin, as writer and actor, has ever done.

Despite the actors, the visuals and Forster's directorial swagger, the movie lacks impact.

This rich, gorgeous music and the wistful pastoral scenes create a rhapsodic mood that the rest of the film doesn't really sustain.

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

Once again, as love dies and illusions crumble, this natural actress (Isabelle Huppert) shines with human fire. [26 March 1999, Friday, p.B]

Red Heat is directed in a fiery, muscular, pop-graphic style. And it has a James Horner score that puckishly mixes Prokofiev and rhythm and blues. But it's also a movie with a cramped interior. The action scenes seem to be squeezing out everything else, pressing the characters against the wall. [17 Jun 1988, p.1]

It's a movie imbued with a fierce intimacy -- a tone and style similar to cinema verite documentary -- but it's not a banal realism, even if the characters and settings in contemporary working-class Liege initially seem mundane.

The wrong crowd will find these antics infantile and offensive. The right one will have a howling good time.

Kline, though, does give one of the great movie performances of the year so far.

Despite its good performances--Minns, Lumbly, Shelby and Best, as well as Plummer--South Central lacks a certain juice, heat and life. It doesn’t boil with the energy you’d expect from a gang picture, and it doesn’t have the density or rich atmosphere of a Boyz N the Hood, Do the Right Thing or New Jack City.

A feast of bad taste, a demonic hog-wallow.

A business-as-usual blockbuster blueprint that rarely surprises you.

A hip, funny, knowing romantic sports comedy that gets a little strained when it tries to expose its heart. [13 December 1996, Friday, p.A]

With its lilting Lerner-Loewe score and great Kelly dance numbers, this is almost a Hollywood musical masterpiece. But it's sabotaged by the airless "outdoor" studio sets mandated by MGM. [13 Mar 1998, p.L]

An empty-headed movie: one more gargantuan, excessive, over-the-top action thriller with one more superhero -- this time ex-linebacker Brian "The Boz" Bosworth -- battling dozens of deranged villains single-handedly while trucks, motorcycles and cars crash all around him. [20 May 1991, p.F6]

The movie scrambles our responses and covers so much ground, with such zest, that its two and a half hours race past like a firestorm.

A great love story and a deeply moving celebration of simple lives.

A Perfect World proves again, if it needs proving, that Eastwood's directorial signature is among the strongest and surest in American movies. [24 Nov 1993, p.1C]

It's impossible, when we watch "I Am Cuba" today, not to see some poignance in its soaring shots, sadness to its thrilling vistas. [08 Dec 1995, p.C]

Frank Sinatra and his Clan knock over Vegas. [07 Dec 2001, p.C1]

The movie is like a big, smug, sunny ball of fluff, batting around in a crystalline cage. It's bright and well-meaning, but there's little to grab onto or feel. Not even the presence of those expert actor/farceurs, Steve Martin and Diane Keaton, give it any real presence or bite. [20 Dec 1991, p.16]

An old nightmare, made shiny new.

This seedy Barfly is beautifully written, acted and directed. It may be full of dank desire, wasted love and jesting misery--but it blooms. Whatever its flaws, it does something more films should do: It opens up territory, opens up a human being.

A loathsome shocker... Watching it almost turned my stomach.

It's a film objet d'art to contemplate and treasure.

One of the most honest movies ever made about male friendship. [13 Feb 1998, p.N]

The first, and best, of the three versions of Charles Dickens' tale of the French Revolution. [05 Dec 2008, p.C5]

Honest, poignant and very funny, full of memorable, moving moments.

This magnificent pair are the heart of Techine's film, and the sense of frayed, aging beauty and handsomeness they now carry helps project the picture's main theme: the imperishability of true love.

One of the most remarkable English-language feature debuts of recent years.

The Bedroom Window engrosses you in theory more than practice. As a thriller, it has elements that many recent Hitchcock pastiches have lacked: interesting characters and a somewhat complex plot. But perhaps this story simply looks good by contrast. The movie also lacks sheer juice and voltage. [16 Jan 1987, p.C17]

This is a picture in which the barf scenes standard in the usual crude youth comedies aren't gratuitous. They're logical climaxes.

Tape may not be a great movie, but it's a great demonstration of creativity within severe limitations.

Commands respect and affection. [2 June 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]

Exactly the sort of personalized, non-assembly line treat some audiences are always trying, in vain, to find.

London's Fang was, fundamentally, a loner and a killer; the movie Fang is a big, friendly dog, temporarily derailed into the fight game by snarling villains. That makes this White Fang, rather oversunny, overaffirmative, primarily a movie for children. But I liked it anyway, despite the softened tone, the coincidences, despite Hawke's constantly gaping mouth.

