Roger Ebert

The movie is a thriller, with all the usual trappings of a thriller, but the director, Jonathan Kaplan, is able to place the story in a plausible world. The performances go for unstrained realism, the settings are slice-of-life, and until the final scenes even the sicko cop seems somewhere within the realm of possibility.

The movie hums along with a kind of sublime craftsmanship, fueled by the consistent performances of Hackman and Hoffman (in their first film together), the remarkable ease of John Cusack (the most relaxed and natural of actors since Robert Mitchum), and the juicy typecasting in the supporting roles.

Tilda Swinton hasn't often been more fascinating than in Julia, a nerve-wracking thriller with a twisty plot and startling realism.

Mazursky's films have considered the grave and funny business of sex before (most memorably in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Blume in Love). But he's never before been this successful at really dealing with the complexities and following them through.

Using period songs and decor to create nostalgia is familiar enough, but to tunnel down to the visual level and get that right, too, and in a way that will affect audiences even if they aren't aware how, is one hell of a directing accomplishment.

An assured and very serious love story that allows neither humor nor romance to get in the way of its deeper and darker subject.

The movie is not so much about romance as about goodheartedness, which is a rarer quality, and not so selfish. And Cage has a certain gentleness that brings out nice soft smiles on Fonda's face.

A film that unfolds like a court case in which all of the testimony sounds like the simple truth, and none of it agrees.

The movie is bright, the dialogue has wit and intelligence, and Roberts and Grant are very easy to like. By the end, as much as we're aware of the ancient story machinery groaning away below deck, we're smiling.

I wouldn't go so far as to claim Manderlay is fun to watch. Von Trier, who can made compulsively watchable films ("Breaking the Waves"), has found a style that will alienate most audiences. Maybe it's necessary.

I haven't been exactly a fan of the "Nightmare" series, but I found this movie, with its unsettling questions about the effect of horror on those who create it, strangely intriguing.

To describe the plot is to miss the point. Fallen Angels takes the materials of the plot -- the characters and what they do -- and assembles them like a photo montage. At the end, you have impressions, not conclusions.

The scenes inside the craft are really very good. They convincingly depict a reality I haven't seen in the movies before, and for once I did believe that I was seeing something truly alien, and not just a set decorator's daydreams. Science-fiction and special effects fans may find these scenes worth the ticket price. But the movie's flaw is that there's not enough detail about the aliens, and the movie ends on an inconclusive and frustrating note.

These are fellow human beings who suffer, who are limited in their freedom to imagine greater happiness for themselves, and yet in their very misery they embody human striving. There is more of humanity in a prostitute trying to truly love, if only for a moment, than in all of the slow-motion romantic fantasies in the world.

I've seen so many thrillers that, frankly, I don't always care how they turn out — unless they're really well-crafted. What I like about Eyewitness is that, although it does care how it turns out, it cares even more about the texture of the scenes leading to the denouement.

There is one surprise in the movie, a decision having nothing to do with the reactor, that depends entirely on the ability of the characters to act convincingly under enormous pressure; casting stars of roughly equal weight helps it to work.

As it is, Illegal Tender works as a melodrama, and it benefits enormously from the performance of Wanda DeJesus.

It's so rare to find a film in which the events are driven by people, not by chases or special effects. And rarer still to find a story that subtly, insidiously gets us involved much more deeply than at first we realize, until at the end we're torn by what happens - by what has to happen.

Little Darlings really wants to be two movies at once: A fairly serious film about teenagers and sex, but also a box-office winner like "National Lampoon's Animal House" or "Meatballs." That's why we get awkwardly forced comedy like the food-fight scene. The movie also suffers from uncertain direction.

There are images of astonishing beauty in Godfrey Reggio's Powaqqatsi, sequences when we marvel at the sights of the Earth, and yet when the film is over there is the feeling that we are still waiting for it to begin.

About the best Friday the 13th movie you could hope for. Its technical credits are excellent. It has a lot of scary and gruesome killings. Not a whole lot of acting is required.

Working Girls is not a slick and dramatic movie. There are moments that seem forced and amateurish, and the over-all structure of the story is fairly predictable. What the movie does have, though, is the feeling of real life being observed accurately.

Logan's Run is a vast, silly extravaganza that delivers a certain amount of fun, once it stops taking itself seriously.

This movie is the work of a man who knows how to direct a thriller. Smooth, calm, confident, it builds suspense instead of depending on shock and action.

A sweet, good-looking film about nice people in a beautiful place, and young John Bell is an appealing performer in the tradition of the Culkins. Quinn and Nielsen are pros who take their roles seriously, and Vic Sarin's direction gets the job done.

If there's anything worse than a punch line that doesn't work, it's a movie that doesn't even bother to put the punch lines in.

The film expends enormous energy to tell a story that is tedious and contrived.

