Richard Corliss

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

Allen has assembled an attractive cast and given most of them clichés to inhabit. He has also stinted on inventiveness.

With his instinct and craft, Miller has provided more autosuggestive violence on a $1 million budget than The Blues Brothers did with half the Chicago police force and $30 million.

It is a serious, often hilarious peek under the rock where nightmares strut in $800 suits and Armageddon lies around the next twist of treason.

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

The film offers no message, no solutions, only a great time at the movies.

Kasdan has been a serious filmmaker, so he gives the goofiness a smart look and some pertinent metaphors about Americans wrongfully detained. But the aim is no higher than the impulse of old schlockmeisters like Roger Corman and Ed Wood: to get the audience to scream.

Alvin's tragic memories give perspective to the triumph of his trek, even as Farnsworth's weathered brilliance makes this movie a G as in gem.

The summer's zazziest action movie.

This is an original work in an antique mood. The actors and authors all have fun with the genre without making fun of it. Rather, they revive it.

This is a chase movie (Simon Legree after three Little Evas) across parched outback terrain, captured with rapturous authenticity by cinematographer Christopher Doyle.

In standard-narrative terms, Daybreakers suffers from tired blood. No question the Spierigs are prime film imagineers. What they needed here was a director.

Hannah and Her Sisters is old-fashioned in another sense: its plot has the elegant geometry of a Philip Barry play. [Feb 3, 1986]

Slick, brutal and almost human, this is the team-spirit action movie Mission: Impossible should have been.

Disney is trying to lure the disparate audiences of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (kids) and "The Passion of the Christ" (Evangelicals). But on either level, Narnia fails. There's no fire, no passion and not much fun.

Agreeable but never compelling, Silverado proves it takes more than love of the western to make a good one. Maybe the dudes at K-Tell were a mite too slick for the job.

Doesn't aim too high or strain too hard; it is at ease inhabiting its pretty, miniature realm.

See Hairspray. It's light and airy, but it will stick around: the first aerosol movie. [29 Feb 1988, p.101]

Pretty lame. Sharkboy has an especially frantic, amateur atmosphere, with a mostly maladroit cast.

This Ed Wood is dead wood.

Few movies have spread their fibs or facts as clumsily as this one. There's not an emotionally plausible moment in the picture.

Copycat, directed by Jon Amiel ("The Singing Detective", "Sommersby"), means to be a Greatest Hits album of atrocities. A sick mind is a terrible thing to waste. [13 Nov 1995, pg.120]

AP2 starts out bright and clever--shagnificent, we might almost say--before sinking into a swamp of shagnation.

As transparent as this device is, Angels has elemental satisfactions in its blend of movie genre that could appeal to wide segments of the audience.

The most mature and satisfying work in a glittering, consistently surprising career.

A stupefying shambles, Two of a Kind just noses out "Staying Alive" for Worst Picture of the Year.

The film fairly groans from all the narrative gamesmanship and lavish romantic gestures...The unbewitched viewer may groan as well.

Landis seems no surer of his visual style than he does of his movie's tone, so he tries everything: shots angled from a dog's-or a god's-eye view, eerily lighted special effects, more dancers, more extras, more noise, more cars and car crashes. Alas, more is less, and The Blues Brothers ends up totaling itself.

In a brief review in Time magazine this week, I gave Dan a gentleman's B-. Let me try to remember why. Because the pressure of keeping his ardor secret turns Dan pleasingly cranky.

Instead of the meeting of maestros at the top of their form, Righteous Kill has the feeling of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds facing off for the first time in an exhibition game. It's like Old Timers' Day at the Motion Picture Home.

t's a movie for adults -- if they can keep up with its careering pace -- and, yes, you can take the kids. It juggles a '90s impudence with the old Disney swank and heart.

The rhythm of rural life has rarely seemed so lucid and luminous.

This is a good-natured retro romp that is truer to Golden Age movies than to golden oldies songs.

As thoughtful as it is handsomely acted. Caine's subtle, bold performance should guarantee him an aisle seat on Oscar night.

A contemplative crime drama with a high startlement quotient.

The skitcom format soon becomes tiresome.

The whole rollicking adventure zips along a mile a minute.

