Richard Schickel

Kubrick’s remains perhaps the blackest comedy ever put on screen, and with Peter Sellers brilliantly playing multiple roles, the blackest, funniest movie of the post-war era.

Perhaps the funniest movie for grownups so far this year.

Raiders of the Lost Ark has it all—or, anyway, more than enough to transport moviegoers back to the dazzling, thrill-sated matinee idyls of old. It is surely the best two hours of pure entertainment anyone is going to find in the summer of '81.

This says nothing about Gallo's own demonic charm as Billy or his directorial boldness in juxtaposing the emotional surreality of his story with the bleak reality of his hometown in winter, creating a sort of casual but strangely haunting weirdness.

It is hard to think of another film more tightly autobiographical than this one. It's even harder to think of other films that build so gripping a narrative out of a string of comparatively minor and disparate incidents.

Hudson painstakingly makes an obscure corner of history reverberate in a nearly mythic way. It is lovely work. And like old snapshots of forgotten people from another time, strangely evocative and moving.

Carrie's ultimate triumph is spectacular beyond anything one is used to in this antique genre. Brian De Palma's sure and powerfully individual style, blending romance, darkish satirical humor and suspenseful spookiness, transforms what could have been dreary stuff. From its first shot, Carrie catches the mind, energetically shakes it and refuses to let go even after the end credits have rolled.

No film since Preston Sturges was a pup has so shrewdly appreciated the way the eccentric plays hide-and-seek with the respectable in the ordinary American landscape; no comedy since Annie Hall or Manhattan has so intelligently observed not just the way people live now but what's going on in the back of their minds; and finally, and in full knowledge that one may be doing the marketing department's job for them, it is the best movie of the year.

The filmmaking is marvelously austere, yet in its sudden bursts of action electrifying, in its stern morality sobering, in the blackness of its comedy often quite delicious.

But it is the style with which this wild farce is developed that sustains our horrified interest and keeps us laughing as the darkness gathers around Barbara and Oliver. [11 Dec 1989]

A war film that, entirely aware of its genre's conventions, transcends them as it transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors, to take the high, morally haunting ground.

If Shakespeare's poetry enters the mind through the ear, Kurosawa's enters it through the eye. But the imagery is of comparable quality, at once awesome in its power, delicate in its irony and, finally, for all the violence of the events it recounts, eerily serene in the sureness with which it achieves its effects.

Remain open to fantasies but not be consumed by them. These are good lessons for a would-be director. They are good lessons for everybody. And no recent movie has taught them with more patient sweetness. [Feb. 5, 1990]

An austere and delicate examination of the ways in which a likable family falters under pressure and struggles, with ambiguous results, to renew itself. This is not very show-bizzy stuff, but for once, a movie star has used his power to create not light entertainment or a trendy political statement, but a work that addresses itself quietly and intelligently to issues everyone who attempts to raise children must face.

Along with the high comedy, this determined insistence on the gory stupidity of ancient but still potent fancy is what holds the film together. Grail is as funny as a movie can get, but it is also a tough-minded picture — as outraged about the human propensity for violence as it is outrageous in its attack on that propensity.

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]

You'll have to seek it out in its limited release, but no current movie is more worth the effort.

Sublime and sorrowful movie.

This horrific tale is told with marvelous shadowy indirection and delicate lyricism. It is full of enigmatic silences, which create a nice, ironic tension between the film's genteel manner and its really quite ferocious theme.

Caught in the movie's grip, you are simply hypnotized by the damned thing.

It is among the best and most delicately managed films of the year.

It takes its place on the very short list of the unforgettable movies about war and its ineradicable and immeasurable costs.

If this were not such great American-vernacular moviemaking -- hilarious yet hypnotic -- one would be tempted to see something Greek in the tragedy that Ed never comprehends.

Think of A Fish Called Wanda as the next best thing to a Looney Tunes-Merrie Melodies summerfest…Wanda defies gravity, in both senses of the word, and redefines a great comic tradition. [July 18, 1988]

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]

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]

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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]

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.