A brilliant entertainment, full of bemused skepticism and reckless, prodigal love -- for these people and their vanishing era and lives.

There's something ridiculous in the picture, but something sublime as well. It would be a shame to miss either, a pity not to open your eyes as well as your heart. [25 May 1994, p.1C]

His (Dafoe's) re-creation of Schreck is an Oscar-level performance, but more than that, it's an unforgettable one: great, scary, horrifically funny.

A blend of the classical and the trite, the beautiful and tawdry, the genuinely moving and the cornball. Oddly, producer-director-star Costner often can't seem to tell the difference.

If the real-life story is genuinely inspirational, the movie stirs us as well.

A film made by a master, with a simplicity that is really revolutionary. It's a work capable of changing the ways you look at the movies - and at life.

Whatever may be flawed in Oliver Stone's searing, full-torque new war movie "Salvador", one thing about it is burningly right: It's alive. It broils, snaps and explodes with energy. The events (condensed from two years of battles and political upheaval in El Salvador) fly past at a murderous clip, hurtling you along almost demonically. [10 Apr 1986, p.6]

A jaundiced look at the CIA, bolstered by a terrific cast. [14 Sep 1986, p.6]

Parents is all leftovers, despite the tasty little tidbits that Quaid and Hurt keep sporadically cooking up: Dad's spotless collars and loopy grin, Mom's brittle Cutex-lacquered claws. [27 Jan 1989, p.7]

Fireworks is a great new film that takes the traditions and makes them burn and explode, in violence and beauty, flame and flower. It's a film that lights up the night, opens your eyes. [20 Mar 1998, p.C]

Passion, obsession, mad love, the violent clash of insider and outsider-all these themes, plus the performances, are rich enough to carry us past that wounded climax, if not to carry the movie past the fatal attractions of the big box-office cliche. [18 Sep 1987, p.1]

Sluggish and preposterous, full of violence and cliches.

The movie suffers from a devastating flaw for a comedy: It isn't very funny.

Hoop Dreams has the movie equivalent of all-court vision. It picks up everything happening in the gym, in the stands and even outside. It gives us the thrill of the game, but it doesn't cheat on either the vibrant social context or the deep human story.

As solid as the earth, rich as a good meal and sometimes funny as hell.

A contemporary Russian movie that you could honestly call revolutionary, more for its style than its politics.

As a transcription of Bogosian's theater piece, Talk Radio is tense, packed and crackling with life. As a dramatic investigation into Alan Berg and his murder, it's shallow and dubious. But as a synthesis of those two disjointed halves into a volatile whole--a comic-paranoid nightmare about media success, media myths, prejudice and the pathological relationship between performers and their audience--the film is an often dazzling success. Bogosian and the cast are bravura performers; Stone a director with guts and talent.

The splendid new documentary Crumb, a sympathetic yet woundingly candid portrait, catches the artist with much the same skill. [26 May 1995]

A splashingly pleasant little surprise.

Splendid, soaringly ambitious Chinese period fantasy.

A movie with surprises, some of which you should discover for yourself. But its main surprises may be the power of Collette's performance and the beautifully controlled mood and atmosphere Brooks creates.

Love in the Afternoon is a 1957 romantic comedy by writer-director Billy Wilder that fondly re-created the atmosphere--the brio, wit, star personality and sardonic joie de vivre--of the great Hollywood-continental comic romances of the 1930s. And there's an obvious reason: It's a tribute from one movie comic master to the man who taught him how to do it. [15 Oct 1997, p.1]

A Selznick-produced Hitchcock: a courtroom melodrama of murder and romantic degradation for which Hitch wanted Laurence Olivier, Greta Garbo and Robert Newton, but had to settle for Gregory Peck, Alida Valli and Louis Jourdan. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

There's a razzly-dazzly beauty in Barbara Ling's designs and Kanievska and cameraman Ed Lachman shoot them wittily. But it's swallowed up in the story's empty outrage.

The beauties of Shower lie in its human observation, in its funny interplay, candor, lusty acting and hearty simplicity - and also in its warm imagery and the fascinating symbolic use it makes of water.

It suddenly morphs into one more overly slick, empty show.

It's a gross parody of its original. And since the original was a gross parody to begin with, the whole thing begins to seem gaseous, overbright, hideously inflated, as if all the bodily function jokes were about to belch it right off the screen.

It's hard to watch and listen to Together without, in some sense, having your heart lifted by its music.

