Roger Ebert

I laughed all the way through, in fact. This is the best comedy since "The Hangover," and although it's almost a scene-by-scene remake of a 2007 British movie with the same title, it's funnier than the original.

A lightweight charmer with a winning performance by Robin Tunney.

Oddly enough, Crimson Tide develops into an actors' picture, not just an action movie. There are a lot of special effects, high-tech gadgets and violent standoffs, yes, but the movie is really a battle between two wills.

It's a movie based on an idea, and all the conventional wisdom agrees that emotions, not ideas, are the best to make movies from. But Being There pulls off its long shot and is one of the most confoundingly provocative movies of the year.

About two men who both wanted to be dominant, who both had all the answers, who were inseparably bound together in love and hate, and who created extraordinary work--while all the time each resented the other's contribution.

Final Analysis is the kind of movie that's a lot more fun to look at than to think about. Maybe that's the point.

A skillful action movie about a plot that exists only to support a skillful action movie. The entire story is a set-up for the martial arts and chases. Because they are done well, because the movie is well-crafted and acted, we give it a pass. Too bad it's not about something.

The movie exudes a sense of authenticity, of a subject researched well. The major difference, however, between "Network" and "Power" is that "Network" had a plot and "Power" does not.

Bob Byington directs with an exact sense of what he wants; consider the perfect timing of his use of Harmony's mom (Margie Beegle). How she says "don't ask me" and "leave me out of it" is unreasonably funny.

Doesn't have anything wrong with it that couldn't be fixed by adding Ebenezer Scrooge and Bad Santa to the cast. It's a holiday movie of stunning awfulness that gets even worse when it turns gooey at the end.

City Slickers comes packaged as one kind of movie - a slapstick comedy about white-collar guys on a dude ranch - and it delivers on that level while surprising me by being much more ambitious, and successful, than I expected. This is the proverbial comedy with the heart of truth, the tear in the eye along with the belly laugh. It's funny, and it adds up to something.

It's strange about Stir Crazy. We go in with big expectations, and we laugh so much at the beginning that we're ready for the movie to launch itself as a hit. And then it all goes flat and we come out disappointed.

I saw it a third time. By then I had moved beyond the immediate shock of the material and was able to focus on what a well-made film it was; how concisely Solondz gets the effects he's after.

It is not about memories but memory. Yours, mine, Proust's. Memory makes us human.

The movie didn't quite work for me. Its timing wasn't confident enough to pull off its ambitious conception.

The story is a mess, but for long periods of time that hardly matters. It's beside the point, as we enter one of the most striking spaces I've ever seen in a film.

Paltrow is truly touching. And Black, in his first big-time starring role, struts through with the blissful confidence of a man who knows he was born for stardom.

There are a lot of logical gaps in this movie.

The movie's fatal flaw is to treat her [Moore] like a plucky Sally Field heroine. That throws a wet blanket over the rest of the party.

It is pitch-perfect, telling the story through the enthusiastic and single-minded vision of its hero Ralphie, and finding in young Peter Billingsley a sly combination of innocence and calculation.

For most of the film, I sat in quiet amazement: I was witnessing a complex, well-crafted, clearly told story, in a screenplay that moved well and had dialogue that sounded colorful without resembling a Quentin Tarantino clone. [8 Oct 1997, p.47]

The movie is astonishingly foul-mouthed, but in a fluent, confident way where the point isn't the dirty words, but the flow and rhythm, and the deep, sad yearning they represent.

Broderick is splendid as the gambler. He knows, as many addicts do, that the addictive personality is very inward, however much acting out might take place.

The comedy bogs down in relentless predictability and the puzzling overuse of naughty words.

Certainly better than "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." How so? Admittedly, it doesn't have as much cleavage. But the high-tech hardware is more fun to look at than the transforming robots, the plot is as preposterous, and although the noise is just as loud, it's more the deep bass rumbles of explosions than the ear-piercing bang of steel robots pounding on each other.

What happens would not make sense in many households, but in this one, it represents a certain continuity, and confirms deep currents we sensed almost from the first.

The movie has a wide appeal, with a gap in the middle. I think it will appeal to children young enough to be untutored in boredom, and to anyone old enough to be drawn in, or to appreciate the artistry.

The movie is long and slow. Either you will fall into its rhythm, or you will grow restless.

Although the movie is a wall-to-wall exercise in bad taste, it somehow retains a certain innocence; it challenges and sometimes shocks, but for me at least it didn't offend, because its motives were so obviously good-hearted.

Starts out with the materials of an ordinary movie and becomes a rather special one.