With his round, ruddy face, Tighe always seems on the verge of derisive laughter or flash-fisted rage; it's enjoyable guessing which fever will surface first. The rest of the movie is less entertaining, a righteous homily without the grits.

Doesn't offer much.

The perfect summation of Hollywood at this moment - an apotheosis of American male infantilism - and, on its own, a most likable mess.

Whatever city this one is showing in...move there.

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.

Spielberg's sharpest, brawniest, most bustling entertainment since "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the finest of the season's action epics.

This being a Tarantino film, the conversations are as long and lurid and finely choreographed as the martial-arts set pieces.

It's best to see this as a drug buffet. Graze through the vignettes... and you'll find three or four tasty bits to snack on.

Wu is a fine, supple tabula rasa; McGregor (Trainspotting) shows again that he is one of the boldest, most charming young actors.

A bloated, criminally judgmental borderline-comedy.

Jogs from one incident to the next, amassing information and dispensing attitude but rarely creating real characters. That's supposed to be director Milos Forman's forte; here, though, nearly everyone is an enemy or a stooge.

Payne cannot shape or propel his own good material. He lets things dawdle when briskness would be a boon, and defeats the gung-ho efforts of Dern and other worthy actors. [9 December 1996, p.82]

Has so much razzle-dazzle that viewers may end up both raised and dazed. It's remorselessly inventive, trying anything fast and sassy to keep you watching. In other words, it's the most honest display of showpeople's need to be noticed this side of a Madonna concert.

If this madly entertaining movie has a fault, it's that it's too ingenious for the genre it ostensibly inhabits.

An ambitious but sub-ordinary SF epic in which, as so often, Willis is better than his material.

Gives its fine actors room to breathe and behave--and in Michelle Rodriguez's case, glow.

From its first shot, of a mangled car high up in the branches of a tree, this cool, handsome thriller proceeds with an elliptical elegance.

The story has to carry way too much weight, as war remorse battles McCarthyism. The Majestic's makers don't get what made Capra movies invigorating.

In an amazing year for animation, The Princess and the Frog is up at the top. Go on, give it a big kiss.

The Squid and the Whale is domestic tragedy recollected as comedy: a film whose catalog of deceits and embarrassments, and of love pratfalling over itself, makes it as (excruciatingly) painful as it is (exhilaratingly) funny.

When a genius like Lasseter sits at his computer, the machine becomes just a more supple paintbrush. Like the creatures in this wonderful zoo of a movie, it's alive!

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?

The film is a gorgeous garland on an unknown soldier's grave.

An exhilarating ride, start to finish. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg set a high bar for this subgenre with "Shaun of the Dead," but Reese, Werner and Fleischer may have trumped them. This isn't just a good zombie comedy. It's a damn fine movie, period. And that's high praise, coming from a vampire guy.

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.

And now we have this ill wind, this feeble gust of an environmental horror story. The writer-director's disintegration from robust artistic health to narrative incoherence, from hitmaker to box-office loser, has an almost tragic trajectory. It's a saga worthy of being told by the young M. Night Shyamalan.

She (Blanchett) seems the only guardian of sanity in this good-old-boy Bellevue.

It's just possible that Tarantino, having played a trick on history, is also fooling his fans. They think they're in for a Hollywood-style war movie starring Brad Pitt. What they're really getting is the cagiest, craziest, grandest European film of the year.

The pulse of Curtis Hanson's direction is lethargic; the comic bits are so slack and deadpan you could mistake the film for an earnest drama--an Afterschool Special for troubled kids and their pooped parents.

Like Saturday Night Fever and, for that matter, the Rocky films, Flashdance has made it big by taking experiences of black youths and playing them in whiteface. But unlike its grittily romantic predecessors, Flashdance is pure glitz.

That first movie raised the craft of torture to a low art. Expect no less in LW2, directed by Richard Donner and written by Jeffrey Boam. This installment features a surfboard decapitation, death by carpenter's nail gun, a bomb wired to a very sensitive seat ( and reduction of the Afrikaaner diaspora by about one-half. (24July 1989, p.53)

Hollywood's smartest media satire in years--and a breakthrough for Jim Carrey.

