Stephen Hunter

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.

To see seemingly reg'lar guys utterly stripped of dignity and defense is cruel enough, but crueler still is the laughter that you cannot seem to stop from rupturing your lungs and aorta.

Hatched by screenwriters watching "The Sixth Sense" on methamphetamines

Cradle Will Rock is left in mid-rock, as it were, its energy squandered, its sense of history confused, its sound and fury ultimately signifying nothing.

Isn't juvenile, it isn't even infantile. It's prenatal!

The movie, alas, is shackled somewhat by Waugh's original, pedestrian plot, which is too full of discrete incidents and slow to form an overarching story.

The story fails to really engage on any level save the kinetic.

Delightful, delicious and destructive.

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 seems such a waste to go onto the actual streets of Lower Manhattan and shoot a movie this stupid. Think of the money, the logistics, the interruptions in the city's life -- all that trouble for what? For this? For shame.

Checks in somewhere between a delight and a diversion.

He (Tobias) had a life, however, that was way off the charts in its unpredictability, and sharing it with him is fascinating.

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.

In the end, Unfaithful leaves you dispirited and grumpy: All that money spent, all that talent wasted, all that time gone forever, and for what? It's an ill movie that bloweth no man to good.

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]

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.

Full of astonishments, not the least of which are its ideas.

She is so funny she should come with a seven-day waiting period.

Certainly handsome, well made and for most of its running time gripping, the film ultimately turns into a $60-odd-million piffle.

What an amazing little film. God love the French. They make movies with ideas in them, other than: How many cars can we blow up?

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.

You will laugh. Then you will laugh some more. Then you will laugh still again.

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?

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

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 movie builds slowly to its grinding climax, and the suspense -- the standard by which a thriller must primarily be judged -- is first-rate.

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.

Del Toro will probably get an Oscar nod for his Jerry, because the film is so full of Oscar moments, including a cold-turkey detox bit. He rumbles and shivers and screeches and bangs his head on the wall and takes a shower in his clothes. I never believed a second of it.

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

The psychological darkness that underpins this film doesn't seem inappropriate to its wit and charm, but rather amplifies it, makes it more real.

Feels as if it's inspired by the old "Road" comedies of Crosby and Hope. Except that it's "On the Road to Hell."

The director, Patricia Rozema, has a rare talent: She gets third-rate performances out of first-rate performers with almost startling efficiency. All are bland, some hardly exist at all, and as performance, the whole thing seems a waste.

The result is a big, gushy, emotional, secret-driven, family-obsessive casserole, perhaps facile in some of its resolutions, but so full of good heart and love -- the real kind, which is scratchy, awkward, difficult to express and doesn't conquer all but just some -- that the movie is difficult to resist.

As a piece of journalism then, Boiler Room is first class.

None of the killings has any suspense, and the capital I irony -- that these people make their living selling death in small mechanical packages and munitions to the world and are now being hunted down by the same devices -- never begins to produce any results. Put it on a level with a mid-series "Halloween."

A piece of pulp claptrap; it has no insights whatsoever into totalitarian psychology and always settles for the cheesiest kinds of demagoguery and harangue as its emblems of evil. They say they want a revolution? Then give us a revolution, one that's believable, frightening, heroic, coherent and not a teenagers' freaky power trip.

So drippy and slippery you'll feel that you're hiding in Kevin Costner's nasal passages during the filming of "Waterworld."

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.

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]

The film occasionally drags -- a money transfer scene set in a department store lasts longer than several geologic epochs -- but it's so funny and the plot twists are so sudden and violent it's great fun.

Fitfully amusing but nothing remarkable

Seems to me, teenage suicide isn't that funny, and nothing in this movie changed my mind.

You keep expecting Shopgirl to get funny or sad or poignant; it never does. It just starts, then it's over.

Ocean's Thirteen is too complicated for its own mediocrity.

Takes its absurd premise and keeps itself narrowly focused, pushing its heroic cast through obstacle after obstacle.

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

It's pretty elementary.

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

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

A mousy little nothing of a picture.

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

It's too film-savvy for kids who won't catch the allusions to Clark Gable and W.C. Fields, but it's too film-simple for buffs and too boring for adults and too magenta-bright for critics. It's completely human proof! [26 Mar 1997]

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

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

What's important is that Major Dundee, not a great movie but a great star-driven, big budget 1965 studio western, is back in all its fractured glory and confidence.

You can make a good movie about a bad marriage, as countless directors, the latest being Ozon, have discovered.

[Craven's] stroke of genius is to offer the horror movie in an ironic mode. He's winking at viewers and inviting them to share a clever conspiracy that we on the cholesterol-clogged side of 30 cannot begin to understand.

Gets more and more complex until it's almost laughable; it has too many beats, too many reverses, and in the end seems unbelievable.

A whodunit so bafflingly constructed that you can't even figure out what it is, so the whodun part is superfluous.

The Good Shepherd is serious adult moviemaking, a truly surprising effort from De Niro, a man deeply interested in the art, craft and psychology of espionage. He seems to believe that we'd better be interested in it, because it's interested in us.

Of the pieces, two are first-rate, a few more are amusing or provocative, and the rest are actively annoying.

That tale gets a first-class Hallmark Hall of Fame treatment in Kevin Reynolds's swaggering The Count of Monte Cristo, which is old-form moviemaking at its best.

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

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.

Endlessly interesting. It's about people who thought ideas and art mattered, which makes it a rarity today.

The camera, freed to glide, flows as if through the old man's memory, discovering both the glory of his life and the tragedy.

Too simple for its own good.

It's not really a movie. I suppose it's what could be called a recorded behavior.

It's the best kind of movie: so alive in its storytelling that only in retrospect do you realize that the ideas represent a metaphysical inquiry.

Lower City is sexy, but in a nice, dirty way. Everyone in it is deliciously low and sleazy, and so underdressed in the blazing heat that they are just dying to strip.

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.

A triumph of place over sense.

Unlike so many pagan entertainments that seem to have no moral center as they blow things up, this one in fact does. It's very small, but it's there.

A passionate film buff's valentine to the two directors he loves most: Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma. The film that this worship has inspired is pretty amusing when the director apes Hitchcock, and pretty awful when he apes himself.

That said, what must be added is that, disappointingly, Night Falls on Manhattan doesn't quite add up.

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

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

Everyone in the movie, from Dillane to (especially) Serbedzija down to the child actor Robbie Kay (as young Beer), is fabulous, and Podeswa has an ability to distill history into a few powerful images. The movie, however, is circular in structure and keeps reiterating points it has already made. For some, it will be a long sit.

Despite its brilliant evocation of this great city at this most provocative time in history, the movie just gets sillier and sillier.

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

May be the most ruggedly decent film to come along in a couple of decades.

Simple, earnest and workmanlike, it sings of Olof, glad and big, and how he lost his -- well, we can't say what he lost.

Palmetto, directed by the German genius Schlondorff, who memorably brought "The Tin Drum" to the screen, somehow never quite finds the right line through the materials.

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.

An odd duck of a movie, it's really a British Labor Party television commercial bitterly shoehorned into the cheesy format of an American triumph fantasy, with a horn section.

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 result is a cross between a hurricane and a tornado as run through a movieola dialed all the way up to 10.

It's without posturing or phony outrage, and offers instead something far more affecting: a deep sense of melancholy. This is the way it is, it says, and not much can be done about it.

Boasts the purest of Disney raptures: It unites the generations, rather than driving them apart.