The performance by Flora Cross is haunting in its seriousness. She doesn't act out; she acts in.

Fiennes and Richardson make this film work with the quiet strangeness of their performances; if they insist on their eccentricities, it's because they've paid them off and own them outright.

If the story is immensely satisfying in a traditional way, the style has its own delights.

It's a funny homage, a nod to the way that some movies are universal in their appeal.

A movie filled with moments in which we recognize not movie stars, but ourselves.

Amores Perros will be too much for some filmgoers, just as "Pulp Fiction" was and "Santa Sangre" certainly was, but it contains the spark of inspiration.

Biloxi Blues may indeed be based on memories from Neil Simon’s experiences in basic training during World War II, but it seems equally based on every movie ever made about basic training, and it suffers by comparison with most of them.

Intelligent and subtle.

It is light and pleasant and funny, the characterization is strong, and the voices of Phil Harris (O'Malley the Alley Cat) and Eva Gabor (Duchess, the mother cat) are charming in their absolute rightness.

Kindergarten Cop was directed by Ivan Reitman, whose best work shows an ability to mix the absurd with the dramatic, so we're laughing as the suspense reaches its peak.

It's a movie without a brain. Charlie's Angels is like the trailer for a video game movie, lacking only the video game, and the movie.

As we switched relentlessly back and forth between A and B, I found that I wasn't looking forward to either story.

It is not what's there on the screen that disappoints me, but what's not there.

Dad is a case of a movie with too much enthusiasm for its own good. If the filmmakers had only been willing to dial down a little, they would have had the materials for an emotionally moving story, instead of one that generates incredulity.

Follows the "Lock, Stock" formula so slavishly it could be like a new arrangement of the same song.

American Flyers is shaky at the core, because it tries to tap-dance around its own central issues.

Sixty seconds of wondering if someone is about to kiss you is more entertaining than 60 minutes of kissing. By understanding that, Mamet is able to deliver a G-rated film that is largely about adult sexuality.

By movie's end, I'd seen some swell photography and witnessed some thrilling chase scenes, but when it came to understanding the movie, I didn't have a clue.

If holes in plots bother you, Marathon Man will be maddening. But as well-crafted escapist entertainment, as a diabolical thriller, the movie works with relentless skill.

This movie is lively at times, it's lovely to look at, and the actors are persuasive in very difficult material. But around and around it goes, and where it stops, nobody by that point much cares.

Every once in a while, a movie like that comes along; a movie you’ve got to see so that you, too, can be in the dark about it.

A love story about two strong-willed people who find exhilaration in testing each other. It is not about sexual love, or even romantic love, really, but about that kind of love based on challenge and fascination.

The director Brad Anderson, working from a screenplay by Scott Kosar, wants to convey a state of mind, and he and Bale do that with disturbing effectiveness.

It is a luxury to be enveloped in a good film.

It looks and listens to its characters, curious about the unfolding mysteries of the personality. It is a treasure.

D. C. Cab is not an entirely bad movie -- it has its moments -- but if it had used more actual taxi-riding incidents and more recognizable driver types, it could have been a little masterpiece.

It is not often that a movie catches exactly what it was like to be this person in this place at this time, but Jarhead does.

Seductive and beautiful, cynical and twisted, and one of the best films of the year.

The movie is wise, deep, and painful, and it is filled with words. Used to be, a "sex film" contained lots of nudity and steamy scenes. That kind of stuff would just slow this one down.

The target audience for Phantasm II obviously is teenagers, especially those with abbreviated attention spans, who require a thrill a minute. No character development, logic or subtlety is necessary, just a sensation every now and again to provide the impression that something is happening on the screen.

Jacques Tati is the great philosophical tinkerer of comedy, taking meticulous care to arrange his films so that they unfold in a series of revelations and effortless delights.

A truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy. Elaine May, the director, has mounted a multimillion-dollar expedition in search of a plot so thin that it hardly could support a five-minute TV sketch.

The secret may be that Cronenberg approaches his trashy material with the objectivity of a scientist; it is his detached, cold style that makes the material creepy instead of simply sensational.

You sit there, and the action assaults you, and using words to re-create it would be futile. What actually happens to Jason Bourne is essentially immaterial. What matters is that SOMETHING must happen, so he can run away from it or toward it.

Set It Off is advertised as a thriller about four black women who rob banks. But it's a lot more than that. It creates a portrait of the lives of these women that's so observant and informed; it's like “Waiting to Exhale” with a strong jolt of reality.

