Stephen Hunter

Endearing if slight, Superstar at least knows what it's doing the whole way.

It's not great; it's also not idiotic.

The movie is content to be a kind of middling expression of human decency: It's never either terribly funny or terribly dramatic, but Latifah's quiet solidity and common sense root it in ways that larger, louder pictures never achieve.

He got too much movie. That's the scoring total on Spike Lee's He Got Game, which ultimately must be judged a mild disappointment.

All the King's Men hasn't been directed so much as over-directed, although the result, when you make an effort to filter out all the film school pyrotechnics, is an honorable run at Robert Penn Warren's classic novel.

Andrew Dominik's long and bizarre movie about the American outlaw appears to stick close enough to the facts so that historians won't be able to complain. But it languishes toward torpor.

The films are bloody, stupid and buoyant in a kind of infantile way, celebrating mayhem, flesh and gore. Planet Terror is by far the livelier.

What we have here is a genuine outlaw work of art.

Works far better as journalism than as drama. One weakness is that poor Linklater has to keep bringing in guest explainers, who lay out one policy or another but have nothing whatsoever to do with the story.

It's a cult movie in search of a cult. It'll probably find one. It certainly looks and feels like no other movie ever made.

No, it's not great. No, it's not a disaster.

The movie ends not with a bang but a wimp.

The movie is maddeningly plain...I found the movie infuriatingly underdone, but what is clear about it, and perhaps what reaches sensibilities more sublimely tuned than mine, is the utter seriousness of the piece. It cares about eternal issues and faces them head on. [15 May 1998, p.D05]

I liked, too, some late plot reversals, sorely needed after the numbingly simple straight-ahead plunge of the first hour of the movie. Things aren't quite what they seem and the twists are neatly done.

And though brilliantly acted, it's not. For some reason, the director and the writer (Paul Bernbaum) have chosen an exceedingly awkward path into the materials. They break the narrative into two strands and play them off each other in cheap and easy ways for insubstantial effect.

The movie's surface of bright, brittle patter, initially off-putting, comes finally to serve as camouflage for the sinister movement of large and powerful forces.

It's like a "Saturday Night Live" sketch on a $60 million budget.

Short is a professional choreographer, and his dancing seems unstuck in time. How he can break his movements down to such small elements, keep them so precise and in such rigorous rhythm, yet keep the whole thing on track and moving forward with Nureyev's beauty and discipline is something to see.

Awake is a pleasing if negligible diversion.

It's handsome, well-populated and offers beautiful scenery and settings. But "House of Flying Daggers" it ain't; maybe "House of Fallen Arches"?

It seems almost disrespectful to weave in a provocative re-creation of the killings -- somehow a massacre of unarmed innocents that shocked the world should be more than just fodder for ginning up the tension at the end of a commercial movie.

You have a movie in which sharks with triple-digit IQs hunt humans with double-digit IQs. It’s no contest.

It's hardly a muckraking piece but more a celebration of racing at the high end and the extremely prosperous folks who play it.

You can feel Hoodlum hungering to be bigger than it possibly can be. It wants to be "The Godfather" of African Americans, a vast tale of crime and heroism and nerve and ambition. But it tries too hard and ends up feeling spotty rather than deep. [27Aug1997 Pg D.01]

For a movie, Michael Mann's Ali is great radio. It's almost better to squint, so that you see the film in soft focus, just fury and motion and blurred faces; meanwhile, with your ears cranked open wide, everybody sounds much more like they should than looks like they should.

Unfortunately, while Stallone can carry the weight, the movie can't. Too much of it is too busy -- too many undeveloped subplots -- and some of the main plotting feels murky.

The first section of Three Times is fabulous; the second is fascinating if remote; and the third a jangly, modernist mess.

What compels then isn't the overwrought plot, but the simpler things, the dynamics between the actors, the avuncularity between old pros Costner and Hurt and the class condescension between Costner and Cook. It has a fascinatin' rhythm.

