Stephen Hunter

All in all -- well, there is no all in all. There are just parts. Some fit, some don't. Some are cool, some aren't. It's the craziest thing you ever saw.

The Crow, the death-haunted, mega-violent, pulpy, vigorous final film of Brandon Lee, may not qualify as much of a monument to a lost life -- what film could? -- but it's a hell of a movie.

Let's get Sarandon and Jones into another movie soon; they're wonderful. Schumacher can direct and there's probably even a part for Brad Renfro. As for Grisham, he needs a course in remedial plotting.

So twitchy, fidgety, skittery and wiggly that the drug it made me yearn for was Dramamine, followed by a chaser of bourbon, 12 years old.

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

Far from great, but much farther from awful, Troy offers several popcorn buckets' worth of good old-fashioned time at the movies.

In some ways Soderbergh does a much better job than Tarantino. He handles the time shifts more adroitly, always keeping us on track; he goes easy on the violence, and when he does unleash it, it's short, fast and ugly.

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

This one's a turkey as big as the Eiffel Tower but it's bad in a particularly American way: It's wildly overdone, it throws in everything in an attempt to appeal to everyone, it's gargantuan and anti-logical, pointlessly ornate and pointlessly violent.

Here's a film that so merrily thumbs its nose at propriety in exchange for visceral thrills, and at probability in exchange for the really cool plot twist, that it checks in as the guiltiest pleasure since "The 13th Warrior."

You may find some of the story developments melodramatic -- I did -- but the film itself is quite powerful.

The movie, in fact, is a lot like Willis' performance: impressive in an iconographic way, but really not nearly as much fun as it should be. It's like watching a spitting contest between totem poles. [20 Sep 1996]

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

Just what we need least: a warm family comedy about child molestation.That's Georgia Rule, which combines battleship actresses of the "Steel Magnolias" variety, fall-down-go-boom comedy that was obsolete in the '30s, Lindsay Lohan's cleavage and intergenerational fondling just for kicks.

What we have here is a genuine outlaw work of art.

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.

You are likely to encounter more surprises on the way to the bathroom each morning than you do in this film.

It's good fun for bad boys.

Some stories are eternal. They will not go away. They are told and retold for generations. Take the story of Jesse James --it is not one of them.

It is the most dynamic animated film ever made, and the prance of its camera, the sense of penetration into its action, the brilliantly paced editing pyrotechnics give it a crackle of life far more abundant than any feature that's come before.

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.

[Craven's] stroke of genius is to offer the horror movie in an ironic mode. He's winking at viewers and inviting them to share a clever conspiracy that we on the cholesterol-clogged side of 30 cannot begin to understand.

It's the best sports documentary since "Hoop Dreams," a great piece of work."

As an example of the art of casting, the movie is brilliantly engineered. It allows two major stars to each play the showy villain for a time, and also for each to do an imitation of the other.

Works far better as journalism than as drama. One weakness is that poor Linklater has to keep bringing in guest explainers, who lay out one policy or another but have nothing whatsoever to do with the story.

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.

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

No, it's not great. No, it's not a disaster.

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.

That's not to say it's great; it's not. Maybe it's not to say it's good, because it's only sort of good. It is to say, however, that it's nifty.

Some of the tropes of The Lost City are ineffective. What does work is the sense of loss. The late Cuban novelist and screenwriter G. Cabrera Infante finds a brilliant device in the love affair between Fico and Aurora (Ines Sastre), his sister-in-law, in that Aurora in some way becomes Cuba.

The movie ends not with a bang but a wimp.

For the most part, Daredevil doesn't take a single dare; it travels the road much trod, even if it's through the midtown air.

All in all, Jennifer 8 is about four bricks shy a load and two hours too long.

Delightful, delicious and destructive.

Still, if the movie is mediocre, the history it represents is not. For that correction to our collective Western amnesia, then, Annaud deserves some special award.

It's a rugged, almost chauvinistic celebration of American get-up-and-go that never acknowledges, even implicitly, that our get-up-and-go got up and went. It might be characterized by words begin with G: gusto, guts, gumption, gee whiz and gosharootie, though, er, never G-spot. [14 Jan 1994]

Here's the lowdown, the q.t., the true gen: The Black Dahlia is a big nowhere.

All in all, it's like a bachelor's apartment: a complete mess.

The movie captures exactly why those of us who do this for a living can't seem to shed ourselves of it: that crazed, dizzying, exhausting sense of being, if ever so briefly, where it's happening; and the sense that somewhere out there in the great unknown landscape that is our readership is somebody who cares what we write. The movie understands what draws people to Suns both real and imaginary.

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 movie's highest level of artistic expression was the ingenious Internet campaign that catapulted it to culture phenom months before it even opened. The thing itself turns out to be pretty much an afterthought, cheesy and not very well worked out.