The actors are supported by the best kind of writerly craft and directorial technique, the kind that refuses to call attention to itself, never gets caught straining for scares or laughs. Popular moviemaking -- elegantly economical, artlessly artful -- doesn't get much better than this.

This could have turned out to be an exercise in easy sentiment, easy to shrug off. But Frank Cottrell Boyce's script is carefully understated, and director Michael Winterbottom has achieved a remarkably seamless blend of fictional and factual footage.

The result is mainstream moviemaking at its highest, most satisfying level.

More important, we should take into account the fact that this is really quite a good movie--a character-driven (as opposed to whammy-driven) suspense drama--dark, fatalistic and, within its melodramatically stretched terms, emotionally plausible.

All the actors in No Man's Land are wonderfully alive, fractious and unpredictable. Their performances also help break down the schematics and turn this into an emotionally potent, powerfully thoughtful and finally tragic experience.

Makes everything Hollywood has lately done in the action genre look clumsy, dull and stale. It is a short, nonstop stuntfest that, by going back to basics and placing them on the screen with simple, breathless stylishness, turns what is essentially a lowlife movie form into something one is not embarrassed to call "pure" cinema--all energy, movement and high kinetic wit.

Very simply, Bertolucci has found an elegance of design and execution that few of his contemporaries could even dream of. [23 Nov 1987]

A formally elegant, subtly savage and powerfully affecting film.

The actor (Puri) and the film make something fine, winning and memorable.

Unsparing but never unsympathetic, emerges as one of the year's best, most brutally honest movies.

Seems to encompass all the humor, sadness and weirdness of ordinary life in an utterly winning, morally acute way.

Altogether wondrous.

It proposes that you can make an extraordinarily satisfying comedy without writing a joke. Subtly played and elegantly directed, this is an Adults Only movie in the best sense of the term.

Maybe these lives are, objectively speaking, inconsequential. But they have a resonance that big, sappy "relationship" pictures ought to envy.

Japanese Story is a simple, austerely told tale. But there is something memorable, even haunting, about it.

It is, like quite a few Lumet pictures, rather small in scale, easy to overlook. But I think it is time to gather around a director who has embraced his octogenarian bleakness and sing his praises. Ultimately, I think you'll laugh a lot at what he has wrought here -- but only well after the movie is over and the full scale of its perversity settles into your bones.

Pixar's improved computer animation is up to all the demands of this excellent adventure.

The result is a harrowing film, impossible to "like" in any conventional way, hypnotically impossible to turn away from.

I found myself -- all twitchy intellectualism aside -- liking it enormously. There's more to Stevens's exteriors than those great shots of the looming ranch house. He had learned John Ford's trick of keeping the horizon low in the frame, and there are literally dozens of long, wide shots that are more than merely awesome. They suggest an emptiness that stumbling, ill-educated, materialistic people will somehow fill with something -- oil derricks, bragging Texas talk, reactionary politics. [Reprinted in the NY Times: 25 May 2003, p.21]

Elegantly made, romantically doomy, curiously affecting movie.

Sayles is a meditative storyteller, with a tendency to mute melodrama rather than letting it wail. But he is also one of the few filmmakers still ferreting out the strangeness and anxiety hidden beneath our poses of ordinariness. [22 July 1996, p.95]

What we come to care most about in writer-director Joshua Marston's film is how his heroine achieves the state promised by his title, Maria Full of Grace. Our emotional investment in her derives primarily from the astonishing performance of Moreno, 23.

The best movie of this very young millennium.

A solemn, subtly structured, beautifully acted and ultimately hypnotic movie.

Director Joel Schumacher's breathlessly paced and incident-crammed movie will induce a certain sense of deja vu among veteran viewers.

It is a powerful portrait of a slightly befuddled man who, when inhuman demands were placed on him, found within himself an unexpected response.

Very simply, World Trade Center is a powerful movie experience, a hymn in plainsong that glorifies that which is best in the American spirit.

