Richard Schickel

Bening gives a remarkable performance, proposing the intriguing possibility that a kept woman can also be a liberated woman. In any case, she shares her fears and vulnerability only in a few private moments with the camera, never with the besotted Bugsy. But good as she and everyone else in Bugsy is (mention must be made of Harvey Keitel, Elliott Gould and Ben Kingsley as assorted thugs and mugs), the picture belongs, in every sense of the word, to Beatty.

Kevin Spacey (gives) a truly great performance.

A war film that, entirely aware of its genre's conventions, transcends them as it transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors, to take the high, morally haunting ground.

We forgive Bridget the movie its obvious flaws because of its equally inescapable charm.

Their film is not so much thought out as strung together -- colorful incident upon colorful incident, but without logic, gathering suspense or any attempt to establish emotional connections between audience and actors.

If Shakespeare's poetry enters the mind through the ear, Kurosawa's enters it through the eye. But the imagery is of comparable quality, at once awesome in its power, delicate in its irony and, finally, for all the violence of the events it recounts, eerily serene in the sureness with which it achieves its effects.

Anyone grownup enough to gain legal admission to the movie (it is rated R) will probably find himself either reduced to guffaws or wishing he had stayed home looking at his poster of Nastassia Kinski wearing a snake.

Remain open to fantasies but not be consumed by them. These are good lessons for a would-be director. They are good lessons for everybody. And no recent movie has taught them with more patient sweetness. [Feb. 5, 1990]

There is none of the affectionate respect for working-class life and values that marked the similar, and far superior, "Norma Rae," nor any of that film's sense of felt reality either.

Half comedy, half action piece, the movie runs sputteringly on the not inconsiderable charm of its stars. But basically it is languid, indeterminate and uninvolving.

No wonder adolescents have taken Repo Man for their own. Lifting its hood is like peering into a teen-ager's mind: miswired and noisy, Repo Man is capable of fast starts and amazing cornering. [4 Feb 1985]

An elegantly polished little film.

Brideshead Revisited is untaxing, pleasant enough to watch. But I'm still waiting to be seriously discomfited by it.

So even when they don’t achieve the glorious farce of a Fargo, there is always something fascinating about following the Coens’ rapt gaze as they peer into the American nut bowl.

A smart live-and-let-live parable.

An edgy exploration of role playing and sexual choice in a climate where all options are acceptable.

In Washington's finely shaded performance he's a low-pressure system, illuminated by distant flashes of lightning.

There are a few moments when the picture's easygoing pace turns into wobbliness, but these are insignificant compared with its many moments of shrewd insight into the lives of amusingly shaded but very recognizable human beings. This is the kind of small, star less film that big studios sometimes do not know what to do with. Audiences should have no such difficulty. They will, if they have any sense, simply cherish it.

As rigged as a casino slot machine, preying on people's hopes but paying off only for the house.

This is a much colder film, with austere aspirations — not fully realized — to transcend its melodramatic origins and to become an authentic tragedy. … As Michael plots his careful, lethal moves, the recurring, unforgettable image is of his eyes growing colder, until they finally go dead to the horrors around him.

Ends up less than the sum of its many, often interesting parts.

A brilliant exercise in popular but palpable surrealism.

An austere and delicate examination of the ways in which a likable family falters under pressure and struggles, with ambiguous results, to renew itself. This is not very show-bizzy stuff, but for once, a movie star has used his power to create not light entertainment or a trendy political statement, but a work that addresses itself quietly and intelligently to issues everyone who attempts to raise children must face.

When our sympathies shift to [Cameron Diaz's Kimmy], the movie sours. It is no help either that Ronald Bass neglected to write (or Mulroney was unable to find) a character in Michael. Why all this fuss over this lox, we keep wondering.

Yet despite all that boring talk, Dead Again is a hit, the late-blooming rose of a movie summer that was mostly mulch. [23 Sept 1991, p.73]

These stories, alas, are utterly predictable. Still, Samuel L. Jackson breaks through the crust of cliches as an expert called in to verify the instrument's provenance, and violinist Joshua Bell plays and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts John Corigliano's score ravishingly.

It twists it, shakes it and stands it on its ear. But as before, the film's technical brilliance is the least of its appeals. Satirically acute, intricately structured and deftly paced, it is at heart stout, good and untainted by easy sentiment.

Our response to the ape's doom, once touched by authentic tragedy, is now marked by relief that this wretchedly excessive movie is finally over.

