Peter Rainer

The role plays all too easily into De Niro's worst current habits. He's dulled himself out in the service of a phony kitchen-sink pseudo-realism. For De Niro, less has become less.

Disposable, sporadically amusing.

Since Mr. Bean rarely speaks a complete sentence, the effect is of watching a silent movie with sound effects. This was also the dramatic ploy of the great French director-performer Jacques Tati, who is clearly the big influence here.

David Mamet and jujitsu come together in Redbelt, and the result is a draw.

A sad experience, but the sadness has no emotional heft because its people have none. This movie hasn't earned its funk.

It just may be the most boring movie ever made – period.

What this film is really about is how interconnected we all are, like it or not, on the Internet, and how alluring and alarming this can be.

"Money Never Sleeps" doesn't get inside the sociopathology of the money culture. In a sense, it is a product, an expression, of that culture. Maybe that's why it's so disagreeably agreeable.

It might seem as though there is nothing new to be done with the crime thriller, but The Code (La Mentale), directed by Manuel Boursinhac and written by Bibi Naceri, provides a new twist.

Each man has his own distinctive style, and yet when they jam together it sounds like the most natural thing in the world.

What have the Yes Men actually accomplished with their japery? Their film is an inadvertent reminder that activist antics are not the same thing as reform.

A movie that has more sap than a pine forest.

Creepily evocative.

The inevitable showdown between these two paragons is something of a fizzle; there's too much over/under-acting going on.

In U-Turn Stone is reaching for the pulp without the politics. He's trying for noir as ritual dance. But Stone is too frenzied a filmmaker to keep the dance steps simple.

It's still possible to have a good time at this movie, and the primary reason is De Niro.

You can feel your IQ plummeting while watching The Beverly Hillbillies but since you lose 10,000 brain cells a day anyway, why not have a few laughs?

What's missing is romance. Despite the engaging friskiness of its two stars, the film is romantically vapid. Watching it is like trying to warm up to a hologram.

Much more kid-oriented than any other computer-animated movie thus far. In other words, it's much more Disneyish. I enjoyed it.

The film may be subtitled "Shut Up & Sing," but you can't sing with your mouth closed.

It's a sideways view of a national trauma. The large cast includes standout performances from such unlikelies as Demi Moore, playing an alcoholic crooner, and Estevez himself, as her long-suffering husband. Everyone in this film is powerful.

Kazi is a bundle of energy, and the film touches on an important and often-overlooked issue: The commercial pressure that is often brought to bear on rappers to be scurrilous and offensive. This project, which was produced by Bruce Willis and Queen Latifah, shows that there is another way.

The film includes graphic omnisexual and incestuous couplings and has an air of free-floating dread but, especially given its subject matter, it's oddly vacuous – it rarely takes hold emotionally even when its people hit bottom with a resounding thud.

There are enough pleasantries and good jests in this new film to make a meal.

Perhaps Nair believes that heroism in our tabloid era has become degraded. If so, she overcorrected. Amelia is so pure in heart that it slides right off the screen.

Actually, it's hard to have any thoughts while watching Jonah Hex – the cranium-crushing soundtrack takes care of that.

The only reason to check out Big Bad Love is Debra Winger, last seen onscreen in 1995.

Bee Season, at its core, is about something powerful: The ways in which family members wreak destruction on each other with the best of intentions.

This is a Holocaust movie that is so relentlessly observed and so aware of woe that it never feels like it belongs to a genre.

The film could be more adept and probing, but the ladies - Cleo Hayes, Marion Coles, Elaine Ellis, Fay Ray, and Geri Kennedy - are delightful.

At its best, it's a lively on-the-road chronicle of how to put an act together from scratch.

A movie that really zips along; it offers some of the same pleasures as the silent slapstick comedies, particularly the Keaton films, with their sense of how sheer velocity carries its own wit.

A weepie for audiences under the (mistaken) impression that independent movies are always more emotionally honest than Hollywood movies.

Despite all the heavy artistic artillery Mendes has brought to bear, his movie isn't all that far removed conceptually from "Top Gun" - which was also about military men itching for a chance to rock 'n' roll. The only difference is, "Top Gun" was unabashedly a popcorn movie while Jarhead is a box of unpopped kernels passing itself off as a full meal.

Snarky and enjoyable, but it could have been a ferocious black comedy. No Thank You For Playing It Safe.

Mostly a snooze. Maybe if Buscemi himself had starred in it things would have turned out better.

The screenplay is by Hanif Kureishi, who wrote "The Mother" for Michell and also scripted the classic "My Beautiful Laundrette." He has a feeling for outsiders.

