Rick Groen

De Bont knows how to edit a pulse-pounding sequence, he knows how to keep the screen white-hot, and he sure knows how to blow things up real good. What he doesn't know is how to slow down - this premise is perfect for him.

There's plenty of humour in Comedian but not a lot of happiness -- apparently, the sad clown is a cliché for good reason.

The well chosen cast helps -- no one strikes a false note.

Upbeat it ain't, but when the light fades from the final frame, there remains something unusual in the Dardennes canon – the possibility of an escape from futility's clutches, and a reason for hope that might, just might, be more than an illusion.

There are many good reasons why the world doesn't need yet another adaptation of the Charlotte Bronte classic. Yet they all pale before the one great reason why it does – the chance to marvel at Wasikowska's performance.

The older John Kerry, today's candidate, is conspicuous both by his absence (he's not interviewed here) and by the contrast between then and now, between the hero he was and the politician he's become. That contrast gives the film a nostalgic yet palpable sadness.

Fun, fun, fun. Take the title at its word, because this movie is nothing less than a flat-out, lung-pumping, 76-minute sprint.

Is Funny Games an unqualified success? No, and for this reason: In order to analyze the devolution of violence into entertainment, the premise obliges the film to superimpose a complicated game atop the genre's simple one – in other words, it makes a game out of the game it condemns.

The film manages the extraordinary feat of forcing us to empathize simultaneously with both the potential victim and the potential villain.

As the title more than hints, Love Is All You Need is no stranger to formulaic clichés, but it’s still a Bier film. There’s a sprinkling of vinegar in the treacle, a bit of ballast in fancy’s lightweight flight, and, of course, the triumph of optimism that can seem unearned in her dramas is made to measure in a comedy.

Crazy, Stupid, Love seems at times like a bunch of movies searching for an identity. Happily, some of them are actually worth watching.

What began as quick and engaging, Hollywood craft at its most proficient, ends as dull and predictable, Hollywood product back in formulaic mode.

A tormented and tormenting man uses violence to break the historic chain of violence, then bequeaths to his loved ones the most precious gift he can give -- his total silence and perpetual absence.

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

Mainly, it's a clever gimmick, cleverly wrought, offering further evidence that you can dress up the student body in all manner of garb for all types of genres.

When Veber is on form there's no one better. And when he's not, well, give The Valet a look anyway -- there's still much to admire.

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

It isn't an exciting work of art so much as a contemplative reverie on the nature of art -- and what's wrong with a smart essay that unfolds like a sweet dream?

Both smart and shrewd -- it wraps that same comforting message in a thoroughly entertaining package.

This picture will linger, stuck in those corners of the mind you may not care to visit, where the stranger you meet lies in the bed beside you, or stares back from the mirror before you, and where the comfort offered is nothing but cold. [14 June 1991]

Occasionally, Rees's script seems to mimic Alike's poetry, and fall into its own slough of earnestness, as the stages of the girl's dawning enlightenment get dutifully ticked off like stations of the cross.

Petersen seems to be holding back, telling us about the liberating power of the imagination but never really showing us. Of course, to show us would be to spoon feed the audience, thereby blunting the message and defeating the point. [20 Jul 1984, p.E9]

The result, Elegy, isn't a great film but it is a good one, and better for Coixet's perspective, her ability to interpret Roth's world from the other side of the gender fence.

A rarity – a political film that delivers its timely message with a cinematic punch and no undue speechifying.

Both the Chicks and this doc are left to deal with the aftermath as best they can. The film chooses to pad with an occasional over-reliance on cutesy filler -- a pregnant Emily having an ultra-sound, giving birth, recuperating at her beloved ranch away from it all.

Director Barbra Streisand does justice to the popular book until the two-thirds mark of the film, whereupon the script abruptly changes from a psychic history to a gauzy romance. A Prince of a movie, until the end. [27 Dec 1991]

If you've got six hours to invest watching superior television in a movie theatre, then spend the time wisely with The Best of Youth.

In truth, what follows is less disturbing than intriguing – to audiences hip to the mechanics of horror flicks, it's rare fun to be fooled, and this one is pretty damned clever.

Dull moments, so much the rule in most genre comedies, are the exception in Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- it does run long, but it mainly rollicks.

