Stanley Kauffmann

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.

Eastwood, who directed the picture adequately, is inadequate in this role. He has done a lot of impressive acting in films, but none of it has been sexually romantic, and the age of 64 was not the right time to take up that line of work. [03Jul1995, Pg. 26]

Nothing like a full picture of Che--nor of Granado and his eventual scientific career in Cuba, for that matter. But it exhilarates with the spirit of these young men in Act One of their lives.

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

The gem in this rag pile is Cameron Diaz as Mary: quick, witty, pretty, warm. There is something about Mary. [17 Aug 1998]

The story is multiplex and unclear.

Whatever the outcome of all this hugger-mugger, as yet unresolved, Stolen gives us hints about a special sort of muscle.

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.

Though there is plenty of action, particularly at the start and at the end with two blasting sea battles, much of the film is not sufficiently interesting.

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]

To name only one of its predecessors -- for me, the towering one -- doesn't "Schindler's List" do everything that Polanski achieves and more?

Built on one of those particularly ludicrous plots in which, just before the end, we are meant to believe that a long succession of coincidences was really a diabolical scheme. [23 Feb 1998, p. 24]

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.

More amusing than exciting. [19 June 1989, p.28]

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

Jacques Richard has fashioned an adoring tribute to this wonderfully maniacal man.

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.

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

But the best of the story is that there isn't much--as such. A slice of living is put before us. Some things happen. That's all.

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.

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.

Black comedy? Black enough, but they muffed the other word. Robert Benton and Harold Ramis, put on dunce caps and go stand in the corner.

To read a Carver collection is to walk through a gallery of beautifully formed objects. To blend his stories into "soup," no matter how smartly, to see them "as just one story," is to vandalize good art, to rationalize filmic opportunism as aesthetic principle. [25 Oct 1993]

It is a film of flawless consistency and uncompromised truth.

Fonda believed in acting. She doesn't seem to believe in it anymore. Her performance in this film is a collection of reactions, vocal whoops, and pouncings that we have seen often before in lesser actors.

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.

Extraordinary--delicate, seriously disturbing, and lovely.

The son has served the father well, though he faced an odd difficulty: the architect's life was so unusual that his son's understandable absorption with it steals a bit of time from his treatment of the work.

It's dazzling and serious, with flurries of impulse playing around a persistent core of madness. [6 May 1996, p. 24]

The film holds us principally because of its Napoleon. Philippe Torreton doesn't perform the role: he exists.

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.

One aspect certainly is remarkable. The dialogue is, at least to an American ear, authentic. Allen doesn't mention any aid on the script, so we are to assume that he wrote it himself.

The whole is just a wan rejection of traditional story, as well as a weak slap at those who still bother to attack the story tradition.

Nothing about this film sounds, as described, novel. Yet it grips, because it has been made with plentiful feeling and vigor. [June 26, 1989]

At the last, My Mother's Smile conveys that, if Bellocchio is just doggedly hanging on to a career, he is still able to make us feel nostalgia for those high Italian days.

Malkovich has done considerable directing in the theater, but nothing in the acting here shows acuteness of choice or subtlety of touch.

Little more than the distended first half of a twisty, dark "Law & Order" 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 result is a picture that, moving through political and social chaos, is stubbornly amusing.

Everything falls into place, click click click. Like many a formulaic piece, this one engages a real theme--here it's the conflict between the concept of duty and the idea of the individual--and does little with it. [25 Jan 1993]

Green treats his people with affectionate knowledge, untinged with patronizing. And he sees them in ways that are free of cinematic cliché.

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.

Martin himself still seems to be filing in at run-throughs for the real star who couldn't make rehearsals. [11 March 1991, p.28]

Harron's work here is unclear in its theme or purpose. Was she showing how a woman managed to find a woman's way to success in a man's world? Was Harron interested in Page's delusion about what she was doing? Or did she want to scoff implicitly at the customers who made Page's career possible? We are left wondering.

"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.

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]

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.

Son Frère is a real achievement, delicate, perceptive, somewhat muted but nonetheless strong.

[Reiner] pulls everything together adroitly to make Harry Met Sally a real refreshment. It's what they call a summer picture, which means that, if it's good as this one is-it will seem summery even in winter. [21 Aug 1989, p.26]

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.

Crowe is, in his unique way, astonishing. Even at his biggest moments he seems both convincing and somewhat reticent.

Bellochio, who began his career in 1965, has made some of the most trenchant Italian films on political themes, and Good Morning, Night is one more of them.

