Richard Schickel

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.

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]

The production's genially tatty air enhances its anarchical mood and encourages one to go with its goofy yet often shrewd comic flow.

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]

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

Harris and Mastrantonio do have a strong death and resurrection sequence, but long before that, one is pining for a rubber shark or a plastic octopus -- anything, in fact, out of a good old low-tech thriller. [14 Aug 1989, p.79]

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]

A relentlessly grim film.

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.

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

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.

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.

This is the most assured and hilarious of the three Martin-Carl Reiner collaborations.

Essentially a liberal soap opera.

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.

In short, The Karate Kid presents the smallest imaginable variations on three well-tested formulas for movie success. Robert Mark Kamen's script is developed with maddening predictability, and John G. Avildsen's direction is literal and ambling. Films like this are what the PG rating is supposed to be all about.

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

Julie Taymor's inventiveness has diminished to a kind of strained cuteness. Everything that makes an artist an artist -- the obsessions, the egotism -- is ignored in favor of upbeat movie conventions.

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]

Like the first of the Addams chronicles, this is an essentially lazy movie, too often settling for easy gags and special effects that don't come to any really funny point.

Its major sin--a certain ineluctable improbability--is pretty much offset by the moments of winsome humanity Gibson finds for his freebooter; by the rich, nicely tuned portrayals of the other actors; and by director Ron Howard's smoothly professional mastery of yet another genre that is new to him.

This is a confident and honorable movie -- and a gripping one.

One has to admit that enormous moviemaking skill goes into the creation of pictures like The Incredible Hulk. The sheer craft directors such as Leterrier lavish on them is awesome to me. I can't imagine how they orchestrate -- or even remember -- all the little pieces of film they require to build their big set pieces. That thought, however, is nearly always followed by this question: Why do they bother?

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

The special effects are marvelous, the good-humored script is comic-bookish without being excessively campy, and there are two excellent performances.

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

The Coen brothers merrily subvert that standard caper trope.

Rene Russo is both knowing and vulnerable, proving beyond a doubt that she is modern Hollywood's one true heiress to the screwball tradition. [19 August 1996, p.68]

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.

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 nerve of these people, recycling that story. No, the shrewdness of these people. For Days of Thunder offers adolescent males the possibility of a high-speed crash almost every minute. It offers their dates the possibility of a shy, winning Tom Cruise smile on an equal-opportunity basis. The boys get some sober, silly chat about the nature of courage. The girls get to see one of their sex (Nicole Kidman) play doctor with Cruise. [16 July 1990, p.87]

Murray, with his curious blend of pathos and aggressiveness, is terrific, and so is an acutely uptight Dreyfuss, never once copping a plea for our sympathy.

Works as a sweetly loony ensemble piece, a sort of cracked romance that's typical of director Barry Levinson at his shrewd but unpretentious best.

What it doesn't have is a central figure you can give a hoot about.

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

The new boys know how to create wonderful transformations in a character's expression with a deft stroke or two, and they have mastered the deliciously parodistic plasticity required by the movements of their ever twisting-turning-tumbling creatures. Their pastoral scenes still glow with the old Disney sweetness, and the ones of foreboding glower with the old relish for the grotesque. They satisfy an older viewer's nostalgic feeling for his childhood's delight while fulfilling the younger crowd's need for a kind of magic the movies too rarely even try to provide of late. It is never too early to learn that animation is still the best special effect.

Loutishness without self-awareness remains loutishness--and it is finally depressing.

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.

Reynolds can't help looking rather shifty as he relates his story and Breslin, who was so wonderful in Little Miss Sunshine, is obliged to play a standard-issue wise child.

Director Harlin's only large mistake is staging the several violent deaths too authentically. They momentarily mar the high-speed implausibility of a movie that, like his Die Hard 2, agreeably combines the edgy and the genial.

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

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.

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.

In this climate, turning even a small corner of this century's central horror into feel-good popular entertainment is abhorrent.

McTiernan does not fall too much in love with any scene, character or gadget. He has judged his material (and our attention spans) very well. His alternation of menace and human interest, technological wizardry and action sequences is subtly calibrated, ultimately hypnotic in its effect. [5 Mar 1990, p.70]

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

A pretty but utterly misleading picture in which cheap sentiment is used to supply easy, false resolutions to agonizing issues.

Audiences whose expectations do not exceed their grasp will find it a much more comfortable vehicle for escape than any that McQueen & Co. discover on location.

It features as ghastly a group of interstellar pirates, the Klingons, as ever entered the star log, plus a spectacularly self-destructive planet and plenty of technically adroit and sometimes witty special effects. These are classic directorial occasions, and Nimoy rises to them with fervor, in effect beaming his film up onto a higher pictorial plane than either of its predecessors.