Rising above its flaws, Internal Affairs converts a genre flick into a generic study, an examination of the mean streets that even the healthiest mind travels, those dark alleys where our force is sometimes overworked and always understaffed, the places where we, too, must police ourselves. [13 Jan 1990]

Not surprisingly, prison must be the perfect incubator of sadness and anger, because every one of the “performances” is astonishingly vivid. At the extremes of the emotional spectrum, at least, these guys are brilliant.

Young and bold and bristling with talent, Argentine director Lucrecia Martel has continued right where she left off in her feature debut.

At first startling, even disengaging, that strange style eventually dovetails with the awful substance.

As a captivating bauble, a tribute to a romantic legend, Don Juan DeMarco shines. But as an exercise in performing artistry, a gift from a living legend and an heir apparent, it positively glitters.

The embodiment of the very message it so modestly conveys -- it's the accomplished little guy we fervently root for.

In the end, cast and audience are having such fun that it seems almost mingy to complain when the church, lacking a foundation, collapses under the weight of its own cleverness.

A movie deeply immersed in movie lore, and the more seasoned the swimmer the richer the experience.

Solondz has finally made a movie that isn't just offensive -- it also happens to be good. He's still shouting, still violating our politically correct sensibilities, but the shocks now have thematic purpose. They don't just titillate, they resonate.

As returns go, Return To Paradise falls short of heavenly, but it does get to the stars -- at least three of them.

For all the undeniable merits, it somehow feels manufactured, and thus, to a degree, calculated - the product not of a collective imagination taking esthetic chances, but of an imaginative collective putting the rivets into a well-wrought plan that can't go awry.

You can’t feel for anyone when nothing feels real. Memo to Christopher Nolan for future outings: Kill the dream, tell a story.

Without Kristin Scott Thomas, I've Loved You So Long would be a watchable but hardly a memorable movie. With her, it's both - she so fully inhabits the character that everyone and everything around her are simply enhanced.

I meant what I said And I said what I meant A flick pretty faithful 'Bout 80 per cent.

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.

Most of this is bald, and very funny; some of it is witty, and even funnier. [14 Dec 1988, p.C9]

The only country in the Western world without a universal system – is indeed Sicko. But if that social wound is gapingly obvious, so is this documentary.

Despite a formidable effort and occasional grace, there's something cowardly about Braveheart -- it's an aspiring giant with a diminutive soul.

You may well watch this film and not buy into a single frame. Me, I couldn't help myself.

Jacob's Ladder is a cheat - but a talented, disturbing, beguiling cheat. We don't know we've been truly had until it's finally over, when the screen fades and the lights rise and we wake up with a start, deliciously unnerved. [2 Nov 1990, p.D3]

It's adapted with charming dispatch from the Dick King-Smith story, and served up by the same CGI wizards who animated the critters in "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Narnia Chronicles."

The dialogue is an occasionally witty cut above the norm, partly because director Greg Berlanti goes easy on those cute baby reaction shots, but mainly because of something rather more valuable: screen chemistry.

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.

The film's quiet realism demands from us our own act of faith: We're asked to watch closely and to listen intently in the promise of a greater reward to come. Well, the promise is partly kept.

Mr. Holland's Opus is all heart. I suppose a brain cell or two might have helped to win over laggards such as me, but no matter. It sure means well and, in a note-perfect world, strikes its basic chords with a naif's true conviction. [19 Jan 1996]

The devil may wear Prada, but Meryl wears the crown.

Delightful as it often is, the picture suffers fom the same structural and thematic tidiness, even smugness, that it nominally opposes.

Remove the comma from the title and Love, Marilyn plays like the command it is.

A mature biopic as entertaining as it is timely.

An entertaining oddity, an amiably black comedy whose bared teeth double as an engaging smile: It takes a satiric bite and leaves you laughing through the pain.

It's light, it's bright and it succeeds precisely where the lesser doc fails -- by setting modest targets and hitting them square on.

Pick your cliche - searing, rivetting, haunting - Keitel delivers a performance to rival Brando's in "Last Tango In Paris."

I doubt that Jean-Michel Basquiat would have endorsed the subtitle. Indeed, The Radiant Child seems to inflate the very cliché that the rest of this film is keen to refute.

For those who like their horror served straight up with no ironic chaser, The Descent is a tasty cup of torment.