I Am Sam is about as connected to the real world as Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham, from which its title is derived -- in fact, in the realism department, Seuss may have the edge.

And yet the great conundrum of the Holocaust is that it was perpetrated by human beings, not monsters. Few movies have rendered this puzzle so powerfully.

Uma Thurman looks frumpy in Motherhood. This is the only pressing reason to see it.

The Village is a better movie (than Signs) --probably his best since "The Sixth Sense"--but it indulges Shyamalan's penchant for messianic uplift.

Secretary is deeply conventional: Edward and Lee accept their bondage as the way to a more fulfilling life. It's the filmmakers who need to be spanked.

As summer franchise superhero flicks go, it's tolerable.

Amir Bar-Lev's documentary is fascinating on all kinds of levels: as a movie about the nature of art, the lure and pitfalls of celebrity, and the complicated conundrums of parenting.

Caine is reason enough to see any movie. He gives this clever, somewhat lumbering caper movie a deep-seated soul.

The Town might have amounted to something more than an occasionally good movie about crooks in trouble. There's a knife-edge here, but it's been blunted.

It's a kiddie comedy that really shouldn't be on the big screen at all; it has all the creative range of an Afterschool Special.

There's nothing much to the movie, except for the amiability of the actors and the layers of feeling Linklater provides, but that's just almost enough.

Some good gross-out inventiveness, but too heartfelt by half. Do we really need the Farrellys to champion inner beauty?

Some movies are so flagrantly awful that they achieve classic status. To this rarefied company we must now add The Astronaut Farmer.

Amos & Andrew starts out with a promising premise but everything in it is off -- the timing, the tone, the performances. It's the kind of film that makes you wonder from moment to moment just what E. Max Frye, the writer-director, had in mind. Maybe nothing? [05 Mar 1993, p.F10]

La Vie en Rose elevates Piaf the archetype over Piaf the artist. Although I question this approach, I'm not sure it could have been done any differently, at least given the facts of Piaf's life. If there is such a way, Duhan didn't find it.

Mamet doesn't take the material as far as it can go -- we're left with a pleasing fable about the battle of the sexes and the virtues of persistence in a just cause. The neatness of it all is both appealing and appalling, and perhaps this combo is what finally hooked Mamet.

As the boarding school honcho Father Benedictus, Geoffrey Rush chews so much scenery that he looks ready to burst.

Like much reality TV, sections of American Teen seem patently staged, or coached, for the camera.

It’s a hyper-aestheticized meditation on the meaning of history, visually astonishing, dramatically stilted. No masterpiece, but quite a feat (and quite effete).

Killing Zoe is a raucous, arty little neo-film-noir that comes equipped with a bucket of blood to splatter the halls of convention. It’s not terribly good but you keep expecting it to take off in unexpected directions.

A rare example of first-rate filmed opera.

The role fits Fox like a glove but perhaps at this point in his career he should be scouting for something less form-fitting.

A sham.

Best viewed as an oddball career move rather than as a successful movie.

O'Sullivan's movie could easily have been made 60 years ago. This is not intended as a compliment.

Hellboy II comes across as an original. But being original is not always the same thing as being wonderful.

The cast…is first-rate, but each is given a single note to play.

Even though It Could Happen to You has its tenderized, good citizenship side, it's been written (by Jane Anderson) and directed (by Andrew Bergman) with an embracing cheer. It's blissfully uncynical.

The young cast is mostly callow and TV-bland and the special effects don't quite seem worth that hefty price tag, but overall this is a presentable addition to the franchise.

A slight but winning heart-tugger.

Depp is rather sweet in portraying Don Juan's self-delusions, but his performance is hampered by the role.

A film with an intriguing premise and likable performances but not much excitement. [13 Oct 1990, p.F13]

Smith, it should be noted, has compared Neville in interviews to Job. Tone down the highfalutin references. In the end, this is a sci-fi zombie movie, folks.

What Happens in Vegas is not only annoying, it's also incompetent – a bad mix.

In Moving Midway, Cheshire chronicles not only the history of the move but also of the family members, past and present, who occupied the place, and, most pointedly, the slaves who worked its fields, some of whom turn out to be related.

Washington doesn’t look as if he’s having much fun, and who can blame him? Perhaps he agrees with me: Apocalypse movies, like apocalypse heroes, need some laughs, too.

May be accurate around the edges, but at its heart it's a fairy tale.

Fire in the Sky, a UFO movie, doesn't fly. It claims to be based on an actual case of alien abduction but the movie is as phony as a $3 bill. [13 Mar 1993, p.F4]

It exploits post-9/11 anxieties as fodder for goofball gooniness. "Dr. Strangelove" it's not.

