Richard Schickel

Hearts sinking, we are obliged to endure much pseudo-serious gabble as we head toward another painfully predictable triumph of the human spirit. There must be some better way of hunting our--and Oscar's--goodwill. [Dec. 1,1997]

Simone is a funny, smart, improbably successful satire on contemporary celebrity obsessions, the waning summer's most delirious comedy.

The film is high romance, rather like those American movies of the 1940s -- people snatching at happiness in a world aflame. We don't make them anymore -- stupid us --but we ought to be glad someone does.

The Santa Clause presents us with an Anti-Claus, Tim Allen of Home Improvement, hard-edged, discomfitingly frenetic and spritzing cheerless one-liners.

Valmont arrives stiffened by the elegant, inert formalism of Forman's direction, and chilled by Carriere's all too sober respect for his source and by their mutual determination to apply modern psychological understanding to the behavior of the principal figures.

What saves it, aside from good performances by Burt Reynolds and a thundering herd of supporting grotesques, is, of all things, a tough, tiny nut of valid social criticism.

It's great to have the Moose back, but it would be greater still to see him in a humorous context fully worth of him.

But that's the thing about this movie. It never leaves well enough, or good enough, alone. It keeps looking--sometimes a little too hard--for ways to transform the ordinary into the discomfiting.

Writer-director Shainberg seems to be aiming for a dark comedy, but mostly his movie is coy without being funny, ugly without being truly transgressive, stupid when it needs to be smart.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay is less a response to its source than a careful college outline of it.

The sober wit of this comedy arises not from conventional artifice -- snappy dialogue, wacky situations -- but from a realistically drawn ensemble interacting truthfully with one another.

The movie F.I.S.T. stands for nearly 2½ hours of almost unmitigated boredom—a misfired would-be proletarian epic with Sylvester Stallone misplaying the Jimmy Hoffa part with a self-confidence that borders on the sublime.

As fine--hard, soft, approachable--as any in movie history.

Without question, the best crime movie of the year--and one of the best movies of any sort now playing.

Remarkable. [22 July 1991]

This wisp of a movie turns out to be more thoughtfully affecting than many a more high-flying film.

Solondz observes all this activity from an objectifying distance, very much the anthropologist trekking through the heart of darkness

The film comes uncomfortably close to risible. But it also achieves moments of real power. It's worth a wary look before it attains midnight cult-movie status.

Their sweet, determined, gently understated struggle for fulfillment in a superstitiously conservative society makes this densely, deftly packed movie a quiet joy to behold.

After “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Hulk,” there's something refreshing about this movie's complete lack of intellectual pretense.

This is, alas, one weary ride--77 minutes that sometimes feel like that many hours.

The movie has two other qualities you don't always find in films of this kind: a sense of humor and a sense of character. [15 August 1994, p. 61]

Reasonably genial and diverting. [18 May 1987]

Worst-in-breed not only for this year, but very likely in living memory.

Beautiful Girls is always in touch with reality but never drowned in it. [19 February 1996, p.64]

Gibson is a primitive all right, but so were Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith, and somehow we survived their idiocies.

The result is a mess. Kym, in Hathaway's unsympathetic performance, is an annoyingly sour observer of the proceedings, a time bomb everyone hopes will not explode before the marriage is completed.

A movie of shadows and half lights, the best approximation of the old black-and-white noir look anyone has yet managed on color stock.

This is, or was, a true story, but invested as it is with relentlessly cliched emotions, it plays like cheap fiction.

[Salles]'s imagery, like his storytelling, is clear, often unaffectedly lovely, and quietly, powerfully haunting.

It doesn't work. It is just a mess -- though the sound track, full of Dylan songs is, of course, good to hear. But it is not better than the track on Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home" documentary of two years ago.

An often deft, frequently droll little movie.

One thinks of the great opening line of that great novel The Good Soldier: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Like many such tales, this one is worth taking to your aching heart.

Upon all these folks, writer-director David O. Russell turns a bland, almost anthropological eye. Nothing surprises him and nothing outrages him, except for bed-and-breakfast lodgings, about which, at last, his movie tells the terrible truth. [1 April 1996, p. 72]

A grim and draggy romance in which even the clothes and sets are dismal.