I wouldn't call the film inspirational -- it is too well observed to succumb to easy sentiment -- but its realism is patiently engaging and subtly insinuating. And Linney and Hoffman are extraordinary.

It is the hilarious business of Shrek, a delightful new animated feature based on the William Steig book, to subvert all the well-worn expectations of its genre.

What makes this movie work is the kind of cool that made Get Shorty go so nicely: an understanding that life's little adventures rarely come in neat three-act packages, the way most movies now do, and the unruffled presentation of outrageously twisted dialogue, characters and situations as if they were the most natural things in the world.

A smart, shrewdly crafted movie.

Comic, suspenseful, romantic.

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.

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

Bening gives a remarkable performance, proposing the intriguing possibility that a kept woman can also be a liberated woman. In any case, she shares her fears and vulnerability only in a few private moments with the camera, never with the besotted Bugsy. But good as she and everyone else in Bugsy is (mention must be made of Harvey Keitel, Elliott Gould and Ben Kingsley as assorted thugs and mugs), the picture belongs, in every sense of the word, to Beatty.

An elegantly polished little film.

An edgy exploration of role playing and sexual choice in a climate where all options are acceptable.

There are a few moments when the picture's easygoing pace turns into wobbliness, but these are insignificant compared with its many moments of shrewd insight into the lives of amusingly shaded but very recognizable human beings. This is the kind of small, star less film that big studios sometimes do not know what to do with. Audiences should have no such difficulty. They will, if they have any sense, simply cherish it.

This is a much colder film, with austere aspirations — not fully realized — to transcend its melodramatic origins and to become an authentic tragedy. … As Michael plots his careful, lethal moves, the recurring, unforgettable image is of his eyes growing colder, until they finally go dead to the horrors around him.

A brilliant exercise in popular but palpable surrealism.

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.

All in all, Nurse Betty is a wonderful movie, unpredictably alive to the fact that the American citizenry is a lot stranger than we like to admit.

Airplane! is a splendidly tacky, totally tasteless, completely insignificant flight, a gooney bird of a movie that looks as if it could never get off the ground and then surprises and delights with its free-spirited aerobatics.

It is a measure of its complexity--and of the forces Penn and Sarandon have held in reserve during their hypnotic struggle for his soul--that its final moments leave us awash in emotion.

Insanely funny, if occasionally out-of-control, black farce.

Results in about the nicest movie you could ask for at the holidays: a gently funny, sweetly adventurous film that makes you feel genuinely good, that is to say, entirely unconned by false sentiment or sharp, overmanipulative Hollywood practices.

The film is more than a murder mystery and more than a study in character conflict. At its best, it is an intense and complex portrait of an urban landscape on which the movies' gaze has not often fallen.

[Darabont] makes you feel the maddening pace of prison time without letting his picture succumb to it.

The smartest, funniest, most cleverly structured comedy of the year.

A true movie rarity: a brutally honest romance. If you loved "Sleepless in Seattle," you'll just hate it.

I have rarely, if ever, seen a documentary reconstruction of a historical event that is so rich in firsthand (and well-preserved) photographic material.

Two cheers, at least, for permitting the past to appear not as a stern lesson but as a delicious irrelevance. [10 Mar 1986]

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.

He's (Wilson) a terrific sidekick to Chan's funny, earnest, often victimized righteousness. This kid could be a star.

Wry, richly layered, wonderfully observed Argentine film.

It's hard enough to find comedies like this at any time, so it's a small and welcome miracle to come upon one in the midst of a typical movie summer.

The movie has two virtues essential to good pop thrillers. First, it plugs uncomplicatedly into lurking anxieties -- in this case the ones we brush aside when we daily surrender ourselves to mass transit in a world where the loonies are everywhere. Second, it is executed with panache and utter conviction.

