Roger Ebert

Alda gives the film's strongest performance. Kinnear, often a player of light comedy, does a convincing job of making this quiet, resolute man into a giant slayer.

The film chronicles their criminal career in a low-key, meandering way; we're hanging out with them more than we're being told a story.

The director's cut adds footage that enriches and extends the material but doesn't alter its tone. It adds footnotes that count down to a deadline, but without explaining the nature of the deadline or the usefulness of the countdown.

[Stone] gives us provocative notes and sketches but not a final draft. The film doesn't feel at ease with itself. It says too much, and yet leaves too much unsaid.

Evolution aside, there are some wonderful images in Aliens of the Deep, even if the crew members say how much they love their jobs about six times too often.

Highlander 2: The Quickening is the most hilariously incomprehensible movie I've seen in many a long day - a movie almost awesome in its badness.

Even with Cecil B. Demented, which fails on just about every level, you've got to hand it to him (Waters): The idea for the film is kind of inspired.

The movie as a whole lacks the conviction of a real story. It is more like a lush morality play, too leisurely in its storytelling, too sure of its morality.

The movie plays like the kind of line a rich older guy would lay on a teenage model,suppressing his own intelligence and irony in order to spread out before her the wonderful world he would like to give her as a gift.

There is a lack of drama and telling detail. When events happen, they seem more like set pieces than part of the flow.

Movies like this are not for everyone, but arrive like private messages for their own particular audiences.

The strength of the thriller genre is that it provides stories with built-in energy and structure. The weakness is that thrillers often seem to follow foreseeable formulas. Frears and his writer, Steve Knight, use the power of the thriller and avoid the weaknesses in giving us, really, two movies for the price of one.

The thing about Godspell that caught my heart was its simplicity, its refusal to pretend to be anything more than it is. It's not a message for our times, or a movie to cash in on the Jesus movement, or even quite a youth movie. It's a series of stories and songs, like the Bible is, and it's told with the directness that simple stories need: with no tricks, no intellectual gadgets, and a lot of openness.

The film has the obnoxious tone of a boring home movie narrated by a guy shouting in your ear.

"Deep Rising" was one of the worst movies of 1998. Virus is easily worse.

Drugstore Cowboy is one of the best films in the long tradition of American outlaw road movies - a tradition that includes "Bonnie and Clyde," "Easy Rider," "Midnight Cowboy" and "Badlands."

This is a film that is affirming and inspiring and re-creates the stories of a remarkable team and its coach.

Sentimental without being corny, a tearjerker with dignity. The Great Santini is a movie to seek out and to treasure.

One of those rare movies that's not only based on a comic book, but also feels like a comic book. It's vibrating with energy, and you can sense the zeal and joy in its making.

This is not great comedy, and Wayans doesn't find ways to build and improvise, as Carrey does.

Eddie Murphy looks like the latest victim of the Star Magic Syndrome, in which it is assumed that a movie will be a hit simply because it stars an enormously talented person. Thus it is not necessary to give much thought to what he does or says, or to the story he finds himself occupying.

Batman & Robin, like the first three films in the series, is wonderful to look at, and has nothing authentic at its core.

The De-Dee character subverts those expectations; she shoots the legs out from under the movie with perfectly timed zingers.

This is the Batman movie I've been waiting for; more correctly, this is the movie I did not realize I was waiting for, because I didn't realize that more emphasis on story and character and less emphasis on high-tech action was just what was needed. The movie works dramatically in addition to being an entertainment. There's something to it.

What I like about the movie is its combination of suspense and intelligence. If it does not quite explain exactly how decryption works (how could it?), it at least gives us a good idea of how decrypters work, and we understand how crucial Bletchley was -- so crucial its existence was kept a secret for 30 years.

A long, flat, curiously muted film about the heavyweight champion. It lacks much of the flash, fire and humor of Muhammad Ali and is shot more in the tone of a eulogy than a celebration. There is little joy here.

The Island runs 136 minutes, but that's not long for a double feature. The first half of Michael Bay's new film is a spare, creepy science fiction parable, and then it shifts into a high-tech action picture. Both halves work.

Easy Money is an off-balance and disjointed movie, but that's sort of okay, since it's about an off-balance and disjointed kinda guy. The credits call him Monty Capuletti, but he is clearly Rodney Dangerfield, gloriously playing himself as the nearest thing we are likely to get to W.C. Fields in this lifetime.

There is a line and this movie crosses it. I don't know where the line is, but it's way north of Wolf Creek. There is a role for violence in film, but what the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty?

The movie, written and directed by Dylan Kidd, depends on its dialogue, and like a film by David Mamet or Neil LaBute has characters who use speech like an instrument. The screenplay would be entertaining just to read, as so very few are.

Watching it, you feel like an eyewitness to injustice.

