Richard Schickel

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]

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

The players are uniformly good, but a special word must be said for Fiennes, whose portrayal of physical awkwardness and painful taciturnity never begs either for laughs or for sympathy.

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

The sensible formality of Taylor Hackford's direction has the effect of cooling the film's narrative frenzies and helping the actors dig some simple, truthful stuff out of the hubbub.

Something more surprising might have been made of this odd couple, but Van Sant, emptily employing the realist manner of his early films, is goodwill hunting in all the wrong places.

What he (Scott) does superbly is establish a raw, compelling reality that transcends his movie's banal premises and predictable conclusion. That permits Moore to play, and us to feel, authentic pain, isola- tion and courage--shocking stuff to find in an action movie these days. [25 August 1997, p. 72]

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.

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.

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

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.