One is left wondering why Williams has granted early retirement to his inner anarchist, what dark need compels a great clown to become a sad, fuzzy one in movies only Bob Dole - faking it -could love.

All in all, Nurse Betty is a wonderful movie, unpredictably alive to the fact that the American citizenry is a lot stranger than we like to admit.

The director's stylistic self-denial serves to keep one's attention fastened where it belongs: on a persuasive, if perhaps debatable vision of Gandhi's spirit, and on the remarkable actor who has caught its light in all its seasons.

There is some elemental human desire -- lately largely denied at the cinema -- to see pretty people in handsome landscapes assuaging our need for epic romance. On that level, Australia delivers with real panache.

If sometimes this loose and anecdotal film loses dramatic pace, it always rights itself. And it remains steadily in touch with its best qualities - generosity, common sense and a mature decency that is neither smug nor sentimental.

Well acted and, within its limited terms, well made, Gallipoli represents a failure of nerve as well as design.

It is the movie's often awesome imagery and a bravely soaring choral score by James Horner that transfigure the reality, granting it the status of necessary myth.

Maybe this documentary is a bit too enthralled by her, but she emerges from it a game girl, a gay activist and a curiously sympathetic figure.

Airplane! is a splendidly tacky, totally tasteless, completely insignificant flight, a gooney bird of a movie that looks as if it could never get off the ground and then surprises and delights with its free-spirited aerobatics.

Gere and Molina are themselves terrific as the con men.

It is a measure of its complexity--and of the forces Penn and Sarandon have held in reserve during their hypnotic struggle for his soul--that its final moments leave us awash in emotion.

The result is a well-tooled machine chugging coldly along a twisting road to nowhere.

Dark, detailed and only really gets going when the gunplay starts.

What must be said is that the new movie is simply awful: poorly structured, vulgarly written, insipidly directed, monotonously performed.

As much a dark, odd couple comedy as it is a quirky, efficient little thriller.

Things finally work out all right--except for audiences, who will find this thin movie bereft of the more richly textured sentiments of Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso."

Cameron Diaz is sublimely screwy as the single-minded bride determined not to let anything--including the deadly mishaps that keep shrinking the wedding party--spoil her nuptials. [30 November 1998, p. 111]

Along with the high comedy, this determined insistence on the gory stupidity of ancient but still potent fancy is what holds the film together. Grail is as funny as a movie can get, but it is also a tough-minded picture — as outraged about the human propensity for violence as it is outrageous in its attack on that propensity.

There's something refreshing about its utterly unembarrassed embrace of the familiar. The director, George Tillman Jr., either doesn't notice or doesn't give a hoot about the way Scott Marshall Smith's script piles up cliches.

Not in any sense a great movie, a masterpiece that future generations will want to rediscover. But it is a solid, well-made, generally gripping and intelligent movie -- and how many of those have lately been made in America?

Ferris and his adventures represent a teen's dream of glory: to have, at one's fingertips, the technical skills to sabotage the adult world's machinery of oppression and, at the tip of one's tongue, the perfect squelch for grownups' moralistic blather. [23 June 1986]

Insanely funny, if occasionally out-of-control, black farce.

Future III is all smiles, nostalgically respectful of the western genre, serenely sure of the strength of its own more immediate heritage and of our affection for it.

You'll have to seek it out in its limited release, but no current movie is more worth the effort.

Tom Hanks doesn't turn Polar Express into much of a thrill ride. For that you need 3-D goggles.

This time, though, the creative group has neglected to build to the kind of giddy, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink climax that made Airplane! such a memorable exercise in anarchy. Top Secret! plays more like a pillow fight in a summer-camp cabin, an agreeable way to pass the time after lights-out, but one that just peters out when everyone gets tired of breaking the rules.

Results in about the nicest movie you could ask for at the holidays: a gently funny, sweetly adventurous film that makes you feel genuinely good, that is to say, entirely unconned by false sentiment or sharp, overmanipulative Hollywood practices.

There is something arresting about it too. The damned thing keeps gnawing at your mind -- if only for its almost perfect lack of conventional sentiment. Or movieness.

Director Kelly Makin has a gift for casually tossed-off farce.

It is, of course, always a pleasure to watch Martin's steam-gauge face register his rising internal pressures and to witness his exquisitely expressed blowoffs. But Candy offers even more insinuating delights. Covering lonely need with empty gab, insecurity with a not entirely trustworthy savvy, he is the most dangerous kind of pest, the type who worms rather than blusters his way into your life.

Layer Cake is a treat--especially if your taste in desserts is devil's food.