Stephen Hunter

A dead-on sense of how rich kids live and talk today, a sense of the melancholy of a dysfunctional family, and some great dark laughs.

May lack originality but makes up for it in sheer bravado and really nice clothes

As long as it stayed mainstream dirty it was okay, but when it got into perversions the American Psychiatric Society hasn't even named yet, it left me behind.

You may not enjoy The Mother (I certainly didn't), but it's a movie so heavy on truth, its spell cannot be denied.

Under its scope and reach and passion, Gangs of New York is pretty ordinary stuff.

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

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.

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.

You feel yourself sinking deeper and deeper into a whole universe that's been put together with almost anthropological intricacy and feels convincing to its tiniest detail. [20 Apr 1995]

It's not a great movie, but Yu Nan's performance is superb without being showy or melodramatic.

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

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.

As a piece of almost dadaist filmmaking, Spy Kids is great fun with its continual spirit of invention.

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

The movie may take five extra minutes to end and could do with one less sunset but . . . other than that it's damned near perfect.

More than watchable, if less than compelling.

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

The movie is very loud. It is pointlessly loud, arbitrarily loud, assaultively loud.

An enigma inside a conundrum inside an escargot shell, the French puzzler La Moustache will delight some people even as it annoys others.

Seems to go sideways as often as it goes forward. Altman can't help noticing things more interesting than the story.

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

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

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.

Le Petit Lieutenant shows how good French movies can be when they stay French and don't try to go international.

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

The movie's surface of bright, brittle patter, initially off-putting, comes finally to serve as camouflage for the sinister movement of large and powerful forces.

It isn't Austen, but it's delicious fun.

In the end the movie goes nowhere a hundred movies haven't already been and tells us nothing we don't already know. It does so with so much violent energy, however, it's like four brutal years at film school crammed into an hour and a half.

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

The best kind of genre filmmaking: It plays by the rules, obeys the traditions and is both familiar and fresh at once.

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]

An exceedingly bright comedy that never makes you feel stupid for enjoying its brisk pacing, smart lines, sound construction and superb comic acting, not only from Ashton Kutcher but from Cameron Diaz and well-chosen No. 2 bananas Rob Corddry and Lake Bell.

The new Dutch film Black Book manages to turn World War II into a large piece of cheese. A lurid, pulpy, slightly perverse potboiler, the movie suffers mainly from its utter lack of seriousness.

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

An intense two-character drama that follows as the participants in an office flirtation attempt to go up a notch toward an actual relationship, with disastrously unforeseen consequences. [11 Nov 1994]

Marshall keeps the film lean and focused. He does have a nice taste for horror imagery.

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

Political junkies will love this movie.

The backgrounds, it must be said, are the most impressive features in the picture: Vibrant with color and often deeply evocative, they make you wish something a bit more lively was happening in front of them. [18 Nov 1994]

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

Profane, sacrilegious, pornographic, sadistic and Sade-istic, titillating and the most honorable movie of the year.

If the movie is meant to uncover any "big scandals," it's a disappointment. The investigator, in one surprising sequence, goes through a number of alleged "torture" photos and acknowledges that the vast majority of them represent "standard operating procedure." That is supposed to be the film's kicker: not what was illegal but how much was legal.

The movie has considerable intensity, particularly when it views hunting as a form of counter-guerrilla warfare, with the gunboys wandering into the thickets, daring the big cats to come bite them and get a bullet for their trouble. It's best trick, though, is a straight steal from "Jaws" in which the lion -- I couldn't tell if it was "Ghost" or "Darkness" -- slides across the savannah in the high grass, just a form in the seething stalks, its tail alone visible, like a fin in the glassy water. There's a primordiality, a natural human fear of things with teeth and fangs, really provoked by that image. Too bad the movie couldn't have checked into that vein more often. [11 Oct 1996]

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 tension is never crushing, as it would be in an American job. Instead, it grows by increments, until you realize the movie, in its quiet way, has you snared entirely.

It's a stunner that sadly grows tiresome at the end.

By the time it winds down, U.S. Marshals has all but destroyed itself. It's gone pffft! in the night.

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

Embraces reality, humanity and compassion, as leavened by wisdom and wit.

It's a celebration of young American women, finding them smarter, tougher, shrewder, more rigorous, more persistent and more honest than any movie in many a moon.

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.

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

Crazy? Crazy is too mild a word by far to describe the twisted worm at play inside the skull of the Canadian director David Cronenberg -- And that craziness is given full vent in the vomitorium called eXistenZ.

