Rick Groen

There's a line near the end of Without Limits that's meant to sum up the tragic flaw of the movie's hero: "He insisted on holding himself to a higher standard than victory." The same might be said of the movie itself, which refuses to adhere to the basic success formula of the sports bio-pic -- the familiar arc that moves from early success through character-forming struggle to eventual triumph. [25 Sep 1998, p.D9]

Postcards From The Edge, is long on witty one-liners but woefully short on coherent structure. [13 Sep 1990, p.C5]

The considerable charm of Mad Hot Ballroom can be traced directly to its choice of subjects. They happen to be 11-year old kids, and the lens loves every precious one of them.

Bronson is one of those “based on a true story” dramatizations where the theatrically staged drama only gets in the way of the more interesting truth.

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

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

Separate Lies is deceptive in more ways than it intends. Because the acting is so uniformly superb, we're almost fooled into believing that the movie is as good as the cast. It isn't, not by half.

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.

Mini-gems of comic editing grace the narrow, claustrophobic world created in Manhattan Murder Mystery. It's a safely escapist film that's vintage - albeit mid-level - Woody Allen. [20 Aug 1993]

What Happens in Vegas should damn well have stayed in Vegas.

What benefits the picture early on, giving it a casual air, becomes cloying in the later going, making it feel like a smug exercise in mutual admiration.

This is a film that dearly wants to be important, that wants to do for Holland what Irene Nemirovsky's "Suite Française" does for France - examine the German occupation through a prism of painful honesty. Yet the lofty ambition comes dressed in cheap attire; Verhoeven can't seem to stop himself from shopping downmarket.

A cinematic homage as flawed as its subject. Flawed, yet with a peculiar fascination of its own -- what we have is a genuine artist paying sincere tribute to an unapologetic mediocrity, and stooping awkwardly to the task.

A jagged slice of life, What Happened Was ... converts an ordinarily clumsy date into an extraordinarily touching encounter, without the aid of melodrama and with no loss in credibility. For us no less than the star-crossed characters, it's a leap into a shallow end that turns perilously deep. [30 Sep 1994]

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

A Perfect World is perfect indeed - for the initial 15 minutes. After that, the fault-lines start to emerge, widening, widening, until the thing cracks open and falls apart. [24 Nov 1993]

The result is infotainment dressed up as an art flick. Turkish society is fascinatingly complex and its East/West tensions give rise not to easy allegories but to hard ambiguities. To explore that truth, read any novel by Orhan Pamuk. To escape it, watch Bliss.

The picture is as tastefully pretty as its girls, and just as motionless.

Into the West has its admirable side - it tries oh-so-hard to be a healthy treat for the whole family, and never plies us with cheap sentimentality. [01 Oct 1993]

Bolstered by a solid premise, this film starts out impressively enough - it looks to be a worthy character study. But it soon stops dead, wheels spinning badly, and then, hungry for momentum, lurches off in a completely cockeyed direction. [16 Oct 1992]

The Last Circus is a bizarre, surreal, grotesque, fascinating, demanding, disappointing and ultimately exhausting political allegory that plays like a waking nightmare.

Individually, Dawson and Cassel each generate plenty of screen heat, but, together in that one bedroom scene, their chemistry is downright explosive, so much so that it seems we have strayed into a whole different movie, and dearly want to stay there.

The ethical fallout, the lingering fog of the so-called war on terror, is not that people don't know what's wrong or who's guilty - it's precisely that they do, and count it as the cost of doing business.

Ushpizin takes us to a fascinating place, and hands out the sort of brochure that tourists always need but seldom get -- the charming kind, fun to ponder and rewarding to browse.

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

Well-acted, nicely shot, slick and certainly sexy, Swimming Pool may be all foreplay and no climax, but what the heck -- there are worse ways to be teased.

The film is an unremarkable exercise in craft dedicated to a thoroughly remarkable artist – the tale is sublime, the telling only serviceable.

Watching this, we should feel an immense amount, but don't, and somehow, decades after this horrible event, that void only seems to compound the tragedy.