The Wizard is bright, fast and energetic, but there’s not much real life to it. It’s another movie that’s disappeared into its own marketing hook: Three kids on the road, living and loving, racing toward personal redemption and video ascension.

Movies today rarely touch chords that are spiritual or deeply emotional, but Nathaniel Kahn's remarkable documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey does both.

The movie can still make temperatures rise -- though for musical rather than political reasons.

One of the most beautiful and profound films to emerge from Japan during the past decade.

What isn't scary--or exciting, amusing or fun--is XXX: State of the Union, a movie so preposterous, cliché-packed and over the top that it makes the original "XXX" seem as good as the original "State of the Union."

In the end, it's a heartening, rewarding experience to watch this journey--and, especially, its end.

In The Weather Man, Nicolas Cage, a great oddball movie star who sometimes takes enormous risks, has a good, risky part again.

Shines whenever we see the performances of Phoenix and Caan.

An odd little ghoul too cleaned up to survive, a bloodless vampire movie that's mostly lifeless as well.

Somehow The Boy in Blue, amiable enough, always feels like an "afternoon" movie -- a throwaway, not good enough to plan an evening around. [03 May 1986, p.9]

Trashy and glorious, the restored Metropolis is a pop epic for the ages.

The story is engrossing, full of thrills and humor, the period re-creation wondrous and the pace intoxicatingly brisk. And the actors are all so good and their parts so well-written that we're engaged emotionally as well.

Movies about moviemaking usually fall into one of two categories: ones that satirize or debunk the film industry or ones that celebrate it. Irma Vep, a sometimes dazzling French film by writer-director Olivier Assayas, does both. [13 June 1997, p.I]

For a film that points out so much wrong with German society and shows such dubious, dangerous behavior, it leaves the audience with high spirits and a sense of crazy exhilaration.

It's a real disappointment: too hasty, too scattered and superficial, and, in the end, disappointingly sappy and sentimental.

A film that art-house audiences in 1959 loved madly. And who can blame them? A buoyant, searingly colorful retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in Rio de Janiero, writer-director's Marcel Camus' movie is a romance heightened by its backdrop.

It's a candy-flavored blast of a movie. But though children may love it, they shouldn't monopolize it. Adults will want to eat this peach, or ride it to Manhattan, just as much.

The movie looks like far more than a million dollars and it offers the kind of smart, picaresque good time you get from books like "The Reivers" and "Huckleberry Finn" and movies like "Bronco Billy" and "Bonnie and Clyde."

The movie doesn't deserve any of the talent bestowed on it, from Reiner's amiable direction to the occasional grace notes in the performances of Hudson, Marceau and David Paymer.

A gargantuan epic, a historical adventure-drama of overwhelming visual grandeur.

One more movie comedy about how love can turn you into an idiot. And its major flaw, among many others, is that the idiocy takes over the movie.

It's a movie that robs the story of its politics and point and never really matches the charm of the '60s film.

Russian Dolls, like "L'Auberge," has an excellent cast (mostly the same one, in fact) and an impish style and speed that gives it more obvious audience appeal than the average French film.

Notoriety, they won. The revolution, they didn't. That perhaps is the secret message of the film. Dylan was right. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

The movie's humor is engaging but odd. The script is pretentious but sweet. And the symbolic use of the flying machine-which pulls you back to "Brewster McCloud"-doesn't work very well. But a flawed film like "Arizona Dream," with its wistfulness and pain, is still twice as interesting as most of the bloated, slick, empty successes that tend to get released here, films that look as if they were dreamed up by used-car salesmen in a desert. [6 Jan 1995, p.L]

Viveka Seldahl and Sven Wollter will touch you to the core in a film you will never forget -- that you should never forget.

Instead of coming to a high, flavorful boil, the whole thing quickly overcooks and begins evaporating into hot air.

This century's Planet of the Apes is a rouser, a screaming-banshee fun house.

These are real characters, fully observed, gutsily written, beautifully acted by the two leads.

This is a movie for all cultures and all people, for families and especially for those who have lost them.

Witchboard is smarter, and better acted, than much of its bloody competition. But it isn't crazy or original enough to stand too far above them. It's makers and its monsters alike deserve the same salutation: Better luck next time. [16 Mar 1987, p.8]

A classy supernatural lady-in-distress thriller.

It's a mixed bag; parts of it are awful. But it has, and needs, only one major defense: It's full of Grade-A rock 'n' roll, rousingly well performed. It moves, it swings, it jumps and vibrates. It's a musical. [05 Nov 1990, p.F10]

Has the kind of super-cinematic qualities and bravura acting that make up for almost anything.