Bound by Honor contains some effective performances, some moments of deeply felt truth, and a portrait of prison life that I assume is accurate. What seems to be missing is a clear idea of why the movie was made, and what the director, Taylor Hackford, wanted to say with it.

I don't know what vast significance Michael Clayton has (it involves deadly pollution but isn't a message movie). But I know it is just about perfect as an exercise in the genre.

At the end we are left with the reflection that human consciousness is the great miracle of evolution, and all the rest (sight, sound, taste, hearing, smell, touch) are simply a toolbox that consciousness has supplied for itself.

A modest, cheerful little movie like Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo is so refreshing. Here is a movie that wants nothing more than to allow some high-spirited kids to sing and dance their way through a silly plot just long enough to make us grin.

The material might have promise as a black comedy, but its attempt to put on a smiling face is unconvincing.

Still Bill is about a man who topped the charts, walked away from it all in 1985 and is pleased that he did.

Seems Like Old Times is another one of those near-misses that leaves a movie critic in a quandary. It's a funny movie, and it made me laugh out loud a lot, but in the final analysis it just didn't quite edge over the mystical line into success.

The movie gets a little confused toward the end, I think, as its writer and director, Lea Pool, tries to settle things that could have been left unresolved.

The problem is that the material's stretched too thin. There's not enough here to fill a feature-length film.

This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination.

Kevin Kline's performance shows a deep understanding of the character, who is, after all, better than most teachers, and most men. We care for him, not because he is perfect, but because he regrets so sincerely that he is not.

The concept is inspired. The execution is lame. Anger Management, a film that might have been one of Adam Sandler's best, becomes one of Jack Nicholson's worst.

Big Top Pee-wee is as guileless and cheerful as Pee-wee’s first movie, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, but it’s not as magical. It has too much plot, somehow, and not enough wide-eyed discovery in which everything is new to Pee-wee every moment of his life. He seems almost from Earth in this movie.

How can you make a movie about a man who cannot change, whose whole life is anchored and defended by routine? Few actors could get anywhere with this challenge, and fewer still could absorb and even entertain us with their performance, but Hoffman proves again that he almost seems to thrive on impossible acting challenges.

If quirky, independent, grown-up outsider filmmakers set out to make a family movie, this is the kind of movie they would make. And they did.

The problem with Die, Mommie, Die, a drag send-up of the genre, is that it spoils the fun by making it obvious.

It's awkward, not because of the subject matter, but because of the contrasting acting styles. Here are two men trying to communicate in a touchy area and they behave as if they're from different planets.

The movie doesn't work. It meanders and drifts and riffs.

LaBute's "Your Friends and Neighbors'' is to "In the Company of Men'' as Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction'' was to "Reservoir Dogs.'' In both cases, the second film reveals the full scope of the talent, and the director, given greater resources, paints what he earlier sketched.

Mulan is an impressive achievement, with a story and treatment ranking with "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King."

Part 2 seems even more like a Stallone vehicle than the first movie. I'm not even sure it's intended as a comedy. It's filled wall to wall with the kind of routine action and violence that Hollywood extrudes by the yard and shrink-wraps to order.

Unlike any other film I have seen about the Holocaust.

I know Letters to Juliet is a soppy melodrama, and I don’t mind in the least. I know the ending is preordained from the setup. I know the characters are broad and comforting stereotypes. In this case, I simply don’t care. Sometimes we have personal reasons for responding to a film.

Skillfully made, but it's not necessary...On the other hand, should you see it, the time will pass pleasantly.

Coffy is slightly more serious and a little more inventive than it needs to be.

Nobody laughed. One or two people cried, and a lady behind me dropped a bag of M&Ms which rolled under the seats, and a guy on the center aisle sneezed at 43 minutes past the hour. But that was about all the action.

Movies like this renew my faith that the future of the cinema lies not in the compromises of digital projection, but by leaping over the limitations of digital into the next generation of film technology.

It doesn't have that sneaky sense of awful things about to happen. Scott makes the hero so rational, normal and self-possessed that we never feel he's in real danger; we go through this movie with too much confidence.

So concerned with being a film that it forgets to be a movie.

We've seen this done before, but seldom so well, or at such a high pitch of energy.

A typical Kitano film in many ways, but not one of his best ones. Too many of the killing scenes have a casual, perfunctory tone.

All of the elements are here for a movie I would probably enjoy very much, but somehow they never come together.

Unlike "Saving Private Ryan" and other dramatizations based on D-Day, Overlord is an intimate film, one that focuses closely on Tom Beddoes (Brian Stirner), who enters the British army, goes through basic training and is one of the first ashore on D-Day. (Reviewed in 2004)

What Raising Arizona needs more than anything else is more velocity. Here's a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it's worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced.

