Stephen Hunter

As coherent storytelling, Skins isn't that tightly wrapped, but as an excoriating look at the plight of the modern American Indian, it bites hard.

The suspense may be fraudulently manufactured but it captivates us nevertheless, and by the end we're reduced to the bloodlusting anonymity of the true culprits in all this jaded junk, and that is the TV audience.

The film boasts all the hallmarks of the '50s historic epic save the presence of Tony Curtis.

Far from an amusing romp.

While one might have wished for a better movie, and a few smarter decisions regarding the screenplay, generally it's a riveting, even inspirational account of an American feat of arms about which few know but about which many more should.

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.

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

Statham isn't the best thing in Transporter 2; he's essentially the only thing.

This is a smart movie, full of astonishing reverses and switchbacks, and it adroitly walks the thin line between too clever by half and not clever enough by three-quarters.

It's too long to be great and it's too square to be great and it's too loud to be great and it finds homosexual effeminacy too funny to ever be called great, but I can't imagine anyone coming out sadder than they went in.

A lot of White Oleander is heavy sledding of the waa-waa, touchy-feely kind. But just as much of it has the sting of something so real it hurts.

Slick, gripping and largely believable.

A funky, fun film version of the famous Marvel superhero concoction, one of the earliest of the revisionist wave of supes and in some ways the most lovable or at least the most knowable.

The movie feels more like a walk across campus than a movie. That's so depressing. On the other hand, each of these lost children is really looking for the same thing, ol' Mr. Love.

Any film where a beer baroness's glass leg (filled with beer) shatters when a high note is struck is okay by me.

A gimmick film, but it's brought off with such verve it's great fun.

Whatta movie: booze, unhappy French people, Alan Rickman and really cool pickup trucks.

A bitter, black and oddly beautiful story.

Surprisingly effective re-creation of a Latin American Bing and Bob on the Road to History.

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

You keep waiting for the movie to clarify, to settle down to its archetypal purity: icon of psychotic evil against icon of neurotic good. Music by Wagner in his "Götterdämmerung" mood, screenplay by Nietzsche, with additional lines by Babaloo Mandel. Oh, what a great big movie wallow, what a transformational blast of cine-pleasure. It never quite arrives

There may be a plot somewhere in William Goldman's script, and there might even have been a structure, but Mel Gibson, James Garner and Jodie Foster are so highly charged, as they slide through riffs that have nothing to do with anything except their own enjoyment in being invited to the party, that it's magnetic -- at least for most of the time.

It's hardly brilliant. But it's easygoing and occasionally quite funny and ultimately satisfying.

But the movie really just sort of peters out rather than reaching a sublime point. In "Groundhog Day," there was an exquisite moment where the wonderfully horrid Bill Murray actually regained contact with his humanity and rejoined his species. No such thing occurs in "Multiplicity"; the movie just staggers toward a point where it's gone on long enough to do everybody the favor of ending it. Send out the writers. [17 July 1996]

Romeo Is Bleeding revels in its own trashiness. It aspires to join that small circle of near-outlaw works set on the grimy edges of film noir, along with "Reservoir Dogs" and "True Romance" -- defiant champions of ultraviolence, campy outrageousness and dime-novel nihilism. Alas, it's nowhere near as good as those two, but it has a certain zany charm. [22 Apr 1994]

Occasionally quite amusing, it just doesn't build.

By contrast, the most amusing character is the ever-affable John Mahoney as the patriarch of the wayward Fitzpatrick clan. He gives consistently terrible advice, which his sons follow, which messes up their messy lives even more. I like that in a father.

So much of "Thunderheart" is so good and its intentions are so noble that it pains me to reach the ultimate judgment that the movie is a mess.

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]

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.

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]

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

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

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]

As a visual adventure, "The Lawnmower Man" is great fun.

Beautifully mounted and shot, Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book still feels somewhat callow. Its title aside, it never really deals with the issues that the great Kipling raised continually in his distinguished body of work.

Dunston Checks In checks in somewhere between cute and zany. It's never really funny, but director Ken Kwapis has a low flair for slapstick that occasionally ignites a spark or two.

Where "Boyz N the Hood" cut deep, to bone, this one stays glibly on the surface. It's slick and routinely entertaining, if never quite persuasive. [06 Nov 1996]

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

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.

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.

Reiner should have had faith in his sensational material to make its points without a minister in the pulpit. The movie would have been much better, and much shorter, too. [03 Jan 1997]

The movie's two instincts are at complete odds with each other. The first is to portray with compassion and understanding a young man of great gifts who is twisted by a cruel society into childhood's end. The second is to provide a rousing goose of vigilante justice more appropriate to the Death Wish films. How much better if Yakin had made up his mind; the movie wouldn't feel so split.

Out to Sea is out to brunch: It's got too much on the table, but if you look carefully and show some patience, you can pick out the odd treat. [02 July 1997, p.C10]

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

Except for the two stars, not much is believable in the movie. The ice skating sequences are clearly hampered by Sweeney's lack of skill, and it's crushingly obvious when a skating double has slipped into the picture. He's the guy who never looks at the camera.

City Hall has plenty of smarts; it just lacks real wisdom.

The violence is muted and discreet, never appalling, and the sexual tension between Streep and Bacon has been dialed way down. What they want is what they get: a nice, tidy, polite thriller. [30 Sep 1994]

The trouble with The Ref is that it keeps running out of steam, so it seems to develop a new plot wrinkle every seven minutes. Typically, it'll run through the new idea until it runs out of steam again, then invents yet another one. One feels it continually re-imagining itself, and as the minutes flee by, the re-imaginings become thinner and thinner.

Derived from a novel by former Miami Herald reporter John Katzenbach, it might be described as an inversion of the treasured '50s genre known as the Crusading Liberal Movie, as pioneered by, say, Stanley Kramer. But Just Cause doesn't just invert it, it turns it inside out, on its head, upside down and backward, then kicks it in the tail. [17 Feb 1995]

One doesn't come away from it with any sense of what the victory cost in human terms.

Endearing if slight, Superstar at least knows what it's doing the whole way.

It's not great; it's also not idiotic.

The movie is content to be a kind of middling expression of human decency: It's never either terribly funny or terribly dramatic, but Latifah's quiet solidity and common sense root it in ways that larger, louder pictures never achieve.

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.

All the King's Men hasn't been directed so much as over-directed, although the result, when you make an effort to filter out all the film school pyrotechnics, is an honorable run at Robert Penn Warren's classic novel.

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 films are bloody, stupid and buoyant in a kind of infantile way, celebrating mayhem, flesh and gore. Planet Terror is by far the livelier.

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

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.

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

The movie ends not with a bang but a wimp.

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]

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.

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.

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

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.

Awake is a pleasing if negligible diversion.

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

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.