Stephen Hunter

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

You may or may not like what you see, but there it is, indisputably, right in your face.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The movie made almost no sense whatever to me. I literally could not follow it, even as I was dazzled by it.

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.

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

The best thing about the movie is that it's interested in the soldiers, not the self-serving popinjays who seem to think the war is a big fat career-enhancing photo opportunity. The people who got shot at deserve most of the attention.

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

That's exactly the problem with this movie: It's not about a killer, or his victims, or the manhunt or the cops. They're all in it, of course, more or less. But it's about a writer.

Kind of like watching a John Waters film on fast forward with all the good parts cut out. It's empty of charm and meaning, but it certainly kills time, for those who wish it dead.

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.

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.

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.

The film feels as if it has a huge gap in it and the name of the gap is Bill Clinton. Who is this man who would be, and became, president? The film has no idea; Clinton himself is glimpsed occasionally, a completely charming fellow who can handle a press conference superbly, but who somehow is never there. As Carl Cannon wrote in The Sun's Sunday Perspective section, "It's as basic as this: Can his word be trusted?" The movie never bothers to confront such an issue or even, really, to acknowledge it; in documenting the Democrats, it clearly comes to share their uncritical view of the Hamlet-Bubba who carries their standard...Like the campaign itself, then, it's far too tightly wound up in details to examine a larger picture, which in the end may be the problem. [18 Feb 1994]

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.

In Proof of Life it's the same old story, a fight for love and glory, except that time goes by . . . slowwwwly.

Though 45 minutes longer than the original release, still feels thinner, less complex, more mythic and far less compelling.

Nothing really connects; it's not fluid and roaring but a collection of set-pieces. [25 Feb 1994]

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.

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.

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

The remake adds 24 minutes and subtracts most of the suspense.

Tasteless and without redeeming social value, and also dank with the stench of decomposition masked by not enough formaldehyde, Nightwatch is the best kind of movie pleasure, a completely guilty one. [17 Apr 1998]

Frequently fascinating, it never builds into anything profound.

It all adds up to something less powerful and interesting than the original.

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

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.

It's of an odd genre: a formally scripted (by Tony Grisoni) feature with a musical score that adheres totally to journalistic accuracy and willfully ignores formula, melodrama and uplift. It's a real down-lift.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we can agree on two things: The American health-care system is busted and Michael Moore is not the guy to fix it. His Sicko, an investigation and indictment of a system choking on paperwork, greed, bad policy and countervailing goals, turns out to be a fuzzy, toothless collection of anecdotes, a few stunts and a bromide-rich conclusion.

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

The sad truth is that Wonder Boys is little more than a sentimentalized encomium to the disheveled, childish life it ascribes to writers.

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.

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

So insidey it's almost parochial.

I had some trouble with the plot, but I'm not the only one -- so did the screenwriter.

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

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

It seems to celebrate him more for his attitude, his fashionably leftist politics, his fame and his friendships than for any meaningful accomplishment.

The New World is stately almost to the point of being static and thus has trouble finding a central story around which to arrange itself; it's not quite the thin dead line, but it's close.

This is a modest documentary, actually made in 2002 but only now gaining national release, which celebrates Attucks and that particular team, but most important Coach Crowe, by all accounts a remarkable man.

Too busy trying to make remarks to be much fun in the end. But it really only has one remark, which it reiterates about a thousand times, and it's not all that remarkable: Fame is overrated.

More than predictable. It plods along with the inevitability of a doomed soldier going off to war.

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]

Under its scope and reach and passion, Gangs of New York is pretty ordinary stuff.

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.

More than watchable, if less than compelling.

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

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

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.

If the movie is meant to uncover any "big scandals," it's a disappointment. The investigator, in one surprising sequence, goes through a number of alleged "torture" photos and acknowledges that the vast majority of them represent "standard operating procedure." That is supposed to be the film's kicker: not what was illegal but how much was legal.

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]

By the time it winds down, U.S. Marshals has all but destroyed itself. It's gone pffft! in the night.

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

The performances are so monotonic that you understand depicting authentic humanity is not the writer-director's goal: Each character has been reduced to a single unpleasant primal trait from which deviation is not permitted.

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

Yet as sophisticated a piece of filmmaking as it is, it seems hamstrung by the banality at its center; that's why it never assembles into a satisfying whole. It's pretty -- oh, what's the word? -- stupid in its dramatization of the silly little connections that unite us, and it's somewhat selective in its choice of them.

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

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

Afterglow is a lazy river of a movie that chooses beauty over sense and rhythm over reason. It goes nowhere slowly. [16Jan1998 Pg B.06]

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Once the movie settles down to story, it turns out to play like an extended Twilight Zone episode that merely reiterates the theme of the first few minutes: that man is fundamentally a beast and he must struggle endlessly against his own worst instincts and that each victory over those instincts is merely provisional.

What line is thinner than the one between confession and narcissism? Upon that line, exactly, does Elegy dwell, before tumbling off on the bad side.

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

Like the bad fight that ends the bad marriage: ugly, messy, loud, sometimes incoherent, but ultimately necessary. You're glad when either of them -- the marriage or the movie -- is over.

The rhythms excite expectations that go unanswered.

The film's ardent sentimentality, as magnified by the schlurpy music, is straight Chaplin, but not as good. The Film's subtext of sight-gag and clown-dance is also straight Chaplin, also not as good. [16 Jan 1990, p.3C]

Farrell appears to be a rarity in undercover culture, a vice cop who goes on the lowdown as an Irish beatnik. Oh, that's a good disguise for South Beach. As for Foxx, he's still channeling Ray Charles through squinty eyes and a kind of shaky head. They have zero chemistry.

Haggis also appears to have no respect for his audience. At its crudest, the film settles for agitprop...it's no Hollywood guy's call, particularly as he's extrapolating from a single case that could have occurred anywhere, at any time.

The result is fascinating, if uneven and ultimately rather silly. Problems with the ending, so common these days, dog this visionary film as well.

Riveting in its low way. It traffics in imagery profoundly disturbing.

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.

As Shakespeare would have certainly written if he'd been on the movie beat, Double, double toil and trouble, movie stink and critic bubble/'Hocus Pocus' has no focus/has no rhyme, has no reason/ and is... out of season.

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.

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.

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 key question the film raises: Is what happened to the Tipton Three an outrage? It allows us to draw our own conclusions strictly on an eye-of-the-beholder basis.

Cradle Will Rock is left in mid-rock, as it were, its energy squandered, its sense of history confused, its sound and fury ultimately signifying nothing.

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

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.

Checks in somewhere between a delight and a diversion.

The movie has trouble getting beyond the winking stage and is always letting you know that these are the soon-to-be famous Beatles. [22 Apr 1994]

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

Feels as if it's inspired by the old "Road" comedies of Crosby and Hope. Except that it's "On the Road to Hell."

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."