Gibson, as director, doesn't give himself a soppy speech explaining why he doesn't say them. He lets us figure it out. That is the essence of the story and, we eventually realize, the essence of teaching, too.

The movie does not have a conventional happy ending. Life will go on, and people will strive, and new routines will replace old ones. The movie has no villains and few heroes. But it has given us several remarkable scenes, especially two confrontations between Madigan and Hackman, one in a bar, the other at a wedding rehearsal, in which the movie shows how much children expect from their parents, and how little the parents often have to give.

Endless, pointless and ridiculous, right up to the final shot of the knife going through the cockroach. This movie is desperately bankrupt of imagination and wit, and Tom Selleck looks adrift in it.

A movie that seems consumed with a desire to push us too far. This movie is so far beyond good taste, and so cheerfully beyond, that we almost feel we're being One-Upped if we allow ourselves to be offended.

Beresford is able to move us, one small step at a time, into the hearts of his characters. He never steps wrong on his way to a luminous final scene in which we are invited to regard one of the most privileged mysteries of life, the moment when two people allow each other to see inside.

Sometimes movies tire us by trying too relentlessly to pound us with their brilliance and energy. Here is a movie pitched at about the energy level of a coffee break. That the people are oddly assorted and sometimes very strange is not so very unusual, considering some of the conversations you overhear in Starbucks.

What Campion does is seek visual beauty to match Keats' verbal beauty. There is a shot here of Fanny in a meadow of blue flowers that is so enthralling it beggars description.

This is a rare thriller that's as much character study as sound and fury.

It is straightforward, heartfelt and genuine.

This is a bitter, sour movie about two people who are only marginally interesting.

There is a terrifying moment in adolescence when suddenly some of the kids are twice as big as the rest of the kids. It is terrifying for everybody: For the kids who are suddenly tall and gangling, and for the kids who are still small and are getting beat up all the time. My Bodyguard places that moment in a Chicago high school and gives us a kid who tries to think his way out of it.

This stuff is so concocted I had no business caring about it. But I did, because of Bullock.

The cast is excellent because it understands the material, and sympathizes with it: James Stewart, as the doctor, and Lauren Bacall, as the widow, play scenes with Wayne that absolutely make us forget we're watching a movie.

Feels uncomfortably stage-managed, and raises fundamental questions that it simply ignores.

There is anguish here that makes "American Beauty" pale by comparison.

I was not bored during A Good Man in Africa. Just uncomfortable, as the characters thrashed about in search of a purpose.

It portrays an unpleasant situation and then treats it with sitcom tactics. Either the humor should have been angrier and more hard-edged, or the filmmakers should have backed away from the situation altogether.

A smart film with an edge to it.

The Wild Bunch is one of the great defining moments of modern movies.

Here is a bold, beautiful, visually enchanting musical where we walk INTO the theater humming the songs.

Tucker's scenes finally wear us down. How can a movie allow him to be so obnoxious and make no acknowledgment that his behavior is aberrant?

What makes the film work is the underlying validity of the story, the way the filmmakers don’t simply go for melodrama and laughs, but pay these characters their due. At the end of the film, I was a little surprised how much I cared for them.

It's one of the best films of the year.

Imagine the forges of hell crossed with the extraterrestrial saloon on Tatooine, and you have a notion of Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

Movies like this can be insufferable if they lay it on too thick. The Boy Who Can Fly finds just about the right balance between its sunny message and the heartbreak that's always threatening to prevail.

A perfectly sound biopic, well directed and acted, about an admirable woman. It confirmed for me Earhart's courage -- not only in flying, but in insisting on living her life outside the conventions of her time for well-behaved females. The next generation of American women grew up in her slipstream.

An utterly meaningless waste of time...It is a dead zone, a film without interest, wit, imagination or even entertaining violence and special effects.

It's based on some DC Comics characters, which may explain the way the plot jumps around. We hear a lot about graphic novels, but this is more of a graphic anthology of strange occult ideas.

Great Balls of Fire gives us a Jerry Lee Lewis who has been sanitized, popularized and lobotomized. Even then, the story ends in 1959 - before most of the events for which "The Killer" became notorious.

The humor comes from the contrast between Elling's prim value system, obviously reflecting his mother's, and Kjell's shambling, disorganized, good-natured assault on life. If Felix and Oscar had been Norwegian, they might have looked something like this.

It's one of those films where you feel the authority right away: This movie knows its characters, knows its story, and knows exactly how it wants to tell us about them.

Like an Astaire and Rogers musical, this is a movie you don't go to for the dialogue.

This movie is not a collection of parts from other films. It's an original, and what it does best is show how strangers can become friends, and friends can become like family.

It's easy to like the movie because we like the actors in it, and because the movie makes it easy on us and has charming moments. But it feels too much like an exercise. It's yuppie lite--affluent, articulate people who, except for those who are ill, have problems that are almost pleasant.

