Rick Groen

Polished, intelligent, impeccably well-bred, it's an upscale kids' flick designed to appease the fears of discriminating parents: If those stubborn tykes refuse to crack a book, then this is the next best thing - Young People's Masterpiece Theatre. [11 Aug 1995, p.C2]

Duelling roles are an actor's dream, and Cage takes full advantage. He and that face of his -- hang-dog homely one minute, vibrantly macho the next -- are perfectly cast. So is Streep as the sophisticated Manhattanite drawn into a steamy realm of Southern discomfort.

Once again, Cianfrance handles the individual scenes with menacing aplomb but, once again, the whole is much less than the sum of its parts.

The greatest story ever has finally been told. Or, if you prefer, the damn thing has come to its merciful end.

Hitchcock unspools at that deliciously silly juncture where biography meets fallacy. Translation: Any director who could crank out Psycho must be a crackpot himself.

The tale may be Dahl's, but there's a whole new wag to it – this is decidedly, weirdly and, at best, wonderfully a Wes Anderson movie.

The best satire implicates the audience; this stuff keeps our sense of superiority smugly intact.

In most every frame, Hartley takes pains to tilt his camera at odd angles – in other words, he's gone literally off-kilter, and it's just off-putting. What's worse, a further hallmark of the Hartley canon, his self-reflexivity, has begun to smack of self-promotion.

A plot so thin you could filter coffee through it.

This is an adaptation that must have been hard to screw up, yet screwed up it has been. If the movie is far from dreadful, it's even further from the searing experience it could have been.

Without warning, the picture falls hard into the very trap it had so studiously avoided, the one marked Expensive Gimmick... The same feature that begins like no film you've ever seen ends like every cartoon you've always avoided.

From the first stylized shot to the final comic resolution, Moonstruck is completely sui generis - hard to describe but easy to love.

A grownup departure from the teen-romance norm -- it speaks nothing about passion and volumes about trust.

Raimi doesn't make the mistake of over-thinking the flimsy psychology of the genre. All this conflicted-hero stuff isn't meant to be profound; instead, it's there for the same reason as everything else -- to give the action (the interior action in this case) a healthy shot of pop energy.

Avatar is a king's ransom fairly well spent, not least because Cameron's invitation into his superbly crafted universe comes with an unexpected price: He makes it easy to gaze fondly on all this movie magic, but only in exchange for a hard look at ourselves.

This is a rare adaptation where the script (by McGrath himself) heads straight for the novel's horrible essence, reproducing it non-verbally and in an even more concentrated form.

As for the implicit tragedy amidst the funny business, the swelling ranks of the unemployed, the movie has no solution but instead offers itself as implicit solace: Escape, ye wretches, into my clever humour and my nifty dialogue and my star's considerable charm.

A worthy docudrama that is solid if not sublime. But, sometimes, a merely good film can brush up against greatness, and this one does so twice – in Sean Penn's magnetic performance and in the cautionary tale's contemporary resonance.

So much cinematic majesty perched precariously atop so little common sense. But, hell, maybe Quentin's right; relax, enjoy -- a castle with a shaky foundation is still quite a sight.

No filmmaker, in any cinematic culture, has a better eye or ear for the working class than director Mike Leigh.

What it doesn't have is the resonance of Cronenberg's "A History of Violence," a film that exploited the same genre even while transcending its limitations. Eastern Promises delivers, but not on that scale.

Spike Lee's voluminous "When the Levees Broke" proved a thorough indictment, a compilation of tragic and appalling facts encyclopedically catalogued. By contrast, Trouble the Water (on Oscar's short-list in the best doc category) has a more personal focus and, although just as damning, manages to strike a more hopeful chord.

The result isn't meant to be an historical document transmuted into fiction; instead, it's fiction turned into a fable, a dark fable.

C'mon, in matters of haunted-house inhabitation, settling into an ex-mortuary is like renting above a dentist's office -- ashen faces and ghastly screams come with the territory.

