Stephen Hunter

Of the many comic book superhero movies, this is by far the lamest, the loudest, the longest. Good Lord, what an epic sit. My rear end deserves a medal...I wish I could say it wasn't so, but for most of us, this "X" marks a splat.

It's a small, amusing movie that's long on charming affability. [03 Feb 1995]

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.

It's too bloody to be funny and too silly to be dramatic and too self-indulgent to be anything other than what it is, one more bad movie.

For my generation, Revenge of the Sith is a brilliant consummation to a promise made a long time ago, far, far away, in a galaxy called 1977.

Andrew Dominik's long and bizarre movie about the American outlaw appears to stick close enough to the facts so that historians won't be able to complain. But it languishes toward torpor.

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.

The film, built of interviews with participants, is fast-paced, utterly absorbing and ultimately tragic.

For two hours, the bliss of the brainless fluff is yours for the asking. It cheerfully puts the escape back in escapism.

Friends, Washingtonians, countrymen, I come not to praise Gladiator but to bury it.

Parker stays with and even streamlines Wilde's clever manipulations of betrayals and lies and plots and counterplots. Yet the film never feels stagy.

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.

After an hour of brilliant, bitchy dialogue and deceit, it simply runs out of energy; or possibly the budget ran out.

It's a diversion, well crafted by Mackenzie from a book by Alexander Trocchi, but little more than that.

It's all expectable, it's all enjoyable: British theatrical professionalism at the highest pitch.

It's a fine, old-fashioned 2 1/4 hours at the Bijou.

A considerable kick, though it would have helped if one of the boys had wiped off the lens of the camera once in a while.

Deep Cover is good fun.

The best -- the brilliant -- bits of Reality Bites etch in epigram, anecdote and brittle, dazzling dialogue the inner life of young people who want desperately to believe but haven't decided in what. It loves them but it doesn't pity or sentimentalize them. It's tough as nails.

From the very first seconds a viewer believes totally in Downfall.

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.

It's nothing less than a spiritual journey set in New Jersey.

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

It could hardly be called rip-roaring. I should report that it drives about a quarter of the audience out of the theater before it is half over. That's because it's slower than molasses in Siberia.

A provocative experience that lights you up even as it brutalizes you. And I don't even like Brad Pitt very much.

What The Page Turner lacks in scale and ambition, it makes up for in precision. It's a small French delicacy, tart, acerbic and cynical, that focuses on three or four characters and yet manages to bring them and their dilemmas to vivid life.

The movie is small but sensational. I don't know what writer-director Frank E. Flowers might lose by trying to take his career international, but he has real talent.

Meant to be a sleek, dark, disturbing David Cronenberg-style thriller, Olivier Assayas's film is just an annoying concoction.

It never smirks or condescends as does, say, a Michael Moore; it never seems smug and superior, only committed and compassionate.

The movie has more cleverness than violence, and its breakdown of cliches is vivid and witty. Baesel is an extraordinary presence, holding the film together with his mesmerizing performance, charm and openness, and Goethals measures up to him.

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

Sumptuous, warm, continually amazing, it's a completely enjoyable couple of hours at the flickers.

Like a bouquet of poisoned flowers -- beautiful, delicate and lethal. A trio of horror films from three "extreme" Asian directors, it shows how much evil fun talented bad boys can have on a very small scale.

Generally quite amusing, with a brilliant cast.

It never answers the key question: Why should we care?

The movie never transcended its elaborate production work to achieve an independent reality.

Once the movie settles down to story, it turns out to play like an extended Twilight Zone episode that merely reiterates the theme of the first few minutes: that man is fundamentally a beast and he must struggle endlessly against his own worst instincts and that each victory over those instincts is merely provisional.

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

Although almost nothing about The Eye is surprising, the movie is nevertheless engrossing, as it mutates from horror movie to ghost story to psychological drama to disaster flick (a late, stunning twist). It casts a spell strong enough that viewers won't want to look away.

What line is thinner than the one between confession and narcissism? Upon that line, exactly, does Elegy dwell, before tumbling off on the bad side.

If you don't fall in love with it, you've probably never fallen in love with a movie, and never will.

Suffers from all the excesses of the genre: gunfights that go on and on and on, a plot that is almost incomprehensible.

Like the bad fight that ends the bad marriage: ugly, messy, loud, sometimes incoherent, but ultimately necessary. You're glad when either of them -- the marriage or the movie -- is over.

But the movie has a great deal of zest and charm, and Yakusho gets so exactly that crest of melancholy that is a man’s early 40s, until he decides to go for another kind of life, that the movie is infinitely touching.

The rhythms excite expectations that go unanswered.

The film's ardent sentimentality, as magnified by the schlurpy music, is straight Chaplin, but not as good. The Film's subtext of sight-gag and clown-dance is also straight Chaplin, also not as good. [16 Jan 1990, p.3C]

Farrell appears to be a rarity in undercover culture, a vice cop who goes on the lowdown as an Irish beatnik. Oh, that's a good disguise for South Beach. As for Foxx, he's still channeling Ray Charles through squinty eyes and a kind of shaky head. They have zero chemistry.