This is one of the best movies of the year.

The real reason to see this movie, though, is because it makes a big yacht race seem so glorious, such grand adventure. Ballard is a former cinematographer with a knack for visualizing the outdoors.

The screenplay by Jim McGlynn, which plays a little like something Eastwood might have made, is subtle and observant; there aren't big plot points, but lots of little ones, and the plot allows us the delight of figuring out the scams. [25 Apr 1997]

In a movie with the energy of this one, we're exhilarated by the sheer freedom of movement; the violence becomes surrealistic and less important than the movie's underlying energy level.

On the basis of this film, Monty Lapica, at 24, has a career ahead of him as a director, an actor or both. He also has a life ahead of him, which the film does a great deal to make clear.

About as good as a movie with these characters can probably be, and I am well aware that I am the wrong audience for this movie.

A rambling, undisciplined, sometimes embarrassing failure from one of the most gifted comic filmmakers around.

Would be a mindless action picture, except that it has a mind. It doesn't do a lot of deep thinking, but unlike many futuristic combos of sf and f/x, it does make a statement:

Mel Brooks will do anything for a laugh. Anything. He has no shame. He's an anarchist; his movies inhabit a universe in which everything is possible and the outrageous is probable, and Silent Movie, where Brooks has taken a considerably stylistic risk and pulled it off triumphantly, made me laugh a lot.

This is one of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema.

As pure movie, The X-Files more or less works. As a story, it needs a sequel, a prequel, and Cliff Notes.

The Mephisto Waltz, which is inferior to "Rosemary's Baby" on all sorts of fundamental levels like direction, photography and acting, is fatally inferior in its understanding of the supernatural. If a horror movie is to be taken seriously, it has to pretend to take horror seriously. And this one doesn't.

The strength of Leigh's film is that it is not a message picture, but a deep and true portrait of these lives.

This was for me the best film at Cannes 2004, a story vibrating with urgency and life. It makes a powerful statement and at the same time contains humor, charm and astonishing visual beauty.

Exhibiting high spirits and a crazed comic energy. It doesn't quite work, but it goes down swinging--with a disembodied hand.

Shines with a kind of inspired madness.

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.

But if the movie were simply the story of this event, it would be no more than a sad record. What makes it more is the way it shows how racism breeds and feeds, and is taught by father to son.

First reactions while viewing Time Bandits: It's amazingly well-produced. The historic locations are jammed with character and detail. This is the only live-action movie I've seen that literally looks like pages out of Heavy Metal magazine, with kings and swordsmen and wide-eyed little boys and fearsome beasts.

But with a screenplay that developed the story more clearly, this might have been a superior movie, instead of just a good one with some fine performances.

Jogs doggedly on the treadmill of comedy, working up a sweat but not getting much of anywhere.

An astonishingly bad movie, and the most astonishing thing about it comes in the credits: Written by Elaine May, Warren Beatty, Chris Rock, Lance Crouther, Ali LeRoi and Louis CK. These are credits that deserve a place in the Writers Hall of Fame.

The town seems to be as preoccupied as ever with its own personalities and memories, as if it were sitting for its portrait.

A brilliant and absurd film of "Titus Andronicus" that goes over the top, doubles back and goes over the top again.

I started out liking this movie, while waiting for something really interesting to happen. When nothing did, I still didn't dislike it; I assume the X-Men will further develop their personalities if there is a sequel.

A startling documentary.

No director since Fassbinder has been able to evoke such complex emotions with such problematic material.

Benton has made better movies, but this one has no organic reality.

We like these people, which is important, and we are amused by them, which is helpful, but most of all we envy them, because they negotiate their romantic perplexities with such dash and style.

An odd, desperate film, lost in its own audacity, and yet there are passages of surreal beauty and preposterous invention that I have to admire. The film doesn't work, and indeed seems to have no clear idea of what its job is, and yet (sigh) there is the temptation to forgive its trespasses simply because it is utterly, if pointlessly, original.

Man on Wire is about the vanquishing of the towers by bravery and joy, not by terrorism.

Despite jumping through the deliberately disorienting hoops of its story, Eternal Sunshine has an emotional center, and that's what makes it work.

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.

Hard-boiled, filled with action, held together by male camaraderie, directed with a lean economy of action. It's one of the most expensive B-pictures ever made, and I think that helps it fit the subject. "A" war movies are about War, but "B" war movies are about soldiers. (Review of Original Release)

It is also probably relevant that Spacey, in preparing the project, knew something we could not guess: He is a superb pop singer.

I was surprised to find myself seduced by the film’s simple, sweet story, and amused by the sly indications that the Cleavers don’t live in the 1950s anymore.