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

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.

By the end-credit sequence, when the stars appear in spandex outfits to reprise Dancing Queen, the audience may be singing along as if they'd overdosed on ouzo.

Mostly awful.

Makes for a long, lumpy trip with a charismatic guide and some brilliant detours.

To transport picturegoers to a unique place in the glare of the earth, in the darkness of the heart--this, you realize with a gasp of joy, is what movies can do.

The film is about joy--in conniving and surviving, in connecting with audiences, in its own fizzy, jizzy style.

The film dances; the heart sings.

Flouting all rules of the sea but honoring every war-epic cliche about guts under pressure.

Last Action Hero starts out mostly nuts, and winds up mostly bolts. Or, rather, winds down. That's a problem with pastiche: it must be constantly jump-started with ingenuity, and even that ultimately pales. By the end, nothing matters. [21 June 1993, p67]

For all its japes and jokes, the movie is really about exhaustion of the spirit: sitting in a bleak hotel suite at 4 a.m. with the bad taste of last night in the mouth and the feeling that tomorrow will not be a better day.

Warm-hearted humanism is glopped all over Renaissance Man in the hopes that we won't notice that the story makes no sense.

The film is full of sharp acting and home truths, but its ambition to be different finally surrenders to its need to be loved.

in a larger sense Be Kind Rewind declares that the riches of cinema history touch each of us personally. Films become so deep a part of us that we own them that our memories of them, whether faithful or fanciful, become their meanings. As a movie critic and, even before and above that, a movie lover, how can I disagree with that?

It's strenuous, smartly-made and ordinary to an extraordinary degree.

Intoxicating. [19 Dec 1988, p.78]

The only thing Schumacher and his scrupulous craftsfolk forgot to give the movie was life -- the energizing spirit of wit and passion that makes scenes work and characters breathe.

Redacted pretty successfully sustains a dual level of hysteria (in its content) and disinterest (in its film-long framing devices). It's an amazingly vigorous work for a filmmaker who turns 67 on Sept. 11... The movie is a cry of national shame; for De Palma, it's a new badge of honor for a wily old vet.

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 fun in this moody, pounding, overlong, rewarding bring-down of a film is seeing Eddie’s curled lip of contempt, which he flashes at all the suckers, freeze into a rictus when he gets his.

Fond, zippy new documentary about the Bruce who, on the Hollywood circuit, is the real Boss.

The Road to Guantánamo is his (Winterbottom’s) most unsparing statement yet of war's brutalizing effect on both the prisoner and his jailer.

With their technical astonishments, Director Henson and Executive Producer Lucas have been faithful to the pioneering Disney spirit. In suggesting the thrilling dilemmas that await a wise child, they have flown worlds beyond Walt. [7 July 1986, p.65]

Ceases to be a cogent study of the disease of genius and devolves into two lesser creatures: an ordinary weepie and an Oscar contender.

This is a comedy with the old-time blend of wit and sentiment. Years from now, when you stumble across it on TV, you could persuade yourself that, back in the two-thousand-oughts, they made pretty good movies.

It's a terrific movie. I love the look and the verve of the thing, the confidence of its epic design, its smart use of half a dozen noted British thesps, lending weight and wit to the supporting roles.

Corelli is a coffee-table movie: one leafs through the gorgeous vistas and nods through the narrative.

I Love You to Death lacks the precision, ferocity and guts needed for black farce.

Nemo, with its ravishing underwater fantasia, manages to trump the design glamour of earlier Pixar films.

A film worthy of being displayed on a screen eight stories high.

Cool, shiny, handsomely made and, in its compelling-repelling way, mordantly funny.

Three of the hippest indie film princes make a perfect commercial comedy.

The most beguiling romantic comedy this side of "Broadcast News." [11 Jan 1988]

This is what lifts Seven Pounds above other Smith dramas -- he does tentatively allow another adult onto his solitary planet.

It's a brilliant idea, for about 10 minutes. Then the bare set is elbowed out of a viewer's mind by the threadbare plot and characterizations.

Van Damme has been known as a martial-arts legend, movie star and pain in the ass. But never an actor -- until now.