It's frenetic to the point of crazy while achieving a mark that barely exceeds mediocre.

American director Jim Sonzero has taken the same campus setting and plot and added some rationale by "science-fictioning" it.

The film is visually mannered and full of posing and longueurs. But it is stylish, very French (despite its American origins) and diverting if well short of brilliant.

As for Damon, this may not be a performance so much as an appearance. But he cares so utterly, it works.

It's a pretty good sub movie, with some pretty good performances, that, alas, somewhat disintegrates in the last half-hour.

What's so good about the movie is Gyllenhaal's refusal to show off; he doesn't seem jealous of the camera's attention when it goes to others and is content, for long stretches, to serve simply as a prism though which other young men can be observed.

The cast and the direction are too good, in the end, for the rather desultory place the movie ends up.

Anthony Hopkins, with a toothpick and a slouch. Fabulous!

The script is adroit: It doesn't force the humor, and it steadily keeps track of Jim's growing maturity.

An enigma inside a conundrum inside an escargot shell, the French puzzler La Moustache will delight some people even as it annoys others.

A triumph of place over sense.

It's a great style, it's a fabulous performance, but it never quite finds what it's searching for.

Each moment feels real, but the movie wears you out in some way. High naturalism is just as much a stylization as High Stylization. The groping nature of the conversations comes to feel as artificial as iambic pentameter.

More political allegory than horror movie.

Demonstrates that a movie need not be good to be cool.

In truth, I didn't care much for it, while respecting it a great deal. It's self-consciously childish and "innocent," and everything is overdrawn to cartoon dimension.

It has the big themes that obsessed Kurosawa at his greatest, and that alone makes it worthwhile.

The movie's surrender to banality is all the more dispiriting because it gets off to such a good start.

This dame is as sick as a sick dog on a hot day, if still always perversely amusing, and the story is constructed as a survivor's ordeal, not a colorful picaresque.

It's funny and violent and fast and, er, Danish.

On the technical side, The Invasion has several first-rate, terrifying action sequences and grips totally from start to finish. But a subplot involving the Russian Embassy doesn't really pay off, and the relationship between Kidman and glum paramour Daniel Craig (another doc) isn't much.

It is not bad on its own terms, and it is certainly engrossing, but it comes nowhere near the power and sordid glory of the original.

Seems to go sideways as often as it goes forward. Altman can't help noticing things more interesting than the story.

It never answers the key question: Why should we care?

But for all the meta-movie excitement, the content danced somewhere between mildly interesting and moderately enjoyable.

That said, what must be added is that, disappointingly, Night Falls on Manhattan doesn't quite add up.

Memoirs of a Geisha is everything you'd expect it to be: beautiful, mesmerizing, tasteful, Japanese. It's just not very hot.

Folks, I think I'm speaking for all of us when I say this is pretty darn fine American entertainment

More than watchable, if less than compelling.

But the best thing about Jakob the Liar is that it's not "Patch Adams at Auschwitz."

Cocaine is the most aggressively edited film in years: It pounds, it churns, it spurts, it spray-paints.

Reminded me somewhat of Archibald MacLeish's famous line that a poem "should not mean but be." That's the reality of The Apostle: It does not mean, it simply is.

Fitfully amusing but nothing remarkable

The movie is neither good nor bad, but in its clever packaging of boy fantasy and girl fantasy, extremely cunning. As for Princess Diaz, no force on Earth can stop her now.

The highest accomplishment of Buffalo Soldiers is its wise invocation of that weirdest of all precincts, the post, and the odd culture it spawns.

Woody Allen's new film has a few shortcomings but it's a heartfelt cry from what may be the last serious man left in the America as he contemplates what his native land has become.

Seems to me, teenage suicide isn't that funny, and nothing in this movie changed my mind.

A celebration of the actor's art – but not the dramatist's.