A conspiracy thriller that begins well and makes good points, but it flies off the rails in the last 30 minutes.

One of those movies that explains too much while it is explaining too little, and leaves us with a surprise at the end that makes more sense the less we think about it. But the movie's mastery of technique makes up for a lot.

Pretty much a mess of a movie; the acting is overwrought, the plot is too tangled to play like anything BUT a plot, and although I know you can create terrific special effects at home in the basement on your computer, the CGI work in this movie looks like it was done with a dial-up connection.

Director Phil Alden Robinson and his writers, Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne, do a spellbinding job of cranking up the tension, they create a portrait of convincing realism, and then they add the other stuff because, well, if anybody ever makes a movie like this without the obligatory Hollywood softeners, audiences might flee the theater in despair.

While the surface of his film sparkles with sharp, ironic dialogue, deeper issues are forming, and Chasing Amy develops into a film of touching insights.

It's sometimes distracting to tell a story in flashbacks and memories; the story line gets sidetracked. The director, Taylor Hackford, is successful, however, in making the present seem to flow into and out of the past.

The movie isn't as funny or entertaining as "Evil Dead II," however, maybe because the comic approach seems recycled.

The movie was produced by Seinfeld, and protects him. The visuals tend toward the dim, the gray and the washed-out, and you wish instead of spending a year with their store-boughts, they'd spent a month and used the leftover to hire a cinematographer.

The movie never convinced me that much chemistry existed between the cop and the ex-con. And, for that matter, I wasn't much moved by Macaulay Culkin's performance as the smart little waif.

The special effects are convincing, the performances are forthright, and the direction, by Stephen Sommers, recalls his energetic, lighthearted The Adventures of Huck Finn.

It is done well, yet one is still surprised to find it done at all.

Bertolucci can direct great set pieces, of course, and some of his biggest scenes (like the outdoor dances that are his favorites) are spectacular. But he needs well-defined characters to anchor his stories, and he seems more confident when he drills into their psyches instead of spreading himself all over the ideological map.

The movie is a chaotic mess, overloaded with special effects and explosions, light on continuity, sanity and coherence.

What impressed me is how effective the movie was, even though the outcome is a foregone conclusion. That's a tribute to the director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, and the actors, who have been chosen with the same kind of typecasting that perhaps occurs in life.

The message is boldly displayed, but told with characters of such sympathy and images of such beauty that audiences leave the theater feeling more pity than anger or resolve. It's a message movie, but not a recruiting poster.

Finds the right notes to negotiate its delicate subject matter.

Is alive, and takes chances, and uses the wicked blade of satire in order to show up the complacent political correctness of other movies in its campus genre.

Prince of the City is a very good movie and, like some of its characters, it wants to break your heart. Maybe it will. It is about the ways in which a corrupt modern city makes it almost impossible for a man to be true to the law, his ideals, and his friends, all at the same time. The movie has no answers. Only horrible alternatives.

May be the most intimate documentary ever made about a live rock 'n' roll concert. Certainly it has the best coverage of the performances onstage.

It is piffle, yes, but superior piffle.

The details of the film and of the performances are meticulously realized; there is a reward in seeing artists working so well. But the story has no entry or exit, and is cold, sad and hopeless. Afterward, I feel more admiration than gratitude.

Persona is a film we return to over the years, for the beauty of its images and because we hope to understand its mysteries.

Director Chris Columbus has fun with this goofy premise, but as always I am distracted by the practical aspects of the story. Does it bother the Greek gods that no one any longer knows or cares that they rule the world? What are the genetic implications of human/god interbreeding?

The films portray the Klan as criminal, racist and anonymous, but those have always been its selling points; it is not portrayed as boring and stupid.

This is Matt Dillon's first film since Drugstore Cowboy, and demonstrates again that he is one of the best actors working in movies. He possesses the secret of not giving too much, of not trying so hard that we're distracted by his performance.

The movie deals with narrative housekeeping. Perhaps the next one will engage these characters in a more challenging and devious story, one more about testing their personalities than re-establishing them. In the meantime, you want space opera, you got it.

It's a total miscalculation from beginning to end, inspired by an idiotic decision to increase the average age of the Benji audience by starring him in a movie rated PG.

The most ingenious device in the story is the way Chow and Su play-act imaginary scenes between their cheating spouses.

The movie offers brainless high-tech action without interesting dialogue, characters, motivation or texture.

The Jessica Lange character is wrong because she isn't selfish enough. In the original, the character was a tough dame who had married the fat spider for money, and was looking out only for herself. Here the character's motivations are marred by soft bourgeois values like affection and career dreams. The original film had a good girl and a bad girl; the Lange character wants to be both.

Bird wisely does not attempt to "explain" Parker's music by connecting experiences with musical discoveries. This is a film of music, not about it, and one of the most extraordinary things about it is that we are really, literally, hearing Parker on the soundtrack.

