Stephen Hunter

The interplay between Glass and Lane is riveting and rigorous.

Witherspoon's simply terrific, and it's amazing how quickly and easily she sheds speculation that she was too modern for the role.

It begins by scaring you to death by evoking a monster, and by the end it has seduced you into caring for him.

Straightforward, droll, brutally honest and arresting.

It's a brilliant, profound movie, but it's almost no fun at all.

Gibson may not be much of a deep thinker, but he's a heck of a storyteller. Apocalypto turns out to be not a case of Montezuma's revenge but of Gibson's: It's something entirely unexpected, a sinewy, taut poem of action.

The longest, hardest sit of the season -- you are stuck there, a single tube of puckered muscle, waiting for the extremely ugly violence to occur -- but it is driven by performances of such luminous humanity that they break your heart.

You may not want to hang with the haunted Caouettes, but the movie is so compelling, it doesn't give you a choice.

There are complications, extremely cleverly worked out. Jones is in just about every scene in this taut, provocative film.

Nuanced, exquisite and predictable.

The genius of the film is its utter commitment to the Pekar point of view.

In its insistence on the centrality of the war to the collective consciousness of mankind, it's of a piece with "The English Patient," rather than "Saving Private Ryan."

The movie avoids sensationalism. What it requires and what it delivers is performance.

It feels so real it hurts, and it's the perfect antidote to all those movies where all sorts of stuff blows up.

A character so real and poignant (yet hysterically funny), she'll linger for months or years.

It takes the rock movie into regions it has never been before.

Isn't much of a movie, but it's a whale of a story.

It's sad, funny, shocking and completely unlike any movie in a dozen years.

A brilliantly amusing couple of hours.

The trick of this movie is that it's so changeable: You think you've got it nailed and it slithers away to become some other new, fabulous thing.

Anyhow, either as history at its most inspiring or moviemaking at its most exciting, The Tunnel is a trip.

For my generation, Revenge of the Sith is a brilliant consummation to a promise made a long time ago, far, far away, in a galaxy called 1977.

May be too much suspense for some, but it's vividly powerful.

It's a new new thing, classic myth from both literature and the movies, commingled, set to great folk music, and untrammeled by any sense of predictability, urgency, realism or believability but hypnotic, graceful and seductive.

It is in fact a traditional mystery more reminiscent of Agatha Christie than the reigning film noir aesthetic of 1947. But it's fabulously entertaining.

Jon Heder in the magnificent Napoleon Dynamite, is one of the most winning movie creations in years.

Delightful, delicious, de-lovely.

The cutting is so sinuous and breathtaking, the music (by Danny Elfman after too much coffee) so onrushing and the camera so penetrative of the depths and heights of midtown Manhattan at cloud level, that the illusion, despite its artificiality, works. You don't believe it but you "believe" it.

What is so impressive about Welcome to Sarajevo is its cool restraint: Like the best of journalism, it never stoops to sensationalize or sermonize, but merely observes. It's about the facts rather than something called The Truth. [9Jan1998 Pg. D.01]

What emerges is quite extraordinary.

The movie offers one of the great lost pleasures, one we so seldom encounter at the bijou anymore. You watch this monster unreeling in its splendid vitality, its absurd ambition, its wobbly tone, its beauty, its stupidity, its immaturity, its tragedy, its grandeur, and before you know it, close to four hours has blasted by. And when you leave, you seize whoever is up close to you -- friend or foe, stranger or lover -- and begin to talk. You have opinions. You must express yourself. You must be heard. [5 Aug 2001, p.G1]

It's shallow as a puddle, but lots o' fun.

Jungle Fever is so many graceful things, so many angry things, so many truly moving things that its occasional faults are the faults of excess passion, not failure of imagination. Most importantly, it seethes with life, unlike nearly every other movie out of Hollywood these days.

One False Move doesn't make a single false move its own self: It's as tough and gripping as they come. It's the first movie I've seen in months where, when I was walking out, I thought to myself, "Damn! I wanna see that one again!"

No American film this year can touch it. [28 Feb 1992, p.10]

Imagine "The Godfather" through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy just in from the hinterlands of rural Jersey and his dad's pepper farm, and you have an idea of the originality, and the oddity, of the film. [16 Feb 1996]

What makes Lynn Littman's film so devastating -- beyond, that is, the power of Jane Alexander's brilliant performance as the surviving mother -- is its icy control and its complete disavowal of sentimentality and sensationalism. It's a small monument to the principle of understatement. [02 Dec 1983, p.B1]

Lung-bloatingly funny.

The Pixar people have an extreme talent for conjuring imagery that is both soaring in its majesty but also resonant -- it's a stylization but acute enough to carry emotional meaning.

Generally quite amusing, with a brilliant cast.

It's a fine, old-fashioned 2 1/4 hours at the Bijou.

So those seeking a softer approach to the realities of both child- and animal-rearing should search elsewhere. The rest of us, meanwhile, are free to enjoy a well-made family drama pitched to young adults that's honest, tough and surprisingly engaging.

The camera, freed to glide, flows as if through the old man's memory, discovering both the glory of his life and the tragedy.

The Good Shepherd is serious adult moviemaking, a truly surprising effort from De Niro, a man deeply interested in the art, craft and psychology of espionage. He seems to believe that we'd better be interested in it, because it's interested in us.

Unlike so many pagan entertainments that seem to have no moral center as they blow things up, this one in fact does. It's very small, but it's there.

A lot of bigger movies won't provoke you half as much.

It gets frenetic, in the French way, but it never stops getting amusing. This is what happens when you let grown-ups make movies.

Stunningly acted by Liam Cunningham and Orla Brady as the Cloneys.