I praised "Lovely & Amazing," which also features a romance between an adult woman and a teenage boy. But "Lovely & Amazing" is about events that happen in a plausible world (the adult is actually arrested). Tadpole wants only to be a low-rent "Graduate" clone.

I think it works like a nasty little machine to keep us involved and disturbed; my attention never strayed, and one of the elements I liked was the way Paltrow's character isn't sentimentalized.

You may be able to find parallels between these characters and those in "The Breakfast Club." On the other hand, you may decide life is too short.

It is a Kafkaesque story, in which ominous things follow one another with a certain internal logic but make no sense at all.

His film is more subtle and wide-reaching, the story of a man for whom everything is equally unreal, who distrusts his own substance so deeply that he must be somebody else to be anybody at all.

There may be possibilities here, but they're lost in the extraordinary boredom of a long third act devoted almost entirely to loud, pointless and repetitive action.

Southern Comfort is a film of drum-tight professionalism. It is also, unfortunately, so committed to its allegorical vision that it never really comes alive as a story about people.

Wants to make larger points, but succeeds only in being a story of derangement.

A very angry film.

It has been said that all modern Russian literature came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat.” In the same way, all of us came out of the overcoat of this same immigrant experience.

A big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie.

I enjoyed the movie for the sheer physical exuberance of its adventure. It is magnificently mounted and photographed.

Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris is one of the great emotional experiences of our time.

Those tensions and conflicts produced, I believe, the right film for this material. I don't require that its makers had a good time. I'm reminded of my favorite statement by Francois Truffaut: "I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between."

Marcia Gay Harden finds a fine balance between madness and the temptations of overacting. Yes, she runs wild sometimes, but always as a human being, not as a caricature.

Daylight is the cinematic equivalent of a golden oldies station, where you never encounter anything you haven't grown to love over the years.

This movie is a real curiosity. It's dead. I don't mean it's bad. A lot of bad movies are fairly throbbing with life. Mannequin is dead. The wake lasts 1 1/2 hours, and then we can leave the theater.

Plays like a genial amateur theatrical, the kind of production where you'd like it more if you were friends with the cast. The plot is creaky, the jokes are laborious, and total implausibility is not considered the slightest problem.

How can you forgive a movie that begins by asking you to care who will win freedom, and ends by asking you to care who will win a fight?

A polished, high-ozone sequel, not as good as the original but building once again on a quirky performance by Robert Downey Jr.

This movie is one amazing piece of work, not only for the Hoskins performance but also for the energy of the filmmaking, the power of the music, and, oddly enough, for the engaging quality of its sometimes very violent sense of humor.

A fascinating study of behavior that violates the rules.

Will kids like the movie? The kids around me in the theater seemed to, although more for the Muppets than for the cautionary tale of Scrooge.

Mr. Magoo is transcendently bad. It soars above ordinary badness as the eagle outreaches the fly. There is not a laugh in it. Not one. I counted.

This isn't a great movie, but it sure is a nice one.

Isn't a slick documentary; some of it feels like Blaustein's home movie about being a wrestling fan. But it has a hypnotic quality.

A tedious exercise in style, intended as a meditation on guns and violence in America but more of a meditation on itself, the kind of meditation that invites the mind to stray.

I was fascinated by the face of Emmanuelle Devos, and her face is specifically why I recommend the movie.

The movie is told almost entirely from Nolte's point of view, and he makes an immensely likable character right from the top.

Flash Gordon is played for laughs, and wisely so. It is no more sophisticated than the comic strip it's based on, and that takes the curse off of material that was old before it was born. Is all of this ridiculous? Of course. Is it fun? Yeah, sort of, it is.

There seem to be two movies going on here at the same time, and December Boys would have been better off going all the way with one of them.

The film is a soapy melodrama set from about 1936 to 1946 and done with style.

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

A pleasure to look at and scarcely less fun as a story. I came to scoff and stayed to smile.

The ending doesn't work, as I've said, but most of the movie works so well I'm almost recommending it, anyway -- maybe not to everybody, but certainly to people with a curiosity about how a movie can go very right, and then step wrong.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 shows Quentin Tarantino so effortlessly and brilliantly in command of his technique that he reminds me of a virtuoso violinist racing through "Flight of the Bumble Bee" -- or maybe an accordion prodigy setting a speed record for "Lady of Spain."

The movie is smart about journalism because it is smart about offices; the typical newsroom is open space filled with desks, and journalists are actors on this stage; to see a good writer on deadline with a big story is to watch not simply work but performance.

Begins with a thought-provoking idea from Philip K. Dick, exploits it for its action and plot potential, but never really develops it.