I thought Rumble Fish was offbeat, daring, and utterly original.

There must still be a kind of moony young adolescent girl for which this film would be enormously appealing, if television has not already exterminated the domestic example of that species.

Helena Bonham Carter may be Burton's inamorata, but apart from that, she is perfectly cast, not as a vulgar fishwife type but as a petite beauty with dark, sad eyes and a pouting mouth and a persistent fantasy that she and the barber will someday settle by the seaside. Not bloody likely.

I laughed. I did not always feel proud of myself while I was laughing, however.

A visionary roller-coaster ride of a movie.

Everything's laid out for us and made clear, we understand the situation we can see where events are leading... and then, in the last 30 minutes, he springs one concealed trap after another, allowing his story to fold in upon itself, to twist and turn, and scare and amuse us with its clockwork irony.

David Fincher's film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive.

Here was a great artist. She enjoyed her life. She didn't complain at the time, she didn't complain when she went cold turkey, she didn't complain in her 80s.

Since Fitzpatrick is an actor (and "no ladies' man," he told Clark), this is a performance and, as such, one of the most effective I've seen. It's amazing how, watching the film, you dislike Telly so much you want to deny Fitzpatrick's accomplishment in creating him.

This astonishing documentary, so beautiful, so horrifying.

That the director, Paul Greengrass, treats the material with gravity and uses good actors in well-written supporting roles elevates the movie above its genre, but not quite out of it.

Watching Holbrook, I was reminded again of how steady and valuable this man has been throughout his career.

The impersonation of Welles by Christian McKay in Me and Orson Welles is the centerpiece of the film, and from it, all else flows. We can almost accept that this is the Great Man.

There's no way I can recommend this movie to anyone much beyond the Tooth Fairy Believement Age, but I must testify it's pleasant and inoffensive, although the violence in the hockey games seems out of place.

What he asks of the actors (those who are “soloists,” anyway) is not realism but the same kind of playful show-off performances he's getting from the musicians. And to understand the acting, it's helpful to begin with the music.

Astonishing things happen and symbolism can only work by being apparent. For me, the film is like music or a landscape: It clears a space in my mind, and in that space I can consider questions. (Review of Original Release)

The wonder of Rashomon is that while the shadowplay of truth and memory is going on, we are absorbed by what we trust is an unfolding story.

Civil Action is like John Grisham for grownups.

The movie is like a Dickens novel in which the hero moves through the underskirts of society, encountering one colorful character after another.

A feeling movie, a mood movie, an evocation of the kind of interaction we sometimes hunger for.

Silly at times, leaning toward the screwball tradition of everyone racing around the house at the same time in a panic fueled by serial misunderstandings. There is also a thoughtful side.

It is encouraging that well-crafted thrillers are still being made about characters who have dialogue, identities, motives and clean shirts.

A movie like this falls outside ordinary critical language. Is it good or bad? Is there too much melodrama? I don't have any idea. It triggered too many thoughts of my own for me to have much attention left over for footnotes.

Made with sublime innocence and breathtaking artistry, at a time when its simple values rang true.

A plot like this is so hopeless that only acting can redeem it. Lopez pulls her share of the load, looking geuninely smitten by this guy and convincingly crushed when his secret is revealed. But McConaughey is not the right actor for this material.

The movie is "Dawn of the Dead" crossed with "John Carpenter's "Ghosts of Mars," with zombies not as ghoulish as the first and trains not as big as the second. The movie does however have Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez.

The movie is afraid to be - yes - Politically Incorrect. It isn't really critical of anybody's behavior, and it sketches its campus fringe groups in broad, defanged generalizations. Beneath its facade of contemporary politics, it's another formula film in which the kids want to party and get drunk, and the adults are fuddy-duddies.

A damped-down return to the Kingdom of Far Far Away, lacking the comic energy of the first brilliant film and not measuring up to the second.

The film has been directed by Jonathan Parker; he adapted the Melville story with Catherine DiNapoli. It's his first work, and a promising one. I admire it and yet cannot recommend it, because it overstays its natural running time.

It's just a sound-and-light show, linked to the marketing push for Pokemon in general.

I admired the movie. It is made with quiet competence, and will remind some viewers of the Hitchcock who made “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and “Foreign Correspondent.”

The Parallax View will no doubt remind some reviewers of Executive Action, another movie released at about the same time that advanced a conspiracy theory of assassination. It's a better use of similar material, however, because it tries to entertain instead of staying behind to argue.

Mullen and Garfield anchor the film. Mullen, that splendid Scottish actor ("My Name Is Joe") and Garfield, 24, with his boyish face and friendly grin.