As an anatomy not only of Polanski's psyche but also of the legal system he confronted, it's as baroquely compelling as "The Dark Knight."

The animated characters in "Clone Wars" are about as lively as the actors in the live-action movies, so I guess Lucas has achieved his goal of eliminating humans from his movies altogether.

The whole thing is piffle, but it moves fast enough to stay entertaining.

No great claims should be made for In Her Shoes. If the aim here was to show how chick lit can become just plain lit, the effort failed. But there is something to be said for froth when it's expertly whipped.

It's sweet and winsome and a little pat, done with just enough feeling to lift it out of its class. [15 Mar 1995, Pg.F5]

It’s a tricky, harrowing little film. Kazan keeps things fairly schematic--every plot point is secured, every look is “knowing"--but the overall effect is ambiguously unsettling.

Barring a middle-class revolt, it's extremely unlikely that, whatever its virtues, universal healthcare could ever take hold in America. Still, I'm glad Moore made his film.

It would be easy to overrate I've Loved You So Long, which often dampens its best effects with undue tastefulness, but the image of Scott Thomas, with her despairing resilience, stays with one.

By all odds, Tarnation should have been an unwatchable, masochistic morass, but Caouette's love for the broken Renee--which is the true subject of the film--is awe-inspiring.

The film's tone wobbles between straight-arrow action and curdled camp. [12 Nov 1993, p.F1]

Sets out to demonstrate that life is about more than having sex. Inadvertently -- I think -- it ends up showing us just the opposite. As if we didn't already know.

Sometimes a film is best utilized as a travelogue. Such is the case with the comedy-drama The Girl From Monaco, which isn't much of a movie but offers scrumptious views.

Fiennes's performance, tricky and impassioned, is the showpiece.

A lovely minor achievement. It would have been major if Breillat had been more expansive with respect to Anaïs instead of contentedly letting her go on about her lumpish ways.

It's a truly prodigious piece of work, resembling a career summation far more than a maiden voyage.

Lynch needs to renew himself with an influx of the deep feeling he has for people, for outcasts, and lay off the cretins and hobgoblins and zombies for a while. Mulholland Drive is the product of David Lynch, Inc.

As Molière, Romain Duris is frisky and, playing the wife of his benefactor, Laura Morante proves once again that she is one of the most intelligent and attractive actresses in the world.

Seems tailor-made for an intelligent thriller in the Graham Greene mode, but in Jewison's hands, the dragnet that closes in on Brossard is lackadaisical, and the larger political overtones--especially concerning the complicity of the Catholic church in aiding Nazis--are spelled out over and over.

Consistently good as long as it centers on Buck and his seriocomic travails.

A loose-limbed documentary about the hip-hop D.J. scene that, for know-nothings like me, is highly informative without being in the least academic.

The Korean director im Kwon-Taek has made more than 90 films since his first in 1962, and perhaps this explains why his latest, Chunhyang, seems so effortless and masterly. Based on a highly popular eighteenth-century Korean folktale, it's a movie that, stylistically, mixes the traditional with the avant-garde; the narrative may be ritualistic, but there's a let's-try-it-on-for-size friskiness to the filmmaking.

Taking Sides has a padded-out, stagebound quality that is anything but lyrical. And Szabó, a Hungarian best known for "Mephisto" and "Colonel Redl," is not at his best here.

The movie paints a vivid portrait of a time and place, but falls back on familiar formulas that diminish its value as both emotional drama and slice-of-life realism.

At its best, though, Blue Chips is really about the wiggy, muscle-twitch world of high-pressure college athletics. The movie is best around the edges, when it's jamming and anecdotal and not taking itself so heroically seriously.

In this otherwise rather schematic swatch of social catharsis, Brazil's Fernanda Montenegro gives the best performance by an actress I've seen all year.

In the end, the difference between "Funny Games" and Hollywood schlock horror may only be a matter of breeding. Funny Games is "Saw IV" with a PhD.

When Kandel revisits his childhood neighborhoods in Vienna and Brooklyn and ruminates in his sprightly way on the past, the full measure of his humanity comes through.

The film is a stodgy snooze, and Theron, who is about as expressive here as a porcelain doll, lacks all believability--she's followed her best performance (in Monster) with her worst.

Aside from these two actors (Downey/Rourke), Iron Man 2 isn’t much of a whoop-de-do.

