Stephen Hunter

Big, dull and empty -- nobody associated with this production appears to have thought hard about storytelling.

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

When a burning rat is the funniest thing in your movie, I think you're in big trouble, even in Miami.

Poor Roberts, pretty and perky as the day is long, hasn't a hoot in hell of bringing Julianne off. She's simply not actress enough, she doesn't have that suppleness that would enable her to sell the complexity of emotion, the jealousy, the irrationality, the meanness and the intelligence.

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

Nothing is real, but at the same time, nothing is fake. Nothing is, period. You don't believe a second of it for a second, so banal and predictable is it.

The movie has trouble getting beyond the winking stage and is always letting you know that these are the soon-to-be famous Beatles. [22 Apr 1994]

A sturdily entertaining vehicle, easily the little guy's best American-made film.

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]

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

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

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

This isn't a movie where story matters that much: It's a movie of character and milieu, both of which it evokes brilliantly.

In the end, I'm wondering what's so special about a film that has but one guilty pleasure and that's Ben Kingsley spraying saliva-lubricated variants of the F-word into the atmosphere like anti-aircraft fire for 10 solid minutes.

It's a classic story in form, and in this country it used to star Jimmy Cagney.

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

In Mercury Rising, the mercury may rise but pulses never do. A promising thriller with tough guy Bruce Willis wearing an ever-more radiant tapestry of bruises on his face, the film ultimately surrenders to the entropy of stale plotting and familiar formula.

There's not enough story in it to fill a shoebox.

Fun, if you're inclined toward cynicism, contempt, nihilism and cool stuff like that.

It's that rarest of all films, the one that can unify, not divide, the generations, as both jaded teen-agers and their more innocent parents can connect with it. And of course for the kids, it's pure balm from heaven.

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.

You have a movie in which sharks with triple-digit IQs hunt humans with double-digit IQs. It’s no contest.

It's hardly a muckraking piece but more a celebration of racing at the high end and the extremely prosperous folks who play it.

Jungle Fever is so many graceful things, so many angry things, so many truly moving things that its occasional faults are the faults of excess passion, not failure of imagination. Most importantly, it seethes with life, unlike nearly every other movie out of Hollywood these days.

This Psycho seems a little nuts.

It gets duller and duller as it turns out to have used up all its amusing tricks in that first 30 minutes.

Here's the best thing about Stealing Harvard: A dog bites Green in the crotch for a really long time. Priceless.

It stays in character, small, human, bitter and sad.

It more or less self-destructs in a ridiculous last few minutes when it becomes a noble sacrifice-o-rama.

An Irish lark that blows in, trailing daffodils and the sniff of spring, from that adventurous releasing company Shooting Gallery Films.

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

A surprisingly lush, well-produced film.

The effect for viewers is that of having inserted one's head in a kettledrum that is being pounded on by drunken monkeys.

Shakur is superb, as I said, but so is Belushi. Initially a kind of glowering Bozo whose very sleaze is seductive and whose efficiency is attractive -- he's very Dirty Harry-like in his solutions to criminal problems -- he drifts off, almost banally, into the most repellent of all evils, the criminal sociopath masquerading under the flag of authority and using the system to hide his tracks. He stops being funny and merely becomes horrifying.

It's pretty appalling, and it's boring.

This unpretentious little bit of superior craftsmanship will be utterly mesmerizing to two kinds of people in particular: those who love cell phones and those who hate them.

It's hardly great, but it's completely mesmerizing. [02 Feb 1996]

In Proof of Life it's the same old story, a fight for love and glory, except that time goes by . . . slowwwwly.

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.

Hatched by screenwriters watching "The Sixth Sense" on methamphetamines

What a superb job director Marcus Nispel has done re-creating, yet also revising, 1974's grisly, gristly, protein-centric masterpiece.

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]

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.

Director Ken Loach is full of astonishments. An avowedly leftist filmmaker, he has always seen beyond political cant to compassionate reality. He's also incredibly sensitive to what might be called the nuances of life, and he always brings a high sense of spontaneous reality to his films.

It grinds on and on without mercy. You're in the cross hairs. There is no escape. Where is that Secret Service when you need it?

You can feel Hoodlum hungering to be bigger than it possibly can be. It wants to be "The Godfather" of African Americans, a vast tale of crime and heroism and nerve and ambition. But it tries too hard and ends up feeling spotty rather than deep. [27Aug1997 Pg D.01]

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

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

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.

Has a gritty authenticity to it … captures the spectacularly crazed quality of urban violence.

The end result of Shrek the Third is that you laugh a lot and you go home grumpy.

He treats jocks like humans, not stars or superheroes, and in the end has managed something unique for documentaries these days: It's as entertaining as it is fair.

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

The key question the film raises: Is what happened to the Tipton Three an outrage? It allows us to draw our own conclusions strictly on an eye-of-the-beholder basis.

Enervated, torpid, slack, dreary and, oh yes, nasty, brutish and long.

It never makes you laugh that hard. Not even close. And so the thing becomes a bloody assault on the senses that commingles atrocity with tedium.

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.

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.

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

Big Fish stinks from the head.

The problem is that director Peter Berg, aided and abetted by Smith and Theron and third banana Jason Bateman, seem to have made it literally, not realizing its out-of-whack tonalities and grotesque plot twists were meant to be played for laughs.

Utterly shatters the illusion with a trite plot, banal dialogue, clunky sentimentality and, worst of all, a sort of narrative arbitrariness.

The first section of Three Times is fabulous; the second is fascinating if remote; and the third a jangly, modernist mess.

Petersen leaves out, largely, character, back story, anecdote and warm personal relations. Poseidon isn't cute, funny, warm, nice, inspirational or uplifting. It's about the incredible labor of survival in a world turned totally sociopathic in an instant.

The Craft casts a spell with a cast of four kicky young actresses, atmospheric California settings, cool special effects and the attitude of a music video. [03 May 1996]

One of those rich girl/bad boy things that defy understanding and leave you on the outside. Fascinated, but on the outside.

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

The remake is directed by another slickster, the Irishman John Moore, who is no deep thinker (as his "Behind Enemy Lines" confirmed) but, like Donner, he's an able hack -- smooth, stylish, clever, soulless and a hoot. And so's his damned movie. And it is damned.