Stanley Kauffmann

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The New Republic
For 471 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 39% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 59% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Stanley Kauffmann's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Lowest review score: 0 Hulk
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 274 out of 471
  2. Mixed: 152 out of 471
  3. Negative: 45 out of 471
471 movie reviews
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    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    Army of Shadows
    One particular bit of luck for this reissue is the fact that Melville's cinematographer, Pierre Lhomme, was on hand to help with the restoration of this thirty-five-year-old film. The result is a paradoxical beauty. Very many of the scenes are in sunlight--Melville avoided such facile stuff as shadows for suspense--yet they are chilly. The seasons vary, but the general effect is of a bright winter day that is freezing.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Breathless
    It is a film of flawless consistency and uncompromised truth.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Battle of Algiers
    Whatever the news-linked reasons for its revival, Pontecorvo's film is wonderfully worth seeing, or re-seeing, for its own sake.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Pulp Fiction
    But the way that this picture has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming. [14 Nov 1994]
    • The New Republic
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Schindler's List
    And Ben Kingsley--O rare Ben Kingsley!--is the Jewish accountant whom Schindler plucks from a condemned group to run his business and who combines gratitude with disdain, subservience with pride. (Actors who want to study the basis of acting--concentration--should watch Kingsley.) [13 Dec 1993]
    • The New Republic
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Stanley Kauffmann
    The English Patient
    The English Patient is excitingly promising. Then the screenplay goes rotten, like an overripe melon. [Dec. 9, 1996]
    • The New Republic
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    Sideways
    Payne's directing is alert, warm, patient. He knows that the surface must keep us interested until we go below it, and his confidence holds us.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    Reversal of Fortune
    Irons, busily offset by Silver, gleefully choreographed by Schroeder, gives the picture its real bravura reason for being. [19 Nov 1990]
    • The New Republic
    • 93 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Do the Right Thing
    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]
    • The New Republic
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    8½
    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.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Secrets & Lies
    Leigh, the writer, ties up things somewhat neatly and is a touch homiletic. Leigh, the director of cast and camera, is masterly. [Sept. 30, 1996]
    • The New Republic
    • 92 Metascore
    • 50 Stanley Kauffmann
    Goodfellas
    Scorsese's style, fierce as it is, doesn't accomplish what he clearly expected of it. Often, in many arts, fresh treatment can redeem familiar subjects, but it doesn't happen here. [Oct 22, 1990]
    • The New Republic
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    Moolaadé
    Sembène's love of his people and his commitment to the richness that underlies the poverty of their condition have always made his films gems of truth, as they do once again here.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    Lost in Translation
    Coppola handles her film with very pleasant economy, with a kind of warm precision. Her father, who was one of this picture's producers, can be as proud of her as we are grateful.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    Neither as sparkling as it is said to be nor as bad as it seems to be at the start. But it's pretty good—thus, as British phenomena go these days, exceptional.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Sweet Hereafter
    Any film that provides Ian Holm with a large role is off to a good start. The Sweet Hereafter gets off to that start and keeps going. [Dec 8, 1997]
    • The New Republic
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Before Sunset
    The result is a peculiar small gem, a true Linklater gem. The verity of the film, rather than any novelty or twist, keeps us fixed.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    Saving Private Ryan
    Steven Spielberg's new film begins as a monumental epic; then it diminishes; and, by its finish, is baffling. [August 24, 1998]
    • The New Republic
    • 90 Metascore
    • 50 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Crying Game
