Mike Clark

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

Michelangelo Antonioni's famed mod mystery (complete with a funny scene with The Yardbirds) examines the nature of reality-or-not as captured by photography -- throwing in sexual titillation and brilliant use of sound on the side. [20 Feb 2004, p.13D]

A super cast injects it with Teddy Roosevelt vitality. [17 Nov 1995, p.D1]

Nicholson has at least three magnificent moments in Hour 2. The best is a wedding toast that comes after another that will painfully remind you of every banal wedding toast you've ever heard.

Though the power of some Holocaust documentaries is in part a product of their epic scope and epic running times, The Last Days overwhelms at just 87 minutes. [05 Feb 1999]

This is a smart and often tense work whose ultimate merit isn't completely calculable now.

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

True to the book's squalor but also finding honest humor where it can.

August's direction, as usual, is a tad glacial, but at its frequent best, the film soars to explosive heights. [31 Jul 1992, p.6D]

Despite little dialogue, the story and screenplay were Oscar-nominated -- and, at 50, Wilde's physique is amazing for an actor who once played Chopin. [18 Jan 2008, p.4D]

Underrated Jerry Schatzberg directed (he later did Pacino's 1973 Scarecrow), and the script is by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, so it's smart. [22 Jun 2007, p.3D]

The three principals re-screen the Fellini masterpiece at Ekberg's country villa, and it's the kind of privileged moment only the movies can supply. You can bet Scorsese couldn't resist it, and I can't either. [20 Nov 1992, p.4D]

It plays even more like a bent version of Meredith Willson's "The Music Man" for the new millennium. Slinging a line of bull but displaying genuine affection for the youngsters he's bamboozling.

Shake it all up and you get Collateral, a movie with only one conceivable flaw: its disinclination to break new ground, though no one held that against "The Fugitive" more than a decade of Augusts ago.

Warren Beatty's uproariously rude Bulworth is 90% triumph.

It's so exhilarating (and already such a hit) that even the fogies who choose which documentaries are nominated for Oscars may have to acknowledge its existence. [15 Aug 1991, p.5D]

This is still a great Carney performance and inspired casting by writer/director Paul Mazursky. [16 Sep 2005]

Federico Fellini's first film (co-directed with Alberto Lattuada) would make a compatible living room double bill with FF's 1986 Ginger and Fred...Pleasing all the way through. [17 Mar 1989, p.3D]

To see someone even attempt bittersweet treatment of this subject is surprising, but to largely pull it off is a major feat.

I'd give this Howard Hawks perennial four stars (like everyone else) if I didn't find the climactic jailhouse scene so labored. [5 May 1989, p.3D]

This is a filmmaker who instinctively knows that a shot of Santa sitting at a bar as Ricky Nelson sings Jingle Bells will be no-frills funny.

The rap sequences are shot and edited with the excitement of a crisply broadcast sporting event, which in a way they are.

Director Roman Polanski co-stars with and directs wife Sharon Tate in their only collaboration. That's one reason this box office bomb, which came out less than two years before Tate was murdered by Charles Manson's crew, has picked up a following. [08 Oct 2004, p.4E]

If Martin Scorsese's staggeringly ambitious one-of-a-kind finally has too many flaws to be great, it has as much greatness in it as any movie this year.

Doesn't sound like a very prepossessing title, but prepare to be taken aback by "what's in a name." [6 July 1994, Life, p.1D]

Here's an ''opened-up'' film of a fragile, sentimental play that doesn't overemphasize every dramatic point, and doesn't tromp on every minefield in the material. [13 Dec 1989, p.1D]

Filmmakers of Bernardo Bertolucci's magnitude don't often take on sexual coming-of-age movies, but judging from the pleasures of Stealing Beauty, maybe more of them should. [14 Jun 1996 Pg.04.D]

The gritty, Oscar-nominated "Traffic" is a limo ride compared with the bloodletting in this year's foreign-film nominee from Mexico.