This film is so good it is devastating.

Spacey does what can be done with the material, but it never achieves takeoff velocity.

It's only 76 minutes long, but although kids will like it, their parents will be sneaking looks at their watches.

Casting can be the reason that one movie works and another doesn't. It is the first reason for the success of The Girl From Monaco, the kind of romantic comedy with a twist that used to star Jack Lemmon.

It's an incredible lapse in a movie of this size and ambition - but they've failed to make Judge Roy Bean interesting. He's one-dimensional, predictable, propped up by Paul Newman's acting style, with no personality of his own.

This is essentially Renee Zellweger's picture, and she glows in it.

The movie is worth seeing, for the good stuff. I'm recommending it because of the performances and the details in the air-traffic control center.

The affirmation at the end of the film is so joyous that this is one of the few movies in a long time that inspires tears of happiness, and earns them. The Color Purple is the year's best film.

A decent futuristic action picture with some great sets, some intriguing ideas, and a few images that will stay with me.

It has been criticized for switching tone in midstream, but maybe it's only heading for deeper, swifter waters.

I liked the music. I would rather have the movie's soundtrack than see Groove again--or at all.

River's Edge is not a film I will forget very soon. Its portrait of these adolescents is an exercise in despair.

Revenge plays like a showdown between its style and its story. It combines the slick, high-tension filmmaking fashion of today with the values and sexual stereotyping of yesterday. It's such a good job of salesmanship that you have to stop and remind yourself you don't want any.

Instead of staying on that safe, predictable level, it begins to dig into the awkwardness and hypocrisy of our commonly shared, attitudes about race.

Intriguing in the way it dances in and out of the shadow of Bergman's autobiography.

The movie wants to be a laffaminit extravaganza like the Zucker & Abrahams productions, but with slyer humor, more inside jokes, throwaway references and just plain goofiness, as when the characters occasionally break into their own language.

The Serpent and the Rainbow is uncanny in the way it takes the most lurid images and makes them plausible.

Monsters, Inc. is cheerful, high-energy fun, and like the other Pixar movies, has a running supply of gags and references aimed at grownups.

Has zest and humor and some lovable supporting characters, but do we really need this zapped-up version of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic? Eighteenth century galleons and pirate ships go sailing through the stars, and it somehow just doesn't look right.

In its own way and up to a certain point, 1492 is a satisfactory film. Depardieu lends it gravity, the supporting performances are convincing, the locations are realistic, and we are inspired to reflect that it did indeed take a certain nerve to sail off into nowhere just because an orange was round.

As for Madchen Amick, a stunning beauty with an edgy intelligence, Kazan has given her a role that grows more interesting as it deepens.

Once is the kind of film I've been pestered about ever since I started reviewing again. People couldn't quite describe it, but they said I had to see it. I had to. Well, I did. They were right.

Richard Dreyfuss, who is sometimes too exuberant, here finds the right tones for Mr. Holland, from youthful cocksureness to the gentle insight of age. His physical transformations over 30 years are always convincing.

Rendition is valuable and rare. As I wrote from Toronto: "It is a movie about the theory and practice of two things: torture and personal responsibility. And it is wise about what is right, and what is wrong."

While so many films about coming of age involve manufactured dilemmas, here is one about a woman who indeed does come of age, and magnificently.

Living these lives, for these people, must have been sad and tedious, and so, inevitably, is their story, and it must be said, the film about it.

By now, everyone knows who wins, but the scenes before the fight set us up for it so completely, so emotionally, that when it's over we've had it. We're drained.

Would it be heresy on my part to suggest that Fiddler isn't much as a musical, and that director Norman Jewison has made as good a film as can be made from a story that is quite simply boring?

This is a deceptive film. It starts in one direction and discovers a better one. Cheshire is a dry, almost dispassionate narrator, and that is good; preaching about his discoveries would sound wrong.

A Little Romance has been described as a movie about the way kids behave when adults aren't looking. I think it's quite the opposite: A movie about the way kids behave when adults are looking - and when adults are writing the dialog and directing the action, too. It gives us two movie kids in a story so unlikely I assume it was intended as a fantasy. And it gives us dialog and situations so relentlessly cute we want to squirm.

Not realizing that Inkheart is based on a famous fantasy novel, I had the foolish hope the movie might be about books. No luck. Wait till you hear what it's about.

Trumbo has taken the most difficult sort of material -- the story of a soldier who lost his arms, his legs, and most of his face in a World War I shell burst -- and handled it, strange to say, in a way that's not so much anti-war as pro-life. Perhaps that's why I admire it.