Says the actor Jeff Bridges, a long-time and articulate soldier in the campaign against hunger: “It’s a problem that our government is ashamed of acknowledging. We’re in denial.”

Reserved yet still suspenseful and hugely ambitious, Syriana sets out to prove what many have come to suspect -- that oil money is the root of all contemporary evil.

Just when the movie seems set to soar, there's a drag factor -- it keeps getting weighed down, if not sunk, by an anchor of ponderousness.

For the kids, the action is always lively and, for the rest of us, the dialogue has a witty and even caustic edge.

Despite its hastily tacked-on resolution, Mississippi Masala is still a lesson well delivered - flecked with humour and never pedantic. [28 Feb 1992]

Sometimes, when you least expect it, Hollywood is so Hollywood good, serving up a flick guaranteed to answer the clarion call of the multitudes. "I just want to be entertained," you say? Well, fork out then, because The Italian Job does the job.

Despite acting under the computer-generated encumbrances of that monkey tail and those centaur legs, Delphine Chanéac does something remarkable with Dren – she makes her a disturbingly sexy thing.

There's much to observe – for example, the thoroughly credible performances of the cast, most of them non-professionals.

What a strange and strangely compelling movie this is.

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.

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.

Kick-Ass is some kind of twisted fun.

What is it that sets this film apart from assembly-line animation - all the bright baubles that are momentarily diverting and instantly forgotten (Rock-A-Doodle is a recent example)? The most obvious, and important, difference is the story line itself. FernGully has the deceptive simplicity of all good fables. [18 Apr 1992]

This broad farce about a group of soap-opera stars is played at a hysterical pitch, but there are some real chuckles amid the mayhem. [31 May 1991]

Frankly, with so much to feast my dazzled eyes upon, I barely noticed that the plot was missing in action. And that's because the action itself is so pure.

Has a refreshingly different twist: What we have here is a "what if" comedy.

Quite consciously, Sprecher has dramatized that wry riff from Frank Zappa: "Life is high school with money." [12 Jun 1988, p.C3]

You don’t need to root for the best movies and you don’t want to root for the worst. But, occasionally, along comes a picture so nearly good that you dearly wish it were better. Welcome to She’s Out of My League, where the rooting interest is strong but so is the frustration.

This is a mannered comedy, more stylized and theatrical, almost surreal at times, and less accommodating to his trademark brand of razor-sharp dialogue.

Everything you've come to expect, and cherish, in a Mike Leigh movie.

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.

Waydowntown may not be perfect, but it is perfectly astute in the target it selects and in the questions it raises.

It's perfectly admirable, absolutely controlled, and fully understandable. [09 Oct 1992]

Breakdown is a taut little thriller, the kind of well-crafted yarn that sets itself attainable goals and then meets them.

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.

The movie doesn't have the heart of the book, but it does have a solid mechanical pump, strong enough at least to keep a robust story on two-hour life support.

Certainly long and not always engaging and comes with a predictably basic ending, yet there are unexpected pleasures, moments of beauty and tiny pockets of joy to sustain you through the journey.

A masterly piece of documentary chicanery that kills George W. Bush without once pandering to his legions of ill-wishers.

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.

With his breathy, antic delivery, pouring out his heart in staccato bursts, Cusack puts a nice loop on the sensitive teen theme. For his is an upbeat, mature brand of sensitivity, the healthy kind that makes fine discriminations, not nasty judgments.

Whether the film is uniquely brilliant or dismissively dumb is not the issue here. Either choice can (and will) be offered – it’s the choosing that counts.

No, this isn't the Care Bears. But it is a compelling yarn, in a Grimm sort of way, a throwback to a time when storytellers felt freer to tap the emotional currents that run deep and often dark in all children, and when the stories themselves formed a moral maze that trusted the kids to find their own way home.

Unfortunately, as the phone battery wears down, the plot's theatrics heat up to pot-boiling degrees of incredulity – a senile mother, a vicious personnel director, even a coiled serpent, all vie to raise the ante. Talk about your bad day.

If you long for the bleak intelligence of an Ingmar Bergman film, where humankind is deeply flawed and God is indifferently silent and the landscape is cloaked in perpetual winter, then Beyond the Hills promises to be your cup of despair.

Beijing Bicycle is a good film that owes a huge debt to a better film. And that, of course, is Vittorio De Sica's "The Bicycle Thief."