This may be hard ground for the audience that loves to cheer the lump out of its throat at the end of a movie. But for actors, it is the high ground. There is a ferocity in Cruise's flakiness that he has not previously had a chance to tap. That, in turn, gives Newman something to grapple with. There is a sort of contained rage in his work that he has never found before, and it carries him beyond the bounds of image, the movie beyond the bounds of genre.

There's something old-fashioned and dauntless about the way the film pushes past our initial resistance to its setting and subject matter, past pain, past defeat, to make this point. Because it rejects easy victories, this may be one of the few inspirational movies that could actually inspire someone, somewhere, sometime.

Ironizes without parodying an antique screen manner, then reaches out from beneath this smooth cover to grab us.

Reimagined instead of recycled, an adaptation of a '60s old TV show emerges as a first-rate thriller.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Intellectually austere but technologically and aesthetically riveting documentary.

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.

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

Its business is to turn sure-thing expectations into a game of chance, and provide us with that rarity--a genuinely eccentric yet deeply insinuating film.

Even the car chase in Fletch is witty and believable and something an adult can attend without flinching. As the adolescent revels of summer wear on, that alone could make it a movie to cherish.

Patient and plodding -- but as realized by John Malkovich, in his directorial debut, utterly absorbing.

Now and then McGrath's film feels a bit rushed and breathless, but mostly you sink gratefully into its handsomely staged plenitude.

This is a sad, subtle and very good movie, designed not so much to make you think, but to make you feel the impact of large events on little lives.

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.

Before Director Ron Howard and his gargle of writers (Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel and Bruce Jay Friedman) arrange a satisfactorily romantic ending for their odd couple, they also manage to satirize everything from presidential politics to daytime television. They are a jostling, busily observant, fundamentally good-natured crew, and audiences are well advised to take a plunge on Splash.

Well acted, and it achieves a strong, smart, engaging life of its own.

To make an unembarrassing movie about embarrassment is definitely an eye-opening achievement.

As long as Training Day stays tightly focused on the struggle between the two cops, the movie is first rate.

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.

A modestly mounted, but curiously poignant little documentary... which somehow -- quietly, devastatingly -- shows and tells you more than you may perhaps want to know about the dehumanization implicit in the mighty, blighted Iraqi adventure.

It has everything you want in an epic: sweep, scope, wild reversals of fortune and plenty of bold, basic emotions.

Murphy, abetted by director Tom Shadyac and a whole raft of writers, cannot entirely escape the curious blend of aspiration and sloppiness that marked the earlier film.

[Matlin] has an unusual talent for concentrating her emotions--and an audience's--in her signing. But there is something more here, an ironic intelligence, a fierce but not distancing wit, that the movies, with their famous ability to photograph thought, discover in very few performances. Children of a Lesser God, though given a handsome openness in Director Haines' production, cannot transcend the banalities of the play. But Matlin does. She is, one might say, a miracle worker.

For us dog saps, it is especially nice to see cuddlesomely real pooches instead of drawn ones doing smart-pet tricks.

It is a guileless tribute not only to plain values of plain people in Depression America, but also to the sweet spirit of country-and-western music before it got all duded up for the urban cowboys.

Occasionally succumbs to Mika's legato rhythms, but it is more often a sly, subtle comedy about the oh-so-gentle art of murder.

And while more than 30 writers worked on the screenplay and untold numbers labored to re-create the ambiance and effects that the animators once tossed off with a few squiggles of their pencils, The Flintstones doesn't feel overcalculated, over-produced or overthought.

A genial, expertly played political comedy proves that the spirit of Mr. Smith still lives.

A raw, unblinking film. It teaches that in dire circumstances our only obligation is to our own survival; all else -- culture, ideology, even love -- is a dispensable luxury.

Little Children does not have quite the bleak discipline of Field's more keenly judged "In the Bedroom." Yet it is a more ambitious film and a considerable achievement.

