Richard Schickel

Williams, who has comparatively little screen time, has come to act, not to cut comic riffs, and he does so with forceful, ultimately compelling, simplicity. [June 5, 1989]

Curiously intense, alertly principled, refreshingly uncynical movie.

Men is a little too neat structurally, its moral and human issues a little too clear-cut: at heart it is old-fashioned melodrama. But Sorkin's dialogue is spit-shined, and the energy and conviction with which it is staged and played is more than a compensation; it's transformative. And hugely entertaining. [14 Dec 1992]

The Wachowskis have the predilection for loopy camera setups common to first-time directors, but their hearts are in the right transgressive place, and their film will tide some of us over until Quentin gets...well...unbound.

Witness, which is one of the most originally conceived and gracefully made suspense dramas of recent years, to work into edgy juxtaposition the representatives of two subcultures that are ordinarily mutually exclusive.

This movie does not fully separate itself from our admittedly low -- even slightly shameful -- expectations, does not become the pure documentary it might perhaps better have been.

This good-natured movie is very much in the spirit of those ancient comedies from Ealing Film Studios in which nice, silly people defend some enclave of old-fashioned sanity against the forces of brute modernism. [27 January 1997, p. 68]

Somehow it works, in part because of the way director Howard keeps his crowded frames abustle with activity, in part because of the sheer indomitability with which his leading characters are endowed by the actors and by writer Dolman, but mostly because the movie takes enlivening chances with its material.

Metroland finally makes a good, subtle case for the bearable weightiness of middle-class being, for the higher morality of muddling through.

Emma Bolger is -- no other word for it -- magical in the role...In her way she encapsulates In America's virtues. It's a realistic movie, but one that's always aware that transformative hope may be just around the corner.

A carnival of bang-up stunt scenes. which Richard Rush presents with marvelous subtlety.

This feels the way a lot of us are living now -- on desperation's dull yet still cutting edge.

The results are unique in the contemporary cinema -- behavioral honesty and intensity raised to a flash point. If this be comedy, it is so only in the nominal sense that no one dies at the end of the picture.

If the ending of Eleanor Bergstein's script is too neat and inspirational, the rough energy of the film's song and dance does carry one along, past the whispered doubts of better judgment. [14 Sept 1987]

It seemed to me as I left the theater that A Christmas Tale was a little too jumpy for its own good, with too many characters and plot points hastily interwoven. But I've come think that it is faithful to its essential purpose, which is to disprove the Tolstoyan dictum that unhappy families are each miserable in their own ways.

Enough of Curtis' lovably crazed characters do succeed in finding love in all the unlikely places that you leave the theater with your heart humming happily. He has his dark -- well, darkish -- side under control. Which is to say that he is an Englishman, well practiced in masking pain and absurdity and descents into sheer goofiness with mannerly behavior, sly irony and stiff upper lips.

Out of a borrowed and preposterous premise, Audiard has fashioned a film that is more haunting--and more compellingly watchable--than it has any right to be.

The story never runs completely off the rails and is, in any event, just a pretext for a lot of very sharp badinage by Jason Smilovic--a screenwriter who would have been at home writing for Cary Grant--for yards of terrific movie acting and for some well-timed direction by Paul McGuigan.

A tangy frappe of a movie--preposterously comic, deliriously romantic, outrageously stylish in black-and-white.

You are never exactly bored by The Matrix Reloaded. But there is something alienating about it, maybe because it fails to fulfill its possibly loony intellectual aspirations.

Good--sometimes witty—suspense. [28 Jul 1997, p. 69]

Perhaps they don't create quite enough deeply funny earthlings to go around, but a thoroughly meanspirited big-budget movie is always a treasurable rarity. And those little guys from far away are a hoot. [30 Dec 1996]

On the basically farcical level where it chooses to stay, it is a funny and likable movie

Given a budget that encourages their kinesthetic skills, the filmmakers tend to go on a bit, but it's mostly a kind of quick, glancing hipness that's being indulged here.

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]

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

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.

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.

Gere and Molina are themselves terrific as the con men.

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]

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?

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

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

It's a pretty, high-strung story, handsomely done in traditional animation (mostly by hand) that you can take the kids to without wincing.

It would be nice, for instance, to meet some white man, other than Dunbar [Costner], who is not a brutish lout. And it would not harm the film if there were one or two bad-natured Sioux visible in it. [12 Nov 1990, p.102]

Sharing its subject's virtues, it is a lovely addition to the annals of the Greatest Generation.

This complex, heartbreaking film recounts the brutal struggle of one couple to survive.

This anti romantic and anti-comic -- it's not as funny as Delpy seems to think it is -- movie may appeal to the dark side of your immune system.

