Richard Corliss

The fascinating film equivalent of a humane execution.

Watchmen has moments of greatness. It proves again that the action movie is where the best young Hollywood brains have gone to bring flesh to their fantasies.

The message to take from Jodorowsky’s Dune: movies once had brains and balls, and lost them.

Hazel and Augustus will live in film lore because of the young actors who play them.

You may leave the movie with Seussian anapests dancing in your happy head. Here's mine: A treat for the eye, an epic event/ This film is delightful, one hundred percent.

A savory cocktail with a bitter twist.

This film is as smart and funny as its topic and its stars.

Knightley embodies Anna as a girlish woman who has never felt erotic love; once smitten, she is raised to heavenly ecstasy before tumbling into the abyss of shame. It's a nervy performance, acutely attuned to the volcanic changes a naive creature must enjoy and endure on her first leap into mad passion. She helps make Anna Karenina an operatic romance worth singing about.

Seduction is more important than deduction in this chic display of star quality to the eighth power.

Directing with a cool, steady hand that renounces shaky-cam the way Fletcher would denounce rock ‘n roll, and getting strong performances from his two leads, Chazelle provides a potent metaphor for artistic ambition as both a religion and an addiction.

A tortured testament from a true believer.

Sixty years after Snow White, Hercules proves that Walt's art form is still sassy and snazzy.

The Avengers doesn't aim for transcendence, only for the juggler's skill of keeping the balls smoothly airborne, and in 3-D too (converted after production). At that it succeeds.

The Merchant-Ivory attention to period detail often seems like the movie equivalent of good penmanship. But here it accrues a kind of ethical eloquence.

Fast, bold, harsh and primitive, like a prodigious student film with equal parts promise and threat.

A furiously time-looping joy ride and the smartest action film of the early summer season.

If you don't go in panting for a Pixar-level masterpiece, you should have a blast at this cartoon carnaval.

The purity of Dequenne's performance inspires awe.

So here's a tip for those attending this handsomely acted, epic-length little film. Ease into the sleaze, stare at the party animals, look but don't touch, and, oh, boogie all night. [October 6, 1997]

The Coens are artists too, and their cool dazzler is an elegy to a day when Hollywood could locate moral gravity in a genre film for grownups. [24 Sept 1990, p.83]

Well acted and acutely observed, the film doesn't try to be a conventionally satisfying coke-land action film.

A.I. will beguile some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser of the E.T. stripe.

In its pagan fervor, this is an almost religious experience.

Rescue Dawn is a tale of heroism untainted by political skepticism. In an age when U.S. soldiers are seen as villains or victims, the movie offers a GI who bravely, or madly, simply refuses to die.

Where can mass-moviegoers find release for their tenderer feelings? Only at dozens of inspirational sports movies, where guys (on screen and in the audience) get to cry and cheer and win. And, this weekend, at Spider-Man 3.

It turns a hot topic into a pretty cool entertainment--one that satisfies the viewers' need for righteous revenge while leaving them a queasy little question on the way out: Does gun diplomacy make sense only in movies? Or do Americans want it to play out in real life?

Nettelbeck is a sharp observer of life's surprises, and Gedeck has an appraising, intelligent beauty. Her Martha is like the film: tart on the outside, sweet on the inside, with a delectable aftertaste.

An enthralled and mostly enthralling guided tour of what Herzog describes as "one of the greatest art discoveries in the history of human culture."

Like the virtual game he plays on us, the film is weird, it's addictive, and Lord, it's alive!

It is pristinely acted; and its range and heart dwarf other summer films, so cogent is it about our common aches and dreams.

[Murray] has the natural actor's charm of making manners matter. He carries Groundhog Day with his uniquely frittery nonchalance and makes the movie a comic time warp anyone should be happy to get stuck in. [15 Feb 1993, p.63]

Cheers for a Cannes director who has infused his technical mastery with radiant life. In the Museum of the World of Wes Anderson, the dolls are dancing.

Gremlins has enough style and savvy to stand on its own as the summer's most original Hollywood picture.

Most films today are afraid to try anything new. Natural Born Killers is an explosive device for the sleepy movie audience, a wake-up call in the form of a frag bomb. [29 August 1994, p.66]

The filmmakers throw in a few cheesy scares: mom in a monster mask, a baby sitter jumping in front of a camera. But the rest is pretty freaking cool.

The trilogy ascends and soars with the two combatants and ends not with a whimper but with a blast of light. Thus the fabulous original film has found an honorable way to sign off. For those who didn't bother to join the early crowds, The Matrix Revolutions is a definite might see.

In a movie age when there's hardly a garde, let alone an avant-garde, Maddin proves there are many languages to cinema, including the dead one of antique film. And in that language, he sings, he soars.

Toss in enough gorgeous bluegrass music to make the movie's CD a must-have, and you have prime, picaresque entertainment.

Pummeling, exhilarating.

Cronenberg delivers.

Boyle's ingenuity with the camera gives this fraught journey plenty of menace and pizazz.

The Woman in Black is a welcome addition to the old canon; renouncing innovation, embracing anachronism, it's almost "The Artist" of ghost movies. To anyone who fancies throwback stories of the supernatural, there's nothing so appealing as a well-preserved corpse.

A serious, handsome, excruciating film that radiates total commitment.

Steve and the movie still fly high through plot twists and cool stunts.

For those who park their sense and sensibility at the 'plex door, there's plenty to enjoy in the performances, the rowdy innocence of the whole thing, the closing sing-along of Build Me Up Buttercup--and the vision of Cameron Diaz in giggly, gangly bloom.

Watching the film is like reading Playboy for the articles.