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]

To play for an audience of one that is only a few feet away is different in concentration and shade from playing in the theater, and Madden, though the script lags a bit, has nonetheless helped his actors to render what were once theater scenes as film sequences.

Many sequences, many moments, are turned skillfully, and the look of the film is much of the time breathtaking. Yet, for its entire two hours and fifteen minutes, we merely watch it. It is there. We are here, regrettably objective.

What fascinates is, first, that these comics treat the joke the way jazz musicians might treat a theme that each of them plays differently; and, second, that the passage of this joke from one comic to another is like the bonding of a profession.

For all the film's frantic editing, it never really takes off, principally because of Gibson. He never seems concentrated, really present. He was better as Hamlet. [1996Dec9 Pg.27]

The Good Thief merely adds a new tinct to the pathos of Jordan's career. Once again we see a director who is better than anything he has so far done.

One reasonably dependable pleasure in Woody Allen's films is that he uses old-time songs, in moderately jazzed-up versions, on his soundtracks.

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]

Mondovino is repetitious. The version that is being shown here runs 131 minutes and would be more effective with about twenty minutes of condensation.

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.

Embedded here in a culture of formalities, with some of the arcs and gestures of that culture, it almost becomes an opera of its own.

Kaminski, who is as good as any cinematographer working today, matches the chromatic tones of shots to their content in ways that can only be called exciting.

Literal-minded to the last, I felt nothing but pity for Tom Cruise, fanged, wigged and costumed, trying hard with his considerable talent to make his sanguinary appetite real. [12Dec1994 Pg. 24]

The picture is so suavely made that we don't feel disappointed until it is over: what chiefly holds us is the quality of the acting.

Precisely the point of films in this genre is to provide pleasant predictability. We collaborate, in a way: we chuckle silently as, so to speak, we make the film ourselves.

The picture holds us, not only through our wonderment at the mixture but through Serreau's dexterity and her casting.

Over and over in the course of the film, we can see Spacey, a good actor, reaching down into himself to find a source of verity for this plot-constructed character. It is not a pretty sight.

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.

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

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 script is a tidy work of carpentry, in several time planes and with a tart finish. Tense moments abound, fights and shootings and near-drownings, but they seem items drawn from casework files. [5 Aug 1996, p.26]

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]

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]

What Radford has retained of the original, he treats warmly and intelligently, and with a few welcome surprises in the acting. But he has produced a different work, moderately successful in itself, out of materials provided by Shakespeare.

What keeps us watching? Chiefly it is Edward Norton's performance as Harlan. It is hard to doubt his belief in everything he says, no matter how silly or dangerous it sounds.

Gerry is all manner without any trace of depth.

It's the flat, self-exposing dud that fate often keeps in store for the initially overpraised. [26 Jan 1998, p.24]

It's agreeable to see a picture that holds us without perspiring to do so. We are treated not as an audience but as café chums to whom a story is being told

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.

At least we have the chance to see Sharif again, with our memory of the sun behind him, even though this film is not much more than a sweetmeat--Turkish delight.

It is echt Maugham, in its somehow flattering cynicism, its character crinkles, its perceptions that sting even though they don't go very deep.

After years of preparation in the hands of a man celebrated for his penetration and style, the picture adds almost nothing to our knowledge of its subject and adds it in a manner almost devoid of visual distinction. [27 July 1987]

And as film, Apollo 13 is dull… Partly it's because there are no characters, no room for any substantive character development… Apollo 13 is staffed with human puppets. [31 July 1995]

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.

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.

Well-photographed and adequately directed and acted, Iron Island is (painless) propaganda, informing us about domestic peace and goodwill. And this film, too, leaves us with a question: why does the currently aggressive Iran want the world, especially our chunk of it, to see what it is "really" like?

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

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]

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.

Like much that he has done, Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (Zeitgeist) is so simple that initially it's difficult. [13 Apr 1998]

This same film, shot for shot, line for line, could have been much more solid and engrossing, much farther up the Parnassian slope, with a better actor as Hughes.

But the contrast between setting and story isn't all that bars North Country from fulfillment. The major trouble is Theron. She plays Josey as well as is needed, but she is simply too beautiful.

A pretty good thriller for the first forty minutes or so. [25 Aug 1997, p. 24]

One other element helps Out of Sight tremendously: the editing. [3 Aug 1998]

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

Jaoui directs with flow and affection, and she plays Sylvia sensitively. Bacri has the right middle-aged assortment of humors.

The cast could not -- one could almost say need not -- be improved.

