Stanley Kauffmann

That climax stretches credibility, but the whole point of the piece is that the Joe of the opening has become someone else.

Disembodied, patchy, pointless work, which isn't even successfully pretentious.

The entire film feels like the result of a market study. Tests were held (it seems) to determine which problems would have the most audience-grab, particularly when combined with two other problems. [06 Mar 1995 Pg.30]

Nelson's writing, as arranged by Simpson, adds absolutely nothing to our experience of September 11.

Bertolucci's original story--a generous adjective--was made into a screenplay by the American novelist Susan Minot, who has an unwavering eye for the predictable and an ear for the tired phrase. [24 Jun 1996 Pg.32]

We may indeed yawn a bit from time to time, but we know that we are yawning in the presence of a director who is intelligently disturbed by the moral inertia he sees around him and whose future is worth watching.

Mamet's understanding of the essentials here and his skill in supplying them are not major achievements for him, but it would be wasteful not to recognize them. Spartan is another feather, though a small one, in his cap.

Herman handled his script cleanly and cast the picture well. [09Jun1997 Pg 30]

Andy Garcia, who first became noticeable in The Untouchables, has seductive strength, homicidal cool. One reason to look forward to Part IV is that he'll fill the center better than Pacino does. [21 Jan 1991, p.26]

We are left finally with a double response: it is hard to know exactly why the film was made, what its emotional and thematic point is, yet we are glad it happened because of Harris's performance.

Sternfeld not only deals empathically with his cast, he seems to know that his screenplay is not very novel or stirring; nonetheless, he wants to present these human beings in their skins, so to speak.

Candor about homosexuality is now so widely accepted as part of theater-film possibilities that plays and films offering not much more than such candor seem dated. In that sense Love! Valour! Compassion! is an important, if dull, milestone. [09Jun1997 Pg 30]

The really relevant defect of this thriller is that it isn't scary.

For me, the execution of the picture is so weak, so imitative, so facile that it makes all the thematic discussion seem idle. [25 Nov 1996, Pg.30]

His (LaBute's) work needs attention even at its nadir, which I hope this new film is.

I hazard the guess that quite small children--pre-science fiction, pre-heroics--will enjoy its fairy-tale quality.

The daring achievement of Jarhead is that it is not a film about war, about combat: it is about being a soldier.

The most important aspect of the stories about all five characters is the way they are told. Attal and his editor Jennifer Augé have found an attractive playful style: they never let the stories rest, almost juggling them, and keep them gamboling before us.

Little in [Connery's] character is explored or colored. It's not a highly complex role, but the man has qualities that could make him interesting; after all, it's his aberrant action that initiates the whole naval plot. Connery merely fulfills his contractual obligations to the producer-no depth in him at all. [26 Mar 1990, p.26]

The result is not a quilt, just a succession of story snippets that keep interrupting one another.

As Freundlich surely knew, he must have counted, as do we, on the revelation of character to enrich the piece. It doesn't happen. None of the people is particularly interesting, not even the obligatory neurotic, well enough played by Julianne Moore. [6 October 1997, p. 28]

Schreiber's directing is ambitious, but it is nowhere near the originality and truth in his acting. Throughout the film we can feel him striving to control, to invent, to glisten.

The picture's effect: the sexual element is trenchant, while the status of Muslim youth registers strongly.

The tenuous conclusion is that all this metaphysical hugger-mugger was divinely ordered to reconcile Costner and his father. All those dead players were summoned from that Great Locker Room in the Sky in a painfully false move. [9 May 1989, p.26]

The real surprise, and Bertolucci's best achievement here, is the performance of Prince Siddhartha by Keanu Reeves. That is not a misprint. Reeves has done tolerable work in the past, except for his feeble Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, but here he carries off an extremely demanding role. [13 Jun 1994]

Meyer's screenplay has been called unsuccessful, and I agree; but, without glossing some bumps that are his doing, I'd say that in this case the trouble with the screen adaptation is the novel.

The picture as a whole lacks the energy and incisiveness --the sheer anger-- that have marked Costa-Gavras's best films. A pity, because it is a true Costa-Gavras subject.

Moreau's face is the base and the beauty of the film.

Imagine finding the will to get up every morning to do another day's work on this stale story tarted up with relevance.

Even at the low end of the Spielberg spectrum, there has always been some air of ingenuity, some sense of the maker's excitement. Not here. The Terminal plods in spirit and execution.

The $25 million of his own that Gibson is said to have put into this film may be conscience money, and the savagery in the picture may--consciously or not--be Gibson's way of saying that violence is not always valueless.

This Jeffrey Hatcher-Kimberly Simi version, directed by Lasse Hallström, has a resemblance to some of Casanova's memoirs but is chiefly based on the assumption that, in a costume drama, anything goes.

The film's intent was presumably satirical in the vein of "Catch-22" or "M*A*S*H," but the satire is so weak, the action so devoid of comic perspective, that we are left with a naked gaggle of ugly episodes.