If a movie like this had a neat ending, the ending would be a lie. We do not want answers, but questions and observations.

The agony of invention is there on the screen.

I like the movie on a simple physical level. There is no deeper meaning and no higher skill involved; just professional action, well-staged and filmed with a certain stylistic elegance.

Above all, this is a movie where the characters ask the same questions we do: They're as smart about themselves as we are.

The movie is finally just a little too ungainly, too jumbled at the end, for me to recommend, but it has heart, and I feel a lot of affection for it.

It's a rambling, unfocused biography of Wyatt Earp, starting when he's a kid and following his development from an awkward would-be lawyer into a slick gunslinger. This is a long journey, in a three-hour film that needs better pacing.

Yes, it has some big laughs, and yes, some of the special effects are fun, but the movie has too many gremlins and not enough story line.

The director is James Foley, who is obviously not right for this material.

Has the same mixture of dumb puns, corny sight gags and sly, even sophisticated in-jokes. It's a lot of fun.

A sweet but inconsequential romantic comedy.

The ghost of anime can be seen here trying to dive into the shell of the movie mainstream. But this particular film is too complex and murky to reach a large audience, I suspect; it's not until the second hour that the story begins to reveal its meaning. But I enjoyed its visuals, its evocative soundtrack (including a suite for percussion and heavy breathing), and its ideas.

The director is Nick Cassavetes, son of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, and perhaps his instinctive feeling for his mother helped him find the way past soap opera in the direction of truth.

It is an angry, radical movie about the vise that traps workers between big industry and big labor. It's also an enormously entertaining movie; it earns its comparison with On the Waterfront. And it's an extraordinary directing debut for Paul Schrader, whose credits include Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder.

In a film that is wall-to-wall idiocy, the most tiresome delusion is that car chases are funny.

Bacon is a strong and subtle actor, something that is often said but insufficiently appreciated. Here he employs all of his art.

Slides too easily into its sentimentality; the characters should have put up more of a struggle.

In countless ways visible and invisible, Sirk's sly subversion skewed American popular culture, and helped launch a new age of irony.

When Chase bothers to actually play a character, he can be very effective (his "Funny Farm" was one of the best comedies of 1988). But sometimes he seems to be covering himself, playing detached so that nobody can blame him if the comedy doesn't work. In this film he seems to have no emotions at all; consider the scene where he discovers that the woman he made love with has died during the night.

Like the original 1963 movie and the TV series, it expects us to be endlessly amused by a dolphin that does things that are endless but not amusing.

The movie doesn't develop, alas, with the patience and restraint of the earlier film.

This is an action movie. It makes no apology for that. But it's high-style action.

Remarkable, how in a film where we KNOW with an absolute certainty that all or most of the dogs must survive, Eight Below succeeds as an effective story. It works by focusing on the dogs.

An experience so engrossing it is like being buried in a new environment.

As well-directed a film as you'll see from America this year, an unsentimental and yet completely involving story of a young man who cannot see a way around his fate.

Space Jam is a happy marriage of good ideas--three films for the price of one, giving us a comic treatment of the career adventures of Michael Jordan, crossed with a Looney Tunes cartoon and some showbiz warfare.

As he is played by Gene Hackman in The Conversation, an expert wiretapper named Harry Caul is one of the most affecting and tragic characters in the movies.

I loved this movie. I loved the way Coppola and her actors negotiated the hazards of romance and comedy, taking what little they needed and depending for the rest on the truth of the characters.

Lipstick is a nasty little item masquerading as a bold statement on the crime of rape. The statement would seem a little bolder if the movie didn't linger in violent and graphic detail over the rape itself, and then handle the vengeance almost as an afterthought.

We got two gold-record singers and they don't sing? So? We got five Oscar-winning actors, and they don't need to act much.

Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.

The Breakfast Club doesn't need earthshaking revelations; it's about kids who grow willing to talk to one another, and it has a surprisingly good ear for the way they speak.

A high-spirited charmer, a fantasy that sparkles with delights.

The Snapper sees its characters with warmth and acceptance, and earns its laughs by being wise about human nature.

Odd and intense, very well acted, and impossible to dismiss.

The movie is more concerned with the story line (premiere-fire-threat-rescue) than with painting the time and place.

Other pleasures: The wicked trick used to smuggle Connery into the locked car with the gold; the chase scene on top of the train; and, of course, the exquisite presence of Down, who has a bedroom scene with Connery that makes James Bond look curiously like Sherlock Holmes.

Why didn't they make a baseball picture? Why did The Natural have to be turned into idolatry on behalf of Robert Redford? Why did a perfectly good story, filled with interesting people, have to be made into one man's ascension to the godlike, especially when no effort is made to give that ascension meaning?

Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.