Maurice (pronounced Morris) is all high-mindedness and good taste. It has no emotional tension or - heaven forfend - strong expression of frustration or need.

Faithful both to the novel's plot and to its higher aspirations. This is not an entirely good thing. On the other hand -- and somewhat surprisingly -- it is not an entirely bad thing.

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

It's kind of fun--if you have the stomach for its more grisly passages.

There is nothing in the history of movies to compare with Slap Shot for consistent, low-level obscenity of expression...Its problem is an ending that abruptly transports the audience from heightened realism to broad satire. It is a defect that Slap Shot shares with the current hit Network—a desire to present an editorial so corrosive that aesthetics, questions of form and proportion simply dissolve.

There is no rhyme or reason to this jumble -- except perhaps to stress Edith's endless self-victimization. This lack of narrative coherence naturally has the effect of distancing us from her story.

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.

Braveheart is too much, too late.

That Max Smart is played by the admirable Steve Carell, who is desperately looking for deadpan jokes in all the wrong places, is beside the point.

As Hobbs, Robert Redford has never been better. A lefty who moves like the ballplayer he once wanted to be, he has, like all the truly great movie stars, the ability to appear as if he has transcended acting and can now simply behave a part like this.

Even when one of the pieces stutters, stammers or just lies deathly still, we are consoled by our knowledge that it will not trifle with us for very long. And by the fact that there is an excellent likelihood that it will soon be replaced by something more engaging.

There is a lunatic energy about it. Every once in a while, Chayefsky abandons the struggle to dramatize his ideas and has somebody, usually Holden, just turn to the camera and spout off. In those moments, his concern — and sometimes his mother wit — comes blazing through and the picture takes on a life not found in safe, sane, well-calculated movies.

A relentlessly grim film.

It is a perfect little masterpiece of high camp, not untouched by pity, terror and the desire to satirize boy-girl romances.

This is rather a thin tale, not much thickened by Burton's direction or Depp's playing. There's a distance, a detachment to this film. It lacks passion.

De Niro's is a domineering performance, a star turn that is both comic and menacing, but it unbalances Wolff's story.

It may be a first film, but Labaki, employing a cast that is full of non-professional actresses, is a slick and knowing filmmaker. Her multiple plot lines are neatly braided and though her characters are conventionalized they are also charming and capable of surprising us.

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

Dolman's comedy isn't exactly a barrel of emotional surprises, but its great cast underachieves admirably. There are worse ways to pass 94 minutes.

A perfectly coherent, handsomely rendered couple of hours, animated in particular by Damon's good performance -- shrewd, innocent, angry, wistful and, above all, likable.

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.

For those of us who think this is the best comedy of 2004, the genius of the movie lies in its relocation.

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

Hopelessly overwrought and deeply dopey movie.

The actors, especially the ever appealing Smith, do what they can to ground the movie in reality, but it stubbornly remains dawdling, remote and pretentious.

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

A performance like De Niro's, in a well-made entertainment like Midnight Run, is cheap at any price. And capable of restoring the audience's faith in the form. [25 July 1988]

By giving his movie a very effective realistic look, by helping his actors to shape strongly believable performances, even when they are doing implausible things, Benton lends credence to these inspirational fibs.

Not since "This is Spinal Tap" have I had such a good time watching amiable idiocy stumble on toward uncertain glory.

It is also extremely well acted at every level (one especially wants to single out Bob Balaban as the Government's chief aggressor and Wilford Brimley as its belated voice of conscience), and directed by Sidney Pollack with a sort of crisp but unassuming professionalism that is rarer than it ought to be. Perhaps best of all, the script, by sometime Journalist Kurt Luedtke, who was once part of a Pulitzer-winning investigative team on the Detroit Free Press, has a marvelously entertaining intricacy, briskly and believably building, half-inch by half-inch, Michael's outrage over and Megan's entrapment in the plot to get him.

Can one recommend this unblinking film to the average moviegoer, out for a good time? Only in this way: if James and his crew can spend years with these blighted souls, surely you can spend two hours with them, exploring compassion's outer limits.

This memory piece, shy in manner but tough in spirit, has brought out the best in everyone connected with it.

