Richard Corliss

It's a real and rare pleasure to see Costner and Duvall together -- these masters of intense passivity, who know how to be watched when they're listening.

Even Galifianakis's pervy charm, and a deeply weird cameo by Mike Tyson, can't save The Hangover. Whatever the other critics say, this is a bromance so primitive it's practically Bro-Magnon.

Like Harry and Sally, the movie is hardworking, spot on; it winepresses its conversation into epigrams. No surprise here.[31 July 1999, p.65]

It's good to spend time with a movie that takes its time. Granted, Harris doesn't advance the genre; instead he burrows into it, finds a home there, as one might retreat to musty library stacks, where old pleasures and treasures await.

Arcand has a gift for witty dialogue but a weakness for force-feeding his story with sentiment. References to ancient holocausts and to 9/11 simply expose the intent of a director who will do anything to touch his audience -- with a sweet gesture or a cattle prod. And in a comedy of manners, that behavior is very impolite.

Blow works for a scene or two, then stalls.

At first and final glance, Poltergeist is simply a riveting demonstration of the movies' power to scare the sophistication out of any viewer. It creates honest thrills within the confines of a P.G. rating and reaches for standard shock effects and the forced suspension of disbelief only at the climax, when we realize that the characters are behaving with such obtuseness precisely because they are trapped inside a horror movie.

Green shoots his groping lovers in the art-film style -- long takes, static frame -- but his tone isn't at all minimalist; it's achingly, breathtakingly romantic, like the old Hollywood love stories his kids have never seen.

Not just a ripping yarn but a powerful, poignant coming-of-age story.

When he had started playing this game of Save the Planet—when he was roguish Sean Connery and the world was so much younger—Bond had been a kind of role model for people of a certain class and ambition. Savoir-faire meant the aristocracy of style: which wine to decant, which brand of cigarette to smoke, which automatic weapon to carry under the armpit. Now that he was Roger Moore, 20 years later, Bond had degenerated into a male model, and something of a genial anachronism.

Isn't an audience that was nurtured on the doomsday screeds of art-house cinema entitled to vacation in the warmth of a superior film about a boy with almost too many people to love?

Sluggish, formulaic.

If you consider what the exalted quartet of Branagh, Pinter, Caine and Law might have done with the project, and what they did to it, Sleuth has to be the worst prestige movie of the year.

"How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure." Irony aside, that's how to respond to this magnificent study in ink and blood.

Well-made fictions like Fatal Attraction prosper because they seem more persuasive than fact.

No kidding: this is the feel-good movie of the year and a cinematic soul massage.

As to the chief complaint about Clash of the Titans -- that the movie stinks -- what can I say? I liked it. This is a full-throttle action-adventure, played unapologetically straight.

The battle skirmishes here mix sudden violence with slow-motion artistry. The attractive cast can sell an obsession or articulate a conundrum with equal fervor.

Belushi mines quick charm out of his surly role. And Arnold, starched tongue in cheek, is a doll: G.I. Joe in Soviet mufti. He could beat the stuffing out of a toy Rambo. [20 June 1988, p.88]

Either the Coens failed, or I didn't figure out what they're attempting. I must be like Harry or Osborne, pretending to a sophistication I lack. Burn After Reading is a movie about stupidity that left me feeling stupid.

Any sentient viewer will be able to predict every lumpy twist of this ludicrous, fitfully enjoyable movie.

So, for those of you who were wondering if a great TV show could top itself at feature-film length, the good news is that The Simpsons did it! But "South Park" did it first.

Quite a good movie--a big, fat, rousing, intelligent, daring, retro, many-adjective-requiring entertainment.

Rourke does strong, sensitive work here, which will cheer his old-time admirers and win him new fans...But the movie itself is pretty bad.

The film causes no tremors, only a hemi-Demme-semiquaver.

What you will find is both familiar in its contours and unique in its casting: the definitive alterkocker action picture. Call it "The Old Dogs of War," or "Incontinent Basterds."

At heart, though, the story is about the deep, complex, poignant love a man has for his daughter: it's the Lolita syndrome without the lust but with every bit of the doting possessiveness. [30 Dec 1991, p.71]

Crouching Tiger is contemplative, and it kicks ass. Or put it this way: it's a powerful film and a terrific movie.

In this vigorous, stalwart epic, they blend martial breadth and emotional intimacy, honor and obsession, romance and machismo to show the glamour and folly of war.

When Eastwood, who also directed the picture (from a Michael Butler-Dennis Shryack script), faces off against Russell's Maleficent Seven, viewers may get an old-fashioned western tingle. But Pale Rider does nothing to disprove the wisdom that this genre is best left to the revival houses. A double feature of Shane and Eastwood's High Plains Drifter will do just fine, thanks.