What makes the movie work, to the degree that it does, are the performances by Turman, Lou Gossett and Joan Pringle.

Intended as a farce, but lacks farcical insanity and settles for being a sitcom, not a very good one.

The film is a visual pleasure, using elegant techniques that don't call flashy attention to themselves. The camera is intended to be as omniscient as the narrator, and can occupy the film's space as it pleases and move as it desires. Here is a young man's film made with a lifetime of experience.

Yes. The movie works, and so we accept everything.

The movie's excellence comes from Foster's performance as a resourceful and brave woman; from Bean, Sarsgaard and the members of the cabin crew, all with varying degrees of doubt; from the screenplay by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray; and from the direction by Robert Schwentke.

The film is elegiac and sad, beautifully mounted, but not as compelling as it should be.

The movie is astonishingly simple-minded, depicting characters who obediently perform their assigned roles as adulterers, cuckolds, etc.

There is a reason to see the movie, and that reason is Piper Perabo.

Betty Blue is a movie about Beatrice Dalle's boobs and behind, and everything else is just what happens in between the scenes where she displays them.

Not only funny and wicked, clever and visually inventive, but . . . kind and sweet. Tender and touching.

Bitter Moon is wretched excess. But Polanski directs it without compromise or apology, and it's a funny thing how critics may condescend to it, but while they're watching it you could hear a pin drop.

The movie is too pat and practiced to really be convincing, and the progress of Ariel's relationships with the two grumps seems dictated mostly by the needs of the screenplay. But Matthau and Lemmon are fun to see together, if for no other reason than just for the essence of their beings.

The film only wants to amuse. It's a reminder that Dogma films need not involve pathetic characters tormented by the misuse of their genitalia, but can simply want to have a little fun.

This movie left me reeling with turmoil and confusion, with feelings of sadness and despair. Those are the notes it strives for.

Here's a movie filled with drama and excitement, unfolding a plot of brilliant complexity, in which the central character is solemn and silent, saying only what he has to say, revealing himself only strategically.

The River Wild is one of the movies you want to play along with, you really do, but it gets so many details subtly wrong that finally you lose patience and turn on it.

It's satirical, exciting, funny, and an influential masterpiece of art direction.

A slick, scary, funny Creature Feature, beautifully photographed and splendidly acted in high adventure style.

Regaled for 50 years by the stupendous idiocy of the American version of Godzilla, audiences can now see the original Japanese version, which is equally idiotic.

A heartwarming film, not a political dirge. Much of this warmth comes from the actress Nisreen Faour.

The film can be seen as a series of his failed attempts to connect, every one of them hopelessly wrong.... This utter aloneness is at the center of Taxi Driver, one of the best and most powerful of all films, and perhaps it is why so many people connect with it even though Travis Bickle would seem to be the most alienating of movie heroes. We have all felt as alone as Travis. Most of us are better at dealing with it. [20th Anniversary Release]

More than most films, it depends on the strength of its performances for its effect - and especially on Penn's performance. If he is not able to convince us of his power, his rage and his contempt for the life of the girl, the movie would not work. He does, in a performance of overwhelming, brutal power.

El sleazo profoundo trasho zilch.

A raw, wounding, powerfully acted film, and you cannot look away from it.

Watch Jan Decleir's performance. He never goes for the easy effect, never pushes too hard, is a rock-solid occupant of his character.

Parker succeeds in making the prison into a full, real, rounded world, a microcosm of human behavior; I was reminded of e.e. cummings' novel The Enormous Room. The movie's art direction is especially good at recreating that world, as in a scene where Hayes and his friends try to escape down an old cistern. And there are visions into the inferno, as in a scene in the madhouse where the inmates circle forever around a stone pillar. The movie creates spellbinding terror, all right; my only objection is that it's so eager to have us sympathize with Billy Hayes.

A movie where the story, like the sub, sometimes seems to be running blind. In its best moments it can evoke fear, and it does a good job of evoking the claustrophobic terror of a little World War II boat.

Has an intriguing cast, a director who knows how to use his camera and a lot of sly humor. Shame about the story. When you see this many of the right elements in a lame movie, you wonder how close they came to making a better one.

One regards Reign of Fire with awe. What a vast enterprise has been marshaled in the service of such a minute idea. Incredulity is our companion, and it is twofold: We cannot believe what happens in the movie, and we cannot believe that the movie was made.

One of the best elements of the movie is in breaking free, he is respecting his father. This movie has deep values.

Then there are the miracles of the performances by Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski and Hunter Carson.

