Peter Rainer

What makes the film worth seeing anyway is the brazen richness of the production. It's as if the filmmakers, closed off from making even a suggestively sensual experience, threw their energies into the colors and textures of their people's lives. [06 Mar 1991, p.F7]

While I don't entirely rule out the possibility that Bruce is a hoaxster, it seems more likely that his story is one of those weird scientific anomalies that more frequently turn up as an Oliver Sacks case history.

Danes doesn't quite fit into the mindscape – she's too bland for a human star – but Cox comes of age quite convincingly, De Niro is a hoot, as is Ricky Gervais as a slimy tradesman. Pfeiffer has a field day.

Directed by Mellencamp from a script by Larry McMurtry, the result is a curious, wayward blend of small-town anomie and intrigue and hero-worshipping narcissism. [21 Feb 1992, p.F10]

It's a lot easier to follow than "Syriana." But intelligibility is about the only thing this international thriller has going for it.

Whether intentionally or not, Martin has given us something truly spooky: A full-fledged portrait of a hollow man.

Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy because these men have found something that many people, of whatever sexual persuasion, never find - true love. And they can't do anything about it.

Party Girl has the courage of its own no-braininess.

What rescues Eagle vs. Shark is its focus on Lily. Although Horsley overdoes the winsomeness, she is genuinely appealing. Love erases Lily's geekiness and in its place stands an attractive young woman.

I realize Legally Blonde 2 was not intended as scathing political satire, but I wish someone out there in movieland did indeed have just such an intention these days.

The usual Sayles mix of torpor and talent prevails here.

Even though The Devil's Own reportedly cost close to $100 million, it comes across as a sleek, medium-grade character study occasionally punctuated by gunfire. If this is what $100 million buys these days, can $200-million movies be very far off?

Hartley has such a spare, controlled touch in this film that this landscape seems both realistic and fantastic. [16 Aug 1991]

Jarecki shows off this footage as evidence of a truly dysfunctional family in various stages of denial. What it reveals at least as much is the modern phenomenon of reality-TV self-exposure carried to such lengths that, by comparison, the Osbournes look like the Cleavers.

It isn't just the violence that is overplayed. There is so much creepy-Gothic Sturm und Drang in The Passion that at times it seems as if Clive Barker should get credit for the story along with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come alive--not even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach hives.

As compelling as Misery often is, I can't say that I really enjoyed it a whole lot. It's too flat-footed and vise-like. Reiner doesn't provide the kind of nasty, sophisticated finesse that might have lifted the film out of pulpdom and into more Hitchcockian terrain. [30 Nov 1990, p.F1]

At best, Helena's wiggy adventures recall such Jean Cocteau films as "Orpheus" and "Blood of a Poet." At worst, they resemble the Vegas act of Cirque du Soleil.

As the gambler who needs his basketball phenom brother to shave points, Whitaker has some expressive scenes, and Roth knows how to make malice gleam. But almost nothing else in this movie does.

The pace is a little too languid, and the vulgarity a little too frequent, for the movie to work as intended.

A feel-good musical that, for a change, actually makes you feel good.

So hyperfrenetic that, in the end, you wonder if the Wachowskis aren't trying to pull off an elaborate hoax – a deranged techno fantasia posing as retro-ish family fare.

Although that pairing (Martin/Latifah) alone may be enough to make this movie a hit, the material is thin and pandering and almost criminally negligent in bypassing opportunities for humor.

It's big and loud, but this Peacemaker is still a dud.

There's something sordid about the way the filmmakers offer up this -- shall we say questionable -- entertainment as a refreshment. [4 Feb 1994, p.C-15]

Judged on any kind of rational level, this film is a mess, and Fairuza Balk, as a punky friend of Howard's son, gives the single most annoying performance I have ever seen. But Franz Lustig's cinematography has a Walker Evans-like power.

Chronicles the eerie and oddly inspiring story of Johnston's ongoing battles to survive - both as artist and human being.

It's all been done before, and better.

If Nine Queens were a great film, instead of just a very good one, this rottenness would be so pervasive that it would burst the bounds of the plot; it would make us shudder.

Nothing that Davies does is ordinary or artless but his craftsmanship has its suffocating side too.