Wuhl is occasionally touching, and his blank-faced disbelief can be very funny; he has the addled look of a shell-shocked aesthete. But for the most part Marvin's funk doesn't bring out Wuhl's sharpest talents; he needs a role with more spring and less vacant staring-off-into-the-distance. And Primus needs a project that will sustain his gift for transforming a group of disparate actors into a spirited jamboree. [21 Aug 1992, p.F11]

With a minimum of actorly fuss, Winger shows us the rage and hurt inside this overcontrolled woman. It's a great piece of acting – high drama at the service of the highest talent.

By turns antic, frantic, and dull, "Pippa Lee" is unconvincing – emotionally, dramatically, filmically.

Fortunately, it never dips into bathos. These two actors SHOULD be noticed. They've crafted the most ingenious résumé of the year.

A lyrical, yet intensely rooted, tragic vision.

The Brothers Bloom is much more interested in showing off its own smarts, such as they are, than in challenging the audience's.

The first-time director, James Marsh, and his co-writer Milo Addica (who wrote "Monster's Ball"), sustain a black-comic tone, and the performances, as far they go, are quietly chilling.

It must be said that the filmmakers, who profess to be as surprised as we are about how things play out, are being disingenuous at best and underhanded at worst.

The passage of time has rarely been more forcefully conveyed in a movie, as we see clips of the interviewees not only from today but also at seven-year intervals from the past.

Hartley is very adept with actors, though – or at least some of them. Posey, for her part, displays a pert quizzical quality that's very charming and very funny. And Goldblum is tailor-made for Hartley's minimalist patter.

Blitz captures high school atmosphere well – not an easy thing to do – but overall the movie coasts on quirkiness.

Began life as a standard sci-fi horror script before mutating into the unfunny mess it now is.

Strangely moving and mournful, but I wish more had been made of the beauty these people are relinquishing, if only as a counterweight to all that artful drear.

Hedges keeps everything in balance: The sadness and frivolity all seem to be part of the same emotional continuum. He’s made a lingeringly poignant little movie.

For movie buffs, the only real fun to be had at Inception could be toting up the lifts from other movies, including Cocteau’s “Blood of a Poet” and “The Matrix” series and just about anything by Kubrick.

It's all a bit precious and preening, but Coogan is marvelous, almost as good as he was in Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People."

Helen Mirren gives the mostly subtly expressive performance based on a living historical figure that I've ever seen.

If you're young enough to have missed some of the better Lemmon-Matthau pairings, like "The Fortune Cookie" or "The Odd Couple," then Grumpy Old Men won't seem so grumpy. [25 Dec 1993, p.2]

The best part is that, amid all the hubbub, Jeunet, improbably and inevitably, draws out a love story between Bazil and Elastic Girl. Without it, Micmacs would have imploded. The romance, which is funny and sexy at the same time, anchors the shenanigans.

The plot for Revenge, based on Jim Harrison’s 1978 novella, seems ideal for a great galvanizing pulp thriller, but the movie bogs down in melodramatic murk.

Watching it is a bit like checking out a grade-school talent show on parents’ night. The eagerness of the performers, their flat-out verve and innocence, wins you over. For a while at least...Finally, the film wears you down.

The stage is set for a wonderful movie, and yet The Luzhin Defence, based on the Vladimir Nabokov novel The Defense, never courts greatness.

It's a pure (guilty) pleasure trip. That's pleasure, De Palma–style -- twisted, dirty, voyeuristic, a vast glissando of amorality.

Braugher perhaps overvalues the parallels between Stephanie and Lydie. The scenario is too schematic and diminishes the power of each woman's story. She frames the drama as a cross between a whodunit and a whydunit, and neither strategy is entirely successful.

What we're left with is outrage in a vacuum. It's impossible to separate out the stop-loss tactic from the misadventures of the war itself, and that's what this film, to its discredit, accomplishes.

Airheads, directed by Michael Lehmann and scripted by Rich Wilkes, is far from great. But it sure is ripe. It's bursting with bad ideas, half-good ideas, good and bad actors yelling and mugging. Like a lot of youth comedies, it's frenetic where it should be inspired.

Together, Lopez and Caviezel make quite a pair. Sorrowful yet hip, they seem to be inventing a new mood: designer melancholia.

Melvin Van Peebles gets the idolatrous treatment in this documentary by first-time director Joe Angio that traces his subject's career as San Francisco cable-car conductor, rap pioneer, filmmaker, Broadway producer, stockbroker, and all-around womanizer.

In Gyllenhaal's all-out performance, it reminded me most of Judy Davis in "High Tide," another movie directed by a woman (Gillian Armstrong) about a misfit mother and her daughter. It has the same fierce honesty.

