Rick Groen

As the end credits are rolling: What happened? Suddenly, the film stalls, and everything that looked great -- the mechanics of the caper, the grafted-on wit and wisdom -- starts to feel repetitious and a tad gimmicky.

An overdose of sympathy makes for a wispy picture, likeable certainly but lacking in crispness and clarity.

So the questions arises: Why bother watching the contrived fiction when the eye-popping fact is readily available? Answer: Why, indeed.

The comedy is warm and witty and wafer-thin, as easy on the palate as a raspberry sorbet on a summer afternoon.

In the end, is In America slight in its sentimentality and manipulative in its moral? Sure, but that's the job of any fable or myth.

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]

A remarkable documentary as important as it is compelling.

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.

This much is inarguable: In the more than two flamboyant hours of Across the Universe, Julie Taymor doesn't cheat us for a single second.

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.

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.

Ultimately, Shine a Light is illuminating indeed, even fascinating, but not in the way Scorsese intended. What he has created, inadvertently, is an invaluable documentation of semi-fossilized Stones – musicologists may like it, sociologists should love it and, some distant day, anthropologists will treasure it.

Because the society in Menace II Society is boxed in sociologically, the picture (for all its strengths) is boxed in esthetically. Already, this genre is beginning to seem as much a victim as the victims it portrays.

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.

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

A powerful, brutal, funny, tragic, vibrant, very human movie.

A splatter of scenes that relocate the funny-bone in the lower anatomical regions -- sometimes hitting the mark, occasionally a glancing blow, often missing completely.

The climax, however, is far superior here, open-ended and ambiguous and neatly linked to this film's recurring metaphor: Teeth, of course, which "outlast everything," which survive the death of the body just as marriage can survive the demise of love. They both endure, yellowed and rootless.

Because of its patently commercial instincts, this is basically a black knock-off of a popular genre. Yet, despite those instincts, and despite the sophomoric moralizing, the movie has zest. The edges are sharp; it holds our attention by holding on to the vestiges of its unique black perspective. In that sense, House Party doesn't so much sell out as buy in - there are worse faults. [11 May 1990]

The Usual Suspects filled me with a highly unusual urge - to be a true "reviewer," to rewind the projector and figure out this humdinger once and for all.