The film's pleasures are simple and obvious: an original plot, lots of slapstick and a lead performance by the Bushman N!xau, who registers every absurdity with the aplomb of an aboriginal Buster Keaton.

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.

A gravely beautiful fairy tale of longing and loss. [20 Sept 1993, p.82]

Maybe Wellesley isn't the only injured party here. Can an audience sue for cruel and edifying punishment?

The new film is conflicted about its subject -- it both derides and adores what it means to parody -- and it's miscast at the top. Still, the Eve Ahlert -- Dennis Drake script has a gentle heart to humanize its sharp sitcom wit.

Miller suggests violence; he does not exploit it. He throws the viewer off-balance by mixing the ricochet rhythms of his chase scenes with tableaux of Walpurgisnacht grandeur.

Cecil B. proves how a dose of smart bad taste can be jolly good fun.

In the end, the Cuban newspaper was nearly right: it's not the Castro character but the whole of this grand, doomed experiment that lacks "charisma and depth."

Kaufman may be counting on the audience's will, insistence and yearning to create a coherent love story from the shards and shrapnel he provides us.

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]

Without question or competition, the most influential movie by a black filmmaker.

Apted...has the storytelling skills to weave a powerful and poignant snapshot of some decent folks who have become, collectively, Britain's first family.

Obsession has seldom looked as gaudy or thrilling as here.

This is more than an Important Documentary: it is engaging and, finally, enraging - as captivating as any "Superman" movie, and as poignant as a child's plea for help.

A feel-good ending is mandatory, even in a comedy like this, which promises to be transgressive because it's the first major-studio job for a director with an underground reputation for being crazy-bold.

This enthralling, enigmatic, romantic drama from Asia's most influential auteur (Chungking Express) is an essay in appetite and inhibition.

The audience gets as pulverizing a workout as the stars do. Or rather, the stars' stunt doubles, who deserve Oscars for best supporting masochism.

Untraceable really is disgraceable. It's bad enough when a movie offers up atrocity scenes that would make the Nanking soldiers seem like Hannah Montana; it's repellent when the movie dresses up the sadism in a moral message that condemns the very weakness it is exploiting.

Documentaries don't fly on figures, or even controversial arguments; they come to life with real, engaging people. And when this freakumentary hooks up with Urail King, it gets an A.

Politics aside, this is a handsome film with orange skies to die for, or under, and a lovely score by Carter Burwell. The picture has some ponderous and snooze-worthy stretches, but it attains a certain melancholic grandeur, with the actors and crew fighting as desperately as Crockett and Bowie to make the best of a fated adventure.

Under the suave direction of Jonathan Frakes, who also plays the Enterprise's second-in-command, the movie glides along with purpose and style.

Binoche is especially subtle and radiant in another splendid drama from Leconte.

Shine a Light isn't the record of a unique event, so it's not on the exalted level of "The Last Waltz." But it has its own fascination. The film is less about the music than about the dedication of show-biz troupers--about doing your job, year after year, as if it's your joy.

You can try not liking this adaptation of the Off-Broadway musical hit -- it has no polish and a pushy way with a gag -- but the movie sneaks up on you. [29 Dec 1986, p.71]

It towers over the year's other movies as majestically and menacingly as a gang lord at a preschool. [10 Oct 1994]

For closeup conflict and emotional kick, the Frost/Nixon movie tops the play. But neither can match the tension and weird poignancy of the original interviews -- reality TV of the highest, queasiest order.

The film's payoff raises more questions than it answers, which may be Shyamalan's intent in this political parable of fear.

Wearying, stupefying, dumber than dumb, When Nature Calls would be a career ender for Carrey--except that a zillion people have seen it. Stop this, folks. It'll only encourage him.

At the core, though, one finds a slacky, sappy film. The human mystery that breathed so easily in "Shawshank" is often forced here.

The movie is a little gimpy. But Murray's molto impressive. He drops his voice half an octave; he walks like a golem tailored by Armani; he puts his silky style in the service of menace. It's a whole nother dimension to him. [8 March 1993]

With Half-Blood Prince, again we have a stalwart, satisfying visualization of the Rowling cosmos.