Playing a cantankerous, beer-swigging human wreck of a man for the umpteenth time, Nolte is very good but very familiar.

Despite the awkwardness of much of the staging, and the unevenness of the script, the movie does give you a sense of real people living real lives. [14 Feb 1992, p.B9]

What Alfred Hitchcock once said about thrillers also applies to Westerns: The stronger the bad guy, the better the film. By that measure, 3:10 to Yuma is excellent.

All this is diverting but also borderline dull.

Blanchett miraculously gives a good performance, even when saddled with lines like this one, to Clive Owen's Sir Walter Raleigh: "In another world, could you have loved me?"

An elaborate techno-heist thriller, The Italian Job features some spectacular chase scenes, but for a change, the people doing the chasing are also worth watching.

Isn't scary, funny-scary, or even just plain funny.

Fiennes brings to the role a shimmering subtlety.

What reveals Pontecorvo as an artist, and not simply a propagandist of genius, is the sorrow he tries to stifle but that comes flooding through anyway--the sense that ALL sides in this conflict have lost their souls, and that all men are carrion.

The entire film takes its cue from Cage's spritzes and jags; it's a delirious performance in a delirious landscape.

What she (Ullmann) does achieve is a couple of scenes of lacerating power.

If Jones were a more accomplished director, and if the relationship between Pete and his captive wasn't so schematic, this movie might have been worthy of Sam Peckinpah.

When promising independent filmmakers decide to jump on the bandwagon and pump up the gore, the results are sure to be touted as visceral and unflinching. Don't be fooled. Kramer has even commented that the movie should be viewed as a modern-day Grimm's fairy tale. It's grim all right.

Great on atmosphere and less good on everything else. That’s not entirely a knock.

Still, in its own Saturday-morning-serial kind of way, Attack of the Clones is a commendable example of the sort of movie we once loved and then outgrew. Of course, if it was even better, we wouldn't feel as if we'd outgrown it.

So relentlessly giddy and hyperactive that it doesn’t really need a movie review--it needs a prescription.

It elevates female sacrifice into an aesthetic. The movie isn't about suffering, really. It's about how you look when you suffer, how you dress up for it. Style is all.

Being touted as the first film ever shot in the Smithsonian complex. With any luck, it will also be the last. This is not the best use of our landmarks.

This documentary about the evangelical belief in biblical prophecy is both overly ambitious and skimpy.

The viciously anti-Semitic 1940 German movie “Jew Süss” is one of the most notorious films ever made...Today it is one of the few Nazi-era films that still cannot legally be shown.

Twisted and outrageous but ultimately artificial. Albert Brooks did this art-reality thing a lot better years ago in "Real Life," his takeoff on PBS's "An American Family," and was sidesplitting besides.

It's a rather lifeless re-telling of the Nativity, with greeting-card imagery and stiff performances.

It's difficult to imagine the target audience for this film. Gangbangers, perhaps?

Garner is good, and so is Brian Dennehy as a crusty ranch owner; Abigail Breslin, playing a leukemia patient, demonstrates that she was not a one-note wonder in "Little Miss Sunshine."

Ultimately, forgettable, but for most of the way it's a pleasant little vacation of a movie.

More often McNamara comes across as Exhibit A in Morris's latest metaphysical creepshow.

The film works best when it focuses on the touching, crazymaking relationship between the two men.

Captures the fear factor in the lives of these men without turning them into the usual home front head cases.

The best episodes have the emotional resonance of full-length features, and yet I didn't want them to be a moment longer than they are.

Considerably less slick than "An Inconvenient Truth," and no less urgent.

How can we take this doomsday scenario seriously when we keep waiting for Bruce Willis to rise from the ashes?

The conceit here is that if a boy and a girl love the same music, that means they're in love. Who am I to argue with such poetic whimsy?

Could have used a lot more grit. Without it, we're left with a crime movie fantasia that slips all too easily into the ether.

The empathy never lifts off -- never becomes poetry. It doesn't help that Leigh indulges his unfortunate habit of larding the soundtrack with draggy, mournful music, heavy on the cello.

Some of this stuff is uncomfortably close to minstrelsy. Bad Company closes on a patriotic note in a brief scene that pays heartfelt tribute to the terrorist-thwarting sacrifices of the CIA. Timing is everything, I guess.

On the personal betrayals that accompany Capote's ache for literary transcendence. The betrayals were necessary to create "In Cold Blood." This is why Capote is such an unsettlingly ambiguous experience.

It is quite likely the greatest Shakespearean film ever and, except for Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, it’s also Welles’s greatest film – which is saying something.

