Mike Clark

A movie this diminutive can be easily oversold, but we might see it on some year-end best lists. It eats at you, just like renewed love.

The rawest, most sustained screen portrayal of 20th century combat.

This grade-A sleeper sends you out with an unexpected smile. [25 Nov 1992]

David Lean's classic Cliffs Notes telescoping of Charles Dickens took Oscars for Guy Green's black-and-white photography and John Bryan's art direction, and you know right off that this is going to be a visual stunner as you watch fleeing prisoner Magwitch (Finlay Currie) dart across Green's spookily lit marshes. [22 Jan 1999]

Despite its title, Punch-Drunk Love is never heavy-handed. The jabs it employs are short, carefully placed and dead-center.

Produced by HBO but too good not to play theaters, this soon-to-be minor classic is the best movie about society's untrendiest since "Ghost World" exactly two years ago.

The movie is so fun that it wouldn't need the mystery to be top-notch entertainment.

A Casablanca-influenced love story set against a French Resistance backdrop in Martinique. [07 Nov 2003]

One of the year's best movies and certainly its most delightful screen surprise.

Hip-hoppish Honey is in the harmlessly junky "let's put on a show" tradition of "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo," minus electricity but with a budget for supporting-cast navel rings that 1984's break-dance sequel certainly didn't have.

The story keeps reinventing itself (some of the later plot twists are among the funniest), but a little goes a long way at 112 minutes - maybe 25 minutes more than this sporadically pointed conceit really needs.

A movie that is easily likable.

Funny... and the payoff is the most provocative Hollywood concoction in a while.

Even in the classiest movie summer of the decade, Mob is destined to demand respect for Pfeiffer. [19 Aug 1988]

Not since "Memento" has a movie served up such a provocative mind-bender, and the Sundance winner by first-time filmmaker Andrew Jarecki has the advantage of being true.

After watching Pfeiffer and Day-Lewis submerge molten 19th-century sparks here, it is now conceivable that Scorsese could make compelling cinema out of “Three Blind Mice.” [17 Sept 1993, Life, p.1D]

Despite the unsexy title, it's one unusually well told. [11 Aug 1993, p.1D]

Pearson's scenes with Garfield are among the most supercharged ever. [28 May 2004, p.6E]

Rafael Sabatini's 17th-century surgeon goes from slave to swashbuckler, Michael Curtiz directs to Erich Wolfgang Korngold music, and a major studio takes an unprecedented gamble on two unknowns to star: Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. [15 Apr 2005]

Though no film for the ages, it's two grown-up hours to tickle clear, sharp, minds. [27 Jan 1995, p.4D]

The best fictional movie about skiing. [27 Nov 2009, p.13D]

Give Anderson credit for at least sustaining a mood. This is the kind of all-or-nothing movie in which a filmmaker probably can't waver from his tone.

Campion's script is very well received, but the film finally makes it on cinematics: bleakly beautiful photography, haunting score, and good acting. [12 Nov 1993]

Though Roger & Me's editing plays somewhat fast and loose with the juxtaposition of real-life events, it qualifies as an event itself. For once, have-nots get to lambaste haves in a documentary likely to be seen. [20 Dec 1989, p.5D]

Cassavetes wrote and directed on his standard improvisational shoestring. The oft-shattering result, which runs 2 1/2 hours, is so uneasily lifelike that the academy temporarily ignored its prejudice against independent productions by rewarding Rowlands and Cassavetes with Oscar nominations. [18 Sep 1992, p.3D]

[Olivier's] greatest Shakespearean movie. [27 Feb 2004]

This subject demands consummate screen treatment and now has absolutely gotten it from director/producer Spike Lee. [10 Jul 1997, Pg.02.D]

Topically relevant and emotionally overwhelming, John Ford's memory-movie concerns the devastation of a Welsh coal-mining family after mine owners impose cutbacks. [16 Jun 1992, p.6D]