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.

As is frequently the case when there is public fuss about a film or play, the work itself is not very good.

Russell wants us to feel the itch of familiarity: it's part of his tonal plan. And he survives this structural hazard because he casts all the roles so well and gives his actors dialogue as fresh as the familiar situations would permit. [01 Aug 1994 Pg. 28]

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.

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.

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

Come back, Jim Jarmusch. Come back to the pungency of your first films. Leave the 1970s. Come back to the future. [03 Jun 1996, Pg.30]

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

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]

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.

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]

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.

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 overall effect of the film is melancholy: it seems desperate for the past.

Holofcener, who studied film at Columbia and has directed shorts, gets some sprightliness into her writing but not much difference in characterization between the two women. [12 Aug 1996, Pg.26]

Eastwood has never seemed less the persona he has built through the decades, the calm yet commanding center of a storm.

The contrast between Holm's pearly speech and the dark things that he tells us and that we see almost outlines twentieth-century civilization, elevation and brutality at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Haggis has made a safe picture. It is familiar enough that it slips easily into our film-watching faculty without any fuss, yet his handling of it--his muscular belief in what he is doing--makes us hope that his next screenplay will be a bit less safe.

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.

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 result is a peculiar small gem, a true Linklater gem. The verity of the film, rather than any novelty or twist, keeps us fixed.

The insinuating quality of 3-Iron is irresistible.

Contrivances accrue so thickly that the source seems to be not 1978 Toback, but 1930s Warner Brothers. The film sweats to be up-to-date with ultra-hectic editing, pace, elision, and sangfroid, but they can't verify the pasteboard base.

Denis and her editor, Nelly Quettier, have assumed that they do not have to show the details of sex because we know them already. Instead, Denis and Quettier create a small visual poem on the subject.

A documentary, thoughtfully made.

Much Ado, for reasons given below, is not quite up to the level of Henry, but once again Branagh has adapted Shakespeare dexterously. Once again he has followed Granville Barker's advice about pace in Shakespeare, understanding that the essence of pace is not speed but energy. Once again he has excellent colleagues off-camera, most notably Doyle, that open-throated composer, and the editor Andrew Marcus, who knows how to tip in glimpses of others to give dialogues a balletic lift. Once again Branagh has his attractive self on screen. Once again--and may I live to type these words a hundred times more--there is Emma Thompson.

The real success of Duncan Tucker, who wrote and directed this debut feature, is that, through credible dialogue and sensitive performances, the basic idea overcomes its cleverness and is affecting.

Steven Spielberg's new film begins as a monumental epic; then it diminishes; and, by its finish, is baffling. [August 24, 1998]

The screenplay of Saraband feels concocted, not absorbed from life in sense and soul like so much of Bergman's work.

Leaves the viewer with the sense of a writing-directing talent concocting complexities. Everything he touches is well-turned, but he now feels compelled to put the pieces together in something other than a lucid design.

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.

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 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.

Softley worries a bit, quite unnecessarily, about keeping our interest; so he lays in a number of overhead shots and considerable zooming at the start of sequences. But his work with his cast is sure, except for the miscast Elliott, and he generates the right internal heat between the lovers.

Like many other Iranian films, Blackboards counters the generally broadcast ideas about this part of the world. It is a testament of quiet endurance, of common concern, of reconciled survival.

The making of the film is so slick, the acting so exceptional, that we find ourselves trapped - caring about what happens to the three principals. [6 May 1991, p.26]

May Ozon and Rampling do more at the level of this film's first hour. Or maybe they could amputate the last part of Swimming Pool and finish the film as it deserves.

No element in the story, or collection of stories, has much novelty: yet the picture grips, because we sense that the director clearly knows he is treating familiar material and forges ahead out of passion.

The chief pleasure in the picture (set in Los Angeles) is in watching Hopkins spin off another of his nutty self-possessed intellectual criminals--this time it's Hannibal Lecter lite.

This film holds and convinces, even evokes empathy, because of Anne Reid, an actress long experienced in British television and film. She gives May intelligence and spirit and a somewhat genteel wonder at the resurging of desire.

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

Yet the McCarthy/Murrow conflict in the picture is not pressing enough--these days, anyway--to justify the considerable skill expended on it.

What Burger and his colleagues have done is to entrance us with a richly acted, beautifully produced story.

The net effect of the incessant dazzle is depressing.

Throughout we keep waiting for the real Almodóvar film, and it never arrives.