Camelot, then, is exactly what we were promised: ornate, visually beautiful, romantic and staged as the most lavish production in the history of the Hollywood musical. If that's what you like, you'll like it. I'll just crouch in the corner here and gnaw my haunch of beef and send the wench to fetch more ale.

Harakiri is a film reflecting situational ethics, in which the better you know a man the more deeply you understand his motives.

On its own terms, it's funny at times and finally sad and sweet.

A mess. It lacks the sharp narrative line and crisp comic-book clarity of the earlier films, and descends too easily into shapeless fight scenes that are chopped into so many cuts that they lack all form or rhythm.

Born to Win is a good-bad movie that doesn't always work but has some really brilliant scenes.

There are some nice things in "Slamdance." Hulce has a certain dogged charm as the hero who draws cartoons in the spirit, if not the style, of Gary Larson, and who is extremely upset that there is a dead body in his apartment. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio gives a sound, three-dimensional performance as the ex-wife who has to decide if this guy is worth the trust - and the trouble. And Harry Dean Stanton remains quintessentially himself.

Green's approach certainly opens up opportunities for his students, and is a refreshing change from the lockstep public school approach, which punishes individualism.

There is the sense they're fighting for each other more than for ideology.

Sometimes you are either open to a movie, or closed. If you're convinced that An Unfinished Life is damaged goods, how can it begin its work on you?

Serenity is made of dubious but energetic special effects, breathless velocity, much imagination, some sly verbal wit and a little political satire.

The opening scenes of Johnny Dangerously are so funny you just don't see how they can keep it up. And you're right: They can't. But they make a real try. The movie wants to do for gangster films what Airplane! did for Airport, and Top Secret! did for spy movies.

Intended as a thriller of sorts, although Antonioni is, as always, too deeply involved in the angst of his characters to bother much with the story. (Review of Original Release)

If you understand who the characters are and what they're supposed to represent, the performances are right on the money.

The movie proceeds on two levels, as a crime thriller and as a character study, and it's this dual nature that makes it an entertainment at the same time it works as a message picture.

What an elegantly seen Dracula this is, all shadows and blood and vapors and Frank Langella stalking through with the grace of a cat. The film is a triumph of performance, art direction and mood over materials that can lend themselves so easily to self-satire

A beautiful and haunting film that tells this story, and then tells another subterranean story about the seasons of a marriage.

It's the kind of movie you can't quite recommend because it is all windup and not much of a pitch, yet you can't bring yourself to dislike it.

Not an extraordinary movie. In its workmanship it aspires not to be remarkable but to be well made, dependable, moving us because of the hurt in the hero's eyes.

This is an engrossing story, told smoothly and well, and Russell Crowe's contribution is enormous.

It's so impossible to care about the characters in the movie that I didn't care if the vampires or werewolves won. I might not have cared in a better movie, either, but I might have been willing to pretend.

Out of the Past is one of the greatest of all film noirs, the story of a man who tries to break with his past and his weakness and start over again in a town, with a new job and a new girl.

The acting is on the money, the writing has substance, the direction knows when to evoke film noir and when (in a trick shot involving loaded dice) to get fancy.

The underlying seriousness of MacLaine's performance helps anchor the picture--it raises the stakes, and steers it away from any tendency to become musical beds.

In this movie the war is not quite over. For those who survived it, maybe it will never be.

The Blue Lagoon is the dumbest movie of the year. It could conceivably have been made interesting, if any serious attempt had been made to explore what might really happen if two 7-year-old kids were shipwrecked on an island. But this isn't a realistic movie. It's a wildly idealized romance, in which the kids live in a hut that looks like a Club Med honeymoon cottage, while restless natives commit human sacrifice on the other side of the island.

There are many moments here that are very funny, but the film as a whole is a bit too long.

I enjoyed a lot of the movie in a relaxed sort of fashion; it's not essential or original in the way "The Truman Show'' was, and it hasn't done any really hard thinking about the ways we interact with TV.

The movie is so extravagant and outrageous in its storytelling that it resists criticism: It's self-satirizing.

Remember the weird beauty of the massed helicopters lifting over the trees in the long shot, and the insane power of Wagner's music, played loudly during the attack, and you feel what Coppola was getting at: Those moments as common in life as art, when the whole huge grand mystery of the world, so terrible, so beautiful, seems to hang in the balance.

If I didn't feel the same degree of involvement with Point of No Return that I did with "La Femme Nikita," it may be because the two movies are so similar in plot, look and feel. I had deja vu all through the movie.

Someone like Petey Greene made a difference and made a mark, and broadcasting is better because of his transparent honesty. He helped transform African-American stations more, probably, than their mostly white owners desired. And talk talents like Howard Stern, whether they know who he was, owe him something.

Despite the rather washed-out color photography it's very much worth seeing.

