Stephen Hunter

This is a movie that understands the larger-than-life appeal of the old-fashioned movie star and one of the movies' most primal appeals: beautiful people doing amusing things while talking about it cleverly.

These are great, primal stories that pull you in, make you care and put you on the edge of madness and violence.

Ghastly yet wonderful at the same time.

It's a terrific film because each of the characters is so fiercely felt.

Tried hard to honor the spirit of the franchise, not exploit it, and take it to a new level and a surprising destination.

The movie is powerful, if numbing. What movie about a massacre isn't?

Janet McTeer doesn't imitate Mary Jo Walker, and she doesn't act her. She becomes her. It's almost spooky.

Its pleasures aren't so much in the inevitable plot complications, but in the passion of the performances and the spare beauty of the elegant framing and photography.

A well-acted first effort written and directed by Jamie Thraves.

A sturdily entertaining vehicle, easily the little guy's best American-made film.

This isn't a movie where story matters that much: It's a movie of character and milieu, both of which it evokes brilliantly.

Writer-director Kirk Jones III keeps the movie resolutely brisk and light, twisting mildly this way and that but never detouring for long.

Fun, if you're inclined toward cynicism, contempt, nihilism and cool stuff like that.

It stays in character, small, human, bitter and sad.

An Irish lark that blows in, trailing daffodils and the sniff of spring, from that adventurous releasing company Shooting Gallery Films.

Memo to left-wing anti-Bushies: Stories like this work. Don't lecture. Tell stories! Much better!

Shakur is superb, as I said, but so is Belushi. Initially a kind of glowering Bozo whose very sleaze is seductive and whose efficiency is attractive -- he's very Dirty Harry-like in his solutions to criminal problems -- he drifts off, almost banally, into the most repellent of all evils, the criminal sociopath masquerading under the flag of authority and using the system to hide his tracks. He stops being funny and merely becomes horrifying.

This unpretentious little bit of superior craftsmanship will be utterly mesmerizing to two kinds of people in particular: those who love cell phones and those who hate them.

What a superb job director Marcus Nispel has done re-creating, yet also revising, 1974's grisly, gristly, protein-centric masterpiece.

Director Ken Loach is full of astonishments. An avowedly leftist filmmaker, he has always seen beyond political cant to compassionate reality. He's also incredibly sensitive to what might be called the nuances of life, and he always brings a high sense of spontaneous reality to his films.

While it's no good time at the movies, Wonderland is an excruciatingly authentic experience.

Has a gritty authenticity to it … captures the spectacularly crazed quality of urban violence.

Grant is casually fabulous and very amusing, but all power to Firth the actor. He's the compleat Darcy, and he never wavers.

It's the latest and one of the best entries in a genre whose highest philosophical expression is the whiplash realization that the universe doesn't play fair.

A caper film of such postmodernist pretense that it's almost a parody of itself.

What's important is that Major Dundee, not a great movie but a great star-driven, big budget 1965 studio western, is back in all its fractured glory and confidence.

The director Vaughn has a flair not merely for action and ambiance but also for character.

Even the digressions are funny.

Like the best horror movies, it doesn't beat you over the head, splatter you, or fold, spindle and mutilate you. Rather, slowly and subtly, it creeps you out. You may go home and throw out your computer and lock the doors.

Lord God, can she take control of a scene, dominate a movie, project to the last seat, radiate power and personality unto the rafters. It's a great performance. I love the way Knightley's eyes light with furious intelligence when she cuts the pompous Darcy a new something or other.

Frank (Ben Kingsley) meets Laurel (Tea Leoni), a woman who has been around the block a time or 200, and she likes Frank's directness, while he likes her unflappability. This is one of the greatest screwball relationships in years.

Simple, earnest and workmanlike, it sings of Olof, glad and big, and how he lost his -- well, we can't say what he lost.

The creation of teen-girl culture seems almost pitch-perfect. The flaw is the flaw of most works of muckraking when they are held to artistic standards: It's a question of proportion.

In its brisk way, it's a devastating piece of work, and very brave too.

A picture that is surely one of the oddest ever made.

Like the best of poems, it doesn't lend itself to easy understanding. But, like the best of poems, it's extremely provocative, to both imagination and intellect.

The moral purity of After Innocence is so overwhelming that it simply leaves you with nothing to say or do. It's kind of beyond criticism.

It denotes a minor movie miracle: how with intelligence, imagination and craft a small film can work in really large ways.

A portrait of a hero.

An eensy-weensy movie sustained by two utterly gigantic performances.

Certainly no feel-good flick of the summer. But it's always tough and honest.

Although nowhere near the class of its equine hero, is quite a satisfying ride.

Color Me Kubrick is like a nice, deep, clear cocktail of ammonia on the rocks: bracing, comic, astonishing, all of which hide its poison center.

The psychological darkness that underpins this film doesn't seem inappropriate to its wit and charm, but rather amplifies it, makes it more real.

Manufactured Landscapes makes an inelegant point elegantly. The point: Humanity is altering the landscape drastically and by implication irrevocably.

What you get for your entertainment dollar in Lady Vengeance is Korean director Chan-wook Park's brilliantly orchestrated story of how Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae ) got her groove back.

There've been dozens of shotgun movies, most of them directed by Sam Peckinpah ("The Wild Bunch," "The Getaway") but Berg is inventive...All this, and Christopher Walken too? What more could a fella ask for?

With its sophisticated psychology, its brilliant story structure and its riveting performances, The Duchess of Langeais feels very new, even if everything about it is old.

Its images of the destruction of the cities is far more powerful than in American films, where the cities are trashed for the pure pleasure of destruction, without any real sense of human loss.

So the film has this weird postmodernist taint: It has a self-aware script that cleverly plays off the reality of its own cast and their famous real-life contretemps. It's smart and knowing.

Something fresh, clever and confident.

It makes a great point: Love, honor and respect your father, but then get the hell out of town.

Like the bitter cold in which it's set, Affliction bites hard and true.

Hanson delivers something ever rarer in film culture, not a new film noir but an old-fashioned total movie, somehow of a single piece.

Its magnificence is that it takes itself dead serious. It's not entertainment, but it's sure a piece of toughness.

In its way, the film is a piercing indictment, though it makes its point without much screaming, hectoring or preening. It's quietly terrific.

This is, after all, the kind of movie in which traffic accidents not only mess up getaways but also liberate goats to wander through the airport. We need more of that stuff.

Its palette isn't primary at all: It's full of secondary shadings.

The movie is completely beguiling, and it delivers joy, the beautiful spark of the gods.

John Waters may not be a great filmmaker, but he's usually onto something, and A Dirty Shame is onto something big.

The last word you'd expect for it is "sweet," yet it is exactly the right one. That may come as no surprise to some, since the director is Jan Sverak, who brought sweetness to his breakthrough film "Koyla," but it caught me by total surprise.

In its quiet way, Ride With the Devil is terrific.

The movie, while no fun, faces hard truths and asks hard questions.

I can't remember a film that sees the here and now more precisely, one that offers total believability in the tone and motive of its characters and then goes further, showing us a whole and completely recognizable world.

It's a document that suggests that the road to hell is paved with bad communication skills.