Richard Corliss

A serious film about the gnawing of conscience and the thirst for redemption, but the tone is so dispassionately vile it may leave viewers shaken or sick. [16 Nov 1992, p.95]

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

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

Nichols and his once and current partner, screenwriter Elaine May, can make a funny, knowing, ultimately judicious film from the deliciously satyric satire.

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

The plot, though, is only the lid of this Pandora's toy chest. Inside, the alert viewer will find humor, imagination and a little Oriental mysticism.

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

There's no reason Banderas, after two Hollywood decades, couldn't do Robert justice; yet for a man whose mourning has turned to madness, he is strangely remote, lifeless, displaying neither rage nor poignancy. If Anaya is the heart at the center of the film, Banderas is the hole.

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.

[A] sexy, spiky love story.

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.

Chris Paine's documentary makes an unapologetic case for the car and an unofficial indictment of the forces allied against it.

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)

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

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]

For a good hour, a very good first hour, the film efficiently accumulates small, terrifying incidents and images.

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

Along with other cast members, Penn takes ages registering his stares and scowls, until the movie is finally not about gangs but about actors' attitudes. Dressed up in '80s street slang, this is a '60s exercise in Method excess. [18 Apr 1988]

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.

Poignant, troubling and altogether splendid new film.

Visually the most ravishing and complex Pixar movie, Brave evokes memories of Walt Disney's early experiments with the multiplane camera, but with the more persuasive intricacies available to CGI artists.

At 78, Polanski has earned the right to pursue his career-long demons of confinement and anarchy even in a minor film like this. But Carnage is not the word for what he's perpetrated here. Minor irritation is more like it.

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

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?

A savory cocktail with a bitter twist.

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.

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

The cast is uniformly superb, and Marc Forster's attentive direction gives proper weight to each perplexing emotion. Strip away the strident melodrama, and you have this season's moodiest, most adult love story.