There is not a more daft, more original or haunting vision to be seen on American movie screens this year... A terrific movie has escaped the asylum without a lobotomy. The good guys, the few directors itching to make films away from the assembly line, won one for a change. [30 Dec 1985, p.84]

Despite its star's heroic efforts, The Aviator is a gorgeous jet, flying on automatic pilot.

The best, surely the smartest, English-language movie of the year to date.

In The Sacrifice, the cryptic Tarkovsky style helps create a towering cathedral.

For its first hour or so, this upscale heart tugger motors along familiar trails. So ennobling -- and predictable -- in director Penny Marshall's fidgety rendering of a case study by Oliver Sacks. [24 Dec 1990, p.77]

An idiot-savant movie, knowing but not smart.

A decent entertainment -- not up there with the "Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings" sagas, but a notch above "The Golden Compass" and "Narnia."

More a case history than a devious puzzle, the movie is like a story overheard from the next restaurant booth: for all your curiosity as to how it turns out, you're not likely to have much personal investment in the people.

It's a bright, engaging bauble with half a dozen Elvis Presley songs for Mom and Dad, and just enough sass -- Stitch sticks his tongue into his nose and eats his snot -- to keep the tweeners giggling.

When it shifts into action mode, the movie can be a spectacular rush.

Apt to leave a haunting impression on the children who see it.

The sweetest and funniest of Guest's true-life fake-umentaries.

Jaden may have to carry the burden of family celebrity, even as he carries his new film. Expertly.

Sideways is by far the year's best American movie.

The new film is a toss-up with George Pal's very watchable 1953 version: the special effects are even better here, the drama even lamer.

Writer Shane Black mines his thriller premise while musing on issues of identity and redemption; he also shaped the itchy camaraderie of Davis and Jackson.

Can't touch the 1972 film's austere poignancy, and McElhone lacks the bewitching beauty of Natalya Bondarchuk in the original Solaris. But the project's gravity and ambition can't be denied.

Though the picture doesn't deserve to appear on any critic's 10-best list, it observes the minimum standards of modern action films, which is to say it looks smarter, talks sassier and moves faster than almost anything else on the market.

Ferrell's latest excursion into delusions of manhood is director Brad Silberling's Land of the Lost, an action comedy with the sloppy construction and saving grace notes of the star's other movies.

This is rapture in pictures. [22 December 1997, p. 81]

A vampire story needs vampires, sure, but it also needs a human victim to lead the audience into the vortex and help them escape it. Otherwise, the fear factor evaporates, and you get this mishmash: an interview in a void, a vampire movie with underbite.

Take this Shower and feel refreshed; it's a cool dip on a hot day.

The movie is less ho-ho-ho than uh-oh, or oh-no. Emitting a stale odor from the first reel, Fred never engaged the audience of kids and adults that I saw it with.

Pacino seems to recall, from his early Michael Corleone days, the power of whispered menace.

The invention is impressive, but there is little indication of the Henson-Oz trademark: a sense of giddy fun.

The true, rare glamour of the piece is its revival of two precious movie tropes: the flourishing of words for their majesty and fun, and--in the love play between Fiennes and his enchantress--the kindling of a playfully adult eroticism.

Sleepy Hollow may be late for Halloween, but this trick is a real treat.

In Rapace, it has an actress who brings a memorable literary character to indelible movie life, as Vivien Leigh did for Scarlett O'Hara.

This is high, and high-wire, melodrama. It's less soap opera than grand opera, where matters of love and death are played at a perfect fever pitch. And grand this Golden Flower is.

It is as cool and distant as the planet the Strangers come from. But, Lord, is Dark City a wonder to see. [2 March 1998]

The result is that rare Hollywood achievement, an adventure of the intelligent spirit. From lift-off to splashdown, Apollo 13 gives one hell of a ride. [3 July 1995]

This isn't "2001," by a long shot, but for 2000, it'll do nicely.

There's something missing, beyond the iconoclastic theology, in this perfectly OK, blandly underwhelming superproduction. The movie lacks an elevating passion, a cohesive vision, a soul. It's as if The Golden Compass has misplaced its artistic compass. Somebody stole its daemon.

It points out what's missing in his (Oshii) approach: fluidity of character line, the subtlety of expression that brought humanity to a Warner Bros. cartoon duck or rabbit.

Here is a picture that has wit, a hairpin-turn narrative, high pizazz and ensemble star quality. Ready, set, Go.

Armed or not, Reeves is the weapon that can go off at any time. That's why Street Kings, though it isn't a great movie, is a pretty damn cool Keanu Reeves movie, one that on the Reevesian action scale measures somewhere between "Whoa" and "Wow."