The problem with G is not merely that the ending doesn't work and feels hopelessly contrived. It's also that the plot adds too many unnecessary characters and subplots, so that the main line gets misplaced.

Kevin Bacon is on a roll right now after several good roles, and here he channels diabolical sleaze while mugging joylessly before the telethon cameras.

For almost all of its length, Escape from Alcatraz is a taut and toughly wrought portrait of life in a prison. It is also a masterful piece of storytelling, in which the characters say little and the camera explains the action. It's one of those very difficult exercises in which large emotions, like the compulsion to be free, are reflected in minute actions, like the chipping away at stone with a pocket nail clipper.

I liked the action, I liked the absurdity, I liked the incongruous use and misuse of mutant powers, and I especially liked the way it introduces all of those political issues and lets them fight it out with the special effects.

A tense, taut and expert thriller that becomes something more than that, an allegory about an innocent man in a world prepared to crush him.

Beautiful, languorous, passive -- it plays like background music for itself.

A rarity, a movie that seems to be on autopilot for the first two acts and then reveals that it was not, with a third act that causes us to rethink everything that has gone before. Ingenious, how simple and yet how devious the solution is.

Possesses the art and craft of a good movie, but not the story.

This is not a great comedy and will be soon forgotten, but it has nice moments.

So assured and perceptive in its style, so loving, so intensely right, that if you can receive on that frequency, the film is like a voluptuous feast.

If you respond to film noir, if you like dark streets and women with scarlet lips and big fast cars with running boards, the look of this movie will work some kind of magic. The story itself may not be so mesmerizing, but who really cares? Style and tone are everything with a movie like this, which wants to bring to life a dark secret place in the lurid pulp imagination.

I would not want to see a sequel to the film, and at 81 minutes it isn't a second too short, but what it does, it does cheerfully, with great energy, and very well.

The film's redeeming feature is that it knows how sad these people are, and finds the correct solution to their problems: They meet in the flesh.

As someone who believes most movies have too much music, I was surprised to find myself noticing how little is in Mr. Destiny. In the quiet, an innocent little fable grows, blossoms and is harvested, to no great moment.

The movie is a pleasant, inoffensive comedy. It's indifferently acted, especially by James Hampton in the lead, and it's too talky. It has some success with making its youngest camel cute - although not as cute as Benji by several miles.

No one should have to endure the life that Aileen Wuornos led, and we leave the movie believing that if someone, somehow, had been able to help that little girl, her seven victims would never have died.

Apart from funny supporting work by the inventor of the Mind Control and the guy in the "Q" role, the movie is pretty routine.

The best of three Star Wars films, and the most thought-provoking. After the space opera cheerfulness of the original film, this one plunges into darkness and even despair, and surrenders more completely to the underlying mystery of the story. It is because of the emotions stirred in Empire that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. This is the heart.

A compelling thriller to begin with, but it adds the rare quality of having a heroine more fascinating than the story.

For Your Eyes Only is a competent James Bond thriller, well-crafted, a respectable product from the 007 production line. But it's no more than that.

Body Double is an exhilarating exercise in pure filmmaking, a thriller in the Hitchcock tradition in which there's no particular point except that the hero is flawed, weak, and in terrible danger -- and we identify with him completely. The movie is so cleverly constructed, with the emphasis on visual storytelling rather than dialogue, that we are neither faster nor slower than the hero as he gradually figures out the scheme that has entrapped him.

The comedy here isn't all on the surface, and Viterelli [the bodyguard Jelly] is one reason why.

One of the glories of True Grit is that it recognizes Wayne's special presence. It was not directed by Ford (who in any event probably couldn't have been objective enough about Wayne), but it was directed by another old Western hand, Hathaway, who has made the movie of his lifetime and given us a masterpiece. This is the sort of film you call a movie, instead of the kind of movie you call a film.

One of the worst movies of this or any year.

The movie should be praying to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Maybe he could perform a miracle and turn this into a cable offering, so no one has to buy a ticket to see it.

Nolte and Coburn are magnificent in this film, which is like an expiation or amends for abusive men. It is revealing to watch them in their scenes together--to see how they're able to use physical presence to sketch the history of a relationship.

What is remarkable is that this film is based on a true story, and filmed on the actual locations. These are hard, violent men, risking their lives to save an animal species.

There is something intrinsically silly in this story, and unless you can find a way to believe in it at some level (even on the level on which Peter Pan believes in fairies), it's just a lot of feathers. Many of them from horses.

A small but wonderful gem of a thriller: A film in which complicated people and a very complicated plot come together in a mechanism that leaves us marveling at its ingenuity.

It should be preserved by the Library of Congress, as an example of creative desperation. It plays like a documentary about a group of actors forced to perform in a screenplay that contains not one single laugh, or moment of wit, or flash of intelligence, or reason for being.

Quigley Down Under is a handsome film, well-acted, and it's a shame the filmmakers didn't spend a little more energy on making it smarter and more original.

