Stephen Hunter

A dead-on sense of how rich kids live and talk today, a sense of the melancholy of a dysfunctional family, and some great dark laughs.

May lack originality but makes up for it in sheer bravado and really nice clothes

As long as it stayed mainstream dirty it was okay, but when it got into perversions the American Psychiatric Society hasn't even named yet, it left me behind.

You may not enjoy The Mother (I certainly didn't), but it's a movie so heavy on truth, its spell cannot be denied.

Under its scope and reach and passion, Gangs of New York is pretty ordinary stuff.

This curious documentary is something rare, evincing opposites: It's both delightful and powerful.

A greatly ambitious undertaking, but from the commercial point of view quite insane. The movie is ridiculously fragile: It's like a Faberge egg, and even a twitch of foreknowledge will destroy the magic of the movie utterly.

The Crow, the death-haunted, mega-violent, pulpy, vigorous final film of Brandon Lee, may not qualify as much of a monument to a lost life -- what film could? -- but it's a hell of a movie.

You feel yourself sinking deeper and deeper into a whole universe that's been put together with almost anthropological intricacy and feels convincing to its tiniest detail. [20 Apr 1995]

It's not a great movie, but Yu Nan's performance is superb without being showy or melodramatic.

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

Too bad the plot held no surprises and the acting no revelations. No actor could be said to stand out and the movie never acquires much tension or momentum.

As a piece of almost dadaist filmmaking, Spy Kids is great fun with its continual spirit of invention.

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

The movie may take five extra minutes to end and could do with one less sunset but . . . other than that it's damned near perfect.

More than watchable, if less than compelling.

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

The movie is very loud. It is pointlessly loud, arbitrarily loud, assaultively loud.

An enigma inside a conundrum inside an escargot shell, the French puzzler La Moustache will delight some people even as it annoys others.

Seems to go sideways as often as it goes forward. Altman can't help noticing things more interesting than the story.

It's tough, astringent, darkly funny and . . . well, it's also generic, untidy, condescending and mild of impact rather than stunning.

It makes a great point: Love, honor and respect your father, but then get the hell out of town.

That's not to say it's great; it's not. Maybe it's not to say it's good, because it's only sort of good. It is to say, however, that it's nifty.

Le Petit Lieutenant shows how good French movies can be when they stay French and don't try to go international.

A character so real and poignant (yet hysterically funny), she'll linger for months or years.

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 isn't Austen, but it's delicious fun.

In the end the movie goes nowhere a hundred movies haven't already been and tells us nothing we don't already know. It does so with so much violent energy, however, it's like four brutal years at film school crammed into an hour and a half.