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.