Stanley Kauffmann

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.