Stephen Hunter

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

11 minutes longer than the original, and 11 minutes worse. [2000 re-release]

Suffers from what might be called colonitis. It comprises too many equal parts, and they tangle each other up. Everything is important, which comes to mean that nothing is important.

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

One doesn't come away from it with any sense of what the victory cost in human terms.

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.

It's got a lot of small movies bouncing around inside it, but there's no big movie on the outside.

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.

So phony it makes your gums ache.

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.

The movie simply delivers too many colorfuls for its own good, none of whom establish a true emotional identity, and thus it isn't moving, it's busy. Busy, busy, busy.

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

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.

The Lake House has the sensibility of something conceived by Stephen King after an overdose of chocolate-covered cherries and valentine cards. In other words, it's sugary sweet and based on a premise that's just -- no other word will do -- ridiculous.

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

One wishes the same wit and energy had gone into the story. That's Shrek 2 in a nutshell -- very pretty to look at, very hard to care for.

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.

The nicest thing is the Asian American actress known as Maggie Q.

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.

Ultimately the movie disintegrates due to its own clumsiness. It's far too coincidence-driven to be believable.

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

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.

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

None of the killings has any suspense, and the capital I irony -- that these people make their living selling death in small mechanical packages and munitions to the world and are now being hunted down by the same devices -- never begins to produce any results. Put it on a level with a mid-series "Halloween."

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.

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]

[McGowan's] serene psychopathology is the movie's most consistent pleasure, and to see her is to both love and fear her.

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

In this film, Nolan seems overwhelmed by the budget, the egos of the stars, the thinness of the script, and he doesn't impose much personality on the picture. It's all Pacino.

It feels old, tired and given-up-on, maybe three drafts shy of minimal production level.

A lot of it is low, crude, admittedly comic in the rudest positive sense, which involves a lot of falling down to humorous effect.

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.

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.

It could hardly be called rip-roaring. I should report that it drives about a quarter of the audience out of the theater before it is half over. That's because it's slower than molasses in Siberia.

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.

Is it funny? Now and then. Stupid? Very. Racist? Possibly. Ugly? Profoundly. Wild? Undeniably. Singular? Completely.

The movie has considerable intensity, particularly when it views hunting as a form of counter-guerrilla warfare, with the gunboys wandering into the thickets, daring the big cats to come bite them and get a bullet for their trouble. It's best trick, though, is a straight steal from "Jaws" in which the lion -- I couldn't tell if it was "Ghost" or "Darkness" -- slides across the savannah in the high grass, just a form in the seething stalks, its tail alone visible, like a fin in the glassy water. There's a primordiality, a natural human fear of things with teeth and fangs, really provoked by that image. Too bad the movie couldn't have checked into that vein more often. [11 Oct 1996]

Suffers from all the excesses of the genre: gunfights that go on and on and on, a plot that is almost incomprehensible.

Short of good, better than awful, it opens brilliantly, then just goes on, toward self-negating absurdity.

Sadly, the last 40-odd minutes are essentially one fight, pushed to the point of absurdity.

Mild pleasures are available in Mr. Woodcock.

All in all -- well, there is no all in all. There are just parts. Some fit, some don't. Some are cool, some aren't. It's the craziest thing you ever saw.

While the music slops and churns and the ground-level bathos rises, the aerial stuff is occasionally stirring.

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

The movie is gross but not unfunny as it covers the Zohan's rise through hair culture, aided by his steamy heterosexuality, his lack of inhibition and his stereotypical career aggressiveness, until the old ladies are lined up all the way to the Bronx for a few minutes of bliss in the Zohan's chair.

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.

Still, if the movie is mediocre, the history it represents is not. For that correction to our collective Western amnesia, then, Annaud deserves some special award.

It's a rugged, almost chauvinistic celebration of American get-up-and-go that never acknowledges, even implicitly, that our get-up-and-go got up and went. It might be characterized by words begin with G: gusto, guts, gumption, gee whiz and gosharootie, though, er, never G-spot. [14 Jan 1994]

Here's the lowdown, the q.t., the true gen: The Black Dahlia is a big nowhere.

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]

The movie's highest level of artistic expression was the ingenious Internet campaign that catapulted it to culture phenom months before it even opened. The thing itself turns out to be pretty much an afterthought, cheesy and not very well worked out.

Clever as it is, the film lacks charm. One problem: too many bugs. Second, bigger world for two purposes: to feed birds and to irk humans.

Will this film do Kerry any good, or the Swifties any harm? My bet is: Not a bit, one way or the other.

The good part about this okay, but way less than great, thriller is that you won't notice how cheesy it is until the heartburn from the popcorn has eased. In these jaded times, that's a bargain.

It's pretty elementary.

Certainly handsome, well made and for most of its running time gripping, the film ultimately turns into a $60-odd-million piffle.

The rhythms excite expectations that go unanswered.

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.

The film, therefore, is like a child's view of these events, untroubled by complexity, hungry for myth and simplicity.

It can only be said that if you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you like.

The movie, directed by Steve Miner, a "Friday the 13th" vet, never quite gins up the giddy, sick, politically incorrect power of the more high-powered "Screams" of late.

The occasional big moments are stunning, and kids from the ages of, say, 6 years to 6 years and 3 days will love it. Anyone younger will be scared; anyone older, bored.

Smith and Lawrence have great comic energy and for at least half an hour are sublimely enjoyable -- until the movie's spirit of bloated gargantuanism takes over. [7 April 1995, p.5]

There's just too much death, it comes too quickly, it has no moral import, it becomes ultimately meaningless. It's not that hyper-violent movies are axiomatically a bad thing, it's just that this particular example is so laden with shootings that it becomes somehow tedious.

Too bad the plot held no surprises and the acting no revelations. No actor could be said to stand out and the movie never acquires much tension or momentum.

The animation is first-rate...But the story needs to catch up to the magic. Otherwise, what's the point?

This is definitely a post-"Field of Dreams" movie, at home in an era that specializes in building ersatz old parks, like the honey at Camden Yards. I love that place, even if it's more theme park than ball yard (I also love theme parks). But "The Sandlot" isn't a theme park or a ball yard; it's a con job.

Like too many Thanksgiving dinners, too much squabbling really wreaks havoc on the digestion. Football, anyone?

Benigni is no Peter Sellers, but the inanity of the film isn't really his fault. He tries hard, and his rubbery willingness to absorb any punishment and come up looking as if he's just swallowed a very cold carp isn't without comic potential. But he is continually betrayed by the lame setups.

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.

Though I don't think giving it a cuddly human personality and the vocals of Rachel Weisz helps much, the thing itself, part dog, part fish, part weasel, part dinosaur, is a terrific illusion, and the technical team manages to really sell the idea of flight. Too bad the acting is so lame, the story so derivative and the thing so long.

Overpublicized and underbrained,Basic Instinct is a bitter disappointment, worth maybe a 10th of the hype that the media have so obligingly ladled out for its benefit.

The biggest disappointment in the film, however, is Piven's Adam. This film idealizes his character too much and thereby jettisons any case for serious respect.

A movie so bewildering and impenetrable that I believe it siphoned off a good 40 IQ points.