For 82 minutes, The Little Mermaid reclaims the movie house as a dream palace and the big screen as a window into enchantment. Live-action filmmakers, see this and try to top it. Go on and try.

This agitated comedy could be called "The Big Chillin'" if it had a smidge of the 1983 film's wit and charm.

Until a vigorous climax, the action scenes have little punch.

Here's another warning: you may laugh yourself sick--as sick as this ruthlessly funny movie is.

Even when the movie sags and strains a bit in Act III, Clooney keeps it flying with old-fashioned movie-star allure. He's got it all: Cary Grant's looks and, inside, Bob Hope's snake-oil-salesman soul.

To their old fascination with Sunbelt pathology, to their side-winding Steadicam and pristine command of screen space, the Coens have added a robust humor, a plot that keeps outwitting expectations and a surprising dollop of sympathy for their forlorn kidnapers. [23 March 1987]

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.

Jason Patric is the chief sleaze; Ben Stiller adds to his gallery of wormy guys; and Aaron Eckhart is the doleful husband who, when asked who his best lay was, unabashedly answers, "Me." [24 August 1998, p. 85]

Constantine is a one-of-a-kind hybrid: a theological noir action film. And until it goes irrevocably goofy at the end, it's a smart ride--and smart-looking too.

The film's blithe misogyny soon becomes wearying; it refuses to see women as more than the sum of their private parts.

It should make audiences happy. But then so did most of his earlier movies, and they were lame, gnat-brained pieces of demagogic doo-doo!

You could also say the picture lacks a coherent plot and complex characterization, but those are irrelevant to the genre. The movie is like a superior athlete who gets tongue-tied in a post-game interview but on the field is poetry in motion.

The rewards for paying attention are mammoth and exhilarating. This is a high-IQ movie that gives viewers an IQ high.

A small epic with subtle strengths.

The film has just enough collisions to be a crashing bore.

Watch Murray's eyes in the climactic scene in the hotel lobby: while hardly moving, they express the collapsing of all hopes, the return to a sleepwalking status quo. You won't find a subtler, funnier or more poignant performance this year than this quietly astonishing turn.

Vivid, relevant and of elevating scariness.

In its purposeful accumulation of depravities, both individual and institutional, the director's non-style has an honorable payoff that's rare in modern Hollywood cinema: the story's weight could come close to burying you in despair.

Veronica Guerin paid with her life. This film would make her proud, for it is ultimately not depressing but -- we say without a shred of journalistic irony -- inspiring.

The differences between the two Assaults--the new one's pretty good, the old one near great--are of tone, style and perspective.

As the director of this noble weepie, Nelson so overuses visual tricks -- zooms, zip pans and multiple perspectives on a simple scene -- that she turns the viewer into an exasperated parent; this is a directorial style in need of a spanking.

The film's both mental and experimental, more melodious than Yentl and at heart as soft and gentle as a Christmas kiss.

The Terminal is Spielberg's shortest feature since the first "Jurassic Park," yet it drags, plods, piling one lifeless situation atop another. For all the effort and good intentions, the movie is in-terminal-ble.

We the viewers are its beneficiaries, watching and waiting for something awful to happen. Here it does, first subtly, then spectacularly. The twist is not revealed until the last shot--if you keep your avid eyes open.

With craft, crackle, a little bombast and plenty of residual rage, he has created a time-capsule movie that explodes like a frag bomb in the consciousness of America, showing how it was back then, over there.

It is a ripping yarn and a spectacularly new and odd vision.

May leave viewers emotionally disconnected from this distinctly unchipper Mr. Chips.

But the film is keyed to Posey's performance: perfectly brittle, faultlessly false. As the most toxic of this family of vipers, she creeps and stings, and no one dares look away.

Rumble Fish is the messiest, most provocative inkblot of the year.

Wings of Desire works hard to be both an essay and a love story, a mural and an intimate portrait. To savor this film, the viewer must work hard too. But when the artists behind the screen and the angels in the audience meet, it's like a smoke and coffee: fantastic! (1998 May 9, p. 79)

Sexy, funny, sad and defiantly romantic, Feast of Love is the rare movie to cuddle up to.