    Jordan would like us to believe that the three films are stages in a metamorphosis, but the stitching shows… Part Two, explored and expanded, might have made a good film, especially since Davidson gives a quiet, knowledgeable, perfectly poised performance. [14 Dec 1992]
    • The New Republic
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Queen
    Whatever the virtues of The Queen--and it certainly has them--it simply would not exist without Mirren.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Truman Show
    The Truman Show is a reminder of the Beckett theme. The screenplay by Andrew Niccol starts from something like Beckett's abstraction and reifies it with details of contemporary culture, then moves on into fantasy. [June 29, 1998]
    • The New Republic
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Hannah and Her Sisters
    At least we know this Allen persona, whatever his current name; the other characters, starting from scratch, don't get much past scratch. Although the picture spreads its attention fairly evenly among them, most of them end up as supporting cast because they are only life-size puppets. [Feb 10, 1986]
    • The New Republic
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    United 93
    To see the flight captain and co-pilot checking the plane before takeoff, to watch the varied passengers settling into their seats, is more agonizing than watching passengers board the ship in all those "Titanic" films. With United 93 we see these people unknowingly stepping into a history that is still in terrible process. But as a work in (let's call it) the Akhmatova mode, it does not and could not succeed.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    Capturing the Friedmans
    A prime candidate for a time capsule, to disclose a century hence the current state of some of our civilization's discontents, including the ability to be convinced that one is telling the truth even when one is lying.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 50 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Age of Innocence
    What helps Pfeiffer most is the fact that though she is exceptionally pretty, she patently doesn't rely on her prettiness: she wants to act. But, with her Ellen, though we know what she means from moment to moment, we simply don't feel it... Winona Ryder is disastrously miscast. [18 Oct 1993, p.30]
    • The New Republic
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    Gondry's virtuosity lifts the film far past science fiction into cinematic efflorescence. He shows us, more seductively than other directors have done, how freehand use of film can capture the flashes in our minds that slip between words.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Best of Youth
    Like some wines, The Best of Youth travels well. From its earliest moments the film is intelligently seen.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    Lost Embrace
    The overall effect is of a young director treating some old problems with the cinematic lexicon of his time. So he is able to create warmth without slush.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Lives of Others
    Despite the fact that parts of this film remind us of past pictures with comparable themes, the director and his actors make it immediate, gripping.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 10 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Piano
    An overwrought, hollowly symbolic glob of glutinous nonsense... I haven't seen a sillier film about a woman and a piano since John Huston's "The Unforgiven" (1960), a Western in which Lillian Gish had her piano carried out into the front yard so she could play Mozart to pacify attacking Indians. [13 Dec 1993]
    • The New Republic
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Letters from Iwo Jima
    Overall, the effect is presumably what Eastwood wanted: we are present at a momentous event, not watching a movie.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Capote
    A slight conceptual nudge and Capote would have focused on (as the closing line tells us) its true subject: an American author's success story. That theme is there, all right, but because it is not centered it is repellent, as the film pretends to be an account of the author's descent into collateral agony...With the true theme of fame-hunger fully fashioned, the film would have been a more authentic American epic.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Away from Her
    Extraordinary--delicate, seriously disturbing, and lovely.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    Fargo
    The Coen brothers wrote McDormand’s role best. Much of the time they seem to have had “Pulp Fiction” in their ears--strings of incongruous banalities; but with this pregnant cop, they struck some gold of their own. [March 25, 1996]
    • The New Republic
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    Nobody Knows
    There is not much progress in the film: actions are repeated and repeated...Yet the film is sustained--and, for the most part, well sustained--by the children.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    L'Enfant (The Child)