A greatly ambitious undertaking, but from the commercial point of view quite insane. The movie is ridiculously fragile: It's like a Faberge egg, and even a twitch of foreknowledge will destroy the magic of the movie utterly.

In noir, everybody's guilty, and that's one of the pleasures of Joy Ride. The three youngsters aren't exactly innocent.

It never smirks or condescends as does, say, a Michael Moore; it never seems smug and superior, only committed and compassionate.

This movie gives it to you, as no movie has in some years. Okay, if that's not your part of the swamp, don't go into it.

As a terrifying example of what can happen when too many angry people are crowded into too small a space, it's a gripper.

The audience is treated to one extraordinary vision after another; the sense of a world literally being destroyed around the principal actors, the sense of their flight through panic and destruction, the sense of concussion, collapse, rubble and ruin.

Blondes may or may not have more fun, but in this one case, they certainly provide more fun.

So childish it seems to arrive in diapers, and that's not bad; it's good.

You have to see this to believe it.

This curious documentary is something rare, evincing opposites: It's both delightful and powerful.

It's without posturing or phony outrage, and offers instead something far more affecting: a deep sense of melancholy. This is the way it is, it says, and not much can be done about it.

The chronological looseness is part of the pleasure of the piece, which magically reassembles in the last reel into something strong, lucid and compellingly powerful.

If you view it passively, as a well-crafted melodrama set in danger among passionate antagonists, The Boxer is rewarding enough. If you attack it intellectually, you see the degree to which it is informed by ideas and realize the power of its argument.

He (Tobias) had a life, however, that was way off the charts in its unpredictability, and sharing it with him is fascinating.

Nicely done, sweet, delicately comic and a complete delight.

Let it swindle you; it's part of the fun. In fact, it's all of the fun.

Like nothing else that's played in months.

Endlessly interesting. It's about people who thought ideas and art mattered, which makes it a rarity today.

What makes the film so affecting, however, is its matter-of-fact evocation of character. Each person in the four-character cast is vivid and specific and believable.

You don't really watch the film; you survive it.

First and best, it's got a rip-roaring story. It sweeps you along, borne effortlessly by believable if flawed characters, as it flows toward the inevitable tragedy. But it's also got a heart: It watches as a child harsh of judgment learns that judgment is too easy a posture for the world, and it's best to love with compassion. [07Nov1997 Pg G.01]

Bleak and post-industrial, this is no easy film to watch. It hasn't a conventional image of beauty anywhere within its grim 93 minutes, being shot in harsh natural light that somehow plays up the grime and chill of back-alley life. But by the end, it's suffused with something utterly rare: moral beauty. [27 June 1997, p.D6]

Phone Booth is 82 New York minutes long, all of them exciting.

The original was about social manipulation as blood sport. Amazing how easily it transports, themes intact, to our blighted decade, and to our children.

The film, built of interviews with participants, is fast-paced, utterly absorbing and ultimately tragic.

This is postmodern folk art, a tricky transaction in which the work isn't just a story, it's a genre survey, a homage, a meditation, a parody and, oh yeah, while it's at it, still a pretty good story.

Isn't quite a great espionage movie or a great Africa movie, but in a summer of heat and wind, it's the next best thing.

So closely observed, so funny and so true to the junk that is everybody's real--as opposed to movie--life that it comes to feel like some kind of a miracle.

The documentary is fascinating, but hardly enjoyable. It's like watching ants eat an elephant.

It is kept watchable and empathetic by the energy of the superb performances and the sense of complete freshness.

It's clean and transparent, with no movie director tricks. The characters, not the montages, speak the loudest.

The film occasionally drags -- a money transfer scene set in a department store lasts longer than several geologic epochs -- but it's so funny and the plot twists are so sudden and violent it's great fun.

Full of astonishments, not the least of which are its ideas.

A deft, tense, pure thriller, the movie has great star turns and is brilliantly directed, but it began as an extremely well-crated screenplay by Russell Gewirtz. It's professionally entertaining.

There's a kind of liberating, almost transforming energy in this film; it lights you up and sends you out all giddy with silliness.

It's good fun for bad boys.

It may stir you, it may make you laugh. I am of the stirred variety. I do not want to meet this guy in the dark, though I've been meeting him in my dreams for years. We all have.

Delightful, delicious and destructive.

Great picture? No. Cool picture? Oui. Not as good, I must say, as the sort of thing we moron yanks were doing on our own over here – "D.O.A." is much better.

Stars Audrey Tautou, gaminelike, waiflike, vivid and completely adorable.

Yes, it's a hyped, hip "Sting" for our times, with goatees, mousse and attitude as part of the update package. It's also Burns's best film since "Saving Private Ryan."

Macdonald has a fetching feel for the continent, and the movie has a powerful sense of what Africa looks and feels like; you can almost smell it.

May be the most ruggedly decent film to come along in a couple of decades.

The two women relate brilliantly, and the movie has lots of fun creating an erotic subtext between them.

Takes its absurd premise and keeps itself narrowly focused, pushing its heroic cast through obstacle after obstacle.

Still, the movie -- as beautifully drawn, as sleek and engaging as it is -- has the annoyance of incredible smugness.

The film is more of an anthropological essay on the way young Americans relate while they make war, not love, and try to survive in the meantime.

It's a very funny movie in that sniffy Brit way.

This movie probably gets the Washington process better than any since Otto Preminger's underrated "Advise & Consent" in 1962. It's not about men of virtue doing the impossible, but men of flaws doing the doable, but just barely.

It's so gritty it'll get under your fingernails. And it harks back to one of Hill's greatest films from the '70s, "Hard Times."