We should hail a movie that recalls creepy political thrillers of the mid-'70s, back when some films were made for grownups and the comfortable catharsis of a happy ending was not required -- think of the panoramically cryptic worldview of "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor," and of course, "Chinatown."

The only collateral damage is in the audience, where, as you sit through the movie, you can feel your IQ drop minute by minute.

His films will never be mainstream fare; audiences who wander into the theater may well find them derisive, needlessly shocking, perhaps unforgivable. But I'd call them, and especially Life During Wartime, unforgettable.

In Susan Minot's goofy script, Tyler ministers to ailing writer Jeremy Irons and other artsy layabouts while searching for the man on whom to bestow her virginity. The climactic deflowering scene provides the only giggles in an otherwise stodgy mess.

We [Farrellys'] mock, they say, because we care. But that doesn't make the film elevating or amusing.

Fincher, whose work on "Fight Club" and "Panic Room" displayed his expertise in melding the suspenseful and the lurid, plays it cool here. He lets his stars do their thing.

If this sounds like an old-fashioned sex comedy, it is -- sexy, for sure, and funny, in wild spurts.

This is a declaration of love: The Opposite of Sex is the smartest, edgiest, most human and handsomely acted romantic comedy in elephant years.

This daring, perhaps confusing declaration of irrelevance suggests that the epic is a form a director like Scorsese must subvert even as he invokes it. But it doesn't erase the sordid splendor of Scorsese's congested, conflicted, entrancing achievement.

Tom Cruise heads a tony cast in a best-seller movie that is firm at the start and infirm by the end.

It's a long drink of water at the fountain of pop-social memory.

"Shrek," this film's prime competition for the first Animated Feature Oscar, is a synoptic parody of fairy tales. In Monsters, Inc. the gags aren't as spot-on but the technique is miles ahead. The vision is grander and warmer.

The Cotton Club is not a bad film, just a bland one; not inept, just inert. Given its garish production history, one rather expected The Cotton Club to sing with hot-jazz desperation. Instead, we get the mediocre craftsmanship of a pit band in Vegas.

It lacks overall focus, and at the end you may have a question for Michael Mann: Why'dyou bother? [July 6, 2009, p.59]

There's enough narrative for three fine films. But not enough for The Interpreter. The thriller pieces feel assembled rather than organic.

Erin Brockovich is slick, grating and false. We bet it makes a bundle.

A coda that will have the movie's audience gasping in exhilarated exhaustion, whispering astonished gratitude to Sokurov for having created vigorous art out of 21st century video technique and asking themselves, "What's the Russian word for Wow!?"

If the film is just as strange and endearing as its glowing protagonist -- and it is -- that's because the director and co-writer (with Mignola) is Guillermo del Toro, 43, who has the wildest imagination and grandest ambitions of anybody in modern movies.

O.K., Ritchie mistakes flash for style. Perhaps that's the price you pay for storytelling exuberance. If he keeps making films as down and witty as Snatch, we may learn to forgive him.

The picture is worth catching for the delicate and toxic nuances of Rudd's performance. And one of its funniest corollaries is that it shows how hilarious and instructive a star this perennial supporting player can be.

This is a serious filmgoer's treat: intelligence cloaked in elegance.

[A] sexy, spiky love story.

Invigorating and annoying, Lola could use a dose of Ritalin. Best to take this 76-minute riff on alternate destinies as an antidote to Europe's minimalist art-house cinema and to enjoy Potente's sweaty radiance.

Designed and destined to win no awards, Machete is expert, cartoon-violent, lighthearted fun. Just the thing to send Junior back to school in a good mood.

Indeed, the entire film is a kind of sock-hop benefit for Approaching Middle Age. This maturing generation never played Taps with such glamour or good humor. Play the music and let the big chill—the knowledge that "we're all alone out there, and we're going out there tomorrow"—melt away in the warmth of the feel-good movie of '83.

A final word for those of you who just don't care for musicals: The movie's true lyricism is less in its score than in its visual and emotional palette, and in watching Depp rise to the majesty of madness. So give Sweeney Todd a try. Even Victor, when he finally saw it, agreed: it's bloody great.

Chow Yun-fat, the epitome of swaggering suavity in John Woo's Hong Kong crime films, wears his role as a good-bad cop dapperly in this good-middling drama set in Manhattan's Chinatown.

