Rita Kempley

The experience overall is like laughing down a gun barrel, a little bit tiring, a lot sick and maybe far too perverse for less jaded moviegoers.

Writer Rupert Walters's episodic narrative is decidedly corny—especially the later chapters—and yes, it's as creaky as old bones. But its weaknesses are offset by the film's elaborate re-creation of plague-ridden London.

A ruthlessly unsentimental portrait of a German war profiteer's epiphany that inspires neither sorrow nor pity, but a kind of emotional numbness.

With its droll underpinnings, Robocop does for cyborgs and Detroit what "Blade Runner" did for androids and L.A.

A tour de force so haunting that other films can't exorcise the memory of its radiant cast, exquisite craftsmanship or complex system of metaphors. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a movie.

This engrossing mystery-comedy peeks through the keyholes of the rich and infamous in a manner both droll and delicious.

A documentary as compelling as the best whodunit.

A magnificent melodrama that draws both tears and laughter from the everyday give-and-take of seemingly ordinary souls.

With its spectacular scenery, stupefying effects and epic scope, is a dream come true.

One of the smartest, most inventive movies in memory, it manages to be as endearing as it is provocative.

Director Jonathan Demme has nailed one with this playful, but dangerous, gangster farce.

Star Wars had all the right stuff, and unlike its confounding progenitor, "2001: A Space Odyssey," it was fairy-tale simple: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," good met evil. [Special Edition]

Though lovely to behold, this film isn't meant to send you home with a song in your heart.

A wonderfully acted, heartwarming family film, it suffers from a goopy score, but not in the least from its potentially stalemated subject matter. Zaillian can make a chess tournament look like the Threepeat.

This wonderfully acted romance brings the touching fantasy "Truly, Madly, Deeply" to mind.

It spins its wheels in a giddy sort of way, then puts the pedal to the mettle, lays rubber and fairly takes wing.

Yentl is Streisand. Either you like her or you don't. And if a little Streisand means a lot, then a lot is what you've got. [09 Dec 1983, p.25]

The suspense drama is based on real-life military monkey tests, and it's as unabashedly political as "Silkwood" and unashamedly sentimental as "Lassie Come Home." Yet it remains taut and resists the temptation to paint the villains too broadly.

It's a richly appointed production that's hard to take seriously since the monks all look vaguely like Marty Feldman.

Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants is more than his wartime memoir; it is an epitaph to innocence.

Merchant and Ivory have regathered many of the cast and crew from their earlier films to work on this reproduction to exquisite effect.

Diverting and provides a satisfying alternative to teen-oriented summer comedy.

The brothers, who have always seemed fond of their characters, have never taken quite so overt a stand for life's simple joys.

Dustin Hoffman's on a roll in Tootsie, a role-reversal movie that plays like the flip side of "Victor/Victoria." Hoffman may be dressed as a woman, but this film is no drag. [17 Dec 1982, p.19]

Armstrong applies a dusting of contemporary feminism, but the stubborn sentimentalism of Alcott's endearing family portrait endures. [21 Dec 1994]

Amadeus isn't meant to be a biography of the composer's life, but a bawdy, black fantasy, a fiction based on a few curious facts. [21 Sep 1984, p.23]

A flurry of stunts, close shaves and deeds of desperate daring, it easily transcends its television origins to become a stylish pacemaker-buster.

Sinbad, one of show business's sunniest souls, brings much-needed buoyancy to this somewhat soggy tale of kindred spirits. [30 Aug 1996, p.F06]