Really effective horror films make us participants in the horror. Jacob's Ladder doesn't draw us in in that way. It's a movie about interior states that's all on the outside. [30 Oct 1990, p.1]

In some ways, this glossily enjoyable movie is a lot closer to Hollywood than Beirut. At times, I thought I was watching some oddball Lebanese variant on "Barbershop."

A highly calculated attempt to recalibrate with raunch the family entertainment template and cash in.

Fukunaga has a fine, spacious film sense and a gift for action, but the doomy, heavy-handed plot devices and overwrought, overacted gangland set pieces betray a novice's hand.

I don't wish to give offense here, but it certainly doesn't hurt that Mary Lou is voiced by that famously small bundle of energy Isla Fisher. (She's 5-foot-2.)

The filmmakers are so driven to show us Mr. Jones as a harrowing free spirit that they don’t put much faith in his redemption. They’re as hooked on Jones the high-flyer as Libbie is.

If Freedomland reminds you of Spike Lee's "Clockers," that's not by accident. Like that film, it's adapted by Richard Price from his novel and is set in the neighboring Northern New Jersey communities of Dempsy, predominantly poor and African-American, and the largely white blue-collar suburb of Gannon.

Just about everything in this pea-brained epic is overscaled and overwrought – it's a cartoon trying to be a towering triptych.

This John Hughes production (citywide) based on the Hank Ketcham comic strip is pretty tepid tomfoolery but at least it’s not assaultive in the way that most kids’ films are nowadays. It’s trying for giggles instead of guffaws.

Watching this San Francisco-based film is a bit like looking at "Vertigo" through several heavy layers of scrim.

It's been said that a thriller is only as good as its chief villain, and, in the same way, most noirs are only as good as their suckers. Palmetto has a good sucker but not much else.

At times the film resembles a promo for Shortz and the Times, and the celebrity puzzlers, who include filmmaker Ken Burns, Bill Clinton, and the Indigo Girls, have an unfortunate tendency to bloviate. Not so Jon Stewart, who seems to regard each Times puzzle as an opportunity to go mano a mano with Shortz.

Mixed Nuts is a farcical whirligig that doesn't whirl. It's energetically unfunny, like "Radioland Murders," and, like that film, it boasts top-flight talent. Maybe the idea of making a comedy about a suicide prevention center just got to everyone-it's a bummed-out comedy about being bummed out. [21 Dec 1994, p.1]

Awash in spurious sentimentality and sniping.

The filmmaking style is annoyingly slick, but the testimonies of these children are excruciatingly moving.

Easy Virtue has aspirations to be much more than a comedy. It wants to flay, if only with a penknife, the entire British class system.

Although his movie often resembles the kind of promotional video one might find as an extra on a concert DVD, N'Dour in full throttle is a sight, and sound, to behold.

What the film is saying, so far as I can tell, is that, if cut, you will bleed. And bleed. As the vampire's kindred Seven Deadly Sinner, wild-haired Kim Ok-vin looks like she's having a high old time.

If Medak had been able to delineate the twinship of crime and show biz, he might have moved the film's frights into a higher realm. Instead, he's come up with a classy freak show.

There is no reason why Reservation Road could not have been great. George has co-written some powerful films in the past, including two for Daniel Day-Lewis, "In the Name of the Father" and "The Boxer." He is not wrong to want to mainline intensity here, but the inner lives of these men have not been explored, only displayed.

My only regret is that the film could not somehow take a leap forward to 1988. I would love to have seen what Lee and Will could do with "Die Hard."

It’s just another example of art-house hokey-pokey. Amazingly, this film won both the Palme d’Or and Best Director Award at Cannes, beating out, among others, "Mystic River."

I haven't heard this much shouting in a movie since the first hour of "Full Metal Jacket."

The sap in this movie rises almost as high as the Angels. It's a special kind of kiddie sentimentality: fantastical and self-congratulatory.

Sets up a cast -- and then proceeds to knock them down like ducks in a shooting gallery.

This is the kind of movie where a character can't just say "the fire's not out yet," they have to say "the fire still lives in these stones." It made me yearn to see "Caveman" again. At least that was INTENTIONALLY funny.

Lelouch means to transcend the genre. He doesn't really move much beyond his usual glib panache here, but the plot is intriguing and so are the actors.

A marvelous documentary that brings home the terror and heroism brought forth by the Katrina debacle.

Lee loads up his movie with so many hot buttons that the film resembles a compendium of all his previous provocations.

What’s remarkable is that you come away from the movie laughing at Graham’s murderous indiscretions and yet you’re frightened by them too. Caine makes you taste the ashes in this black comedy.