If the people responsible for A League of Their Own had tried just a little harder to avoid easy laughs and easy sentiment, they might have made something like a great movie. As it is, they have made a good movie, amiable and ingratiating.

A fairly standard exercise in claustrophobic menace. It is also an exercise in style.

This is a messy movie, sometimes repetitive, sometimes too compressed and allusive. But that's like saying Ty Cobb was not a very good sport -- irrelevant in comparison to the horrific fascination of his story.

Its high-bounding excesses of action simultaneously satisfy and satirize the passion for heedless viciousness that so profoundly moves the action film's prime audience, urban adolescent males.

I don't want to oversell You Kill Me. It is not going to leave you breathless with laughter. But I don't want to undersell it either. For an hour and a half it exerts its own preposterous reality, making you believe it -- and like it.

The film may be manipulative in its construction, and cliché-ridden in some of the incidents it recounts, but it has a good, large heart.

Bringing Gonzo to his senses gives the Muppets briskly economical opportunities to satirize government, media excesses and cult sci-fi's more tiresome tropes.

Mel Gibson, directing for the first time, presents this deeply wet material in a reasonably cool and dry manner. But his film is in desperate need of smarm busting -- something, anything that would relieve the familiarity of its characters, the predictability of its structure, the bland failure to challenge its perfect correctness of outlook. [30 August 1993, p.63]

What a concept! Mad Max meets The Cosby Show. What a surprise! It works better than a fastidious mind might imagine. One reason is that Mel Gibson himself has been recruited to play Lethal Weapon's lethal weapon, Los Angeles Police Detective Martin Riggs. [23 March 1987, p.86]

It is good to see Connery's grave stylishness in this role again. It makes Bond's cynicism and opportunism seem the product of genuine worldliness (and world weariness) as opposed to Roger Moore's mere twirpishness.

Ordinarily such trespasses against truth would be enough to condemn such a movie, but Rhames' gravity and grace, Voight's pinched anguish as he wills himself to do right, the moving work of actors like Don Cheadle and Esther Rolle do much to redeem this film for human if not historical reality.

But if you can see past the thicket of dollar signs surrounding Hudson Hawk, you may discern quite a funny movie -- sort of an "Indiana Jones" send-up with a hip undertone all its own. [10 June 1991]

The blend of digital animation and live action is first rate.

Despite its novel milieu somehow remains trapped in genre conventions. It's still basically a boxing picture, not essentially different from dozens of other movies about life in and around what the old time sportswriters used to call "the squared circle." Mamet's circle is, alas, just a little too square.

Reasonably genial and diverting. [18 May 1987]

Sunshine is a trifle schematic. But it also makes you feel, quite poignantly, the crushing tides of history: heedless, inhuman--and tragic.

This is a fairly low-keyed comedy, but a grown-up dropping in on it can appreciate its lack of frenzy, its fundamental good nature, as easily as its core audience will. It isn’t exactly a gem, but as zircons go, it’ll do.

A relentlessly grim film.

This movie has two big things going for it—the dragon and the man who masterminds its slaying.

Carrera's handsome film offers a richly detailed portrait of a church not so much corrupt as morally lazy after centuries in command of an overwhelmingly Catholic country.

It's a gentle film about somewhat alien beings, who entertain us by creating instead of destroying.

The players don't particularly look like their historical models, but they make us feel their life-threatening pain and puzzlement.

Kids may be puzzled by rebellious worker ants chanting Marxist slogans, but their parental guides may welcome the relief from the prevailing blandness of family films. [Oct 12, 1998 v152 n15 p116]

It is somewhat repetitive, but it is also wonderfully acted, especially by Barrymore.

What a pleasure it is not to be hectored by a director as we laugh our own little laughs, watching a profound story unfold.

A movie that manages to be atmospherically rich while also satisfying the slash-crash imperatives of the police-action genre.

This is a Cuisinart of a movie, mixing familiar yet disparate ingredients, making something odd, possibly distasteful, undeniably arresting out of them. [5 Dec 1994, p. 93]

Both actors are excellent--but there's something conventionally gimmicky about the way it plays its reality/unreality game.

Something of an odd-duck movie. It is not a broad comedy or a wildly romantic one, either. Nor is it Edith Wharton lite. But it does partake of all those modes in intelligently observant ways.

There's no attempt to address the show's endemic weak spots--a slow start and a contrived end. Mostly Stroman just lets it rip. But in some respects the movie is an improvement on the show.

An uncynical sequel that actually deserves its assured success.

Most of the fun comes from seeing people fooled by what seems to us, who are in on the joke, a completely penetrable ruse. Curiously enough, what's really unpersuasive about Mrs. Doubtfire -- not to say draggy -- is its nondrag sequences.