Bullock brings a kind of ground-level vulnerability to 28 Days that doesn't make her into a victim but simply into one more suitable case for treatment.

It's Mamet in a lighthearted mood, playing with dialogue, repeating phrases just because he likes them, and supplying us with a closing line that achieves, I think, a kind of greatness.

The ending of the film is as calculated and cruel as a verbal assault by a Neil LaBute character.

By the time the Incredible Hulk had completed his hulk-on-hulk showdown with the Incredible Blonsky, I had been using my Timex with the illuminated dial way too often.

What a magical movie.

A quiet movie, shaken from time to time by ripples of emotional turbulence far beneath the surface.

The characters involve us, we sympathize with their dreams and despair of their matrimonial tunnel vision, and at the end we are relieved that we listened to Miss Watson and became the wonderful people who we are today.

It tries to be the best bad movie that it can be.

If you have never seen a single film by Agnes Varda, perhaps it is best to start with The Beaches of Agnes.

A splendid movie while its hero is preparing for his flight and actually experiencing it, but it's not nearly as interesting once he descends to earth.

Although the film has big structural problems and leaves a lot of loose ends, there was never a moment when it didn’t absorb me, because I felt as if I was watching the characters talk to one another, instead of to me.

Wise Guys is an abundant movie, filled with ideas and gags and great characters. It never runs dry. It never has the desperation of so many gangster comedies, which seem to be marching over the same tired ground. This movie was made with joy, and you can feel it in the sense of all the actors working at the top of their form.

An imperfect movie with so many moments of truth that you forgive its stumbles. You also note that it's probably of historical value, because it centers on the first performance of an actress who is going to be a big star.

All classic and airtight, and handled by Richet with economy and a sturdy clarity of action; he doesn't go overboard with manic action scenes.

On the basis of this second performance as Bond, Dalton can have the role as long as he enjoys it. He makes an effective Bond - lacking Sean Connery's grace and humor, and Roger Moore's suave self-mockery, but with a lean tension and a toughness that is possibly more contemporary.

This movie is one of the most relentlessly nonstop action pictures ever made, with a virtuoso series of climactic sequences that must last an hour and never stop for a second. It's a roller-coaster ride, a visual extravaganza, a technical triumph, and a whole lot of fun.

A touching and effective film.

So likable, we go with it on its chosen level.

The Santa Clause (so named after the clause on Santa's calling card that requires Scott to take over the job) is often a clever and amusing movie, and there's a lot of fresh invention in it.

Am I acting as an advocate in this review? Yes, I am. I believe that to be "impartial" and "balanced" on global warming means one must take a position like Gore's. There is no other view that can be defended.

Its most impressive accomplishment is to gather a bewildering labyrinth of facts and suspicions over a period of years, and make the journey through this maze frightening and suspenseful.

I think the answer is right there in the film, but less visible to American viewers because we are less class-conscious than the filmmakers.

Broadcast News has a lot of interesting things to say about television. But the thing it does best is look into a certain kind of personality and a certain kind of relationship.

I found the opening third tremendously intriguing and involving, I thought the emotions were so real they could be touched, but then the film lost its way and fell into the clutches of sentimental melodrama.

It's not good, but it's nowhere near as bad as most recent comedies; it has real laughs, but it misses real opportunities.

Once in the jungle they have all sorts of harrowing adventures, and I enjoyed it that real things were happening, that we were not simply looking at shoot-outs and chases, but at intriguing and daring enterprise.

It's an old-fashioned romantic triangle, told with schmaltzy music on the sound track and a heroine with a smoky singing voice, and then the Nazis turn up and it gets very complicated and heartbreaking.

Taken shows Mills as a one-man rescue squad, a master of every skill, a laser-eyed, sharpshooting, pursuit-driving, pocket-picking, impersonating, knife-fighting, torturing, karate-fighting killing machine who can cleverly turn over a petrol tank with one pass in his car and strategically ignite it with another.

I firmly believe such illusions are never the result of psychic powers, but I am fascinated by them, anyway. The wisdom of this film, directed and written by Sean McGinly, is to never say.

Little Ashes is absorbing but not compelling. Most of its action is inward.

Perhaps the documentary The War Room will bring a deeper dimension to the profession's image. At the very least, it may dispel the notion that campaign managers pervert the course of democracy with behind-the-scenes omniscience; the surprise in the film is that they're often as confused as their candidates sometimes seem to be.

Before Sunrise is so much like real life - like a documentary with an invisible camera - that I found myself remembering real conversations I had experienced with more or less the same words.

A towering landmark of film, quite simply because it tells a good story, and tells it wonderfully well.

A colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn. It's a flimsy excuse for a plot, with characters who move below the one-dimensional and enter Flatland.