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

It's funny as hell, and I am proud to say that as a card-carrying white guy, I got three, or possibly even four, of the 239 jokes.

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

The first and possibly the last Will Ferrell star vehicle. It's a clumsy, tedious ride that wears out its welcome as it wears out the seat of your pants and the circulation in your lower limbs.

It's a movie with the exciting parts cut out.

The basketball sequences are the most magical in the film -- both Harrelson and Snipes can play -- but more to the point, he also has a great gift for evoking the needling hostility of athletes, the way the games aren't just about talent but about ego, will, self-esteem.

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.

Haggis also appears to have no respect for his audience. At its crudest, the film settles for agitprop...it's no Hollywood guy's call, particularly as he's extrapolating from a single case that could have occurred anywhere, at any time.

Leconte is always a deliriously clever director; his "Ridicule" and his "The Girl on the Bridge" stand out as vivid films on subjects no one in America would even consider. Possibly he's trying too hard here to be liked, just like Francois. But as long as he's merciless, he's great fun.

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.

About a third as funny as it thinks it is. Still, that's pretty funny and about twice as funny as most American comedies these days.

It's a great family movie, if not historically perfect, and something that a lot of people are going to like.

It's fast and furious, and it proves that crime doesn't pay, unless you know how to do it right.

Nothing of much surprise happens and nearly everybody will feel twinges of the familiar. It's very specific, but also universal in the gentle way it watches two people who are attracted to each other, and what they do about it. [14 Mar 1997]

The result is fascinating, if uneven and ultimately rather silly. Problems with the ending, so common these days, dog this visionary film as well.

It's romantic manliness at its purest, almost but not quite schmaltz, ideally calculated to please true believers and ironic snorters at once.

Frequently funny, just as frequently repulsive, it's filmed in Waters's trademark deadpan style that some adore and some loathe.

A bitter, black and oddly beautiful story.

An end-of-the-world movie like no other.

One of those movies that's great fun to watch, even if it decomposes more totally in your mind with each step out of the auditorium.

Riveting in its low way. It traffics in imagery profoundly disturbing.

The menace never becomes palpable, whether because of illogical plot lines or questionable casting. The stakes are so high, but the suspense never rises to the occasion.

Matthau was merely worthless, while Thornton, God bless his soul, rises to the actual level of sociopathic. I love it when that happens.

But for all the meta-movie excitement, the content danced somewhere between mildly interesting and moderately enjoyable.

For a movie, Michael Mann's Ali is great radio. It's almost better to squint, so that you see the film in soft focus, just fury and motion and blurred faces; meanwhile, with your ears cranked open wide, everybody sounds much more like they should than looks like they should.

Perhaps as a publishing phenomenon the concept works, but on-screen it's pretty dull, with good actors in bad roles and bad special effects.

It's like an enema to the soul as it probes the ways of death ? some especially grotesque in a family setting. You leave slightly asquirm. You know it will linger.

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

It's slight but in a haunting way, like a half-remembered dream.

As Shakespeare would have certainly written if he'd been on the movie beat, Double, double toil and trouble, movie stink and critic bubble/'Hocus Pocus' has no focus/has no rhyme, has no reason/ and is... out of season.

You don't really watch the film; you survive it.

Down in the Valley is exactly what we don't have enough of: It's singular, unusual, unexpected, fresh and familiar at once.

Like so many technological marvels, at the human level it's not only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead.

Jon Heder in the magnificent Napoleon Dynamite, is one of the most winning movie creations in years.

In fact much of Guilty By Suspicion takes place in a trashy roman a clef zone, with bigger-than-life versions of famous moments and people; the trouble is, the bigger they are, the less like life they seem.

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.

He got too much movie. That's the scoring total on Spike Lee's He Got Game, which ultimately must be judged a mild disappointment.

The movie is so disturbing that it seems nearly blasphemous. I wouldn't wish it on an anthrax spore. After all, anthrax has feelings, too.

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

Outbreak is fast on its feet and simple in its head.

Unfortunately, while Stallone can carry the weight, the movie can't. Too much of it is too busy -- too many undeveloped subplots -- and some of the main plotting feels murky.

Director Mary Harron may have more courage than talent -- and she's got a lot of talent. It's too bad Bettie's story isn't more dramatic.

It begins by scaring you to death by evoking a monster, and by the end it has seduced you into caring for him.

The movie is almost devised like a rat-in-maze experiment at the Yale psychology department. Each few minutes some new obstacle comes up for Chris, threatening to obliterate his dreams, at which point the film stands back and watches him improvise brilliantly on the run.

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

It's a long and relatively underdramatized film, but it's powerfully true.

First-class in all departments except clarity.

Will seem a classic if you're stoned, and only slightly less funny if you're straight.

This is one of the most becalming films ever made. The grasslands seem oddly serene, and to watch them is to feel your pulse rate flatten out -- yet another aspect of Mongolian Ping Pong's transcendent charm.

Something fresh, clever and confident.

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.