Yes, the movie gets off the ground when it gets off the ground, and who better to provide the lift than director Carroll Ballard. [13 Sep 1996, p.C1]

At best, the humour in Election is perceptive, nasty, pointed, and lets no one off its barbed hook, not even the audience. In other words, it's a lovely piece of satire, made all the more relevant by the setting.

At best, Leaving Las Vegas is pure alchemy -- it makes of flawed humanity a hymn, and of forlorn hope a beacon.

So no one would argue that Thumbsucker sucks. But the thing does seem just so indie-movie familiar.

The stylings of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino come to the Mideast, but more credibly grounded in a complex setting fraught with raw contemporary politics and ancient class tensions. It makes for a compelling movie but hardly a pretty picture.

The result is a whodunit so nicely crafted that you're tempted to forgive the Byzantine plot -- hell, you're even tempted to pretend you actually understand its twisting obscurities.

Happily, in his adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play, The Deep Blue Sea, Davies has found a setting close to his heart and a subject more nearly suited to his style.

Constant is the very thing The Constant Gardener is not. Attractive yet fickle, the movie beckons enticingly one moment and wanders off the next.

From its quiet opening sequence to its silent final shot, everything about A History of Violence is deceptive, and deceptively simple.

Mainly, though, the film's strength is reportorial, sensitively exploring a theme that has grown ever more prominent with the globalization of sport.

This is a war film with an anti-epic feel, best when it forgoes the forced march of plot to hunker down in the trenches of our flawed humanity.

Canadian director Guy Maddin is an artist supreme - he steals with a liberal flourish and with enough sheer imagination that his previous films (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel) are often described as boldly original. Careful, his latest offering, is no exception - it's an honours graduate from the same school of dusted-off originality. [10 Oct 1992]

Yet, for all that's wrong here, one thing is wonderfully, blissfully right, and his name is Tom Hanks.

Admittedly, near the end, the picture loses some of its energy and compelling ambiguity (about a half-star's worth, I'd say). Still, by then, the big gains have been made. At its best, The Nightmare Before Christmas occupies the imaginative ground held by the likes of White and Dahl and Seuss - that lovely place where, for shining moments, parents and children can travel on the same passport and smile for the same reasons. [22 Oct 1993]

If the kids give the movie its momentum, its fascination comes from a more static source -- the father.

A picture with pop's delicious energy yet none of its attendant risk, a flick that no one will love but everyone will like.

Take a funny, touching, complex play that moves at a breakneck pace, filter it through the huge (if often underrated) talents of director Fred Schepisi, and you've got Six Degrees of Separation. Such a rare gift - a film that treats language with infinite respect and ideas with cultivated precision, a film that challenges us to keep up and rewards our efforts with a bittersweet comedy of manners. [24 Dec 1993]

Hunger -- the disturbing, provocative, brilliant feature debut from British director Steve McQueen -- does for modern film what Caravaggio did to Renaissance painting.

Ambitious and brooding, Coogan has the darker nature; lighthearted and affable, Brydon is all sunny-side up. Happily, both possess a devilishly quick wit and the need to go beyond self-impersonation to the more celebrated variety.

From my doddering perspective - rheumy with a view - Volume 3 puts plenty of cinema into the picture but leeches all the charm out of the tale.

The movie itself seems more familiar than fascinating, more innocuous than inflammatory, and, at 2½ hours, more tedious than anything else.

Although director Taylor Hackford ("An Officer and a Gentleman") handles the usually cumbersome flashbacks with impressive delicacy, he can't stop the narrative from sinking under its own melodramatic weight.

The result is a genre picture that transcends the genre, that gleefully embraces four qualities alien to the bulk of its noisy brethren: (1) thematic texture; (2) kinetic grace; (3) visuals that toy with the mind even while dazzling the eye; and (3) performers who are permitted to act like something other than human wicks for the pyrotechnical bombast.

