Stanley Kauffmann

This picture is an odd misadventure: a gigantic enterprise that, despite some quite exceptional filming, is thwarted by its two leading actors.

Crudup is whole. He creates the man who has pride in what he does, who is suddenly stripped of the work and the pride; and who makes his way, somewhat painfully, to another sort of pride. His story is a small but acute poignancy in the history of the theater, and Crudup realizes it completely.

Dismal and heavy, and the failure rests chiefly with Johnny Depp, who plays Barrie.

Here is a film that carries within itself not only the parody but the very material it exploits and subverts. [05 Sept 1994 Pg. 34]

Sophie Scholl is not as devastatingly moving as "The White Rose," but it, too, evokes awe in lesser beings.

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]

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.

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.

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

The film isn't dreadful: it is just generally disappointing.

It all turns out a bedraggled mess. Lee presumably had two ideas, one an exposé of pharmaceutical greed, the other a sex comedy: then he decided that neither one would make a film in itself and came up with the lame idea of combining them. What makes the resulting blunder even worse is that, intrinsically, almost every scene is directed well.

None of the actors completely satisfies.

The results make poor old King Kong look like something from a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Such is progress. [12 July 1993, p.26]

So this is not, as vaunted, a documentary about a film destroyed by temperaments and tizzies. It is the account of a medical catastrophe that could have spoiled the opening of a supermarket.

Virtually everything that happens in Adaptation is almost juvenile showing off - daring to make a film that is in search of a script.

Twister is full of marvelous special effects. The story exists only to provide some respite between those marvels, like dialogue in an opera full of terrific arias. [10 June 1996, p.24]

As the picture winds on, the feeling grows that Saleem, who clearly knows these people, wants to show that their mode of life in this stark setting has, in a gentle way, a touch of the ridiculous.

Not many of us, I think, would want to see many films made this way, possibly not one more, but this one is an intriguing glance at the director-as-god, deigning to treat human frailty with imperial sway, assuming that his art justifies this slender material.

The picture has enough good feeling and chuckle to take it out of the parochial.

With the ship, with its totality of people, Cameron is wizardly, creating an entire society threading through the various strata of a world that has been set afloat from the rest of the world. [Jan. 5, 1998]

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]

Soderbergh, the writer and director, has slowed his metronome almost to a crawl, has repeated and delayed and protracted, in an attempt at depth. The net effect is a small paradox: incomprehensibility caused by drag, not by rush.

The two leading actors in The Upside of Anger are so good that their performances, even more than the story they are in, keep us interested.

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

Frances McDormand plays the record-producing mother with the nativity that talent makes possible.

In the leading role Michael Pitt is neither good nor less than good. He simply mopes along druggedly for the film's ninety-seven minutes. Van Sant's inculcation of this non-performance is clearly part of his dogged negativism, his intent to purge his film.

Despite the pictorial riches, despite the firm performances by Ray Winstone as the captain and Guy Pearce as Charlie Burns, despite the miraculous John Hurt in an eccentric role that was put in just for spice, The Proposition is hollow.

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.