Stone's most impressive achievement in this film is to allow all the financial wheeling and dealing to seem complicated and convincing, and yet always have it make sense.

Because McQueen can be so effective in action pictures, The Hunter is all the more frustrating: Didn't anybody point out that the script was a mess that made no sense? Didn't anybody have the guts to? Maybe they thought superstar McQueen would save the day. Pictures like this could finish him off.

It's fitfully funny but never really takes off. Out of the corners of our eyes we glimpse the missed opportunities for some real satirical digging.

It is more of a wonderment, lolling in its enchanting images--original, delightful and funny.

Most movies are made by males and show women enthralled by men. This movie knows better.

This is an appallingly silly movie, from its juvenile comic overture to its dreadfully sincere conclusion.

It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.

Perhaps because the Beatles were considered such a draw, perhaps because the songs were counted on to sell the film, there was no agenda to dumb down the material or hard-sell the story. Instead of contrived urgency, there's unpressured whimsy, and the movie exists as pure charm, expressed in fantastical imagery. And then there are the songs.

Here Common isn't called upon to do much heavy lifting in the acting department, but he plays well with Queen Latifah. Sure, the movie is a formula. A formula that works reminds us of why it became a formula.

The fact is, this movie is really about a woman's spunk and a common man's sneaky revenge. And on that level it's absorbing and entertaining.

The movie is like a merger of his ugly drunk in "Bad Santa" and his football coach in "Friday Night Lights," yet Thornton doesn't recycle from either movie; he modulates the manic anger of the Santa and the intensity of the coach and produces a morose loser who we like better than he likes himself.

A delightful demonstration of how spirituality can coexist quite happily with an intense desire for France to defeat Brazil.

What all three of these stories share is the quality found in Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King: An attention to horror as it emerges from everyday life as transformed by fear, fantasy and depravity.

A breathtaking exercise in the macabre, a gruesome thriller with quirky cops and a killer of Lecterian complexity, and even when the movie is perfect nonsense, it's so voluptuous that you're grateful to be watching it anyway.

In sad-sack movies there is often a helpful woman around to help the despairing heroes. In "Garden State," it was Natalie Portman; in "Elizabethtown," Kirsten Dunst. Both were salvation angels, but Tyler has a gentle approach to this kind of role that is perfect for the tone of Lonesome Jim.

There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased.

It is admirable and well-made, but unutterably depressing and unredeemed by any glimmer of hope.

Jarmusch is a poet of the night. Much of Night on Earth creates the same kind of lonely, elegaic, romantic mood as Mystery Train, his film about wanderers in nighttime Memphis. Tom Waits' music helps to establish this mood of cities that have been emptied of the waking. It's as if the minds of these night people are affected by all of the dreams and nightmares that surround them.

Approaches the tricky subject of sadomasochism with a stealthy tread, avoiding the dangers of making it either too offensive, or too funny.

It's a movie about characters, primarily. It cares more about getting inside these people than it does about solving its crime.

A peculiar and intriguing film.

The story, written by Benton from the novel by Richard Russo, unfolds according to its own logic. It has the patience to listen to silences. Above all, it benefits from the confidence of Newman's performance. He is not hammering the points home, not marching from one big scene to another, but simply living on the screen.

WQhat would it really be like to huddle in a wrecked aircraft for 10 weeks in freezing weather, eating human flesh? I cannot imagine, and frankly this film doesn't much help me.

Porky's is another raunchy teenage sex-and-food-fight movie.

Bounds from one gag to another like an eager puppy.

Perhaps this movie was so close to Egoyan's heart that he was never able to stand back and get a good perspective on it -- that he is as conflicted as his characters, and as confused in the face of shifting points of view.

Maggie, Eric's mother, and Angie the manager are the most fully realized characters in the movie, which doesn't offer a single positively drawn male homosexual.

In the last analysis, I guess it all reduces to taste and instinct. Some paintings are good, says me, or says you, and some are bad. Some paintings could be painted by a child, some couldn't be.

The movie's success rests largely on the shoulders of Fernanda Montenegro, an actress who successfully defeats any temptation to allow sentimentality to wreck her relationship with the child.

This is a well-crafted movie by a man who knows how to hook the audience with his story; it's Frankenheimer's best work in years.

It's a compelling visceral film -- sound, images and characters combined into a decidedly odd visual experience that evokes the feel of a graphic novel. It seems charged from within by its power as a fable; we sense it’s not interested in a plot so much as with the dilemma of functioning in a world losing hope.

Sean Penn never tries to show Harvey Milk as a hero, and never needs to. He shows him as an ordinary man, kind, funny, flawed, shrewd, idealistic, yearning for a better world.

