Stephen Hunter

There's not a moment in Boiling Point that could be said to achieve a narrative temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Boil? This limpid pool of cliche and predictability never even bubbles.

Benigni is no Peter Sellers, but the inanity of the film isn't really his fault. He tries hard, and his rubbery willingness to absorb any punishment and come up looking as if he's just swallowed a very cold carp isn't without comic potential. But he is continually betrayed by the lame setups.

Friendship matters to those of us who still claim membership in the human race, and Goldbacher's merciless autopsy on it is both illuminating and dispiriting.

An anti-capital-punishment polemic that won't change a single mind anywhere on Earth but will entertain well enough everywhere on Earth.

And though brilliantly acted, it's not. For some reason, the director and the writer (Paul Bernbaum) have chosen an exceedingly awkward path into the materials. They break the narrative into two strands and play them off each other in cheap and easy ways for insubstantial effect.

Though I don't think giving it a cuddly human personality and the vocals of Rachel Weisz helps much, the thing itself, part dog, part fish, part weasel, part dinosaur, is a terrific illusion, and the technical team manages to really sell the idea of flight. Too bad the acting is so lame, the story so derivative and the thing so long.

Overpublicized and underbrained,Basic Instinct is a bitter disappointment, worth maybe a 10th of the hype that the media have so obligingly ladled out for its benefit.

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

The movie, directed (and written) by Zach Helm in grotesquely bright colors, means to approach the creepy wonder of Roald Dahl but gets only the creepy part right.

The biggest disappointment in the film, however, is Piven's Adam. This film idealizes his character too much and thereby jettisons any case for serious respect.

"Lost" star Matthew Fox pitches in with a strong performance as a coach who, by the laws of whimsy, didn't take the final flight home and had to struggle with survivor's guilt.

A stunning documentary that examines life at the ground level in a patch of banally pretty but otherwise nondescript French meadow. [27 Nov 1996]

Puerile, pitiful, grotesque, offensive, immature, repulsive and, of course, extremely funny.

A meet-cute whimsy set among divorced fifty-somethings in New York, it blunders on toward oblivion, excruciatingly unfunny and pitifully unromantic.

Nell doesn't jell. Earnest and well-intentioned, the film never quite breaks through a membrane into believability, and hence into empathy. [23 Dec 1994]

An Upper West Sidey exercise in narcissism and self-congratulation disguised as a tribute.

A movie so bewildering and impenetrable that I believe it siphoned off a good 40 IQ points.

It's the last thing anyone expected: an old-fashioned monster movie with a heart.

We're supposed to adore Gibson's sang-froid and his toughness, but everything, a few good lines aside, is so witless and monotonous it becomes numbing.

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.

The comedy is strained to the point of lameness, most of it exaggerated clumsiness, stupidity or inappropriateness.

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

It's a highly professional project complete with exquisite production details and superb actors, yet its subject matter is so far out of the mainstream, it feels almost radical.

It's a fine, fierce and nearly unforgettable movie.

It can't fake sincerity. It tries ever so hard, but it doesn't have a single believable second. Every word in it is a lie.

Yet what is most impressive about the movie are the odd notes of grace it provides its ostensible villains. [4 Aug 1995]

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."

Baby, when you walk out of a movie thinking, "Say, that Heather Locklear was pretty darn good," the movie's got some problems!

Let's blame it on poor Robin Williams, who tries so desperately to be likable, whimsical, lovable, smart and funny all at once that he just wears you out. Blame it also on the behind-the-scenes engineers at Disney who think that effects are more important than story and character.

Though it stops short of explosive comedy, the Ivan Reitman film is consistently amusing in its populist celebration of common sense and decency in the place of sophistication, power-brokering and cynicism.

It's like the longest just-say-no commercial in history, only you'd say no not because drugs are evil but because you don't want to get a serious foot fungus.

The movie falls from grace to clunkiness and continues its herky-jerky, way-unfunny trek around the amusement park. Who needs it?

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

There are plenty of reasons to like the movie, such as its genuinely gentle wit, its occasional capture of the absurdities of aging and its endorsement of the permanence of lust, but one factor in particular is its brilliant cast of discarded '70s-era Hollywood stars.

The movie is a feast of miscalculations. It turns out that neither a bat nor a ball make for an enchanting child's companion, lacking as they do the ability to move or express emotion.

The movie streamlines much of Harris's book. It's a shame, because it results in the movie's fundamental flaw -- the one-dimensionality of Hannibal.

The upshot is that the film is technically superb and quite enjoyable as long as you don't bang your head against the plot.

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.

Then, finally, there are the endings, all six of them...For us outsiders, it seems like too much of a good thing...But all those are minor rants: The big fact is that The Return of the King puts you there at Waterloo, or Thermopylae or the Bulge, any desperate place where men ran low on blood and iron and ammo, but not on courage.

