Richard Schickel

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

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.

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

Yet in the end the self-conscious importance of the film produces a rather queasy feeling, for really this story is no more than a crude exploitation — decked out with our latest scientific finery — of what amounts to a penny dreadful fantasy. If you stop and think about it, even if there were a nest of Nazis hiding out in South America, most of them would be pushing 80 by now, and quite incapable of the exertions required by this farflung, not to mention farfetched plot.

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.

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.

[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.

Neither jokes nor fast, flashy action can completely distract audiences from the failure to establish an authentic, rather than a purely conventional connection between Nolte and Murphy.

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.

A movie that may be just a bit too pleased with its own artful bleakness.

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.

Perhaps the funniest movie for grownups so far this year.

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.

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

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

His is a dispassionate sensibility, and he is not a strong enough actor - nor has he a strong enough intelligence - to fight his way out of the false analogy he has drawn between moviemaking and tragic history in the making.

The problem is that the high-pitched whine of Allie's character finally vitiates not merely the viewer's sympathy for him, but sympathy for the movie he dominates, despite the care and courage that went into its making.

This is not necessarily an improvement, but it's not a total disaster either.

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

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.

Altogether wondrous.

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.

A shrewd portrait, sly, casual yet palpably authentic, of the principal ways members of any minority try to respond to an uncomprehending world. [29 Jun 1998, p. 69]

You can, if you will, think of All the King's Men as a purely political parable, but that is to miss its blackest, bleakest meanings.