A voluptuary of a film, drunk on primary colors, caressing Penelope Cruz, using the devices of a Hitchcock to distract us with surfaces while the sinister uncoils beneath. As it ravished me, I longed for a freeze frame to allow me to savor a shot.

Donnie Darko is the one that got away. But it was fun trying to land it.

The Little Drummer Girl lacks the two essential qualities it needs to work: It's not comprehensible, and it's not involving.

It's the most lugubrious and soppy love story in many a moon, a step backward for director Sam Raimi after "A Simple Plan."

Warren Beatty's Bulworth made me laugh -- and wince.

The movie's not without its moments.

Apart from the other good things in Tightrope, I admire it for taking chances; Clint Eastwood can get rich making Dirty Harry movies, but he continues to change and experiment, and that makes him the most interesting of the box-office megastars.

Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality.

A movie of introspection and defiance.

With style and energy from the actors, with every sign of self-confidence from the director, with pictures that were in focus and dialogue that you could hear, the movie descended into a morass of narrative quicksand. By the end, I wanted to do cruel and vicious things to the screenplay.

I want to escape, Oh, Muddah Faddah -- Life's too short for cinematic torture.

Sometimes overwrought excess can be its own reward. If Obsession had been even a little more subtle, had made even a little more sense on some boring logical plane, it wouldn't have worked at all.

A movie like this lives or dies with its performances, and the actors in My Beautiful Laundrette are a fascinating group of unknowns.

A warm human comedy.

The portrait of everyday Japan in The Eel is intriguing; the quiet area where the story is set is filled with people who take a lively interest in one another's business, while all the time seeming to keep their distance. [11 Sep 1998, p.32]

The Fourth Kind is a pseudo-documentary like "Paranormal Activity" and "The Blair Witch Project." But unlike those two, which just forge ahead with their home video cameras, this one encumbers its flow with ceaseless reminders that it is a dramatization of real events.

A love story about two people with no apparent chemistry, whose lives are changed by a stranger who remains an uninteresting enigma. No wonder it just sits there on the screen.

It's never really believable, but it tries to be, and it would have had a better chance as straight satirical comment.

Although the movie seems happiest when it is retailing potential scandal, its heart is not in sex but in business, and the central value in the film is the work ethic.

Bonnie and Clyde is a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful.

Dogtooth is like a car crash. You cannot look away. The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos tells his story with complete command of visuals and performances. His cinematography is like a series of family photographs of a family with something wrong with it.

My Favorite Martian is slapstick and silliness, wild sight gags and a hyped-up acting style. The Marx Brothers would have been at home here. The movie is clever in its visuals, labored in its audios, and noisy enough to entertain kids.

The Brood is an el sleazo exploitation film, camouflaged by the presence of several well-known stars but guaranteed to nauseate you all the same.

But I'm making Welcome to the Dollhouse sound like some sort of grim sociological study, and in fact it's a funny, intensely entertaining film.

Its hero upstages anything the plot can possibly come up with.

A perplexing and disturbing film of great effect.

This movie leaves me looking forward to the director's next film; we can say of Rian Johnson, as somebody once said about a dame named Brigid O'Shaughnessy, "You're good. You're very good."

The splendid cast embodies the characters so fully that the events actually seem to be happening to them, instead of unfolding from a screenplay.

It is like no other film you've seen, and yet you feel right at home in it. It seems to be going nowhere, and knows every step it wants to make. It is a constant, almost kaleidoscopic experience of discovery, and we try to figure out what the film is up to and it just keeps moving steadfastly ahead, fade in, fade out, fade in, fade out, making a mountain out of a molehill.

The film is a glorious experience to witness, not least because, knowing the technique and understanding how much depends on every moment, we almost hold our breath.

Culkin plays Alig as clueless to the end, living so firmly in his fantasy world that nothing can penetrate his chirpy persona. Whether this is accurate--whether indeed any of the facts in the film are accurate--is not for me to say, but it works.

Unless a story has been introduced to make the shooting part of the plot, it can get pretty dreary. 100 Rifles is pretty dreary.

I WANTED it to be a typical romantic comedy starring those two lovable people, Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant. And it was. And some of the dialogue has a real zing to it. There were wicked little one-liners that slipped in under the radar and nudged the audience in the ribs.

The story is nuts-and-bolts space opera, without the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's ''A.I.'' But the look of the film is revolutionary. Final Fantasy is a technical milestone, like the first talkies or 3-D movies.

Eminem survives the X-ray truth-telling of the movie camera, which is so good at spotting phonies. He is on the level.

The first time I saw the coming attractions trailer for Sister Act, I roared with laughter and delight. Unfortunately, it's better directed than the movie. The trailer has high energy and whammo punchlines. The movie is sort of low-key and contemplative and a little too thoughtful.

