Stephen Hunter

Gripping, whole and nourishing. Certainly of the fantasy film series currently in American theaters -– I include "Harry Potter and the Secret Toity" and "Star Trek: Halitosis" -– The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is the best, and not by just a little.

For the truth is, given the audacity, the organization, the seriousness of purpose, the movie isn't nearly as provocative as you think it might be.

Lynch's new movie, Mulholland Drive, is a trip and a half: It's like playing Twister and Scrabble simultaneously while high on LSD. Oh, and it's dark out.

One False Move doesn't make a single false move its own self: It's as tough and gripping as they come. It's the first movie I've seen in months where, when I was walking out, I thought to myself, "Damn! I wanna see that one again!"

The Fugitive runs hard and true the whole way through.

The movie becomes something quite rare and magical: a text about a text that is also full of life. In other words, it's a true first: It's both postmodern and fun!

You may not want to hang with the haunted Caouettes, but the movie is so compelling, it doesn't give you a choice.

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

It's the best sports documentary since "Hoop Dreams," a great piece of work."

Laurent's crime is really the crime of being European and conquering people of color. That understood, Cache is brilliant.

You may or may not like what you see, but there it is, indisputably, right in your face.

Charlotte Rampling takes you so far inside the pain of Marie Drillon it leaves you stirred, shaken and a little in awe.

But the most piercing thing about Heavenly Creatures is Jackson's refusal to forgive the girls. He indeed understands them and empathizes with them. But when he has to, he exposes the horrid squalor and ugliness of the crime, which, after all, was a blood-soaked execution, crude as anything done in Rwanda. [9 Dec 1994]

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

Short of good, better than awful, it opens brilliantly, then just goes on, toward self-negating absurdity.

Reminded me somewhat of Archibald MacLeish's famous line that a poem "should not mean but be." That's the reality of The Apostle: It does not mean, it simply is.

The longest, hardest sit of the season -- you are stuck there, a single tube of puckered muscle, waiting for the extremely ugly violence to occur -- but it is driven by performances of such luminous humanity that they break your heart.

The movie is simply not professional. It's not, even by the lowest standards of Republic B-westerns in the '30s or bad, cheap horror films in the '50s, releasable.

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

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

The film is visually mannered and full of posing and longueurs. But it is stylish, very French (despite its American origins) and diverting if well short of brilliant.

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.

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 frenetic to the point of crazy while achieving a mark that barely exceeds mediocre.

A beautiful story, told in measured cadences by a master of old-timey narrative compression and expression.

There's a kind of liberating, almost transforming energy in this film; it lights you up and sends you out all giddy with silliness.

He gives these characters the time to develop, to display their nuances, to establish their relationships with each other, to talk out their destinies.

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