Roger Ebert

Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert are called on to play characters whose instincts are wholly different from their own. By succeeding, they make their characters real, instead of stereotypes.

It's a bleakly funny parable that could be titled "Between Enemy Lines."

So good in so many of its parts that there's a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance.

An enormously entertaining movie, like nothing we've ever seen before, and yet completely familiar.

It provides the most observant study of working journalists we're ever likely to see in a feature film. And it succeeds brilliantly in suggesting the mixture of exhilaration, paranoia, self-doubt, and courage that permeated the Washington Post as its two young reporters went after a presidency.

This is the most bizarre comedy in many a month, a movie so dark, so cynical and so funny that perhaps only Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner could have kept straight faces during the love scenes. They do.

The movie is like a low-rent version of the rock concert documentaries that would follow.

Only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling landscape...Alone among science-fiction movies, 2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.

Cannonball Run II is one of the laziest insults to the intelligence of moviegoers that I can remember. Sheer arrogance made this picture.

(1) Shot for shot, Maddin can be as surprising and delightful as any filmmaker has ever been, and (2) he is an acquired taste, but please, sir, may I have some more?

All great farces need a certain insane focus, an intensity that declares how important they are to themselves. This movie is too confident, too relaxed, too clever to be really funny. And yet, when the cowboys sit around their campfire singing a sad lament and then their horses join in, you see where the movie could have gone.

Movies like this demonstrate that when it comes to stupidity and vulgarity, only the best will do for our children.

The film is visually masterful. It's in black and white, of course.

The most unconventional biopic I've ever seen, and one of the best.

Maybe the movie has too much coherence, and the plot is too predictable; that's a weakness of films based on well-made Broadway plays. Still, that's hardly a serious complaint about something as funny as Play It Again, Sam.

The film is intended for family audiences. It is so gentle and whimsical that one wonders if American children, accustomed to the whiz-bang action of most animation, will accept it. Maybe there would be hope for the younger ones - but what will they make of the subtitles?

If you are squeamish, here is the film to make you squeam.

Oslo, August 31st is quietly, profoundly, one of the most observant and sympathetic films I've seen.

This film leads to a startling conclusion that wipes out the story's paradoxes so neatly it's as if it never happened. You have to grin at the ingenuity of Johnson's screenplay.

I'm giving the movie a high rating for its skill and professionalism and because it does the job it says it will do. I am also advising you not to eat before you go to see it.

Brando doesn't so much walk through this movie as coast, in a gassy, self-indulgent performance no one else could have gotten away with.

The movie does a harrowing job of showing how, and why, a man might be made to confess to a bombing he didn't commit.

Ballast inexorably grows and deepens and gathers power and absorbs us. I always say I hardly ever cry at sad films, but I sometimes do, just a little, at films about good people.

It is refreshing to see Cruz acting in the culture and language that is her own. As it did with Sophia Loren in the 1950s, Hollywood has tried to force Cruz into a series of show-biz categories, when she is obviously most at home playing a woman like the ones she knew, grew up with, could have become.

Not a bad movie, although it could have been better. It isn't flat-out silly like "Troy," its actors look at home as their characters, and director Antoine Fuqua curtails the use of computer effects in the battle scenes, which involve mostly real people.

The interesting thing is that Hiller has saved the movie without substantially changing anything in the book.

The movie crackles with energy and life, and with throwaway slang dialogue by Mamet, who takes realistic speech patterns and simplifies them into a kind of hammer-and-nail poetry.

The Bad News Bears is, in a way, [Ritchie's] most harrowing portrait of how we'd sometimes rather win than keep our self-respect. He directs scenes for comedy even in the face of his disturbing material and that makes the movie all the more effective; sometimes we laugh, and sometimes we can't, and the movie's working best when we're silent.