Stephen Hunter

Oshii is able to knit together action sequences with extraordinary power and conviction.... Ghost in the Shell is absolutely terrific.

The director isn't much on orgies; he's all talk. But that's good, not bad, because his talk is so brilliant. Stillman is the Balzac of the ironic class, the Dickens of people with too much inner life.

It has the aspirations of an epic of crime and punishment, a superb feel for time and milieu, and an almost subliminal feel for myth.

Andre Hennicke is particularly chilling as the yappy mad dog judge who sends them to death.

Enter the world of the sociopathic killer and enjoy.

It all adds up to something less powerful and interesting than the original.

Well told, handsome, stirring and loads of fun.

A portrait of a hero.

Here are old people in all the magnificence of their elderliness. The movie doesn't pretend like getting old is any fun. But it's about the transcendental power of -- well, yes, music; and each of these folks has a talent whose expression is a fuel to survive.

What a good movie. Sometimes you get tired of 'splaining and you just want to say: Hey, this one's really very good. That's all, folks. It's a damn good movie.

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

The result is a panorama of European radicalism. Depending on your politics, you may think "long live the revolution" or "curse the day the CIA ended its assassination program."

A stunner -- as big and messy as a war, as small and perfect as a diamond.

The movie is pure pro-choice agitprop, as it tracks Homer's conversion to the cause of choice and posits the heroism of the abortionist. Pro-lifers will hate it on that point alone.

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

Demonstrates that a movie need not be good to be cool.

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

The fabulous Elizabeth reinvents English Tudor history as gangster movie.

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.

The summer's most rousing action picture.

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.

This is a great liberal movie, which is to say, it will be loved most passionately by great liberals, and despised by the conservatives it contemptuously fails to notice.

Cameron captures the majesty, the tragedy, the fury and the futility of the event in a way that supersedes his trivial attempts to melodramatize it.

Isn't particularly scary. No, it's much harder on you than mere fright: It's . . . creepy.

Surprisingly effective re-creation of a Latin American Bing and Bob on the Road to History.

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.

It's like a summer stock "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," with the proviso that occasionally a giant snaggle-tooth monster slobbers onstage and eats George or Martha.

It's brilliantly acted. But best of all, it's brilliantly made.

It's of an odd genre: a formally scripted (by Tony Grisoni) feature with a musical score that adheres totally to journalistic accuracy and willfully ignores formula, melodrama and uplift. It's a real down-lift.

Generally, Orlando is too busy having witty fun to turn into a cautionary tale against one sex in favor of the other. It's more like an extremely vivid drawing-room comedy imposed on the background of a historical epic.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we can agree on two things: The American health-care system is busted and Michael Moore is not the guy to fix it. His Sicko, an investigation and indictment of a system choking on paperwork, greed, bad policy and countervailing goals, turns out to be a fuzzy, toothless collection of anecdotes, a few stunts and a bromide-rich conclusion.

The next worst thing to being there. That's how real it feels.

The movie's signal flaw -- that is, other than its degeneracy, its sloppiness, its love of dark things and pretty stains and arterial spray patterns -- is Moseley as the demonic Otis.

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.

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.

Quintessential film noir. [20 Mar 2005, p.N03]

Like too many Thanksgiving dinners, too much squabbling really wreaks havoc on the digestion. Football, anyone?

It conforms to that twisted French genius's typical opus: grisly, ironic but minuscule and sordid.

The sad truth is that Wonder Boys is little more than a sentimentalized encomium to the disheveled, childish life it ascribes to writers.

In the end, we're about a third of the way through the great Khan's life; he hasn't even begun to take down the cities of Cathay or spread his seed. That suggests two sequels. I, for one, can't wait.

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.

The movie, though quite funny in parts, turns organically dark, and it refuses to paint a picture of a cotton-candy world. It prefers the real one.

You have to see this to believe it.

Stephen Frears's stunning Liam, -- a vivid, intense evocation of another British time and place.

Brilliantly played by Denzel Washington

It orders you to love it. It demands love, which is the best way not to get it.

The movie's surrender to banality is all the more dispiriting because it gets off to such a good start.

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.

So insidey it's almost parochial.

Two hours and six minutes has never seemed so much like two and six-tenths seconds. It's pure pulp metafiction.

The acting is superb, particularly from the three principals.

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.

I had some trouble with the plot, but I'm not the only one -- so did the screenwriter.

An infectious (in a good way) documentary.

An exuberance, a celebration, a hoot, a kick and a half.

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

While the music slops and churns and the ground-level bathos rises, the aerial stuff is occasionally stirring.

What we deserved was "The Island of Jeanne Moreau." That I'd pay to see.

It's funny, it's heartbreaking, it's scary, it's exhilarating. It's got love stuff and lots of laughs and cool gunfights. It's really long and it feels like it's over in 15 minutes. It does something so few movies do these days: It satisfies.

A brisk, entertaining and even moving exploration of the sometimes frayed intersection where Christianity meets homosexuality.

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

This is another unhelpful screed, uncontaminated by sense or perspective, that preaches loudly to the choir.

The acting in this ensemble is of such a high order that the movie simply takes you in and makes you feel these lives as real.

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.

It is a rabble-rousing cheerfest, based on a true story.

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

This one has crossover hit written all over it.

It seems to celebrate him more for his attitude, his fashionably leftist politics, his fame and his friendships than for any meaningful accomplishment.

The New World is stately almost to the point of being static and thus has trouble finding a central story around which to arrange itself; it's not quite the thin dead line, but it's close.

The interplay between Glass and Lane is riveting and rigorous.

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.

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.

This is a modest documentary, actually made in 2002 but only now gaining national release, which celebrates Attucks and that particular team, but most important Coach Crowe, by all accounts a remarkable man.

Too busy trying to make remarks to be much fun in the end. But it really only has one remark, which it reiterates about a thousand times, and it's not all that remarkable: Fame is overrated.

If you love the theater, you've got to see the film.

The movie is taut, fast, achingly authentic and terribly melancholy.

It's not fierce, it's not angry, it's not radical, it's polite and what might be called "life-affirming." But it does have a couple of attributes most movies don't.

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.

A surprisingly lush, well-produced film.

It's funny and human and really pretty damned wonderful, all at once.

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

I don't think "Queimada" is as great a movie as "Battle of Algiers," but it retains its vitality, its outrage, its savagery and its spirit.

More than predictable. It plods along with the inevitability of a doomed soldier going off to war.

It's so routine and predictable it grows quickly wearisome, its inventions are thin and its wit is witless. You feel the clumsy manipulations coming hours in advance, and when they come, they seem to take forever to finish. [20 Dec 1996]

The much ballyhooed movie, far from great and far from short (2 1/2 hours!), is still great fun.

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]

Mamet loves two things: scams and dialogue. This movie is rich with both.