To evaluate For Your Eyes Only and the other Bond movies, it helps to think of them not as, say, different vintages of a fine Bordeaux but as successive models off the Pontiac assembly line. In one vehicle there may be an annoying ping in the engine of narrative; in another the dialogue may be as sleek as Genuine Corinthian Leather. But all meet the same standards of speed, styling and emotion control. If there is no Rolls-Royce in the Bond series, there is also no Pinto.

Tin tailspins into silliness and never regains its flight pattern.

This documentary, a gallivanting time trip through a bolder film era, is Herzog's final collaboration with Kinski: an act of love and exorcism.

[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.

Does Solondz feel remorse for libeling his own kind? He might need to if his portraits didn't have the gift of dark wit, the ring of social truth. One makes allowances for a master storyteller.

Von Trier has a tendency to go overboard in his denunciations of American violence (Dogville). By contrast, Dear Wendy is a cogent, comprehensive take on the land and the films that obsess him.

You will simply want to shoot yourself by the third inning.

At times Dead Ringers also tilts out of coherence, with scenes that are dramatically stillborn. But Irons is splendid in both roles, and Cronenberg can create tour-de-force tableaux with his effortless black magic. [26 Sept 1988]

There are a few longueurs, and moments when the plot trips, like Jeremy, over its own complications. But The Secret of NIMH is more important as Bon Bluth's declaration of dependence on a form of popular art that can infuse every corner of the imagination with its rainbow light.

So Twilight isn't a masterpiece -- no matter. It rekindles the warmth of great Hollywood romances, where foreplay was the climax and a kiss was never just a kiss.

This is spellbinding reality cinema about duplicity and, worse, ignorance at the highest level.

As both harangue and movie tragicomedy, Sicko is socko.

Enjoy the savory witches' brew that Cuaron has cooked up in his Harry pot. For on its own terms, this one is truly wizard.

The new film is more an embellishment than an improvement on the snazzy Raiders.

Take a while to get their vehicle to sail and soar. But when it does, this Planet is a treasure.

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

Inception is precisely the kind of brainy, ambitious, grand-scale adventure Hollywood should be making more of.

Body Heat is full of meaty characters and pungent performances...a film to be seen at a drive-in, on a heavy summer night, with someone you trust.

A lot of it's real pretty, the colors and creatures and all, but these days, you know, every movie is pretty pretty. I guess the only thing that kept me glued to my seat was the gum somebody'd stuck on the upholstery. [16 July 1984, p.71]

It's like a restaurant where you go for the food and go back for the atmosphere. Or for the waitress. [13 July 1995]

The perfect e-ticket for a flight of fancy into a world far more gorgeous than our own. The film doesn't halve itself to appeal to two generations. At its best, it turns all moviegoers into innocent kids, slack-jawed with wonder.

The real battle here is between two generations of acting styles: meticulous method vs. star quality.

Conran hasn't attached his technical virtuosity to a ripping yarn or infused it with behavioral brio. The first of its kind often doesn't work; Sky Captain may be the Moses that leads other directors to a blue-sky, blue-screen promised land.

His point here seems to be that voyeurism can induce a trancelike emotional paralysis—a message feminists could appreciate if Body Double took less pleasure in the mechanics of mutilation, and that ordinary moviegoers could ponder if the characters' motivations were not so numbingly nitwit. Upscale sleaze—so what else is new?

The real fun is in seeing Hong Kong pop cinema at its innocent, crowd-pleasing best. And for Jackie, that goes double.

In this judicious, irresistible romantic comedy, all the performers are tops. [14 Dec 1987, p.82]

It could be a distillation of some unaired black soap opera, so predictable are the plot contrivances--adultery, pregnancy, illness, missing money--and so cartoonishly are the characters drawn.

Viewers will feel as though they've just finished a great meal but aren't sure what they've been served. Behind them, the chef smiles wickedly.

In its wan attempt to be raunchy, the picture fails where Judd Apatow has usually succeeded; written by three women, this is a girl's mistaken idea of an R-rated comedy.

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.