Let the Right One In is a children's film, but you wouldn't want your child to see it. It's a horror film, but the gruesome splatter is the least of its scares. And it's a love story, but the prepubescent kind where sex is a distant idea and loneliness a shared reality. A wicked trick, a cinematic treat, this is some Halloween offering.

Not an extraordinary portrait, but it does portray an extraordinary man.

In recounting this conflicted tale, director Rachid Bouchareb displays some valour of his own, resisting what must have been a strong temptation to deal in aggrieved agitprop, and instead, quietly but powerfully, confining his attentions to a small group of indigenous soldiers.

Offers you the ostensible bargain of two movies in one -- a character study at the outset and the crime caper that follows. The first picture is intriguing, the second stinks.

Oh, it's The Return, all right. To any masochist who's been pining for all those clichéd tropes associated with Russian cinema -- ponderous pacing and arcane symbolism shot through a lens darkly -- this will seem a welcome blast from the past.

Up and down, Late Marriage is definitely rocky, but there's never a point where we lose interest and want out -- as relationships go, that's not bad.

The surprise lies in Linklater's ability to breathe so much fresh life into a tired formula...This is a picture that recollects not merely a period in time but a state of mind.

Label this one a howler, and add a postscipt to the sequel: shoo Fly II, go forth and don't multiply. [11 Feb 1989]

Pleasant because, instead of the usual hero-and-mayhem jive, Snitch is an honest exercise in workmanlike craft. This is to film what ceramic is to floors or Billy is to bookcase or what a third-line centre is to a winning hockey team – hardly great but good and solid and functional.

A little gem of social realism that makes up in polish what it lacks in consistency.

Cerebral without being dry, delicate without being dull, Mr. And Mrs. Bridge is a rarity: a drama of manners that breathes esthetic life into airless parlours, without either sentimentalizing the occupants or hyping the atmosphere. [21 Dec 1980]

How's this for frightening: The casting of the lightweight Ben Affleck as a CIA agent who holds the fate of the entire world in his pretty-boy hands. Can't deny it, that got my heart pumping like a bunny.

The reality measures up to the rep.

Altman shakes the camera like a two-bit horror director, and it seems a different sort of signature - less masterful than weary, less signed than resigned. Zero-sum, indeed.

Like a skill player who just can't score, The Damned United is all dazzle and no finish and, ultimately, damned frustrating.

In dramatizing the rigours of the ghetto, Yakin stoops to hyperbolic plot devices that tend to erode the very empathy he's striving to create. Things are surely bad, but not that bad - unwittingly, he's demonizing people who deserve better, who are better. [02 Sep 1994]

Despite Auteuil's performance, it's a rather listless amble down the middle of the road, where the thematic ironies are too obvious and the sexual politics too smug.

It has a schlocky title and a rocky start, but then something happens - The Man Without a Face finds its rhythm and its grip, seizing the audience and propelling us straight through to the dewy climax. [25 Aug 1993, p.C2]

Two superb actors etch an unflinching portrait of a young marriage doomed never to grow old.

In this journey, [Crowe] wears the uniform, the accent and the derring-do with consummate panache. Have him strike a muscular pose on the ship's prow, which Weir does more than once, and the manly sight puts that wussy DiCaprio to titanic shame.

But the stuff looks like what it is -- trite imagery grafted over the narrative barrens, like a bad weave on a balding pate.

The result is a picture curiously yet intriguingly at odds with itself: One moment is edgy, the next is not; the cast is terrific, the direction is not; here it’s satirically sharp, there it’s sloppily sentimental; now we’re happily engaged, then we’re cruelly dumped. Some films are electric – Admission settles for alternating current.

The movie's main attraction isn't hard to find. It's essentially a character study, but one where the nature of the study is as unique as the stature of the character.

Ultimately, the result is identical to Mills's debut effort in "Thumbsucker." Once again, clever insight vies with misty-eyed sentimentality, honesty with artifice, real humour with bogus gravity, the genuinely affecting with the merely quirky. But "Thumbsucker" was at least a promising start; Beginners is just a frustrating continuation.