There is something brave and original about piling up most of our worst parental nightmares in one movie and then daring to make a midsummer comedy out of them. It really shouldn't work, but it does. The movie does not linger too long over any moment or mood, and it permits characters to transcend type, offering a more surprising range of response to events. [7 August 1989, p.54]

Like its title -- blunt, thruthful, uncompromising. It is hard on an audience, even harrowing. But that's exactly what Martin Scorsese was put on earth to do.

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.

The picture breaks down awkwardly when it tries to express directly what it has already said better by implication. This generally occurs in earnest scenes between Elliott and his all too dense girlfriend. Dayle Haddon's inexperienced playing adds nothing even faintly convincing to the badly written love interest, and the rest of the film has to struggle to recover from the resulting dead spots. Still, North Dallas Forty retains enough of the original novel's authenticity to deliver strong, if brutish, entertainment.

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]

The result is an admittedly minor, but authentic, holiday treat.

A very good film, beautifully shot and edited, intelligently structured and — to risk what will surely seem at first a highly inappropriate term —charming.

The Coen brothers merrily subvert that standard caper trope.

Like its many raucous predecessors, Blazing Saddles is a thing of bits and bits—some good, some awful—pinned to a story line that sags like a tenement clothesline. The movie tends to improve in the retelling, as memory edits out ineptitudes, the better to dwell on moments of glory... But goldarned if it doesn't work. Goldarned if the whole fool enterprise is not worth the attention of any moviegoer with a penchant for what one actor, commenting on another's Gabby Hayes imitation, calls "authentic western gibberish."

A lot of very good actors...do honest, probing work in a context where, typically, less will do.

As the gags pile up remorselessly, and the viewer strains to keep up with the story line and the cutting subtext, a furious but benign apnea takes hold. You can't enjoy a good long laugh because you'll miss too much. It's the happiest form of internal injury.

For all the film's murky misdirections, it is very enjoyable. That's because Nolan's recreation of the illusionists' backstage world is so marvelously detailed, including as it does revelations of how some of their best tricks are accomplished.

For Hackman embodies the energy and outrage the rest of this rather twee family lacks. Royal stirs them all to life, and this great, bumptious performance by an actor gleefully rediscovering his funny bone stirs us to appreciative life too.

It must have been difficult for Schanberg to confront the record of his own blindness and powerlessness when he wrote the articles on which this movie is based. It must be nerve-racking for the producers to offer a tale so lacking in standard melodramatic satisfactions. But the result is worth it, for this is the clearest film statement yet on how the nature of heroism has changed in this totalitarian century.

Wry humor and even a certain sexiness break through the reserve of a rueful, realistic, but finally emotionally rewarding film.

The Freshman is no small thing. Well, actually, it is a small thing. But to a moviegoer deafened by and reeling from the rolling barrage laid down by the early summer's big box-office guns, the determined modesty, the unsprung affability of Andrew Bergman's comedy are precisely what make it treasurable.

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.

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.

The result is a lovely movie, one that allows its characters unexpected spurts of growth and regression, darkness and grace.

The movie ends in a burst of violence that we are unprepared for and don't believe. Maybe it's the film's final joke. It's a miscalculation -- though a calculated one -- but it does not erase one's fond memories of all the odd, deeply humorous behavior that preceded it.

So long as Casino stays focused on the excesses -- of language, of violence, of ambition -- in the life-styles of the rich and infamous, it remains a smart, knowing, if often repetitive, spectacle.

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.

Babel is a movie that leaves you feeling limp and wrung out, but mysteriously moved by its vivid human encounters with the hot, tightly wired, chancy and coincidental world, ever capable of terrorizing us when we least expect it.

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

A rich man, perpetually tiddly from drink, gets incompetent self into various muddles; unflappable gentleman's gentleman gets him out. It has always been an excellent joke, and Writer-Director Gordon has added a dash of sentiment to their relationship, trusting Sir John's expertise to keep things taut and tart, which he does admirably.

It is good to see the Disney craftsmen doing what they do best on such a grand and risky scale. If one has time for only one space opera this season, this is the one to choose.

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.

These people are fools for heedless love and, perhaps, needless complication, and you can't help responding to the heat of their passion.

