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.