Leaves a quiz show's quantity of unanswered questions. But it has the optimism and determination of a corporate whistle-blower. It makes us believe, for a moment, that it's possible to end-run the spirit of Enron.

You may not be able to follow the overall arc of their scheming, but scene by scene they are a delightful crew, hissing away behind their cloaks and fans.

On the whole, the eek-for-yuks trade-off is more than fair--hip without being campy or condescending to one of the better movie franchises. [1 Dec 1997, p. 84]

If you surrender to the film's often inexplicable rhythms, if you let its dark materials reach out and envelop you, it can be a curiously rewarding experience -- a blend of silences and sudden bursts of violence that, despite its highly stylized manner, feels more edgily lifelike and more disturbing than most movies.

One leaves the film neither hugely thrilled nor greatly awed, but with a pleasant sense of having caught up with old friends and found them to be just fine, pretty much the way one hoped they would turn out in later life.

There is not a lot of scintillating dialogue in The Bank Job, but there are plenty of kinky sexual allusions and it includes a torture sequence about as brutal as anything you're likely to see in the movies these days.

There is delicacy and restraint in all these performances as they ease a far-fetched premise toward believability under Richard Pearce's clear, cool direction.

Al Pacino gives an electric performance, charged with a lunatic energy that expertly captures the weird blend of confidence and self-deprecation (if not hatred) that marks the paranoid syndrome.

For all its brave beginnings and real achievements--its assault on western mythology, its discovery of a subversive sexual honesty in an unexpected locale--Brokeback Mountain finally fails to fully engage our emotions.

This often vivid movie, though it doesn't quite attain its highest intentions, is well worth seeing. And thinking about.

May not be a totally riveting movie, but it is, in its gently insinuating way, a curiously rewarding one.

[The Coens] are therefore entitled to patience, respect and, yes, perhaps a special gratitude for this movie, which never once compromises its fundamentally unpromising yet courageously aspiring nature. [26 Aug 1991]

The film takes this attempt to shatter narrative into little pieces about as far into incoherence as it can go; yet it is also full of odd, hypnotic menace.

Neither slick nor glib, they all suit a film that may finally disarm everyone with its full-frontal naturalness, its unsmirking bawdiness, its obvious liking for athletes as people, and its refusal (most of the time) to poeticize sport. Personal Best is likable precisely because it is so unembarrassed.

Alive to the--yes--sometimes humorous, and therefore humanizing, struggles of the slaves and their would-be rescuers to surmount the language and cultural barriers that separate them. [15 Dec 1997, p. 108]

There's nothing world shattering about Smart People. No one is ever going to call it a "must see" movie. But it is a trim, intelligent, reasonably amusing little movie. Call it a "could see."

The film offers us Mel Gibson as a new Bret Maverick, the Western gambler, as well as the old TV Maverick, James Garner, now playing a wry frontier sheriff. These two guys can make you smile contentedly even when the script is wandering and they're just sort of standing around waiting for its next good part to develop.

The journey is never boring, and it's morally satisfying too. O.K., the movie is what Hollywood likes to call "a ride." But it's one worth taking.

Maggie Smith and Judi Dench are glorious comic actresses, while Joan Plowright provides a firm, touching moral center to the film. They almost make you forget Cher's totally out-of-it work as a disapproved-of American and carry the film to its destiny, which is one of inoffensive inconsequence, prettily staged. [24 May 1999, p.88]

Finally, though, Traffic, for all its earnestness, does not work. It leaves one feeling restless and dissatisfied.

The movie and everyone in it remain, under Ivan Reitman's determinedly casual direction, very loosely organized. They amble agreeably, but not necessarily hilariously, from one special-effects sequence to the next. These are not better, worse or even different from the original's trick work, and their lack of punctuating surprise is the film's largest problem, especially at the shamelessly repetitive climax. [26 June 1989, p.89]

The Farrellys need to remember this: Sappiness is easy, comedy is hard.

A hard-striving, convoluted movie, which never quite becomes the smoothly reciprocating engine Anderson ...would like it to be.

Grace is not as tightly wound as the best of its breed, but it is a genial way to pass the time.

There are pain and honor in this performance, and they constantly rise up to redeem a film that is less probing, less thoughtful than its director's claims and aspirations for it.

The film is full of attractive young performers. And there is a low-keyed conflict between them and a faculty that is trying to discipline their exuberance without stifling their spirits. If the film had concentrated on that instead of on hokey melodrama, it might have been far more engaging and truer to life.

What makes The Good Girl worthwhile is its performances. All the actors play their entrapment with a weirdly convicted blankness. That's especially true of Aniston.

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