DeLillo felt he needed a plot, and he invented one that is shockingly bad for a novelist of his accomplishment. It isn't the use of a plot that degrades the picture: it is the degrading plot itself--which isn't even a good cartoon of a too-busy plot.

Two aspects stand out. Clint Eastwood is not the first person we might think of to direct a film of leisurely pace, concerned with ghosts and a transvestite...Then there's Kevin Spacey, who grows before our eyes. [29 December 1997, p. 28]

Christine Jeffs has directed it with discretion and intimacy, almost a paradoxical privacy.

When a spectacular film rests on at least a minimal armature of character and cogent action, as Troy does, we can just sink back and enjoy. What we enjoy is the sovereignty over time and place and the force of gravity that film has given to the world.

And Jesus Ochoa, the veteran actor who plays Diego, makes us jealous of Mexico. How easily powerful he is, how complex without pretense.

A bit scattery, but it simmers with Shicoff's intensity in lending his faith and being to the role.

It is too weak to say that Herzog disregards conventions of narrative structure and editing: he is there to punish us for attending his film and to make us enjoy it. Other directors have at times made masochists of us: Herzog excels at this, and he doesn't often do it more stunningly than in Cobra Verde.

It has long been clear that Shepard is a rare double talent. He has flourished, rightly, as a playwright, and he is also a compelling film actor. His face does more for the reality of this picture than anything he wrote in the script.

The fact that Pitt and Jolie have not been associated with this type of action is something of a help, but what was needed was the off-balance tickle that--to fantasize--Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell would have given it.

The film is in one sense lifelike: in order to get the good, we have to endure the lesser.

Eloy de la Iglesia, who directed Bulgarian Lovers, has a light and witty touch, reminiscent of his countryman Pedro Almodóvar...But he needed a better screenplay.

Cuadron, at the helm, wanted to pitch his film in a terrain accessible to modern sensibility yet different from what that sensibility is generally fed. And he might have succeeded, except for his casting. [2 March 1998, p. 26]

Where Russell wobbles in this screenplay, which he wrote with Jeff Baena, is not in his intent but that he omitted to make it funny.

Ozpetek is an enriching director. More than a presentation of its contents, every scene seems also to be a distillation of the matters that led to it. He can take a somewhat worn device--moving the camera around his people as they talk--and make it savory.

Patently intended to be a serious exploration of a cultural encounter, but this intent withers through a lack of writers' gravity and a mass of action clichés.

In future Lee can best serve his versatility by never doing anything like this again.

All these mystical elements are so sententiously handled and bump into one another so clumsily that they make the film seem nutty. But because spirituality is the theme of Bee Season, we are obviously not meant to laugh at it. Well, I wish I could get Jehovah's reaction to the picture.

LaBute's dialogue reminds us that, along with that of such others as Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch and Whit Stillman, the sheer writing, these days, of some American films is remarkably fine. LaBute has cast his film to match, with people who can handle his dialogue neatly. [31 August 1998, p. 28]

The grave story is leaden, the comic story isn't funny, and the comparison--the rivalry--between the two modes is never crystallized.

Why, then, is the picture chilling? Because it is a calm reminder of an inevitability. The sight of long lines of young women doing tiny bits of attachment work or packing hour after hour, day after day, is saddening.

The trouble, which becomes quickly and oppressively apparent, is that the screenplay has no point except its plot. No theme, no intent of anything like Oliver Stone weight, is ever manifested.

Gerry is all manner without any trace of depth.

This French pastry, directed by Danièle Thompson, who wrote it with her son Christopher, is a meet-cute comedy in excelsis. Or very near excelsis.

The very considerable impact of the picture is mainly the work of two men, the author and the star.

None of the people in the film is realized as a character: Cronenberg has no interest in character. Each person is given a dab of characteristics and is then sent off to copulate. [21Apr1997 Pg 26]

The result is almost like a film we have seen before but don't mind seeing again. The dialogue is generally fresh, the relationships ring true.

Witherspoon is flavorless, so she emphasizes the screenplay's skimpiness instead of at least partially redressing it.

Its rich movie-ness is heightened by the talents involved. John Mortimer knows how to shape scenes with dialogue, much as painters know how to turn shapes with color. Zeffirelli, in his long career as designer and director of opera, theater, and film, has not been noted for restraint; yet here his directing is generally taciturn and implicative. [7 June 1999, p. 32]

Unusually for a soap-bubble film, Après Vous runs almost two hours and very nearly sustains its length. Five minutes of condensation toward the end would have benefited it. But Salvadori floats everything, hammers nothing, and gets maximum buoyancy out of Camille Bazbaz's jaunty music.

It is Theron who transmutes and sustains this journey through the lower depths.

Flies into the improbable at its big moments. [17 Mar 1997, p. 28]

As in all fiercely realistic thrillers, the action becomes less and less credible as it speeds on. But, as with some such thrillers, we tolerate the incredible as the price of the pulse-quickening.

Winslet is an actress, Diaz is not. The screenplay by Nancy Meyers, who directed, has dialogue that is not near the snap level of, say, Nicole Holofcener's comparable "Friends With Money."