The film is a strictly no-bull proposition.

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.

Will this film do Kerry any good, or the Swifties any harm? My bet is: Not a bit, one way or the other.

The movie suffers from an uncertain structure, but it boasts an extraordinary naturalism, not particularly flattering. Sharon Stone has a brilliant, harsh turn as Zack's mom, and both Bruce Willis and Harry Dean Stanton have good turns as the elder generations of Trueloves. But the movie belongs to its youngsters, and it's a real eye-opener.

The good part about this okay, but way less than great, thriller is that you won't notice how cheesy it is until the heartburn from the popcorn has eased. In these jaded times, that's a bargain.

It's pretty elementary.

It's tough, astringent, darkly funny and . . . well, it's also generic, untidy, condescending and mild of impact rather than stunning.

This movie, written in crayon by James Kearns, is too dumb to come up with a way of defeating the system by using its own rules.

It's not without moments of wit and powerful emotion, but somehow Stepmom never feels either real enough to move us deeply or bubbly enough to make us forget our woes.

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

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.

Incisive and possibly a bit melodramatic as it lays out the reasons and the results of the violent campaign and marshals indignation on behalf of the victims while crying out for Western engagement.

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

Now and then sputters to comic life but more usually wheezes along.

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."

A vicious anti-Catholic diatribe disguised as an audition tape for MTV.

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.

Certainly handsome, well made and for most of its running time gripping, the film ultimately turns into a $60-odd-million piffle.

Well told, handsome, stirring and loads of fun.

It believes, in the end, in the decency of most people.

Illustrates the law of returning diminishments.

The movie's stroke of sheer genius is its wondrous ending.

The rhythms excite expectations that go unanswered.

Funner, biggerer, brighterer, bolderer, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is not only okay, it may even be close to good. A lavish spectacle illuminated by Johnny Depp's swishing pirate captain, the movie has its dull moments, but not many.

At least it cares enough to steal from the very best. Unfortunately, that's about all it cares about.

I liked, too, some late plot reversals, sorely needed after the numbingly simple straight-ahead plunge of the first hour of the movie. Things aren't quite what they seem and the twists are neatly done.

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.

It goes so far -- way too far -- as having a known actor play Grant.

The film, therefore, is like a child's view of these events, untroubled by complexity, hungry for myth and simplicity.

So smug and so proud of itself, and you can tell that everybody involved conceives of it as a civics lesson instead of a story, that they squeeze all the life out of it.

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

Amalric is low-key and immensely likable, but what makes his Paul a worthwhile companion on a three-hour voyage is his utter sincerity, coupled with self-aware irony. He's not a phony, a user, a Romeo or a slut. His earnestness is his best quality; he tries so hard to do the right thing, sometimes only failing by a little. [10 Oct 1997, p.N48]

It can only be said that if you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you like.

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

So predictable it could have been written by a chimp who's watched too much TV, the huge movie is as dumb as it is loud, and it's way too loud.

The movie, directed by Steve Miner, a "Friday the 13th" vet, never quite gins up the giddy, sick, politically incorrect power of the more high-powered "Screams" of late.

The occasional big moments are stunning, and kids from the ages of, say, 6 years to 6 years and 3 days will love it. Anyone younger will be scared; anyone older, bored.

Brilliantly played by Denzel Washington

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

The movie rides the very thin line between art and trash, between exploitation and illumination. It's true, certainly, that it takes one into a universe of such moral squalor that one feels tainted afterward.

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.

It's a trip to Hell and back, and testimony for embittered cynics of all that a movie can be.

Smith and Lawrence have great comic energy and for at least half an hour are sublimely enjoyable -- until the movie's spirit of bloated gargantuanism takes over. [7 April 1995, p.5]

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

It's enough to send you home with jiggly knees and a tummy ache.

There's just too much death, it comes too quickly, it has no moral import, it becomes ultimately meaningless. It's not that hyper-violent movies are axiomatically a bad thing, it's just that this particular example is so laden with shootings that it becomes somehow tedious.

It's kind of like a hit man's Olympics. Isn't this grown-up? In a word, no, and that's what's so much fun about it.

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

Too bad the plot held no surprises and the acting no revelations. No actor could be said to stand out and the movie never acquires much tension or momentum.

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

The animation is first-rate...But the story needs to catch up to the magic. Otherwise, what's the point?

This is definitely a post-"Field of Dreams" movie, at home in an era that specializes in building ersatz old parks, like the honey at Camden Yards. I love that place, even if it's more theme park than ball yard (I also love theme parks). But "The Sandlot" isn't a theme park or a ball yard; it's a con job.

One thing the makers of Saving Silverman do not have to worry about: Hannibal Lecter will never visit them to eat their brains. That is because they have no brains.

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.

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