The 70-minute movie -- which was co-written by the British-Pakistani commentator Tariq Ali, author of the 2006 study "Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope," and photographed in part by docu-doyen Albert Maysles -- is amateur night as cinema, as lopsided and cheerleadery as its worldview.

This may seem too inside-cricket for a U.S. audience. And it's true that Cock and Bull is so postpostmodern, it's very nearly postmovie. But it's no less diverting for all that. It would be a shame if the great novel no one has read becomes the terrific film nobody bothers to see.

It yearns for Pixar-style wit without quite earning it.

The film promises so much more than it delivers that, by the end, I felt like registering a complaint with the Obama Administration's Consumer Protection squad.

But the actor (Nolte) finds truth in Wade's emotional clumsiness, in the despair of a man who hasn't the tools or the cool to survive. There are too many of these men in life, and not enough films that tell their sad tales.

At this late stage in a long career, Allen might consider not trying to make films like the early, funny ones. Instead he should aim simply to match "Match Point."

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]

Michael Tolkin's script abounds in such cynical wisdom, but it never loses an appreciation for the grace with which these snakes consume their victims. [13 April 1992]

Forman and Weller have created an impressive but strangely lopsided movie.

The movie is one continuous, exhausting, exhilarating chase.

Its visual thrills are chilly and wearying compared with the other films' quirky humanity. It's not a megamovie; it's a Sega movie.

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

This British film has the regal, clubby aura of Masterpiece Theatre. [21 July 1997, p. 70]

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

Osunsanmi wants you to believe that everything he shows you that's not reenacted by professionals really happened, and is documented by the omnipresent video cameras. It's a device used far more successfully in "Paranormal Activity," which had the added benefit of being a good movie.

Well, it's sorta funny, and most genial: for all their ranking on parents and drooling over hot babes, Wayne and Garth are innocent kids wasting time creatively.

Hoffman and the film are terrific. Supported by the eminent Catherine Keener (as author Harper Lee) and Chris Cooper (as detective Alvin Dewey), Hoffman begins with a dead-on impersonation of Capote that soon becomes a kind of channeling as the audience comes to see this American tragedy through his eyes.

By next semester, some grad student will be writing a thesis on the B-movie influences on this A+ film.

The Bond women are pallid mannequins, and so is the misused Dalton -- a moving target in a Savile Row suit. For every plausible reason, he looks as bored in his second Bond film as Sean Connery did in his sixth.

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.

Director John Huston offers production numbers full of empty extravagance, a host of familiar characters (like Punjab and the Asp) with little to do - and a chorus of baby Mormans knowingly strutting their stuff, breaking the sound and charm barriers.

This naive little movie hopes to prove itself the Flashdance of football.

The film's steamy sex scenes—especially the first, which takes place in the kitchen among foods and utensils as elemental as love and death-will raise eyebrows and temperatures...Like Last Tango in Paris, Rafelson's Postman shows what his doomed lovers do but does not tell who they are. Their willful sex scenes are explicit and incandescent; their motivations are elliptical smoke signals viewed from the other side of Death Valley.

He (Tony) could be a self-destructive hero out of a Dostoyevsky or Mailer novel. That portrait gives Iron Man 2 its fascination. The rest is a cluttered, clattering toy story.

The movie wants to entertain and educate, not leer, about people flummoxed by participating in a revolution they had meant only to calibrate, and at that it succeeds handsomely.

For all the carnage, Lee's tone is contemplative.

Not a conventionally satisfying movie but a kind of illustrated journalism: an engrossing, insider's tour of the world's hottest spots, grandest schemes and most dangerous men.

The movie could have been a gleaming showcase for cartoon wit. Instead it's an 87-minute commercial peddling sainthood for Michael Jordan.

Fresh alchemizes the terrifying cliches of urban melodrama into annihilating poetry.

Though this Nick and Norah have a lot more angst, they're just as worth watching, admiring and cuddling up to.

A marvelously sad and funny docucomedy. [22 Oct 1990]

An excellent film. [16 Jan 1989, p.64]

Artful but not arty, Spirited Away is a handcrafted cartoon, as personal as an Utamaro painting, yet its breadth and heart give it an appeal that should touch American viewers of all ages.