Stanley Kauffmann

Happiness very quickly displays finesse and control, colored by a nearly exultant glee. [9 Nov 1998]

He has had a notable career, and I wish there had been more specifics about it in the film.

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

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.

Still, flaws and all, we have to be grateful to Nunez for persisting in his independence.

Midnight Run is two films. One is a succession of bright, razor-edge, nutty dialogues between two men. The other is the plot that keeps them together, which is stale and full of boring violent-comic action. [29 Aug 1988]

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]

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.

Ardant is marvelously genuine: fiery, petty, exalted.

Whatever the virtues of The Queen--and it certainly has them--it simply would not exist without Mirren.

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

The film is old-fashioned because it exists. No one, to use an ever-dubious line, makes films like this anymore.

Whatever the plot, it is soothing to be in the company of Fanny Ardant, who plays Catherine and whose twenty-five-year career is dotted with small treasures.

For the eye and for the spirit, it is a study in varying shades of gray.

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]

Mathilde's story is well enough handled by Jeunet to be endurable, and the rest of the film is a reward.

The film is emotionally and visually sustained, so it is pleasant.

This is the fourth film directed and at least co-written by Beauvois. (He has acted in a number of pictures, including a previous one of his own, and he is in Le Petit Lieutenant for a while.) He is a clean and sure director, with a good selective eye: he knows where we ought to be looking at any moment. We can hope for more Beauvois films with worlds of their own.

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 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).

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 tension with which the picture starts soon dissipates, the contrast between Eliska's background and her present place is lost, and the film plods into a tale of village life, spiced only occasionally with a hint of German threat.

A lifeless, tedious picture... A complete dud. [29 Oct 1990, p.26]

The banality of the plot and the writing make the presence in the cast of the celebrated William Hurt, Andie MacDowell and Bob Hoskins all the more disheartening. [03 Mar 1997 Pg.30]

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.

An engrossing documentary.

A story that is still healthfully discomfiting to remember.

What matters much more than the story or the Spicy Stuff is the dancing, the show-biz dancing. It's electric. Exciting. And there's lots of it. [23 Oct 1995]