Rick Groen

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]

Observant and funny and thoughtful too, powered exclusively by vérité footage without a word of narration, Babies is William Blake’s Infant Joy brought to rich cinematic life.

No doubt about it, Nobody's Fool is endowed with a lot of cinematic smarts - from the star's poise to the director's wiles to a lambent cameo from the late Jessica Tandy. And those smarts, part trickster's magic and part craftsman's guile, work their transforming art to perfection - seldom has a shallow pool looked so refreshingly deep. [13 Jan 1995]

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.

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.

Take nothing seriously - not the action, not the gore, not the plot, not the theme. Instead, view Desperado as it's meant to be seen - a comedy - and you're in for an unalloyed treat; heck, you're in for one of the funniest flicks of the year.

Consequently, Ephron is forced to shape and integrate the twin halves of the picture, and she does a splendid job - the intercutting is always fluid and never mechanical. Better yet, the script keeps surprising us, setting up stock situations and then pulling away from a stock treatment.

A film where the cast neatly dovetails with the script which perfectly meshes with the direction. In short, a film that works. [5 Aug 1987]

The Long Day Closes is a twice-remarkable film. Once, because director Terence Davies opens his personal bottle of memories and makes them interesting to us. Twice, because, in doing so, he triggers our own memories. [11 June 1993]

In short, Batman is terrific - funny, smart and sensitive too, the perfect cinematic date.

Heavenly Creatures is a devilishly clever and damnably accurate reflection of that duality - twinning the mystique of adolescence with the mystery of murder, it's a wonderfully natural recording of an awfully unnatural act. [20 Jan 1995]

Even hardened cynics will embrace the cliché – yep, you will laugh, you will cry.

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.

Don't go down this Rabbit Hole unless you wish to see a superb film that treats a sad topic with unflinching honesty. Don't go down this Rabbit Hole unless you believe that tragedy's grief, when transmuted through art's protective lens, can feel liberating, even joyful in its painful truths.

The Shrek franchise is alive and well -- Model 2 is zippier, sleeker, with ever-improving graphics, vast commercial potential and the same sly ability to reach out and hook the whole family.

Before that marvel of human engineering - China's Three Gorges Dam - completes its legacy of human upheaval, there are vanishing sights to be seen.

Hawking is as much a phenomenon as the phenomena he explores. Knowing that, A Brief History Of Time has the deceptive simplicity of an elegant equation - it merely sets up the parallels and permits us to wonder, gazing upon the heavens above and the mysteries within. [28 Aug 1992]

The film takes its cue from the widow, neither sermonizing or even villainizing, content to serve quietly as an admirable exercise in restraint and a moving example of the grace under pressure that is the essence of courage.

In the best picaresque fashion, there's wit here, and irony, love in its many guises, and even a glimpse of transcendent hope. Despite (or maybe because of) the specifically gay characters and themes, the film resonates far beyond its particulars - indeed, in many ways, it goes directly to the divided heart of contemporary, ailing America. [21 Aug 1992]

Sonnenfeld moves things along with alacrity and panache, serving up the exotic visuals quietly, blending in the sprightly humour efficiently, and keeping the mix at a rolling boil.

What an impeccably crafted film this is -- slightly impoverished in theme, perhaps, but so rich everywhere else that it seems rude to notice.

The verdict? Green passes with flying colours -- his is a huge and hugely impressive talent.

The direction may not be flashy, but it is controlled and confident; the frames unfold with a no-nonsense, nuts-and-bolts realism that, in this era of laser-blazing Batplanes, seems downright welcome.

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.

The whole ensemble has a hoot with this material, and their joy is contagious.

This film and Salinger's novel differ greatly in the details of narrative and character. Yet, there's no mistaking the similarity in tone and sensibility and, particularly, in the capacity to split an audience into warring camps fighting on shared ground.

No, the film may not be quite as luminous as the cast, but it's good - very good, in fact.