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]

It will fascinate and possibly even delight cinephiles. Who does not enjoy gawking at accidents, particularly those in which there are no fatalities and the sad story unfolds in almost slow-motion clarity?

This wee, discreet little movie has a certain rueful intelligence about the ways we rather carelessly talk ourselves into love--and out of it as well.

It is hard to imagine anyone, with the possible exception of preadolescent males, who will not, in the end turn on to Turning Point.

This isn't just a thrill ride; it's a rocket into the thrilling past, when directors could scare you with how much emotion they packed into a movie.

This moving tribute to a handful of candles flickering in the darkness has the power to summon us--one prays--to our better selves.

That metaphor is pitch-perfect, but the film works a little too hard at proving the vileness of beauty pageants.

Kevin Spacey (gives) a truly great performance.

So even when they don’t achieve the glorious farce of a Fargo, there is always something fascinating about following the Coens’ rapt gaze as they peer into the American nut bowl.

A smart live-and-let-live parable.

In Washington's finely shaded performance he's a low-pressure system, illuminated by distant flashes of lightning.

Yet despite all that boring talk, Dead Again is a hit, the late-blooming rose of a movie summer that was mostly mulch. [23 Sept 1991, p.73]

The director's stylistic self-denial serves to keep one's attention fastened where it belongs: on a persuasive, if perhaps debatable vision of Gandhi's spirit, and on the remarkable actor who has caught its light in all its seasons.

There is some elemental human desire -- lately largely denied at the cinema -- to see pretty people in handsome landscapes assuaging our need for epic romance. On that level, Australia delivers with real panache.

It is the movie's often awesome imagery and a bravely soaring choral score by James Horner that transfigure the reality, granting it the status of necessary myth.

As much a dark, odd couple comedy as it is a quirky, efficient little thriller.

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.

There is something arresting about it too. The damned thing keeps gnawing at your mind -- if only for its almost perfect lack of conventional sentiment. Or movieness.

It is, of course, always a pleasure to watch Martin's steam-gauge face register his rising internal pressures and to witness his exquisitely expressed blowoffs. But Candy offers even more insinuating delights. Covering lonely need with empty gab, insecurity with a not entirely trustworthy savvy, he is the most dangerous kind of pest, the type who worms rather than blusters his way into your life.

Layer Cake is a treat--especially if your taste in desserts is devil's food.

We have this movie--full of acceptant, sidelong glances at human quirkiness--to delight us.

The result is a film consistent narratively, confident stylistically and abounce with the quaint quality that animated both the hero and his times, something we used to call pep.

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.

This very patient film reaches out and unshakably grips us.

Enigma is not for everyone, but the thoughtful (and the historically minded) will find it an absorbing and extremely well-textured experience.

It feels as if it has been recovered from a time capsule, and what larger meaning it may have is anyone's guess. But it is way cool -- and funny -- in ways that more expensive comedies trying harder rarely are.

A thoughtful epic is both a rarity and an oxymoron. But that's what Ali is, and you can't help being drawn sympathetically into its hero's struggle for mastery of himself and his era.

[Murphy] makes Trading Places something more than a good-hearted comedy. He turns it into an event.

The comedic first part of Jacques Audiard's film doesn't achieve a seamless connection with its melodramatic second half, but you can't deny the originality of his conceit or the tart cynicism of its development.

A smart, tough, yet curiously moving film.

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.

Writer-director Carl Franklin's cool, expert adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress, Mosley's first novel, evokes the spirit of '40s film noir more effectively than any movie since Chinatown.

Ross is a filmmaker with a taste for inherently sentimental tales…but the discipline not to play mawkishly to our sentiments. You will be moved by Seabiscuit--but not to tears.

Emotionally On Golden Pond is no less valid for being something of a cliche. Anyway, the characters are so strong that the piece does not play as a cliché. Hepburn, for example may have a less chewy part than has Fonda, but the briskness of her manner, her well-justified image as a no-nonsense individualist who is nevertheless a good sport, serve her wonderfully. There is a vivifying touch of tension between an actress who was a liberated woman before the movement was born and her role as traditional wife and mother.

