Richard Schickel

Indeed, you could argue that Tell No One is a variant on one of Hitchcock's favorite themes: the running man whose story no one (except us in the audience) believes. These fictions, of course, depend for their success on the French respect for rationalism (and their horror when reason is torn asunder by criminal irrationality).

Lawrence's style, naturally lit and roughly realistic, matches the writing. Lantana sometimes has the air of a routine police procedural, sometimes the quality of a dour film noir. But this movie, so alert to mischance and dreams that don't quite work out as they should, has a good soul, a heart yearning for decency.

This criminal comedy remains deliciously deadpan about the wages of psychopathy.

Our natural sympathy for the Carmichaels is sabotaged by crude and careless moviemaking.

The result is a Big Mac of a movie, junk food that somehow reaches the chortling soul.

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.

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.

One of the worst messes in years.

The screenwriters, Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson, and the director, Jan de Bont, have no interest in providing their actors with stuff to act.

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.

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.

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]

It's as if everyone was just a little too much in tasteful awe of its subject, who is played rather stolidly by Nick Nolte.

Juno is not a great movie; it does not have aspirations in that direction. But it is, in its little way, a truthful, engaging and welcome entertainment.

An uncynical sequel that actually deserves its assured success.

It appears to be a true reflection of her (Shelly) spirit -- eccentric, good-naturedly feminist, kind of funny and kind of sentimental. Despite its realistic setting in a small Southern town, it is much more a fable than it is a slice of authentic life.

How well do Bond's established conventions survive after a third of a century's hard use, the post-cold war deglamourization of espionage and the arrival of yet another actor in the central role? The short answer is, on wobbly knees.

This reflects its fundamental flaw of arrogance, a smug faith in the ability of its own speed, smartness and luxe to wow the yokels.

The film is basically a drag, and not helped by Christopher Cain's stand- around direction. And one's thirst for the clear, cool taste of traditional narrative -- motivated movement, defined antagonists, building suspense -- soon reaches maddening levels. A grownup could die in this wasteland. [5 Sept 1988, p.63]

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

We are free to adore a sad, funny, always good-natured film that eccentrically, tolerantly explores that moment when revolutionary ardor commingled with bourgeois stolidity to form our present weirdly ambiguous culture.

An uninvolving muddle.

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.

The result is a flat, dumbly brutal movie, full of overplotted complexity and empty of all emotional resonance, except that provided by the presence of Jane Greer (the original film's dark lady, here doing a supporting role) and Richard Widmark.

This year's miracle is called Tootsie. It is not just the best comedy of the year; it is popular art on the way to becoming cultural artifact.

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.

[It presents] us with a vast range of richly developed, gorgeously played characters ... and mov[es] them gracefully through time and a lot of very pretty spaces without ever losing its conviction, its concentration or our bedazzled attention. [18 Dec 1995]

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.

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

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

I think the central mistake of this film derives from its lack of irony, a sense it refuses to impart that the world may not be exactly as the zealous Christopher perceives it to be. The film needs at least to entertain the possibility that its protagonist was driven less by high principle than by lamentable screwiness. And we need to leave it carrying some sense of tragic consequence with us. Instead, we're simply glad to be finished, at last, with this annoying man-child.

Morris's manner of relating this story is very often quite inappropriate to its substance. It is a sordid and appalling tale and what it demands is almost an anti-style -- rough, crude, grim, technically poor imagery unrelieved by sleek, slick fancy work. If you are going to rub our noses in this ugliness, you must not let up until, perhaps, we have learned our lesson.

In the end, you feel that Frozen River gives about as truthful a picture of American bleakness as it's possible for a movie to present. It is a movie that asks something of an audience, but it richly rewards our curiously rapt attention.

One of the most wholly original American movies ever made.

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.

What is startling is how well While You Were Sleeping recaptures the true spirit of the best kind of modern fairy tale -- classic romantic comedy.

Elegant and understated.

Eight Men Out lacks either the spacious simplicity of legend or the patient detailing of realism. And Sayles often seems like a man who, trying to stretch a single, gets caught between bases and is desperately trying to evade the rundown.

It just runs on and on -- like a slightly stupid story you wish you hadn't overheard in a singles bar.

Curiously, if fitfully, intriguing.

They bring their characters to good, slightly surprising, quite satisfying places. And leave us beaming happily.

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.

Maybe the filmmakers are so lost in their slambang visual effects that they don't give a hoot about the movie's scariest implications. [10 Nov 1997, p.102]

At some low, what's-next level, Sleepers works like, well, gangbusters. [28 October 1996, p. 113]

A stylish, well-paced film with a good variety of moods and moves.

To make something like Firewall good, you have to make it at least a little bit new--or add more than an unending patter of rain and techno-talk.

There's neither intricacy nor surprise in the narrative, and these dopes are tedious, witless company. Mostly you find yourself thinking, "How long until dinner?"

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

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]

A grim and uninvolving film, for which Philip Glass unwittingly provides the perfect score -- tuneless, oppressive, droning, painfully self-important.

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]

Conan is a sort of psychopathic Star Wars, stupid and stupefying.

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.

Writer Leslie Bohem and director Roger Donaldson brush briskly through the standard scientific and romantic blather. They know that in movies like this, complexity is the province of the special-effects people.

Out of Africa is, at last, the free-spirited, fullhearted gesture that everyone has been waiting for the movies to make all decade long. It reclaims the emotional territory that is rightfully theirs.

What plot it has is borrowed, improbably, from Henry IV, and whenever anyone manages to speak an entire paragraph, it is usually a Shakespearean paraphrase. But this is a desperate imposition on an essentially inert film. [28 Oct 1991]

Judged purely by what director Walter Hill has put on the screen, Another 48 Hrs. is a movie mainly about the several pretty ways that glass shatters when bullets or bodies are propelled through it. [25 June 1990, p.77]

Yet how can one possibly recommend The Salton Sea? If it could, this nasty film would make you smell the disgusting food on the table. And that says nothing about its casual sadism.

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.

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.

Intellectually austere but technologically and aesthetically riveting documentary.