Richard Corliss

As bustling and impassioned as the best Sturges and Capra movies, this one captures both the purposeful edginess of Administration Pooh-Bahs (Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox, David Paymer and Samantha Mathis--nice jobs, all) and the isolation of the President. [20 Nov 1995, p.117]

The performances here are so sharp that viewers may wish End of Watch has been shot by someone who knew how to find the right point of view for a scene and leave it there.

Motion capture, which transforms actors into cartoon characters in a vividly animated landscape, is the technique Spielberg has been waiting for - the Christmas gift, or senior-citizen birthday present that he's dreamed of since his movie childhood.

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.

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

Fetching little monument to the bard of rapturous bereavement.

Batman Returns could mark a happy beginning for Hollywood -- not because it might make a mint but because it dispenses with realism and aspires to animation, to the freedom of idea and image found in the best feature-length cartoons.

A romantic comedy so smart and sweetly mature, it's liberating.

Director Joe Johnston's elaborately dressed kids' movie--about a board game that sucks its players into a perilous jungle overrun by lions, rhinos, monkeys, crocodiles and spiders--spends so much time on the how of special effects that it neglects the why of characterization.

It's hard to know how to respond to Falling Down: deplore its crudeness or admire its shrewdness. But it is occasionally the movies' job to plunge into the national psyche, root around in its chaotic darkness and return to the surface with some arresting fantasy that helps bring our uglier imaginings into focus. In that sense, this often vulgar and exploitative movie has some value. [1 March 1993, p63]

However ripe A Separation might seem for being adapted into a smart American film, Hollywood shouldn't bother. Farhadi's movie is just about perfect as it is.

By the end, the canniest viewers may not be fooled, but--and you can believe this--they may be mesmerized.

At its shambling best, Office Space is like a bracing break at the coffee machine. Some horrible Monday, why not cut work to see it?

So why does the movie version, with Robert Duvall as Tom and Robert De Niro as Des, proceed at the sluggish pace of a Sodality novena? Perhaps because Dunne's collaborator on the screenplay was his wife, the Empress of Angst, Novelist Joan Didion. Onscreen, characters who should percolate with rage simply simmer. Two exciting, dangerous actors have little to do: Duvall spends too much time pacing and waiting; De Niro's big scene has him hanging up his vestments.

Quibbles aside, John Wick is the smartest display of the implacable but somehow ethical Reeves character since the "2008 Street Kings."

As both a simian simile and a wonder of technology, Rise of the Planet of the Apes deserves to be in the company of the great original "Kong." This year's sixth "origins" story of a fantasy franchise (after The Green Hornet, Thor, X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern and Captain America: The First Avenger) is also the year's finest action movie.

Nothing makes a moviegoer feel more isolated than sitting stony-faced through a comedy that makes the rest of the audience laugh and cheer. Am I blind? Or are they seeing things?

Wants to contain multitudes -- high ideals and high tech, the poignant and the silly. Doing so, it becomes a lexicon of modern filmmaking. It could be its own creature: Super-Generico. That's not the worst thing for a movie to be, but it's not quite Marvel-ous either.

Beyond the viral ingenuity of the marketing, what's cool about PA is that it's not just a fun thrill ride; it's an instructive artistic experience. A horror-movie revisionist, Peli follows a less-is-more strategy.

Niftily quirky.

Harold and Kumar are pothead patriots in the first feel-good torture film.

For dinosaurs to rule the earth again, the monsters needed majesty as well as menace. And Spielberg got it all right. [14 June 1993, p.69]

Tries anything for a gross-out laugh — but feels oh-so-familiar

A careful, finally powerful film.

Darren Aronofsky brings wild ambition and thrilling artistry to one of the Old Testament’s best-known, most dramatic, least plausible stories — Noah and the ark — with Russell Crowe infusing the role of God’s first seaman and zookeeper with all his surly majesty.

What explosive mischief might they create? That's the premise of Morris' brilliantly incendiary new comedy Four Lions.

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

The film's success is due in large part to actors who are both faithful to all the social minutiae and seductive enough to keep you watching.

The new Panda has a bright palette, an amiable vibe and enough vivacity to keep kids entertained and any accompanying moms from bolting for "Bridesmaids."

What I'm saying is that I resisted the film but it won me over, a little more than I care to admit.

The full-bodied performances of Merad and Darroussin give everyone - everyone with an indulgence for old movies about old values - a reason to see this Well Digger's Daughter.

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

An ideal play is degraded into an indolent film

No film with an ambition this large, and achievement this impressive, can be anything but exhilarating, a vital affirmation of the creative process.

A picture about war and politics that has manages to be both rational and inspirational. It is also the year's funniest smart movie.

Finding Neverland takes a big, brave leap and lands splat on the sidewalk.

Carano is her own best stuntwoman, but in the dialogue scenes she's all kick and no charisma. The MMA battler lacks the conviction she so forcefully displayed in the ring. She is not Haywire's heroine but its hostage.

Marvin's Room, the 1991 Scott McPherson play, filmed by Jerry Zaks, is an old-fashioned weepie of noble mien with many bright moments and a superb cast.

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.

The Ides of March says that American politics, no less than Italian, is a beachfront property with sharks surfing the waves. That makes this skeptical, savory movie a fitting offering from Hollywood's suavest ambassador to Venice and the world.

Watson makes a smooth matriculation from the England-made Harry Potter epics to this movie's thrifty, six-week Pittsburgh shoot.

It’s an enormous, steroidal blast, and as much ingenious fun as a blockbuster can be.

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.

To find that valuable truth, you have to dig through an avalanche of d--- jokes and strenuous slapstick.