A rich, intricate and very gripping movie.

Whoever thought of having evil's final manifestation take the form of a 100-ft. marshmallow deserves the rational mind's eternal gratitude. But praise is due to everyone connected with Ghostbusters for thinking on a grandly comic scale and delivering the goofy goods, neatly timed and perfectly packaged.

The result is an escapist fantasy that is -- Damon's and Potente's persuasive performances aside -- as weightless and inconsequential as a musical. And at the moment every bit as welcome.

Not for everyone. The plot is full of holes, and its language is worse than it has to be. But it has some swell supporting performances and a lot of vulgar inventiveness, and best of all, it plugs into -- and electrifies -- the mostly unacknowledged grimness that lies just beneath our holiday cheer.

Michael Clayton is not an exercise in high-tension energy; you'll never confuse its eponymous protagonist with Jason Bourne. But it does have enough of a melodramatic pulse to keep you engaged in its story and, better than that, it is full of plausible characters who are capable of surprising -- and surpassing -- your expectations.

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.

Semi-Tough may or may not turn out to be the year's best comedy—there's Annie Hall to remember and Mel Brooks yet to be heard from—but it is without a doubt the year's most socially useful film.

There is not a cheap note or a careless image, not an easy judgment or a forced emotion, in the 2 hr. 43 min. of Bird. It permits a man's life its complexity. It invites us to experience the redeeming grace of his music. And with its passionate craft, it proclaims that Eastwood is a major American director.

Colombani has created uncommonly arresting entertainment.

I don't think it attains the Godfather level -- it lacks dark passion and grand-scale irony -- but it is an intelligent, well-made and seductive movie.

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.

Eventually you may come to think of Talk to Me as a true movie rarity -- a very honest yet curiously affecting experience.

This is a good, serious and absorbing movie -- especially, perhaps, for a reviewer who is roughly Kepesh's age and, of course, eagerly evading the issues his story forces up.

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.

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

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

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]

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.

An often deft, frequently droll little movie.

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.

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.

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

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

Very moving film.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Elegant and understated.

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.

This gripping documentary doesn't exactly say what went wrong, but the pain and puzzlement of its principals as things inexorably fall apart is palpable and saddening.

We're talking fables, not reality, here, and this is a fine and merry one--"Ms. Woods Goes to Washington"--played to airy perfection by Reese Witherspoon and a light-on-its-feet cast.

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]

It's a fine madness, full of jaunty desperation, survivable disasters and the kind of ferocious concentration on a really stupid idea that once propelled Wile E. Coyote.

This darkly sumptuous, hypnotically complex movie ought to have many constituencies.

This wonderfully animated movie is a little more softly pitched than its predecessor, but it still has plenty of rollicking spin on the ball.

The film is most significantly about puzzled people trying to comprehend the cosmic reversal of fortune that was the Depression. They don't have much more than raw courage and simple virtues to rely on. Unlike most period pieces, Cinderella Man encourages us to fondly recall not songs or clothes but values we have largely mislaid.

At times the joints in the movie's carpentry are strained, at times the mood swings jarring. [16 Oct 1989, p. 82]

It has the kind of tension and energy -- maybe even a touch of delirium -- that is only a memory in most of today's big studio movies.

Unfolds with a patient intelligence. The Sixth Sense might not scare you out of your wits, but it could reward them.

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.

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

It's a modest little fantasy. But it's also well made, unpretentious and refreshing.

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]

It is a talkative film, rather earnest in its tonalities, not at all a deft, witty or well-paced. On the other hand, it is, for Allen, a comparatively rare excursion into lower-class life.

This cheeky movie does not impose heavy-duty meaning on Page's life and times. It just lets us draw our own ambiguous conclusions about what she did. It is the better, the more enticing, for so doing.

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