It's not only Phoebe whose daydreams go out of control. Daniel Barnz, the writer-director, also goes a bit flooey. There's a lot more perspiration than inspiration.

Most movies take a while to slip you into a stupor. All the Pretty Horses makes you groggy right away. Set in 1949, it's a lackadaisical series of vignettes apparently culled from a much longer movie that never made it to the screen. Be thankful for that.

It's a film enthralled by its own lower depths… Although Bad Lieutenant is structured as a redemptive thriller, it functions primarily as a freak show with religioso overtones. [30 Dec 1992, Calendar, p.F-7]

You would have to have been born yesterday to miss the switcheroos and reeking red herrings planted in this pulp.

When he's playing a relatively normal guy ringed by eccentrics, as in "There's Something About Mary" and "Meet the Parents," Stiller can be flat-out funny. In Zoolander, he's just one nutso among many, and he cancels himself out.

Schrader really isn't interested in Crane except as the straw man for his moral lessons about sin and sexuality and the nature of celebrity. Auto Focus is the perfect capper to Crane's career: Even in a movie about himself, he remains minor.

Marvelously funny.

A lumpy admixture of politics and carnality, but when it all comes together, it has a lingering force.

Parker is bland throughout. Maybe all those episodes of "Sex and the City" have soured her on this sort of thing.

Evans, in effect, is the real producer here, and the film, which mostly consists of artfully blended archival footage, comes across like a last will and testament.

What seems to start out as a burlesque against the rich -- a satire of class-consciousness -- ends up mutating into something stranger and richer and more ambiguous. [10 Dec 1993, p.F4]

Why would you take your kids to see Space Chimps, an uninspired animated feature about chimp astronauts, when you could take them instead to see "Wall-E"? And if they've already seen "Wall-E," you're really lowering the bar by venturing into this one.

Director Stefan Forbes interviews a slew of victims and beneficiaries of the Atwater attack machine and, in the process, gives us an even-handed portrait of a man who, as much as anybody, bears responsibility for the toxicity of high stakes political campaigning on both sides of the aisle.

Milk is an agitprop fantasy about the selflessness of sainthood. If anybody but Penn was playing the saint, we'd probably feel as if we were being sold a bill of goods. Instead, he just about pulls it off. Such is the treachery of talent.

You could argue, I suppose, that this film, a Sundance hit, is essentially a funny sketch padded out to feature length. And what of it, my man?

The best commentator is Alda, whose rueful memories of being raised as a boy in burlesque are the film's highlight. "It was a form of abuse," he says of those days, but without rancor. It was, after all, the only childhood he knew.

Al Franken is good enough, he's certainly smart enough. So, doggone it, why is "Stuart Saves His Family" so mediocre?

It’s trying for swank bubbliness--Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” crossed with “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” But director Barry (“The Addams Family”) Sonnenfeld and screenwriters Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner are more suited to slapdash nutso comedy. The swings between clunky slapstick and “heartfelt” moments are jolting. (They’d be even more jolting if the slapstick or the heart tugs were effective.)

The mystery of the artistic process is left mysterious -- as it should be.

The "Die Hard" series was never exactly big on nuance, but this new installment relentlessly zeros in on sensation. It's almost sadistically single-minded. [19May1995 Pg.F.01]

It all adds up to a searing portrait of social misery.

This is a half-baked movie about a half-baked person, but it has a fine, melancholic afterglow.

This is the kind of movie where life lessons are posted every quarter-hour. (I timed it.)

The Legend of Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas as the masked one, made me long to re-watch "Zorro the Gay Blade," the great spoof starring George Hamilton. In that film, the Spanish accents were meant to sound deliberately fake.

Nathalie Baye is remarkable in Le Petit Lieutenant where she plays Caroline Vaudieu, a Parisian police inspector who returns to her post after a bout with alcoholism following her child's death.

Compared to "Capote," this new film is altogether lighter.

There's something foul about staging the assassination of a sitting president in order to push a political agenda that could just as easily have been put forward without resorting to such sensationalism.

Decorous to a fault, in the manner of middling Eric Rohmer talkfests, it's a film that could use some shaking up.

Deft and fast-moving, but shouldn’t a musical have at least a few songs you can hum on your way home?

The effect is a bit like watching "Gone With the Wind" with a dumpling substituting for Scarlett O’Hara.

What saves it is Dennis Quaid.

Syriana falls down at the most basic storytelling level, and this incoherence damages even the good parts.

This is a startlingly funny portrait of Gothic Americana.

A tribute to the therapeutic powers of musicmaking and choral camaraderie.