The new picture provides a master coursed in cunning visual art and ultra-satisfying entertainment.

The poise and passion in Eve's Bayou leave one grateful, exhausted and nourished. For the restless spirit, here is true soul food.

Sassy but never cynical, Mikey is first seen, through some cunningly simple special effects, as a kind of hot-rodding sperm cruising up the Fallopian tube to the tune of the Beach Boys' I Get Around. [20 Nov 1989, p.98]

Elegant, thoughtful film.

It's got power and depth, and two kings whose greatness is diluted by hubris, and a thrilling dragon fight, and the demon Grendel as a tortured outcast, and a naked monster who looks a lot like Angelina Jolie.

Donen got it gloriously right the first time. Why do it again? And why do it like this?

Stone's camera closes in on Bogosian's face as if it were the cratered moonscape of the American mind, and the actor / starts shouting into his megaphone mike. Finally, these two have become like Barry's listeners, shrill and unconvincing, weaving their own conspiracy theories in the bleat of the night. This is bag-lady cinema.

Smartly crafted, impeccably acted, The Lives of Others packs a subtle punch, from its creepy first images to its poignant finale.

Coppola brings the old spook story alive -- well, undead -- as a luscious, infernal romance.

All glitz, no glory. [7 September 1998]

A near-perfect movie about men in war, men at work. Through sturdy imagery and violent action, it says that even Hell needs heroes.

The result is Soderberghs liveliest experiment since the strenuously weird "Schizopolis" six years ago -- except that this one works.

The movie, which drops the postcards but keeps the edge, is a show-biz mother-daughter film par excellence -- Terms of Endearment out of Gypsy. [17 Sept 1990, p.70]

A technical knockout. [29 June 1987]

Despite some rough edges and language, this is at heart a beguiling fantasy of comradeship.

The film (directed by Andy Tennant) has more problems than Melanie, and they're insoluble. Its lazy calculation telegraphs each plot turn and underlines emotions with corn-pone music.

The film, which had a troubled history and a humongous reported price tag of $120 million, could have been a fiasco; instead, it smartly remythologizes this indispensable Hollywood icon. [01 Jul 1996 Pg.65]

Apocalypse Now is about an American, perhaps a human madness. It searingly depicts, and finally embodies, the spiritual wounds men inflict on themselves and one another in the name of war. To gain the hearts and minds of a distant people, we lose our own souls.

With all its boardroom bickering, the plot is a gun that shoots mostly blanks. G3 is too faithful to the deliberate pacing of the first two films: the slow walking into a dark room, the silence surrounding the threats... The film is a slow fuse with a big bang. [24 Dec 1990, p.76]

Extending the patented Pixar mix of humor and heart, Up is the studio's most deeply emotional and affecting work.

Though faithful in every detail to Tolkien, it has a vigorous life of its own -- grandeur, moral heft and emotional depth.

Tom Ford -- the Texas-born fashion designer who for a decade was the creative director at Gucci -- financed this first feature himself. The producer couldn't have hired a smarter director.

It's an efficient thriller, with scare weapons ranging from the primitive (a pitchfork) to the apocalyptic (an A bomb). The acting is only horror-film-functional, and you might wish that our trio of renegades knew a few basic laws of the genre.

Something got lost in the move from storyboard to screen, and in the stretch from seven minutes to 103. [27 June 1988]

In this film we learn that it takes 8,000 lbs. of pressure to crush a car but only one credited screenwriter (Scott Rosenberg) to pound out such a lame script.

At 2 1/2 hours, it all plays like the rough assembly of a 90-min. caper film--an anecdote told at epic length. Grier, foxy lady of '70s blaxploitation, is given little chance to radiate. [22 Dec 1997, p.80]

The movie is like a car wreck in which no one is injured but the onlookers.

For a viewer sympathetic to Schwarzenegger's and Cameron's best selves -- the ironist with muscles and the mordant fabulist -- True Lies is a loud misfire. It rarely brings its potent themes to life.

When Possession finds its true home, lodging in the convulsive certitude of Victorian romance, it does indeed catch fire -- and warms any viewer in the mood for love.

Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention is a cure for nagging ethnic generalities. This Palestinian sort-of-comedy has a sly wit that amuses and disturbs in equal, salubrious measure.

This solemn, incoherent, brown film is set in New York and Pennsylvania in 1776-81, but it often looks determined to analogize, one more time, the Viet Nam War.

Those opening trailers are hilarious and devastatingly acute, but the rest of Stiller's film could be more a deconstruction of comedy than a display of it. The brain gets the joke; the ribs are untickled.