    The brothers have given us another treasure. Once again they have made a drama of redemption, and once again they convince us that it is possible.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Shine
    If this weren't a true story, who would believe it? Well, a good many of us, probably. First, it's the kind of exceptional circumstance we like to dwell on as proof that pessimists are wrong; second, Shine is markedly well made, therefore persuasive. [Nov. 18, 1996]
    • The New Republic
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Russian Ark
    Substantively there is no content. Everything we see or hear engages us only as part of a directorial tour de force. That force is exceptional, but since there is not much more to the picture, it leaves us hungry.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    To Be and to Have
    "You'll have to be patient." Philibert said, "That's the point." This is the film's success: its patience, which in a way mirrors the teacher's.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Stanley Kauffmann
    Grizzly Man
    The film is repetitious. Herzog has varied the original footage with some interviews that he conducted with a former Treadwell girlfriend and some other friends and observers. Still, an hour of it would have been more effective than the present feature length.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Shakespeare in Love
    With most historical films the informed viewer scrutinizes in order to cluck at errors. (There are books full of such cluckings.) With Shakespeare in Love, the more one knows, the more one can enjoy the liberties taken. [Jan. 4, 1999]
    • The New Republic
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    Fateless
    It contains little that will be new to any informed viewer; yet it fascinates for all of its 140 minutes.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Brokeback Mountain
    So in all the tumult about this film, the eruption of its subject into wide attention and the consequent revelations about cowboys' lives in the past, let us--without forgetting the American sources of the screenplay--acknowledge the anomaly that the director is Chinese.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Tarnation
    Caouette has opened up a case history vividly, but he has left us without any conclusions, not even with much enlightening empathy. Something more than truth--dare one say "mere truth"?--is needed.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Caché (Hidden)
    As with much art of our time--music, painting, sculpture, theater--Caché in a certain way affronts us. Its deliberate contravention of our expectations, and not necessarily stodgy expectations, is part of its intent.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    sex, lies, and videotape
    Soderbergh is helped enormously by the interplay of his actors, whom he has cast like a master... [He makes] a film that goes past what it shows to disclose what can't be seen. It's a fine achievement. [4 Sept 1989, p.26]
    • The New Republic
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Stanley Kauffmann
    Million Dollar Baby
    If we can watch this picture at all, it is because this universally admired person (Eastwood) is in it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Boogie Nights
    If Boogie Nights were poorly made and acted, its materials would make it intolerably tawdry. But its so well done that we keep watching. [Nov. 10, 1997]
    • The New Republic
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Stanley Kauffmann
    To Die For
    To Van Sant's credit, let's note that he has evoked more lightness and variety from Kidman, more scrimshaw gesture and inflection than I thought she could muster. [23 Oct 1995]
    • The New Republic
    • 86 Metascore
    • 30 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Player
    In crudest terms, there's no one to root for, and unlike Mamet or Pinter, for instance, the story isn't remotely strong enough to thrive without such a center… [The film s]trains hard to be smart and is ultimately repellent. [11 May 1992]
    • The New Republic
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Son
    The ability to conceive a compact drama on this huge subject and to embody it as perfectly as they have done, added to what they have already accomplished, puts Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne among the premier film artists of our time.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Silence of the Lambs
    Demme's pacing is tight throughout, marred only by some low-angle close-ups of the cannibal that are right out of old Vincent Price thrillers. [Feb 18, 1991]
    • The New Republic
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Pianist
    To name only one of its predecessors -- for me, the towering one -- doesn't "Schindler's List" do everything that Polanski achieves and more?