The ghost is played by Patrick Swayze, who can't handle the part; his bereaved girlfriend, Demi Moore, is much better. [13 Aug 1990, p.30]

His (writer/director Konchalovsky's) plunge into the world of mental distortion is so garish, so exploitative, that the picture needs only a few clicks of the dial to move from the horrible to the ludicrous

The best performance, the only one that can really be called acting, is Diane Ladd's as the mother. Ladd gives us a woman full of self-pity and shrewdness, full of sexual experience and guile, who has now reached the age when, if she wants to, she can turn off sexual heat in favor of cold power drive. [24 Sept 1990, p.32]

The progress of the film is so mechanical that we can only wait for the finish, knowing far ahead of time what it will be.

No one is expected to believe Pretty Woman . We're just supposed to enjoy it... Pretty Woman wants only to engage us for two hours, and it does. [16 Apr 1990, p.26]

We get the feeling that, about nine-tenths of the way along, after he had all the characters knotted up, Bass suddenly thought, "Good heavens! I've got to find some way to finish off this thing." The way that he found is lame and makes a hash of what precedes it. [28 July 1997]

The surprise in Jaws 2 is that, given the givens, it came out as well as it did. For me, in terms of sheer visceral zapping, it’s better than the first time around (or under).

Both Wong and Soderbergh have understandably expressed their gratitude at, even in this tripartite way, being part of an Antonioni project... But Eros is better for what they contribute than for his work.

A series of disconnected scenes alternating between two story lines, neither of which is cogent or concluded. The picture is tinged with the irrational.

Birth is one of those films occasionally encountered that make me question my nativity or that of the film-makers. Were they and I born on the same planet? If so, how could we now have such vastly different criteria of a film story's believability?

Turtles Can Fly, is masterly: it courses before us with grace, a control that paradoxically bespeaks love and anger.

Just a series of episodes: it has no trace of the structure that has supported drama and comedy for two millennia.

Pappas's talking heads can't exactly solve the problem, but they help to keep us from forgetting it.

The screenplay, by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, based on a French film, has enough sharp gags and plot twists to sustain it, with an ending that manages to be nice.

I could have managed to bear all the film's shortcomings if it weren't for Clooney. Where was he during the making of this film? His face is there, he knows his lines, he moves as needed, but any traces of the intelligence and rapport, the subtlety and understanding, that have marked his best work are excruciatingly missing. Clooney behaves as if he discovered after he had committed to the film that he really didn't like the script as much as he thought he did but would go through with it anyway. The result is puppetry.

This film by Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus forces us to make some decisions about him. For myself, I find him generally gross, in person and in manner.

We become so distracted by the jigsaw effect that soon we are more concerned with the assemblage itself than with what it is about.

Throughout the film a question tugs at the viewer. Kinsey's work was inarguably important, but his life is not especially interesting.

Ardant is marvelously genuine: fiery, petty, exalted.

All the actors caught me up so warmly that I stopped feeling guilty about liking this corny picture. [28 April 1997, p.30]

The film, so far as it is betrayable, is betrayed by the casting of Jean. She is played by Jennifer Lopez, a sexy star who is out of key with the picture and is presumably on hand to supply the oomph that Redford no longer provides.

The actors understand completely why they are there. The editing, complex because of several time strands, is more than skillful. But the screenplay by von Trotta and Pamela Katz suborns its subject.

Allen is wretched. It is no kind of pleasure to say so, especially with the memory of the good things he has done; but here he simply plunks front and center the fact that he cannot act and never could.

Not every stupid film sets out to be that way. But a furious zeal to entertain, especially to find twists, can push filmmakers past credibility, past twist, even past social decency. A dreadful example is Pushing Tin.

Fiennes has imagined and created from within. His Luther is not the thunderer we might expect, but he is, wondrously, the incarnation of a man passionate for God and angry with mundane intercessions.

The screenplay is at the start far from lucid in setting forth characters and relationships and intents. And after the film has been barreling along for two hours of its 148-minute journey, it seems to have lost the ability to finish. Three or four times in the last half-hour, I thought the film was over, only to be jarred by more of it.

Penn's film is very slow, sententious, ill-judged about the tensions he wants in long scenes. [18 Dec 1995, Pg.28]

I don't think that 8 1/2 "says" very much, but it is breathtaking to watch. One doesn't come away from it as from, say, the best Bergman or Renoir-with a continuing, immanent experience; one has to think back to it and remember the effect. But that is easy, for the experience is unforgettable.

The screenplay is schizoid. The first half is figuratively brassy, but then the violins begin to soar.

A moderately engaging satire, some of it amusing and some of it strained, but in considerable measure it reflects a strange circumstance in all our lives.

There's a great deal in black America that has yet to reach the screen, and Lee is a prime candidate, in gift and gall, to help fill the gap. [July 3, 1989]

Still, it never quite realizes the oneiric quality because, paradoxically, of its best achievement--the performances of the two boys. They are vital, insistent. Their beings contradict the dreaminess and make us ask the questions mentioned above.