This is a very good film, with Depp and Bale performances of brutal clarity. I'm trying to understand why it is not quite a great film. I think it may be because it deprives me of some stubborn need for closure.

The movie is curious in how close it comes to delivering on its material: Sequence after sequence seems to contain all the necessary material, to be well on the way toward a payoff, and then it somehow doesn't work.

The film is entertaining in its own right, and thought-provoking. Why don't more people quickly see through their hoaxes?

Harold is death, Maude life, and they manage to make the two seem so similar that life's hardly worth the extra bother. The visual style makes everyone look fresh from the Wax Museum, and all the movie lacks is a lot of day-old gardenias and lilies and roses in the lobby, filling the place with a cloying sweet smell.

I like the way the slacker characters maintain their slothful gormlessness in the face of urgent danger, and I like the way the British bourgeois values of Shaun's mum and dad assert themselves even in the face of catastrophe.

Actually two movies, one wretched, the other funny. The funny one involves the Jennifer Tilly scenes.

A masterpiece, pure and simple, deep and true...The best film of the year.

The Chaser is an expert serial-killer film from South Korea and a poster child for what a well-made thriller looked like in the classic days.

There are moments in Yagira's performance that will break your heart.

A film that with quiet confidence creates a fragile magic.

Sea of Love tells an ingeniously constructed story that depends for its suspense on the same question posed by Jagged Edge and Fatal Attraction: What happens when you fall in love with a person who may be quite prepared to murder you?

Circle of Friends is heartwarming and poignant, a love story that glows with intelligence and feeling.

It is a thriller trapped inside a pop comedy set in Japan, and gives Reno a chirpy young co-star who bounces around him like a puppy on visiting day at the drunk tank.

The performances are crucial, because all of these characters have so completely internalized their world that they make it palpable, and themselves utterly convincing.

The movie was mostly shot on two difficult locations: The streets of East L.A., and inside Folsom Prison. It knows these worlds. The language, the clothes, the attitudes, are all shown with the understated conviction of a director who is sure of his material.

It might work on video for viewers who glance up at the screen from time to time. The more attention you pay to it, the less it's there.

The Big Chill is a splendid technical exercise. It has all the right moves. It knows all the right words. Its characters have all the right clothes, expressions, fears, lusts and ambitions. But there's no payoff and it doesn't lead anywhere. I thought at first that was a weakness of the movie. There also is the possibility that it's the movie's message.

The film is upbeat, wholesome, chirpy, positive, sunny, cheerful, optimistic and squeaky-clean. It bears so little resemblance to the more complicated worlds of many members of its target audience (girls 4 to 11) that it may work as pure escapism.

The kind of performance Penn delivers in I Am Sam, which may look hard, is easy, compared, say, to his amazing work in Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown."

The idea of the story within a story is one of the nice touches in The NeverEnding Story. Another one is the idea of a child's faith being able to change the course of fate. Maybe not since the kids in the audience were asked to save Tinker Bell in Peter Pan has the outcome of a story been left so clearly up to a child's willingness to believe.

It is an enchanted folly suggesting that romance is a matter of chance, since love is blind; at the right moment we are likely to fall in love with the first person our eyes light upon.

Seems torn between conflicting possibilities: It's structured like a comedy, but there are undertones of darker themes, and I almost wish they'd allowed the plot to lead them into those shadows.

Lacks some of the idiocy of your average teenage rom-com. But it doesn't bring much to the party. It sort of ambles along, with two nice people at the center of a human scavenger hunt. It's not much of a film, but it sort gets you halfway there, like a Yugo.

It is a great film about greatness, the story of the horse and the no less brave woman who had faith in him.

Oh, did I dislike this film. It made me squirm. Its premise is lame, its plot relentlessly predictable, its characters with personalities that would distinguish picture books.

Tells this story in a straightforward, calm way that works ideally as the chronicle of a man's life but perhaps less ideally as drama.

In its amiable, quiet, PG-13 way, The Invention of Lying is a remarkably radical comedy.

Either you stand back and resist it, or you plunge in. There was something about its innocence and spunk that got to me, and I caved in.

Jeff Bridges is a virtual certainty to win his first Oscar, after four nominations.

Cate Blanchett plays Guerin in a way that fascinated me for reasons the movie probably did not intend.

Oldboy is a powerful film not because of what it depicts, but because of the depths of the human heart which it strips bare.

If you like him on TV, you'll like him here, too, because it's more of the same stuff, only outdoors and with animals and shooting stars and the kinds of balloons people can go up in.

Steve Martin is good at that aspect of the Bilko persona, and good, too, at suggesting that there's not a mean bone in the sergeant's body.

The Piersons went, they showed movies, they returned. Taveuni is more or less the same. But by living and coping together for a year, the family is probably stronger and richer.

Ice Station Zebra is a movie so flat and conventional that its three moments of interest are an embarrassment.