Unsatisfying at a very high level. It fritters away more than most movies ever offer up.

Any resemblance (except qualitatively) to "An Officer and A Gentleman" is strictly unaccidental.

Given the subject, the movie is too romanticized, and Christie's eyes remain too sharp here to convincingly convey someone whose memory is fast slipping away. Much of it is powerful anyway.

The satiric idea behind Crazy People deserves a better movie.

It’s a difficult movie to get a fix on, but the difficulty is what makes it special.

Positioned somewhere between sitcom and piercing human drama, The Kids Are All Right, is both overtly familiar and cutting edge.

Director Andrew Wagner, adapting a novel by Brian Morton, is sometimes understated to a fault, but his work with the actors, who also include Lili Taylor as Leonard's daughter, is impeccable.

Sean Penn is so frighteningly good in this movie that he outdoes even the best of his earlier work.

The filmmakers betray the essentially childlike appeal of Shrek by piling up all these too-hip Hollywood references aimed at adults. It's not just kids who will feel cheated.

I’m not sure that depicting Rove as a demonic Wizard of Oz does much more than stir righteous indignation among the already indignant. A more pertinent and challenging mission would have been to show just how the public can be gulled by Rove's dirty tricks in the same ways again and again.

A movie that at best is irrelevant and at worst is unwatchable.

Considering the void at the center of his character, Reeves isn't bad. He's worked up some tricky robotic movements but his dialogue can't match their invention. [26 May 1995, p.F1]

Montenegro, the star of "Central Station," and her daughter make a remarkable pair. They hold your attention even when the emptily portentous story does not.

I hate to sound blurby, but Borat is the funniest comedy I've seen since I don't know when.

At its best in the interludes between explosions.

Following the shows from rehearsals to Tony Awards night, she gets behind the scenes and does a good job conveying the incessant anxieties and glee of the talents involved.

Preteen girls – and not just those who are already American Girl fanatics – should be entranced. And why not? Not many movies for that audience are as respectful as is this one.

Art as a passport to healing may be what audiences are craving these days, but the poultice provided by this movie couldn't cover a paper cut.

It's a giddy nightmare. Nothing is quite what it seems in I Served the King of England, and this is poetically appropriate. The world it depicts is too dangerous and too lovely to classify.

I can agree that the power brokers in this scenario, who effectively broke Barnes's will, have far more interest in tourism than in masterpieces. But casting this story as a battle between the elites and the philistines mischaracterizes the situation.

Ultimately, the blight is so overwhelming that the film collapses from corruption overload.

Don't go to this movie on a full stomach. Better yet, don't go.

Shriner's direction has an Afterschool Special blandness, but those mechanical owls are quite realistic. While the film was in production Hiaasen said that he had "nightmare visions of the gopher in 'Caddyshack.' " He needn't have worried.

Despite much of the turmoil depicted, there is a sweetness to parts of this film that is reminiscent of the 1961 British movie "A Taste of Honey."

If all three of the women’s lives had come across with equal weight and artistry, the film, which glides back and forth among them, might have approached the symphonic. But only the Streep section truly inspires the kind of awe and terror that the film as a whole strives for.

The problem with Christine Jeffs’s Sylvia, as with most movies about deeply troubled artists, is that for the most part we are seeing the troubles and not the artist.

There's plenty for us to feast on in Under the Sea 3D without drawing a single drop of blood. If you have small children, you'd be crazy not to take them to this film.

It’s an M. Night Shyamalan movie with a PhD. Or maybe an MA.

Our familiarity with the actors, and their comfort in this period setting, lend the piece an unexpected air of naturalism.

So intimate and sensual and funny and psychologically self-revealing that it makes most of what passes for sex in the movies look like cheap hysterics.

The problem with The Good Shepherd is that it's a closed-off movie about a closed-off individual. Wilson is inscrutable from the get-go, and remains so. Damon does subtle work within the narrowest of confines.

Has some rapturously observant sequences concerning childhood.

As the movie moves through its murder mystery mode and begins racking up political points, Hank becomes a stand-in for all those Americans bewildered and beleaguered by the war. He becomes a Symbol.