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.