The director is Wolfgang Petersen ("Das Boot"), who is able to unwind the plot like clockwork while at the same time establishing the characters as surprisingly sympathetic.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Part 2 carries a proud old name in the annals of exploitation, but its only ambition is to outgross the original film. It fails.

Passionada assembles the elements for a soap opera, and turns them into a bubble bath.

This is a splendid, rousing historical adventure, an example of what can happen when the best direction, acting, writing and technical credits are brought to bear on what might look like shopworn material.

Trekkies talk at length about how the world would be a saner and more peaceful place if the "Star Trek" philosophy ruled our lives. No doubt it would be a lot more entertaining, too, especially during root canals.

The Frears version is cerebral and claustrophobic, an exercise in sexual mindplay.

Good Morning, Vietnam works as straight comedy and as a Vietnam-era MASH, and even the movie’s love story has its own bittersweet integrity.

Falling Down does a good job of representing a real feeling in our society today. It would be a shame if it is seen only on a superficial level.

Clouseau is Alan Arkin this time, instead of Peter Sellers, and it's hard to say whether we gain or lose. Arkin flounders a little in the stiff French accent he inherited from Sellers. But in his movements and timing, he's Sellers' equal.

Watching the film, I thought of Michael Powell's great 1960 British thriller "Peeping Tom," which was about a photographer who killed his victims with a stiletto concealed in his camera. Sy uses a psychological stiletto, but he's the same kind of character.

The masterstroke is the use of Bryan Adams, who seems like a joke when he first appears (the movie knows this), but is used by Konchalovsky in such a way that eventually be becomes the embodiment of the ability to imagine and dream--an ability, the movie implies, that's the only thing keeping these crazy people sane.

What Haynes does is take away the reassuring segues that argue everything flows and makes sense, and to show what's really chaos under the skin of the film.

It's fun to watch 2 Days in the Valley” in the moment, and then fun afterward to think about the way the story was put together, and all of those lives connected.

So anyway, what happens in Life As We Know It? You'll never guess in a million years. Never.

This film is true about human nature. It is not universal, but within its particular focus, it is unrelenting.

Told chronologically, it might have accumulated considerable power. Told as a labyrinthine tangle of intercut timelines and locations, it is a frustrating exercise in self-indulgence by writer-director Guillermo Arriaga.

So often movies keep our attention by flashy tricks and cheap melodrama; it is an intellectually cleansing experience to watch this intelligent and hopeful film.

The movie has a sweetness and tenderness for these characters, poor lambs, blissfully unaware that they're about to be flattened by World War II.

Best of all, this movie is inhabited by a real cinematic intelligence. The audience isn't condescended to. In sequences like the one in which Travolta reconstructs a film and sound record of the accident, we're challenged and stimulated: We share the excitement of figuring out how things develop and unfold, when so often the movies only need us as passive witnesses.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle works so well because Eddie is played by Robert Mitchum, and Mitchum has perhaps never been better.

Some movies are no better than second-rate sitcoms. Other movies are no better than third-rate sitcoms. The Back-up Plan doesn't deserve comparison with sitcoms. It plays like an unendurable TV commercial about beautiful people with great lifestyles and not a thought in their empty little heads.

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.

There is not much here that comes as a blinding plot revelation, but the movie has a raffish charm and good-hearted characters, and like "The Full Monty" it makes good use of the desperation beneath the comedy.

A remarkable film.

Inception does a difficult thing. It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does.

Starman contains the potential to be a very silly movie, but the two actors have so much sympathy for their characters that the movie, advertised as space fiction, turns into one of 1984's more touching love stories.

The best film ever made about filmmaking.

I have the curious suspicion that it will be enjoyed most by someone who knows absolutely nothing about Shakespeare, and can see it simply as the story of some very strange people who seem to be reading from the same secret script.

I have such an unreasonable affection for this movie, indeed, that it is only by slapping myself alongside the head and drinking black coffee that I can restrain myself from recommending it.

The movie lacks the cleanedged economy of the screenplay for The Player, and it could have benefitted from less talkiness and fewer characters, but as a portrait of a particular Hollywood strata it is bittersweet and knowledgeable.

The movie is not quite successful. It is too secretive about its heart.

Body Heat is good enough to make film noir play like we hadn't seen it before.

Is the film worth seeing? Depends. It breaks no new ground as horror movies go, but it does introduce an intriguing location, and it's well made technically. It's better than you expect but not as good as you hope.

The mistake of The Mummy Returns is to abandon the characters, and to use the plot only as a clothesline for special effects and action sequences.

Alexander's performance makes the film possible to watch without unbearable heartbreak, because she is brave and decent in the face of the horror. And the last scene, in which she expresses such small optimism as is still possible, is one of the most powerful movie scenes I've ever seen.