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

An edgy, watchable film, but one that makes you feel more squeamish than screamish.

Adapted from one of the intricately plotted, well-characterized Martin Beck policiers by the Swedish team of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, it loses a great deal in the translation from Stockholm to San Francisco's Dirty Harry country. Gloomy authenticity, for one thing; pace and a genuine sense of puzzlement, for others.

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.

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 Onion Field is a serious and most uncompromising movie. It lacks, however, the sort of disciplined craft that might have made it a powerful and affecting one.

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

In the end, everything about this glum and self-important adaptation of Anne Tyler's upper-cute novel is dim. [26 Dec 1988, p.83]

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.

Schrader's development of the frame-up story is mechanically melodramatic, and Gere, essentially a boring actor, doesn't help much either. He just cannot carry a picture, even when his passivity and gentleness well serve some aspects of his character, as they do here.

The best seller's passions were misplaced, but in toning them down, the adaptation turns bland.

Love Excalibur or hate it, but give Boorman credit for the loopy grandeur of his imagery and imaginings, for the sweet smell of excess, for his heroic gamble that a movie can dare to trip over its pretensions— and still fly.

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.

Not so good is the absence of hip cross-references to the classic horror tropes.

The result is half Python, half Ivanhoe--and not as much fun as either.

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.

Maybe the film loses a little steam as it rolls along, but it is still puffing and tooting as Clooney and Zellweger ride off into the sunset -- on a comically raffish period motorcycle, free as the wind.

It's an exercise in style by Robert Rodriguez and not to be taken any more (or less) seriously than his giddy "Spy Kids" movies.

Cutting through the epic gesturings of Andy Tennant's direction, he (Yun-Fat Chow) provides reason enough to return one last time to this otherwise weary romance

They have fussed with Sabrina, but they have not really engaged it. They have not found the little twinges of pain, the awkward stumbles into vulnerability, that animate the best comedies, and the best love stories too. Wilder's film had a few of them--enough to ensure that the movie and its audience did not feel totally manipulated.

Everyone in the cast has his or her solo, and all rise brilliantly to their occasions, notably Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Beals, Mina Badie and a divinely neurotic Jane Adams.

One of the most execrable movies ever made. [6 March 1995, p.100]

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]

Maybe kids will like the movie; their lust for dinolore appears to be insatiable. But the rest of us will yearn for Robin Williams' giddy goofing in "Aladdin."

Aiming, perhaps, for a neat double helix of black humor and prankishness, they've ended up with a pretty ugly granny knot.

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.

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.

I think Gonzo, which is wonderfully rich in historical footage, needs some skeptics, some voices suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Thompson was part of the problem, not the solution, when America flirted briefly with revolution (or was it merely anarchy?), leaving consequences that continue to resonate today -- and not always to our advantage.

One of this summer's more pungent pleasures: a well-made sex farce of classical proportions. If there is a horse to fall off or an airplane forced to land at the wrong airport, you may be sure Teddy will be aboard.

I'll stipulate that in Austen's time spinsterhood was a fate to be strenuously avoided. And being a woman writer was by no means an easy path either. Yet, she embraced it, and the immortal results more than justify a hard choice this film never really explores.

Thin, gulpy, awkward, it stands before us, artlessly begging sympathy but betraying its creator's worst weakness. [9 Mar 1987, p.86]

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.

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.

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

Starsky & Hutch has moments of hilarity a little greater than you might expect of a movie that is just out for a lazy good time.

There are a reserve and a realism in Huston's work that make her very modest film more affecting than you might expect.

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

As for Blanchett, she's simply wonderful. She has played her share of queenly figures, but her acting essence is, emotionally speaking, plain-Jane. She's a straight shooter, with an uncanny ability to find a character's spine and communicate it without fuss or feathers.

A movie that demands our surrender -- to its energy, to its bold-stroke moviemaking, to its acting (particularly by Cruise and Watanabe, who blend musing and graceful muscularity) and, above all, to its romantic vision of a lost world.

One of this movie's implications--and it's a common enough one these days--is that sensitivity is a quality impossible to find in straight guys. [20 April 1998]

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.

Lee must have thought he could work a similar magic on this clunking, clanking machine. But despite a few witty wipes and split-screen tricks, he fails. Hulk is no better than hulking.

A lively, nutty film, one full of clumsy, clanging battles filmed by the gifted, eccentric Besson with bloody brio.

The result is a laff riot. Well, all right, a laff scuffle -- a picture that isn't quite as funny as it might be, but is as funny as it needs to be.

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.

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.

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."

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

What saves this movie from hopeless sentimentality is Meryl Streep's subtle performance.