You keep expecting Shopgirl to get funny or sad or poignant; it never does. It just starts, then it's over.

The movie is so tepid and inoffensive: It reminded me of a '70s Disney live-action product, with clean-scrubbed "hippies" like Johnny Whitaker chafing harmlessly under the wise ministrations of Suzanne Pleshette, whose job was to keep the kids in hand.

With its brilliant cast, its creative pedigree, Don't Come Knocking seemed as close to a sure thing as possible, but it only proves the sad truth that there's no such thing as a sure thing.

In fact much of Guilty By Suspicion takes place in a trashy roman a clef zone, with bigger-than-life versions of famous moments and people; the trouble is, the bigger they are, the less like life they seem.

But the film's most annoying error is the arrogant conceit of revisionism. It postulates a world that did not exist, because it exorcises the entwined concepts of communism and Cold War.

So insidey it's almost parochial.

Maybe it's me, but I find it difficult to dislike any movie that has horses, guns and big hats in it.

Weirdly disjointed and uncertain as to tone.

It's nothing but style and noise, threadbare of content, empty of ideas. Is it anything? Not really.

It takes what could be called the Chinese equivalent of chutzpah to make a movie with three of the world's most beautiful and talented women -- Gong Li, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi -- and to be more interested in the male character.

Of The Good German, it can be said that the operation was a brilliant success, even if the patient is not merely dead but most sincerely dead. The movie, in other words, lies there as if on a slab in a morgue, while you admire the corpse for its beauty.

Smashingly stupid.

Now, they're together. You can't look at them, but you can't look away either. So it goes.

The result is a cross between a hurricane and a tornado as run through a movieola dialed all the way up to 10.

Two Woody Allens, two kvetching, whining, neurotic incompetents bungling their lives . . . that's one too many Woody Allens.

What we deserved was "The Island of Jeanne Moreau." That I'd pay to see.

A lot of the film is illuminating; a lot of it is pointless.

This peculiar film is more than one beer short of a six-pack. It's part massive folly, part screwball tract and part steel nerve, even a little heroic. [25 May 1994]

It's a diversion, well crafted by Mackenzie from a book by Alexander Trocchi, but little more than that.

Good message, mediocre movie.

As spectacular as it is dense and as dense as it is colorful and as colorful as it is meaningless and as meaningless as it is long.

The story fails to really engage on any level save the kinetic.

The result is a movie that feels weirdly disconnected from reality.

It's too film-savvy for kids who won't catch the allusions to Clark Gable and W.C. Fields, but it's too film-simple for buffs and too boring for adults and too magenta-bright for critics. It's completely human proof! [26 Mar 1997]

It's so routine and predictable it grows quickly wearisome, its inventions are thin and its wit is witless. You feel the clumsy manipulations coming hours in advance, and when they come, they seem to take forever to finish. [20 Dec 1996]

In all, it's not too bad and it's not too long.

All this stuff is probably right. It's just that the director, Victor Salva, underscores his points with thunderous obviousness and manipulates us through ham-handed plot gambits.

As the movie's tag line has it, it's based on a hell of a story. Too bad they didn't just tell it.

This mid-level, pretty-but-not-hugely-funny Allen film slips into the top spot by regretful default. I enjoyed every single second of it, a little bit.

The movie is bittersweet, adult, with a fair eye toward men's eternal spirit of the infantile, and knowing. Possibly it's too slick, but in some awkward way it sums up the true essence of adult life, which is just sort of getting along without doing too much harm. [30 Apr 1999]

The movie is almost completely uninteresting on the story level but fascinating as a work of imagined reconstruction and anthropology and as a study of the theory and practice of Studio 54.

Everyone in the movie, from Dillane to (especially) Serbedzija down to the child actor Robbie Kay (as young Beer), is fabulous, and Podeswa has an ability to distill history into a few powerful images. The movie, however, is circular in structure and keeps reiterating points it has already made. For some, it will be a long sit.