This despicable remake of the despicable 1978 film "I Spit on Your Grave" adds yet another offense: a phony moral equivalency.

The Secret of the Grain never slows, always engages, may continue too long, but ends too soon. It is made of life itself.

Kafka, as subject or character, simply doesn't fit into the world of this film. Soderbergh does demonstrate again here that he's a gifted director, however unwise in his choice of project.

This is a movie about spies, but it is not a thriller in any routine sense of the word. It's just the meticulously observant record of how naiveté, inexperience, misplaced idealism and greed led to one of the most peculiar cases of treason in American history.

Never Die Alone is [Dickerson's] best work to date, with the complexity of serious fiction and the nerve to start dark and stay dark, to follow the logic of its story right down to its inevitable end.

Moon is a superior example of that threatened genre, hard science-fiction, which is often about the interface between humans and alien intelligence of one kind of or other, including digital.

His film is pro-Kerry, yes, but the focus is on history, not polemics, and provides a record of the crucial role of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Strange, that movies about Satan always require Catholics. You never see your Presbyterians or Episcopalians hurling down demons.

It all comes down to whether you can tolerate Leon Barlow. I can't. Big Bad Love can, and is filled with characters who love and accept him, even though he is a full-time, gold-plated pain in the can.

I felt the Kids were too busy being hip and ironic to connect at the simpler level where comedy lives. They were brought down by their own self-protective devices.

I think this is an important movie. Devastating, violent, hopeless, and important, because it holds a mirror up to a part of the world we live in, and helps us see it more clearly. In particular, it examines the connection between fame and obscurity, between those who have a moment of praise and notoriety, and those who see themselves condemned to stand always at the edge of the spotlight.

Chocolat is a film of infinite delicacy. It is not one of those steamy melodramatic interracial romances where love conquers all. It is a movie about the rules and conventions of a racist society and how two intelligent adults, one black, one white, use their mutual sexual attraction as a battleground on which, very subtly, to taunt each other.

As a family movie, Operation Dumbo Drop is sort of entertaining. As history, it's shameless.

The performances have a gravity about them that is unusual in the movies. How you respond to Butterfly Kiss depends on what you bring to it, and how much empathy you are willing to extend to these sad and horrifying women.

An imperfect movie, but not a boring one and not lacking in intelligence.

What this movie needs is a clear, spare, logical screenplay. It's all inspiration and no discipline.

Insights into human nature don't seem to be the point of the movie, anyway. It's a slick, trashy, entertaining melodrama, with too many dumb scenes to qualify as successful.

The Soloist has all the elements of an uplifting drama, except for the uplift.

In its heedless energy and joy, it reminded me of how I felt the first time I saw "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It's like a film that escaped from the imagination directly onto the screen, without having to pass through reality along the way.

The movie was directed by Ted Demme, with a light touch that allows the humor to survive in spite of the gloomy thoughts and the bleak, dark, frozen winter landscape.

George Tillman says Soul Food is based in part on his own family, and I believe him, because he seems to know the characters so well; by the film's end, so do we.

Depp accepts the character and all of its baggage, and works without a net.

The director, Joseph Ruben ("The Stepfather," "Sleeping With the Enemy"), uses a kind of flat, logical storytelling that leads us inexorably toward his conclusions.

It is in every frame a beautiful and powerful film — a masterpiece.

The funniest movie I have seen in a long time.

Films like this are more useful than gung-ho capers like "Behind Enemy Lines." They help audiences understand and sympathize with the actual experiences of combat troops, instead of trivializing them into entertainments.

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.

It must have been even more exhausting to make this film than it is to watch it. But it's made with a kind of manic joy that makes me suspect its writer-director, Roger Roberts Avary, might develop into a considerable filmmaker, once he thinks of something to say.

This movie indicates that Charles Bronson just doesn't care any more, and is just going through the motions for the money. I admired his strong, simple talent once. What is he doing in a garbage disposal like this?

The sad thing about Turk 182! is that, the whole project sounds like a High Concept movie, in which the idea of the Turk was allowed to substitute for a story about him. Sure, it would be neat to see a movie about a guy like this. But not this movie.

By the time it's over, Penelope Cruz has slipped away with it, and transformed Kingsley's character in the process. It's nicely done.

9/11 was a savage and heartless crime, and after the symbolism and the history and the imagery and the analysis, that is a point that must be made.

Basically just a 98-minute trailer for the autumn launch of a new series on the Cartoon Network.

It is whimsical, bittersweet, wise in a minor key.

A sweet and delicate comedy, a film to make you hold your breath, it is so precisely devised. It has big laughs, but it never seems to make an effort for them.

What makes Sick bearable is the saving grace of humor. Apart from the pain he was born with and the pain he heaped on top of it, Bob Flanagan was a wry, witty, funny man who saw the irony of his own situation.