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.

Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower is a kind of feast, an over-the-top, all-stops-pulled-out lollapalooza that means to play kitschy and grand at once.

Derived from the folksy, avuncular works of Jean Shepherd, it's a movie in search of a story, characters and a reason to exist. In this quest, it goes 0 for 3. It's like watching Jell-O harden, then melt, only not quite so much fun. [23 Sep 1994]

A lot of the film is illuminating; a lot of it is pointless.

The movie itself is a miracle: tough, smart, relentless, provocative and, above all, serious.

The performances are so monotonic that you understand depicting authentic humanity is not the writer-director's goal: Each character has been reduced to a single unpleasant primal trait from which deviation is not permitted.

With all that going for it, one must ask, why didn't they just tell it completely straight? In other words, why did they feel so compelled to create an utterly bogus Max Baer for the virtuous Jim to fight in the movie's admittedly compelling climactic, championship bout?

The movie is -- how can I say this? -- funny as hell. It's like an old Mad magazine "Scenes We'd Like to See" put together by someone on crystal meth, with a vicious streak, an existentialist streak and no mercy anywhere in his soul and only the tiniest flinch at the end, which is probably, sigh, the best way to end.

It's handsome, well-populated and offers beautiful scenery and settings. But "House of Flying Daggers" it ain't; maybe "House of Fallen Arches"?

I appreciate No Country for Old Men for the skill in the film craft. I understand No Country for Old Men for its penetrating disquisition on narrative conventions and its heroic will in subverting them. I admire No Country for Old Men for the way it tightens its grip as it progresses, taking us deeper and deeper into a hellish world. I just don't like it very much.

Strayed has the strange clarity of a fable. It strips everything away until only instincts and emotions are left.

The movie alternates between cornball and ridiculous, and the frequent violence is extremely bloody if stylized. Love it or hate it, and I'm not sure which applies to me, you've never seen and never will see anything quite like Tears of the Black Tiger.

Yet as sophisticated a piece of filmmaking as it is, it seems hamstrung by the banality at its center; that's why it never assembles into a satisfying whole. It's pretty -- oh, what's the word? -- stupid in its dramatization of the silly little connections that unite us, and it's somewhat selective in its choice of them.

It's a terrific movie.

I like watching snakes eat mice just as much as the next fella, maybe even more, but The Strangers turns the gobble-'em-up into an ordeal. It's a fraud from start to finish.

The movie is one of those brilliant and rare blends of paradoxical elements -- both the tragedy and the folly of history, the weight of inheritance, the pressure of the ideal, lots of fairly steamy sex, even a secret agent or two.

The result is a movie that feels weirdly disconnected from reality.

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

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

This one is dumbest. And funniest, as if that matters even a little bit!

It's empty of ideas, which is fine, but it's also empty of heat.

Great sword fights, great acting, fabulous sword fights and, of course, really cool sword fights.

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.

Lung-bloatingly funny.

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.

Talk to Me, with two great actors, tells that story, and it makes you feel not only the joy people experienced in the wash of Greene's raucous, truth-saying humor, but also his wisdom and calm. And many mourned his death at 55 in 1984.

What is memorable is the film's portrait of a man of honor in a sleazy world, possibly a metaphor for the struggle of the artist to stay honorable in a world of backbiting, betrayal and hunger for easy money.

Delivered with such high panache and brio, it's mesmerizing.

Now, they're together. You can't look at them, but you can't look away either. So it goes.

It's a whimsical tale of war and redemption, of faith, hope and even some charity...It's quite a treat, as a matter of fact.

Delightful, delicious, de-lovely.

Though it's not as good as the brilliant "Capote," it's nevertheless a riveting, well-made picture.

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

A few minutes of inspired lunacy aside, The Yes Men is largely a case of the same old preachers preaching to the same old choir.

Afterglow is a lazy river of a movie that chooses beauty over sense and rhythm over reason. It goes nowhere slowly. [16Jan1998 Pg B.06]

I liked Coyote Ugly better when it was called "Flashdance," although I didn't like it very much then.

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.

It's a great style, it's a fabulous performance, but it never quite finds what it's searching for.

As the movie's tag line has it, it's based on a hell of a story. Too bad they didn't just tell it.

This baby takes place in Tim Burton's id. It's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

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.

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.

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

As for Damon, this may not be a performance so much as an appearance. But he cares so utterly, it works.

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