Nowhere Boy is a surprisingly conventional film - adroit at weaving a time-and-place mood but way too rigid dramatically to bring the Lennon family dynamic to life.

The critic in me can authoritatively declare that the film is crap. The fan in me sent his shirt to the dry cleaners for tear removal.

Picaresque movies often feel longer than they are. For them to work, they need an interior spring with more thrust than Darjeeling's attempt at reconstituted brotherhood. The problem is in Anderson's approach, which is so supercool, it's chilly. Anderson has the attitude for comedy but not the aptitude.

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.

It proves that, at the end, he was still a thriller. Fans and doubters alike can look at the gentle, driven singer-dancer at the center of this up-close document and say admiringly, This was him.

Somewhere has a lot of good impulses, and a salutary faith in an audience's patience; but the film's tone, in its script, performances and visual style, is studiously uninflected. It's a document of people seen remotely, maybe from outer space.

Nearly a century after that black-and-white cartoon short, and 65 years after a “classic” animated feature that missed the mark, Disney finally got Cinderella right — for now and, happily, ever after.

Ruby Sparks tries its damnedest to make a picture that seduces moviegoers into accepting it as their best imaginary friend forever. But the sweat shows more than the sparkle.

This fine, persuasive movie will have to serve as his testament, and it's a fitting one. How many men can say they wrote their own epitaphs in their own blood?

Like some silly summer song that can't be shaken from the mind, this is a catchy enterprise, no better than it tries to be and no less funny.

[Filmmaker John] Hughes must refer to this as his ‘”Bergman film”: lots of deep talk and ripping off of psychic scabs. But this film maker is, spookily, inside kids. He knows how the ordinary teenagers, the ones who don’t get movies made about them, think and feel: why the nerd would carry a fake ID (”So I can vote”), and why the deb would finally be nice to the strange girl (” ‘Cause you’re letting me”). He has learned their dialect and decoded it for sympathetic adults. With a minimum of genre pandering—only one Footloose dance imitation—and with the help of his gifted young ensemble, Hughes shows there is a life form after teenpix. It is called goodpix.

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

At its metallic heart, T3 is another chase movie -- one figure relentlessly tracking three others, mostly in cars, at high speed through implausibly underpopulated Los Angeles streets.

It is impressive enough that Paltrow holds your eye as a parade of lovelies and virtuoso actresses (Greta Scacchi, Polly Walker, Juliet Stevenson) march past. But her finest trick is to provide a comic subtext to Emma.

On its own, Captain America is a modestly engaging little-big movie in the median range: well below the first "Iron Man," somewhat above "X-Men: First Class."

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.

Schrader's objectification of sad and stupid material is neither tragic nor transgressive. It is just undramatic and uninvolving.

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]

Solondz's most waywardly endearing film - his gentlest triumph.

Many of D’Souza’s charges in his movie are either piffling (Obama returned a bust of Winston Churchill to the British Embassy), wrong (the U.S. is drilling for at least as much oil now as in the George W. Bush) or murky.

The picture delivers the high-octane, testosteronic goods of a warm-weather smash, and maybe the first great film of the post-human era. It's just a shame that every theater showing this nonstop auto race, this animated car-toon, can't be a drive-in.

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.

Small in stature but consistently entertaining, Seven Psychopaths is a vacation from consequence for the Tony- and Oscar-winning author, and an unsupervised play date for his cast of screw-loose stars.

The Informant! may end up closer to the non-starters. Its lunacy is too deadpan, and its denouement too drawn out, to appeal to those who liked the Bourne movies, or, for that matter, the Gore. But it's worth seeing, and a salutary achievement.

Though it has moments where it rises to fun-awful status, with a hideous giddiness that turns moviegoers into rubbernecking motorists at a crash site, it's mostly just awful.

Davies recalls all these sights and sounds -- so horrifying, so beautiful -- and, with his unflinching style, turns anecdote into artistry. The distant voices still live.

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]

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.

When in doubt, director Tony Scott ("Top Gun", "Days of Thunder") lets loose a spray of water, sparks and sweat-the signature flourish of this Helmut Newton of movie machismo.

The film has such a weakness for the easy incongruity (short men dancing with tall women--isn't that hilarious?) that it could almost be Australian. But Shall We Dance? also has an emotional gravity; it is grounded in a middle-aged man's nagging belief that he has one last chance to grab at life. [16 June 1997, p.76]

An idiot-savant movie, knowing but not smart.

Kick-Ass moves with such bloody assurance that you'd be forgiven for not seeing how smart it is. But smart it is. Smart, important and deadly.

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.

The film dances; the heart sings.

Smaug is different: a really good movie, superior to the first in that it brings its characters to rambunctious life.

The canniest moments in the three-plus hours of Nixon, Oliver Stone's dense, ultimately disappointing biopic, capture Nixon at his most pathetically endearing--the Commander in Chief as klutz.

So appealing is Gordon-Levitt that, for great stretches of his new movie, I suspended my disapproval of his character and just went with the nonstop flow. He almost persuaded me that the film is, if not a premium rush, then an economy high.

M:i:III accomplishes its mission: to run smart variations on dumb tropes. After all, summer movies are not for students but for thrill consumers. Devour and enjoy.

The word "mixed" isn't mixed enough to fit my response to this film.

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.

The film lacks moviemaking buoyancy -- the feeling of soaring in space that Rowling's magic-carpet prose gives the reader. The picture isn't inept, just inert.

Funny, hurtful, splendidly acted.

The Debt is a little too gray and stolid - by which we may simply mean too true to its complex milieu - to qualify as scintillating entertainment. But at the end of a summer in which anything like reality was banned from movie houses, this gnarly political thriller has a tonic effect