Washington Heights, under De Villa's guidance, bubbles. Once more, as in comparable films, it creates a foreign nexus in a domestic setting -- a group of people who live in two cultures.

The finish is so asymmetrical that it, too, seems a comment on the kind of film this might once have been.

The picture is too long. It repeats and repeats. Thirty minutes, instead of its eighty-six, could have told us all we need to know about the danger and tedium of these lives.

Only the onstage performing has moments of lift, particularly Keillor's diabolically homespun monologues and the cowboys with their risqué jokes that are reminders of such outhouse reading as Captain Billy's Whiz Bang.

Stone has concentrated on one of the catastrophe's stories and has fashioned it well--with almost palpable physical detail, and with performances that never sink to exploitation.

But Anker's real success here is himself. He was obviously able to get these men and women to open up to him. And thus, quite obliquely, they remind us of a threat. As everyone knows, American symphony orchestras are in trouble. Attendance is dropping, and managements are trying various maneuvers, even stunts, to attract people.

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 essence of the film is that French gambit which Leconte has called "the magic of the unlikely encounter.

His performance here made me suspect that Schreiber is, in a sense, another Kenneth Branagh--an extraordinary actor who is simply not a film star.

[Douglas McGrath's] adaptation of the novel is as complete as two hours would allow. What it lacks texturally is what no adaptation could adequately supply: the gleam of the Austen prose. [19 Aug 1996, Pg.38]

Noyce has treated this story almost like a page of holy writ. If he has erred, it is in the very awe of his approach.

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

Malick continues to float along the edge of the American film world as an unusually intelligent personage who occasionally delivers the fruit of his meditations. But his role as adjunct philosophe is better than the films he eventually gives us.

In this film the lovers are seeking the impossible through the possible. The knowledge of that impossibility makes the scenes all the more powerful. This is the core of Lawrence's novel, and Ferran has understood it.

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]

Tornatore has learned much from Fellini--especially in the long shots where someone suddenly appears close up. Let's hope he moves on to his own style. Meanwhile, he has given us a nice bask in Sicilian warmth. [Feb. 19, 1990]

Even if this film were more gripping than it is, and it grips somewhat, it would be a bit disappointing because it aims so low. Let's hope that Branagh now has the Hollywood adoration out of his system. [16 Dec 1991, p.30]

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]

We are certainly entitled to marvel at its very existence, but that isn't enough. The work itself is extraordinary.

The dialogue creaks, all the more so since we know better than it does what it is going to say.

What the role needs, and what Macy cannot quite provide, is the sense not of a robot but of a potent man who has been imprisoned by rote. Remember Jack Nicholson in "About Schmidt."

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.

Gross and trite as the material is, Kitano shows again that he is an ingenious, purposeful filmmaker. [27 Apr 1998]

Entertaining though The Hoax is, the film that I imagined before I saw it was better.

The English Patient is excitingly promising. Then the screenplay goes rotten, like an overripe melon. [Dec. 9, 1996]

The writer of Very Bad Things has done poorly by the director. This is particularly painful because they are the same person, Peter Berg. Director Berg shows lively talent, focused and controlled. Writer Berg shows some talent, too, but he is wobbly in design and purpose. [14 December 1998, p.26]

The picture is cloudy in intent. That cloudiness is deepened by Susan Sarandon's performance as Sister Helen. If she were giving the role what it seems to demand, a glow of true religious light, the film would have some organic cohesion, a strong spiritual cord running through it. But Sarandon does little more than present her face. [Feb. 5, 1996]

It's sad to see two talented actresses, Rebecca de Mornay and Jennifer Jason Leigh, wasted in puppet parts. [17 June 1991, p.28]

The name of Hugo Colace ought to be known to the film world. He is the cinematographer of an Argentinean film called Intimate Stories. Not since some Tibetan films have I seen such vastness, sparsely inhabited, almost ringing with immensity.

Jarecki says that his film doesn't precisely answer the question in his title. He is mistaken.

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.

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.

Stands as a poignant marker in the career of a major artist.

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 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]

Lynn Redgrave is nearly incomprehensible as the housekeeper with some sort of housekeeperly accent. [Dec. 14, 1998]

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.

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.

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]

Wade, presumably with Nichols's urging and aid, has tricked up most of the picture with plotting that scuttles the realism of the beginning, strangles any serious view of the theme, and ends up ludicrously incredible. [30 Jan 1989, p.28]

A lively, long, intelligent documentary.

In short, this squad is an ill-trained, slovenly bunch of soldiers. That such behavior exists, or can exist, in any army is surely commonplace, but that Israeli producers should want to make a film about the matter at this time is puzzling.