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    Kings & Queen
    Both these stories, which of course develop further, are more engaging than they may sound, because Desplechin directs them so intelligently and because they are so well acted.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Sling Blade
    Who is Billy Bob Thornton? The question fascinates after seeing Sling Blade, the extraordinary first film that he wrote and directed and in which he plays the leading role. [Feb. 10, 1997]
    • The New Republic
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Turtles Can Fly
    Turtles Can Fly, is masterly: it courses before us with grace, a control that paradoxically bespeaks love and anger.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 40 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Departed
    Is Scorsese desperate? This screenplay has the scent of it, as if he is scraping for material to feed his basic filmic interests. But the risk in this case--not evaded--was that his need led him close to painful strain. I can't remember another Scorsese moment as shockingly banal as the finishing touch here.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    About Schmidt
    Stands as a poignant marker in the career of a major artist.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 30 Stanley Kauffmann
    Unforgiven
    At the last, we're left with a film that tries to doll up a conventional genre with hints of depth, hoping to disguise the cross-dressing by putting it in the shape of an epic. Murnau, Mizoguchi, Ford, even you authors of the Book of Genesis, rest easy. [12 Oct 1992]
    • The New Republic
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Last Days
    The five stories are deftly interwoven by Moll, along with archival footage that puts these stories in contexts of time. [08 Mar 1999]
    • The New Republic
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Since Otar Left
    The last minutes of the film are exhilarating, but its real triumph is in everything that precedes the ending--the relatively simple lives of the three women up to that point.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Out of Sight
    One other element helps Out of Sight tremendously: the editing. [3 Aug 1998]
    • The New Republic
    • 84 Metascore
    • 40 Stanley Kauffmann
    Brazil
    Brazil doesn't add up to much, not only because its cautionary tales are familiar, but because it has no real point of view, nothing urgent under its facile symbols. And the story winds on and on looking for a finish. Three or four times I reached for my coat prematurely. [17 Feb 1986, p.26]
    • The New Republic
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    Through a Glass Darkly
    For the eye and for the spirit, it is a study in varying shades of gray.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    49 Up
    The segments are so cleverly arranged--Apted includes past pictorial references for each of the people we revisit--that now there is something almost mystical involved. It is as if a wizard were giving us an overview of forty-two years that mortals were possibly not meant to see.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 40 Stanley Kauffmann
    Far From Heaven
    Even with its latter-day (modified) frankness, Far From Heaven is only thin glamour that lacks a tacit wry base. Thus diminished, it can be tagged with a term that Susan Sontag once defined so well that she put it out of circulation: camp.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 30 Stanley Kauffmann
    2001: A Space Odyssey
    In the first 30 seconds, this film gets off on the wrong foot and, although there are plenty of clever effects and some amusing spots, it never recovers. Because this is a major effort by an important director, it is major disappointment...What is most shocking is that Kubrick’s sense of narrative is so feeble.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    Old Joy
    A good Listless Film carries a double melancholy for all: it makes us sad for its characters and sad for the world that has thus affected them. Old Joy is such a film.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    In the Name of the Father
    Sheridan and colleagues understood their chief problem: how to sustain interest in a story that was well-known in advance, not a large historical subject with its own prestige but a news story now dated. So they concentrated on character and on acid irony. [03 Jan 1994 Pg. 28]
    • The New Republic
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Stanley Kauffmann
    Volver
    Throughout we keep waiting for the real Almodóvar film, and it never arrives.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Stanley Kauffmann
    Distant
    The film might be called a moral travelogue. Instead of showing us mosques and tourist spots in beguiling old Istanbul, it follows a couple of ordinary Turkish men in drab surroundings and affirms that they breathe the same doubt-laden air as much of the rest of the world.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 30 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Quiet American
    As is frequently the case when there is public fuss about a film or play, the work itself is not very good.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    Iraq in Fragments
    Every moment of Longley's film is interesting, and the more we watch, the more clearly we realize that the film cannot solve anything for us.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Stanley Kauffmann
    Mystic River
    Little more than the distended first half of a twisty, dark "Law & Order" script.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Goodbye, Dragon Inn
    Tsai's film is not free of longueurs, but like much modern work in almost every field, these stretches are deliberate assaults on conventional expectation.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 20 Stanley Kauffmann
    Adaptation.
    Virtually everything that happens in Adaptation is almost juvenile showing off - daring to make a film that is in search of a script.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Stanley Kauffmann
    Trainspotting
    A new voyeurism has arisen in the last two decades or so, and Trainspotting caters to it--an addiction to addiction-watching. [August 19, 1996]
    • The New Republic
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Graduate
    All the talents involved in The Graduate make it soar brightly above its shortcomings and, for reasons given, make it a milestone in American film history. Milestones do not guarantee that everything after them will be better, still they are ineradicable.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Stanley Kauffmann
    Amen.