But it's not what the Wayans brothers do, it's how they do it. They do it funny.

The movie doesn't so much end as reach a stopping point and limp hurriedly off-screen, like a bad stand-up chased out by boo birds. But God, is it funny.

The creepiest, clammiest, twitchiest squealfest in months. It offers, among its many pleasures, the happiness of safe fear.

If you're the sort of person who laughs at funerals, train wrecks, earnest political documentaries and stories about the rape of nature, you'll love Closer.

This is the rare American film really about something, and almost all the performances are riveting.

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.

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.

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.

The movie never rises to the level of the professional, much less the comic. The gags are witless and surprisingly gross. The four actors, each accustomed to being at the center, never develop any rhythm, any chemistry, any anything.

Searing, heartbreaking, so intense it turns your body into a single tube of clenched muscle, this is simply the greatest war movie ever made, and one of the great American movies.

Not merely Pacino's over-mannered, near-histrionic performance, but the movie itself could be characterized as busy, busy, busy. It's so full of plot twists and revelations and exploding sports cars that its very perkiness comes to seem comic.

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]

It never makes much sense.

Payne is a comic miniaturist, who works in a small compass, as if through a magnifying glass with tweezers.

What a bummer! Certainly the meanest-spirited film ever associated with the Disney hallmark.

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

It's a brilliant movie, fluent, spectacular, breathtaking and basically, uh, wrong.

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

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

A devastatingly dishonest, tough look at teenage life.

So I expect the Janeites who love the author will feel themselves ill-served by the film, which appears to have even less basis in fact than "Shakespeare in Love." As for the rest of us, the question is simpler: Is it worth the eight bucks?

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

Only in its final minutes does it somewhat squander its grip on the moral imagination, in a climax that seems oddly to undercut all that's come before and return us to the hallowed sense of violence as cleansing which so animates the world's true killers.

The effects are murky and the giant worm looks more like a smear on the lens than anything else. Most of the intensity is generated by sudden sound effects like ringing phones, alarm clocks or oven timers.

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

It's so spoofy it's difficult to call 'good' or even 'bad'; just say it's smooth.

Ghastly yet wonderful at the same time.

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.

A few others have compared this to a James Bond movie, but it's more of a piece with a Tom Clancy movie; it never leaves the real world that far behind, it has a fair sense of documentary reality, and the action sequences -- from shootout to car chase to a commando takedown of a tanker on the high seas to a final knife fight -- are extremely well managed.

It's sickeningly violent!

He still sees dead people, only now they're the best thing in the movie.

The secret reptile part of you yearns to see Berenger's laconic Shale enforce classroom discipline with his Uzi and back up the no-talking rule with a Claymore mine. But no. Rather, Shale tumbles quickly enough to the fact that more than routine violence is afflicting the school, that there is, in fact, a conspiracy.

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

If nothing else it's a wonderful essay on the meaning of freedom and the courage it takes to wrestle it from despots. In that sense, it feels more political and cultural than religious.

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

A superior adaptation that bypasses the Ann Reinking version now on Broadway.

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.

Ultimately, The Guardian veers off into slobbery touchy-feeliness, and the tone becomes mock-religious, almost liturgical.

It's hard to hate, because as a rabble-rouser it is superbly effective, driven forward by two powerhouse actors.

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

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.

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.

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

First Knight is sublime summer entertainment, from the passion and beauty and grace of its stars to the thrust of its drama to the awe of its spectacle. [07 Jul 1995]

In this movie, the sense of charm has been obliterated.

It's like a "Saturday Night Live" sketch on a $60 million budget.

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?

Give Woody Allen credit for ambition. Failing at one movie wasn't enough. Nearly anyone can do that; it happens all the time. He's chosen to fail at two simultaneously.

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

It's such a great story, you have to ask two questions: Why didn't they make this movie before? And why did they make it this way?

It's not a great movie by any means, but it grips tighter than a chokehold and it cuts as deep as a knife.

It pulps you, but it doesn't enlighten you.

Short is a professional choreographer, and his dancing seems unstuck in time. How he can break his movements down to such small elements, keep them so precise and in such rigorous rhythm, yet keep the whole thing on track and moving forward with Nureyev's beauty and discipline is something to see.

A big, fat, gorgeous, mesmerizing mess.

The film turns out to have nothing going for it at all, except a small charge for soul-deep Madonna haters.

Awake is a pleasing if negligible diversion.

Until that sugar coating at the end, Out of Time is clever, believable and gripping, and seems to be headed to a wondrous, bad place as it carefully modulates classic '40s themes.

The movie is untainted by surprise or originality. It seems built from a blueprint, not a script. Anyone who listens to sports talk radio could write just as good a movie, no kidding. [29 Jun 1994]