At least we have Alan Arkin playing the head of CONTROL. His drone and deadpan are a perfect complement to Carell's. But please, pretty please, let's not go for a sequel on this one, OK?

Although the film's visuals are a cut above, say, "Sin City," another serioso graphic novel-turned-movie, it has the same mood: a film-noir-ish soddenness punctuated by megaviolence. Watchmen is the anti-"Incredibles."

Cuaron is a special talent, and, as botched as Great Expectations often is, it's the kind of failure that deserves an audience--if only to experience Cuaron's way of seeing, which is at its best in the early parts of this film.

Anonyma stands out in A Woman in Berlin not only because of her ragged nobility but also because, alas, Färberböck has surrounded her with a gaggle of Berliners who seem right out of Central Casting.

A celebration of the gloriously mundane.

It's a moderately enjoyable escapade that isn't quite clever enough for adults and not quite imaginative enough for children.

This much can be said for Roman Polanski's carnal hoot-fest Bitter Moon -- it keeps you wondering from scene to scene if the director has gone bonkers. No doubt a lot of the lunacy is intentional, but it's still lunacy. And not terribly enjoyable lunacy either. The film plays like a dirty joke that somehow got lost in the translation.[18 Mar 1994, p.F1]

The most enjoyable thing about the "Ocean's" movies is that nobody involved seems to take them seriously. The star wattage is immense but the stars themselves are refreshingly self-deprecating, almost satirically so.

Improbably, it's one of the most affecting films of the year, which once again demonstrates that all you need to make a good movie is talent.

The most powerfully entrancing children's film in years. Of course, a true kid's classic is just as magical for adults.

Taut and straightforward and a little grungy, which is how these movies ought to be.

The power of “Ladybird, Ladybird” is inseparable from its weaknesses. Loach brings us up close to the misery but, in a larger sense, he stands back.

Soderbergh does overemphasize the "little-people" dreariness of it all. But there is much low-key humor here, too, albeit on the dark side.

I much prefer the whacked-out, Dr. Strangelove-ish brand of political-apocalypse film to all this straitlaced you-are-there dramaturgy, which seems a throwback to the early sixties not only in time but in spirit. But what Thirteen Days sets out to do it does admirably.

Moodysson captures exactly the preening narcissism and gumption of these frazzled would-be revolutionaries trying to wriggle out of their bourgeois straitjackets.

The drawback to Lynch's pile-it-on method is that it is reductive. One reason Wild at Heart, for all its amazements, isn't quite as stunning as "Blue Velvet" is because it seems less the working out of a single fixed obsession than an entire smear of obsessions. [12 Aug 1990, Calendar, p.29]

Sonia may seem happy-go-lucky at the start, but grief steels her. It makes her grow up very fast. She becomes a kind of heroine in the course of the film, which ultimately owes its stature to her presence.

Roger & Me is a terrific movie, but if it were a great one, those images would reverberate with the shareholders' meetings and the AutoWorlds and the Gatsby parties.

I hope Keaton doesn't begin to make a specialty of these roles. They play into what is least attractive in her repertoire – the loosey-goosey, knockabout side of her that all too swiftly devolves into hysterics.

The interaction between soldiers and captives becomes a microcosm for an entire culture. It's a wisp of a movie but it has stayed with me longer than much supposedly weightier fare.

Should be remembered for a pair of performers -- Derek Luke and Viola Davis, whose cameo as the mother who abandoned him cuts through the sap like an acetylene torch.

Emma Roberts is squeaky-clean to a fault and so is the movie.

The filmmakers's attempts to balance out the gung-ho shoot-'em-ups with an overlay of "fairness" are rudimentary. The movie works us into a frenzy of righteous revenge, it makes us cheer each kill by the FBI warriors, and then it tells us that this violence only breeds more violence.

The most deeply and mysteriously satisfying animated feature to come along in ages.

It has its modicum of suspense, and Brendon Fraser, who stars as intrepid professor Trevor Anderson – who does indeed journey to the center of the Earth – is his usual heroically affable self.

The emotional resolutions aren't pat, exactly. But they're not messy either, and for material this inherently volatile, that seems like a cheat.

As a piece of drama, What Happened Was . . . isn't any great shakes; it's essentially an actors' workshop exercise that exists primarily as a showcase for its cast. And because Noonan and, especially, Sillas are so good, it triumphs. [06 Oct 1994, p.F10]

Its stars, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, are on screen virtually all of the time, and they're always worth watching. But the film puts such a premium on tastefulness that it never threatens to become exciting. [23 Nov 1990]