Too many adults have a tendency to confuse bad taste with evil influences; it's hard for them to see that the activities in "Doctor Dolittle,'' while rude and vulgar, are not violent or anti-social. The movie will not harm anyone.

An absolutely superb mounting of a hollow and disappointing production. It shows a technical mastery of filmmaking, and we are dazzled by the performances, the atmosphere, the mood of mounting violence. But by the second hour of the film we've lost our bearings: What is this movie saying about its characters? What does it feel and believe about them? Why was it necessary to tell their stories?

Diaz has one of the most winning grins in the movies. Basically, what I wanted was more of it. Some of that Cary Grant dialog. More flirtation. More of a feeling the characters, not the production, were the foreground. More of the stars.

I look at a film like this and must respect it for its ingenuity and love of detail. Then I remember "Amelie" and its heroine played by Audrey Tautou, and I understand what's wrong: There's nobody in the story who much makes us care.

The screenplay by Kaufman, Crichton and Michael Backes is not about much of anything important, and Connery's deep penetrating wisdom takes away some of the suspense: If he knows everything that's going to happen, why keep us in the dark?

The Vanishing is a textbook exercise in the trashing of a nearly perfect film, conducted oddly enough under the auspices of the man who directed it.

Rubber-stamped from the same mold that has produced an inexhaustible supply of fictional Southern belles who drink too much, talk too much, think about themselves too much, try too hard to be the most unforgettable character you've ever met, and are, in general, insufferable.

Timecop, a low-rent "Terminator," is the kind of movie that is best not thought about at all, for that way madness lies.

Yet Love! Valour! Compassion! has power and insight, and perhaps what makes it strong is its disinterest in technical experiments: It is about characters and dialogue, expressed through good acting--the very definition of the "well-made play."

One of the delights of The Taste of Others is that it is so smart and wears its intelligence lightly. Films about taste are not often made by Hollywood, perhaps because it would so severely limit the box office to require the audience to have any.

The latest in a flowering of good films from Iran, and gives voice to the moderates there. It shows people existing and growing in the cracks of their society's inflexible walls.

The movie is cast so well that the actors bring life to their predictable destinies, and Elizondo casts a kind of magical warm spell over them all.

The work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air.

This is one of those curious films before which the viewer is struck dumb. To describe it is to question and praise it - at one and the same time. I enjoyed the time I spent with Moretti, much as I might enjoy sitting next to an interesting stranger on an airplane, and hearing about his life.

Rgatime is a loving, beautifully mounted, graceful film that creates its characters with great clarity.

this is a very good movie. Woody Allen is ... Woody, sublimely. Diane Keaton gives us a fresh and nicely edged New York intellectual. And Mariel Hemingway deserves some kind of special award for what's in some ways the most difficult role in the film.

John Waters' Pink Flamingos has been restored for its 25th anniversary revival, and with any luck at all that means I won't have to see it again for another 25 years. If I haven't retired by then, I will.

A smart and funny movie, and the characters are in on the joke.

The most significant fact of the film is that the prosecutor Gunson, a straight-laced Mormon, agrees with the defender Dalton that justice was not served.

What Fred and Ginger had together, and what no other team has ever had in the same way, was a joy of performance. They were so good, and they knew they were so good, that they danced in celebration of their gifts.

All of this makes an interesting, if not gripping, film about the play, the playwright and the lead-up work to a stage production. It also leaves me wanting a great deal more.

The story tells a useful lesson, the jungle inhabitants are amusing, and although the movie is not a masterpiece it's pleasant to watch for its humor and sweetness.

The Searchers contains scenes of magnificence, and one of John Wayne's best performances.

A compelling, persuasive film, at odds with the White House effort to present Bush as a strong leader.

Has the sort of headlong confidence the genre requires. Russell finds the strong central line all screwball begins with, the seemingly serious mission or quest, and then throws darts at a map of the United States as he creates his characters.

I won't tell you I didn't enjoy parts of Bad Company, because I did. But the enjoyment came at moments well-separated by autopilot action scenes and stunt sequences that outlived their interest.

The movie is a great American document, but it's also entertaining. (Review of Original Release)

Although I did not understand the story, I would have appreciated a great deal less explanation. All through the movie, characters are pausing in order to offer arcane back-stories and historical perspectives and metaphysical insights and occult orientations. They talk and talk and somehow their words do not light up any synapses in my brain.

No revival, however joyously promoted, can conceal the fact that this is just an average musical, pleasant and upbeat and plastic.