    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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Stanley Kauffmann
    Osama
    We are certainly entitled to marvel at its very existence, but that isn't enough. The work itself is extraordinary.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 20 Stanley Kauffmann
    Who Framed Roger Rabbit
    The plot, the gags, the action are so stupid and strident, so unfunnily parodic, that the film's only interest is in wondering how they did it-the mix of animation and live action. [1 Aug 1988]
    • The New Republic
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Stanley Kauffmann
    Moonstruck
    Two cheery notes: Nicolas Cage, as the erring brother, shows surprising signs of life, and Cher, as the erring fiancee, confounds those who swore she was a remote-control robot. [8 Feb 1988]
    • The New Republic
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    Raising Victor Vargas
    This is Sollett's first feature film -- he has previously made only one short -- and it shows, more than exceptional talent for cinema itself, his ability to evoke character, in a kind of sidewise offhand way, and to create a sense of community both within and around the film.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Stanley Kauffmann
    When We Were Kings
    The film's title ought to be When We Were King's Pawns. Don King maximized the media circus aspects from the start, as the razzle-dazzle directing of Leon Gast, helped in the editing by Taylor Hackford and others, makes electrically clear.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Stanley Kauffmann
    A Room with a View
    Bonham Carter is like an undergraduate in a university production who seems rather good considering that her performance is only an intelligent diversion while she prepares herself for a career in another field. [24 Mar 1986]
    • The New Republic
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    Spider
    Spider is not a pulse-quickening experience, but Fiennes's art makes it engrossing.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    Lilya 4-Ever
    It is Akinshina's presence and performance that make the pedestrian story heart-wrenching. She is pretty, responsive, reflective. Without the slightest strain, she convinces us of the beauty and pathos and hope within Lilya.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Vera Drake
    Leigh's directing is lean and tight. In Imelda Staunton as Vera, he has an actress who can make her only two emotions interesting.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Magdalene Sisters
    Why was this film made after the homes had already been abolished? One reason, hardly trifling, is that it was made excellently. Thematically, however, it stings -- as a reminder that Catholicism is only one religion that is dominated by males and that this domination is proprietary.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Pride & Prejudice
    The present film-makers have retained the essences of the plot and characters but have moved the ambience toward the next stylistic era, romanticism.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Venus
    Melancholy but enjoyable.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    Flirting with Disaster
    A comedy that surfs from beginning to end on a wave of high spirits. The tone is young but not juvenile, sexy but not cynical, optimistic but not stupid. [22 April 1996, p.28]
    • The New Republic
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Stanley Kauffmann
    Three Times
    The film's trouble is in what happens in each section: not enough. Once the atmosphere of each period is established, the story is too weak to interest--and the characterizations are too thin to compensate.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    Well-knit, generally lucid documentary.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    Safe Conduct
    The cast could not -- one could almost say need not -- be improved.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Constant Gardener
    One of the best elements in the adaptation is Caine's blending, like le Carré's, of the past and the present so that one can enrich the other. There are no stilted flashbacks: both past and present are treated as present, which gives the film a texture of depth.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Stanley Kauffmann
    A History of Violence
    This sort of investigation has been done so masterfully by Sam Peckinpah in "The Wild Bunch" and Oliver Stone in "Natural Born Killers" that, in a sternly utilitarian sense, we don't need Cronenberg. He is not, as far as I have seen, in their class. He proves it again in A History of Violence.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    Loach's cast fits perfectly, and his directing has his usual extra tang of commitment. He provides almost a sensory response to his material: we seem to feel the textures and scent the air.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 30 Stanley Kauffmann
    Breaking the Waves
    For this mortal, the film converts piety into pathology and then converts it back again at the end with a Song of Bernadette conclusion. I don't know what the title means. I do know that this ridiculous film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.[ Dec. 9, 1996]
    • The New Republic
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Stanley Kauffmann
    The Squid and the Whale
    All four of the roles are written with pungency. There is even an implication that the two adults realize the triteness of the situation and that they--the characters, not Baumbach--want to speak from inner sources, not from a script. Baumbach pulls this off with some sting and wit.
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