The warming, nicely played relationship of the burglar and his lawyer daughter (Laura Linney) is the source of the film's absolute power. [24 Feb 1997, p. 67]

You watch these impossible stunts with fear and gratitude for the hardest-working man in show biz. To see your first Jackie Chan movie is to fall in love with what the movies once were: a comic ballet of bodies in motion.

The whole movie has a warmth about it that never slops over into sentiment: there is much more here than tall-guy, short-guy jokes. [12 Dec 1988, p.82]

A fine copy.

Here’s the oddest element in this tale of Hollywood fine-tuning run rampant: the movie is pretty good — the summer’s most urgent, highest-IQ action picture.

A more sensitive Ferrell in a script that plays like Charlie Kaufman Lite: that should send up breakthrough and Oscar signals. It doesn't quite, though. The movie is clever, but a little too pleased with its own clockwork intricacy.

There are scenes in the new movie that seem like stretching exercises at a retirement home; there are garrulous stretches, and even the title seems a few words too long. But once it gets going, Crystal Skull delivers smart, robust, familiar entertainment.

This series will survive as well, until 2016 — when, you can bet, there will be a third Star Trek to celebrate the TV show’s 50th anniversary. Here’s hoping that those three years will bestow a measure of maturity on all concerned: Kirk and his bright curators too.

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.

It's an enjoyably old-fashioned shoot-out, if you can shake off the current headlines and sink in to a fantasy of hyper-violence that plays like an NRA vision of America the Beautiful.

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.

It's like a giant sculpture that is so strange and off-putting, it's instantly, intriguingly post-modern. Swept up in the film's pile-driving self-assurance, even Bay-haters may absorb the pain to enjoy the gain.

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]

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

Gaudily entertaining, occasionally wearying sequel.

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

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]

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."

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.

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

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

The movie will divide some Eastwood fans, conquer others. The naysayers will be grateful that, from this healthy, workaholic actor-director, there is always the promise of a good movie - if not here, then hereafter.

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."

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]

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

This Mafia tale doesn’t aspire to the heights of a "Godfather" or the epic sprawl of "The Sopranos." Vromen and cowriter Morgan Land are content to bring subtle shadings to the tale of a strange man in a dirty business.

Attention must be paid to movie allure, in a star like Depp and his current harem. Angelique may be the only satanist among the women here, but they're all bewitching.

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]

Nair sleekly manages the story’s thriller aspects, especially the kidnapping. But this is a character study, and she has found some superb actors to fill it.

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.

Luhrmann, an Australian who pretty much let his camera go nuts in the egregiously overrated "Strictly Ballroom", here makes reasonable, imaginative decisions that are, arguably, true to Shakespeare.

Major League doesn't try too hard or aim too high, but it is pretty funny. With its stock characters, breezy dialogue, dense ambience and instinct for easy emotions, it could serve as the pilot for a pay-cable sitcom. The film's tone is acerb, but its climax is as predictably uplifting as Rocky's and as surefire effective as Damn Yankees'.

Savvy family entertainment.

Another Saturday Night Live skit is turned into a winning movie. And this one has a little heart. [2 Aug 1993]

Rather than juicing each element to blockbuster volume, Clooney has delivered it in the tone of a memorial lecture, warm and ambling, given by one of the distinguished academics he put in his movie.

The movie is finally predictable, but it has connected with a generation that believes it has been saddled with the thankless job of raising its own parents.

It has the slapdash air of a movie that was a little more fun to shoot than to watch. To say that Blades is a little sharper than "Kicking and Screaming," but not nearly so smart as the best parts of "Talladega," is like taste-testing a Big Mac against a Whopper and a Wendy's Classic Double.

Salaam Bombay! deserves a broad audience, not just to open American eyes to plights of hunger and homelessness abroad, but to open American minds to the vitality of a cinema without rim shots and happy endings.

Harrelson rewards watching; he's no less potent at rest than when he explodes in calculated rage.

An adoring tone and the familiar slo-mo, wide-angle baskebatics.

Blane's snooty friend Steff (Spader) could be a tired stereotype, but with his all-year tan, his hip-blase voice and hs view of high school as a "career," Steff becomes a recognizable character of any age: upscale slime in embryo. [3 Mar 1996, p.83]

True to its grim prospectus, The Grey dwells in haunted machismo to the very end.

Existing in a self-contained universe, Scream 4 is its own remake (Screamake), sequel (shriekquel), parody and critique. Thus it taunts and pleases audiences, mocks and justifies itself and makes any review redundant.

It provides intimate glimpses of people usually seen, and then only briefly, as faces on a post-office wall or numbers in a cemetery.

I wish I found The Illusionist as pleasing to sit through (twice) as to write about. I'm glad there's a "new" "Tati" film to add to his small, important body of work, yet I wish that the creator of "The Triplets of Belleville" had made a true Chomet film instead. I'll be waiting for that, with a hope to be found nowhere in this handsome, airless movie.

An action figure with a sweet core, Johnson can pump up the humanity of any franchise, whether he’s playing a stepdad who becomes a hero in Journey 2 or, as here, a stud soldier who treats Flint and Jaye like his grown children and shepherds them through peril. Following those younger Joes, the Retaliation audience is encouraged to clamber up on Johnson’s huge soldiers and go along for a pretty cool ride.

When else has the obscenity of child murder been the cause of such gravity and grace?

Because the emotional drama is so one-sided, I just can't love you.

With more sentiment and splash than the original’s sharp wit, Mr. Peabody & Sherman ends up teaching the same lesson as “Peabody’s Improbable History”: every dog should have a boy.