I enjoyed the energy that was visible on the screen, and the sumptuousness of the production numbers, and the good humor of several of the performances.

The stars are Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep -- arguably the two most distinguished American movie actors under fifty. They have a genuine chemistry together on the screen and undeniable charisma. And that's it in this movie, which gives them not one memorable line of dialogue, not one inventive situation, not one moment when we don't groan at the startling array of clichés they have to march through.

Movies like 8 Women are essentially made for movie-lovers. You have to have seen overdecorated studio musicals, and you have to know who Darrieux and Deneuve and Beart and Huppert and Ardant are, to get the full flavor. It also helps if you have seen Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap."

The 1954 film version of Orwell's novel turned it into a cautionary, simplistic science-fiction tale. This version penetrates much more deeply into the novel's heart of darkness.

Here is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign. A world where if you meet a strange towering creature in the forest, you curl up on its tummy and have a nap.

The movie feels so plotted, so constructed, so written, that I found myself thinking maybe they shouldn't have filmed the final draft of the screenplay. Maybe there was an earlier draft that was a little disorganized and unpolished, but still had the jumble of life in it.

This is one of Kristin Scott Thomas' most inspired performances.

Private Benjamin is refreshing and fun. Goldie Hawn, who is a true comic actress, makes an original, appealing character out of Judy Benjamin, and so the movie feels alive, not just an exercise in gags and situations.

A movie like this touches everyday life in a way that we can recognize as if Turkey were Peoria. I can imagine a similar film being made in America, although Americans might talk more.

The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of Casablanca is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans.

This is a writer's picture, no less than a visual experience that approaches its subject as tactfully as the messengers do. No fancy camerawork. It happens, we absorb it.

The long closing sequence is virtuoso, redefining what went before and requiring Murphy to become a more complex character than she gave any hint of in the opening scenes.

It has smart characters, and is wise about the ones who try to tame their intelligence by acting out.

This is simply the story of one man. Yes, and on those terms I accept it, and was moved by the humanity and logic of the character.

Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal is one hell of an exciting movie. I wasn’t prepared for how good it really is: it’s not just a suspense classic, but a beautifully executed example of filmmaking. It’s put together like a fine watch. The screenplay meticulously assembles an incredible array of material, and then Zinnemann choreographs it so that the story--complicated as it is--unfolds in almost documentary starkness.

The point of the movie is not the plot, but the character and the atmosphere.

Brubaker is a grim and depressing drama about prison outrages - a movie that should, given its absolutely realistic vision, have kept us involved from beginning to end. That it doesn't is the result, I think, of a deliberate but unwise decision to focus on the issues involved in the story, instead of on the characters.

It is one of the year's best films.

Somehow the movie really never takes off into the riveting fascination we expect in the opening scenes. Maybe it cannot; maybe it is too faithful to the issues it raises to exploit them.

It handles a sports movie the way Billie Holiday handled a trashy song, by finding the love and pain beneath the story.

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

It lacks all of the style and sense of fun of the original Critters (1986) and has no reason for existence - aside, of course, from the fact that Critters is a brand name and this is the current model.

Sweet, light entertainment, but could have been more.

It looks good, it moves quickly and it is often a jolly good time. As mindless swashbuckling in a well-designed production, it can't be faulted. The less you know about the British Empire and human nature, the more you will like it, but then that can be said of so many movies.

Kandahar does not provide deeply drawn characters, memorable dialogue or an exciting climax. Its traffic is in images.

One possible approach to 8 1/2 Women, I think, is to view it as a slowed-down, mannered, tongue-in-cheek silent comedy, skewed by Greenaway's anger and desire to manipulate.

The film is so well made and acted, because it captures its period so meticulously.

I believe this film should be seen by every medical student. Like Kurosawa's masterpiece, "Ikiru" (1952), it fearlessly regards the meanings of life, and death.

The costumes and everything else in the film--the photography, the music, above all Shakespeare's language--is so voluptuous, so sensuous.

It never really pulls itself together into the convincing, focused drama it promises, yet it kept me involved right up until the final scenes, which piled on developments almost recklessly.

It’s funny, exciting, preposterous, great to look at, and made with the same level of technical expertise we’d expect from a new Bond movie itself. And all of that is very nice, but nicer still is the perfect pitch of the casting.

American Teen isn't as penetrating or obviously realistic as her "On the Ropes," but Burstein has achieved an engrossing film.

The movie has elements of the genre and lacks only pacing and plausibility. You wait through scenes that unfold with maddening deliberation, hoping for a payoff--and when it comes, you feel cheated.