Children should not be allowed within a mile of this film, but it will appeal to "Jackass" fans and other devotees of the joyously ignorant.

The average issue of Mad magazine contains significantly smarter movie satire, because Mad goes for the vulnerable elements and Scary Movie 3 just wants to quote and kid.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is not only about Germany during the war, although the story it tells is heartbreaking in more than one way. It is about a value system that survives like a virus.

The Tracker is one of those rare films that deserves to be called haunting. It tells the sort of story we might find in an action Western, but transforms it into a fable or parable.

Renier’s performance is the best thing in the movie, although all the actors, cast partly for their faces, are part of creating this desperate world.

The film looks and feels good, and Washington's performance is the more uncanny the more we think back over it. The ending is "flawed," as we critics like to say, but it's so magnificently, shamelessly, implausibly flawed that (a) it breaks apart from the movie and has a life of its own, or (b) at least it avoids being predictable.

It is a skillful, well-made film, although, since Ellsberg is the narrator, it doesn't probe him very deeply.

Movies like Hard Eight remind me of what original, compelling characters the movies can sometimes give us.

It is not an anti-war film. It is not a pro-war film. It is one of the most emotionally shattering films ever made.

This is a repetitive, pointless exercise in genre filmmaking--the kind of movie where you distract yourself by making a list of the sources.

Alive and daring.

Like "United 93" and the work of the Dardenne brothers, it lives entirely in the moment, seeing what happens as it happens, drawing no conclusions, making no speeches, creating no artificial dramatic conflicts, just showing people living one moment after another, as they must.

Works as Gothic melodrama because it understands the genre so well.

One of those movies where "after that summer, nothing would ever be the same again." Yes, but it redefines "nothing."

Quick Change is a funny but not an inspired comedy. It has two directors - Howard Franklin and Bill Murray - and I wonder if that has anything to do with its inability to be more than just efficiently entertaining.

The physical look of the picture is splendid. The screenplay is dead on arrival. The noise level is torture.

Rips up the postcards of American history and reassembles them into a violent, blood-soaked story of our bare-knuckled past.

It leaves you wondering, how was it that so many people liked this man who does not seem to have liked himself?

Twilight will mesmerize its target audience, 16-year-old girls and their grandmothers. Their mothers know all too much about boys like this.

Gator is yet another Good Ol' Movie, and not, I fear, the summer's last. If only it had a Good Ol' Plot worth a damn, it might have even been a halfway tolerable ol' movie.

It’s badly written and inertly directed, with actors who don’t have a clue what drives their characters. This is one of those rare films that contains no chemistry at all. None. The actors scarcely seem to be in the same scenes together.

In the hierarchy of great movie chase sequences, the recent landmarks include the chases under the Brooklyn elevated tracks in "The French Connection" down the hills of San Francisco in "Bullitt" and through the Paris Metro in "Diva." Those chases were not only thrilling in their own right, but they also reflected the essence of the cities where they took place. Now comes William Friedkin, director of "The French Connection," with a new movie that contains another chase that belongs on that short list.

The real reasons to see An American in Paris are for the Kelly dance sequences, the closing ballet, the Gershwin songs, the bright locations, and a few moments of the ineffable, always curiously sad charm of Oscar Levant.

The skullcap moment appealed to me. It was new. Not much else is new in Survival of the Dead.

A screenplay with the depth and insight of a cable-TV docudrama.

Made against all odds into a funny and charming movie that understands the charm of the original, and preserves it.

I realize that Nothing in Common wants to surprise us by inserting tragedy in the midst of laughter, but the problem is, the serious parts of this movie are so much more interesting than the lightweight parts that the whole project gets out of balance.

Simon's not in a lighthearted mood, and so the silliness of the story gets bogged down in all sorts of gloomy neuroses, angry denunciations, and painful self-analysis.

Antonio Banderas is reason enough to see the movie.

The result is not a formal doc but an extended chat between two professionals who, as Pollack puts it, search for "a sliver of space in the commercial world where you can make a difference."

A dirty movie. Not a sexy, erotic, steamy or even smutty movie, but a just plain dirty movie. It made me feel unclean, and I'm the guy who liked "There's Something About Mary" and both "American Pie" movies.

The Bounty is a great adventure, a lush romance, and a good movie.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club is, quite simply, a wonderful movie. It has the confidence and momentum of a movie where every shot was premeditated -- and even if we know that wasn't the case, and this was one of the most troubled productions in recent movie history, what difference does that make when the result is so entertaining?

Spike Lee misjudged his material and audience. He doesn't find a successful way to express his feelings, angers and satirical points.

At the end, I know, Trevor has come unhinged. I accept that and believe it. But it feels like the movie lost the nerve of its original story impulse and sought safety in elements borrowed from thrillers. Its destination doesn't have much to do with how it got there.