Very moving film.

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]

This movie is more emotionally remote than Salles' fine "Central Station." But it is starkly beautiful and says something potent to a world in which nations, like these families, engage in mindless blood feuds.

Jennifer Jason Leigh's draggy performance as Parker is all studied accent (something vaguely mid- Atlantic but never before heard on Earth) and equally studied self-pity and it cannot sustain our sympathy, or our interest in this inept film.

Star Trek is, finally, nothing but a long day's journey into ennui.

A movie that is both as real as food on the table and as hauntingly evanescent as its taste on one's tongue.

These aren't really characters; they are points on a rigidly conceived political spectrum. Singleton has made all the right political moves given his complicated circumstances, but he hasn't really made a movie of them.

As reversible misunderstandings grow into irreversible tragedy, it slowly dawns on you that this is a superior, heartbreaking film.

There is an inherent problem about any sequel that too slavishly duplicates the style and substance of its predecessor; it cannot deliver the delight of discovery that the original provided. Axel made a swell first impression, but he is still living on it, perhaps not yet a bore, but not quite as fascinating as he once promised to be.

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

Maid in Manhattan is not so much a movie as a collection of career moves. J. Lo needs a comedy hit to support her principal activity, adorning magazine covers. Fiennes needs to warm his austere British image if he hopes to become a true international star.

The central conflict, the struggle for Calogero's soul, is stated with a fable's starkness. But the tone of the film is musing, reflective, gently insinuating.

Murphy exudes the kind of cheeky, cocky charm that has been missing from the screen since Cagney was a pup, snarling his way out of the ghetto. But as befits a manchild of the soft-spoken '80s, there is an insinuating sweetness about the heart that is always visible on the sleeve of Murphy's habitual sweatshirt.

In its soft-spoken way, it is fierce, shaggy and deeply weirded out.

Mamet's elegantly efficient script does not waste a word, and De Palma does not waste a shot. The result is a densely layered work moving with confident, compulsive energy.

Coming to America seems to be more career move than movie. After the raucousness of Beverly Hills Cop II and the raunchiness of Eddie Murphy Raw, the star apparently wants to assert his claim on the currently vacant title of America's Sweetheart. His aspirations must be bigger and badder than that. We want -- may actually need -- something more from this gifted man than Eddie Murphy Tame. [4 July 1988 p.66]

Prepare to be riveted: No End in Sight, Charles Ferguson's first film, is without question the most important movie you are likely to see this year.

At once smug and lazy, qualities fatal to comedy.

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.

Handsome, well-acted, richly textured adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's novel.

Nunez's film neither floats like a butterfly nor stings like a bee. It just drones on.

It is a daring thing the director has done, this bleaching out of all the cheap thrills, this dashing of all the hopes one brings to what is, after all, advertised as "a masterpiece of modern horror." Certainly he has asked much of Nicholson, who must sustain attention in a hugely unsympathetic role, and who responds with a brilliantly crazed performance.

Who says remakes are always inferior to the original film? And who says the western is dead? Especially when a movie is as entertaining as this one, you begin to think this formerly beloved genre is due for a revival.

If the movie does not have that almighty precious thing, at least it had the wit to look for it in the right place. Moviegoers seeking a grand yet edifying entertainment, right-stuffed with what Kaufman calls "seriousness of subject matter and a wild humor that comes out of left field," now know where to look too.

Just gives us Andy, the pop postmodernist, and permits us to make what we will of him, which is a fascinating activity.

Sells out real satirical possibilities to its marketing potential as teen fluff. Everyone loses -- except Hedaya, who keeps faith with his character's nutsiness.

Beverly Hills Cop III is just going through the motions, without comic conviction, surprises or suspense. [6 June 1994, p.66]

It's a faux epic -- swell costumes, historically authentic settings, a certain amount of bustle and skulking, but very little dramatically gripping activity.

A funny, gentle and honestly sentimental movie that is easily one of the best of the year in any category, and very possibly the best movie about sport ever made in this country.

Given that this holiday film season has come up more than a little short on love and laughter, one can easily forgive Kate & Leopold the slightly excessive lengths and complications to which it goes in search of those rare commodities.