Mainly, though, it's the exquisite restraint - both of Cornish's performance and Campion's direction - that gives the film its power.

It's not the subject matter itself that's offensive -- pedophilia is as worthy a topic of investigation as any other. Instead, it's the subject's non-treatment -- we don't learn a thing that rings true.

In the deck of clichés that is the typical sports movie, it at least does us the courtesy of shuffling the cards a little.

A half-century ago, "kitchen sink realism" began its harsh existence on the British stage and then migrated to the screen where, over the years, the genre has taken up permanent residence, maturing into a gritty art...Now add Andrea Arnold to the directors' list and Fish Tank to the kitchen. It's classic low-rent realism – you can almost smell the grease on the unwashed dishes.

With Hot Fuzz, you'll just have to settle for semi-hilarity.

British humour at its eclectic best, a deliciously heady mix of dry wit and ribald farce.

Reservoir Dogs sizzles - it's dynamite on a short fuse, and you watch it with mesmerized fascination, simultaneously attracted and repelled by the explosion you know will come.

All that's deliberate, but the lingering question is not: Is Melancholia a sly depiction of the end we deserve, or simply a lovely load of bombast? Be prepared to choose one or the other; unless there's an extra moon in tonight's sky, it can't be both.

What completely undermines that appearance is Shankman's chronic inability to shoot the damn scene. His camerawork is so stiff it should be interred in a pine box.

Daughters of the Dust is hypnotic, flowing with the trance-like rhythms of a poem that is beautifully written yet deliberately arcane. It's the cinematic equivalent of the voices you hear in the fiction of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker, but without the connecting narrative thread that most novels possess and most movies imitate. The result is a difficult work, yet a haunting one. [29 May 1992]

Certainly, his (Allen) work here feels effortless, and that feather-light touch gives the picture its charm – modest but real.

Yes, the premise is delightful; no, the delight doesn't last.

This movie is captivating until it gets uplifting – Flight soars when it crashes and crashes when it soars.

All this is as fascinating as it is humbling, even when Herzog ventures a little too far down eccentricity's back alley.

This is where the movie excels. In the classic neo-realist tradition, it's scant in plot yet rich in mood and character, offering us a revealing hint here, a poignant glimpse there, with each revelation filtered through Michelle Williams's superbly muted performance, all the more moving for being so restrained.

Not often does a film double as a literary critic, but this is the Northrop Frye of docs. Essentially, it revises and sharpens the blunted reputation of a great writer.

This ranks among the highest concentrations of acting talent brought to any screen. But let's spare no praise for David Hare, whose superb script draws heavily on his playwrighting skills.

If physical appearance creates its own class system (in high school and beyond), then Qualls is perfect for this proselytizing role. He has that rarest of movie-star faces -- one that over comes the tyranny of beauty.

The wonder is that the film balances its many genres, from the thorns of murder to the bloom of romance to the thickets of politics, with such easy grace.

Easily among the top 10 films made last year.

Everything about The Queen of Versailles, a documentary both sharply observant and deliciously funny, is jumbo-sized – the riches, the rags, his ego, her breasts, their steroidal pursuit of happiness.

In the end, like any satire worth the name, In the Company of Men spins around to fire its biggest salvo at its ultimate target -- the audience.

Loses its momentum just when you'd expect the suspense to mount -- at the competition itself.

The Canadian film "Atanarjuat" travelled back to the past to meet an ancient legend on its own ground and treated the tale realistically. Whale Rider whisks its legend up into the present, and then adds a touch of lyricism.

More humdrum than horrible. It isn't futuristic film noir; it's just everyday film beige.

Are these enlightened critics or dark nutcases themselves?

Despite these advantages, North Dallas Forty's descents into farce and into the lone man versus the corrupt system mentality deprive it of real resonance. It's still not the honest portrait of professional athletics that sport buffs have been waiting for. It is, though, a stylish cut above most films of this type. [4 Aug 1979]