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]

Maggie Cheung, who was in Assayas's Irma Vep, plays Emily with a semi-detached feeling--observing the role as much as portraying it. The chief pleasure in the picture is Nick Nolte's performance as the boy's paternal grandfather.

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]

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?

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

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.

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]

So much of this adaptation is engrossing that the script's additions are jarring.

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.

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.

But for those who can summon up the talismanic "what if," The American President provides chuckles and tingles, even a few sobs. [18 Dec 1995, p.28]

We are meant to think about a society that revels in this moral pit. But all that puzzled me was why an audience would need a film to immerse it in wanton, speciously motivated death when the television news provides so much of it every day.

The dialogue that is wrapped around the sexual activities only helps to make the film disgustingly ridiculous.

An unusually fine screenplay, then, yet LaBute's accomplishment goes further. He has envisioned a cinematic style for his film that harmonizes exactly with its theme and mood. [Sept 1, 1997]

Spielberg directs so fluently that it takes a while to perceive how well made the film is.

But it is precisely with these contrapuntal strands of huge, timeless nature, of the complexity of every human mind, that Malick bloats his film into banality. [Jan. 25, 1999]

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

All political thrillers, good or less good, have moral implications...Walk on Water, one of the better ones, has grave moral implications and does not ignore them or merely utilize them.

The five stories are deftly interwoven by Moll, along with archival footage that puts these stories in contexts of time. [08 Mar 1999]

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.

Admittedly, the setting does heighten interest, but this film is much more than an ideational travelogue.

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 cast is so good that a kind of counterpoint arises between the riskily lachrymose story and the firm verity of the acting.

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.

The opening minutes in a Union Army camp are as good as anything in Glory; and the buffalo hunt, as edited by Travis, is a marvel. [10 Dec 1990, p.28]

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 most pleasant aspect of the picture is its relish of the moment in which it is set. Deville doesn't omit mention of the anti-Semitism in postwar France; still, this little tailoring shop is a good place to have reached after the preceding years.

Overall Nina's Tragedies is another instance of a subject discussed here lately--a foreign film that is seen one way at home and another way abroad.

It is the two leading performances that make the film seem almost to reach down and embrace us.

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]

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

I cannot remember a moment in this new film that compares, simply in directorial originality, to the work in "Schindler's List."

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.

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.

Aesop endowed animals with human traits to teach us lessons. Seabiscuit almost does the reverse. By means of Ross's adroit shooting and editing, we ourselves pound bravely along the track.

Even though no reasonably well-informed viewer will learn much factual information from the picture, it grips; it even torments, because it lets us move and breathe and shiver and resolve with two particular young men.

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.

García wanted to paint a canvas of nine elements, rather than one large element; and, though only a few of the vignettes are related, the film leaves us with a sense of wholeness, not of stunt.

It is the central performance that holds us. Cillian Murphy glows.

The film leaves the viewer with an increased sense of Shepard's exceptional being and talent--a prime playwright of his time who, if he had so chosen, could also have been one of its leading film stars.

The best way to watch this film is while sipping coffee in a café. Nicotine optional.

Cruise is becoming a real star, confident and gleaming. But neither he nor Hoffman nor the cleverness of the director, Barry Levinson, can prevail against a screenplay that has a beginning at the Ohio home, a finish in L.A., and nothing much in between. [9 Jan 1989]

The director, Michael Mann, remembers the best of film noir pretty well, but it doesn't protect his film against its ultimate Movieland silliness.

Leigh's directing is lean and tight. In Imelda Staunton as Vera, he has an actress who can make her only two emotions interesting.

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

Moncrieff's insistence on her subject suggests conviction -- about her contribution and about her cast. Both beliefs are pretty much justified.

Its very existence as a film sets up expectations that wouldn't exist within a book -- another reason I'd bet that there would be more pleasure in reading the screenplay. I can't remember ever thinking that previously about a film. (1998 May 23, p. 26)

Beatty himself is high wattage, revved up, sharp in his comic timing, gleaming with eagerness to put his film across. As director, he carries on from where he left off in “Reds;” he is sure and fluent, and occasionally he tips his hat to the past. [June 8, 1998]

Nolte and Coburn are so powerful that they distort what, we are told, is the story's theme. [Feb. 1, 1999]

The story of the film is a quiet local tale; the directing is sophisticated.

Smith makes it crackle, with various aggressive honesties and wit. [May 5, 1997}

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