Stephen Hunter

Although almost nothing about The Eye is surprising, the movie is nevertheless engrossing, as it mutates from horror movie to ghost story to psychological drama to disaster flick (a late, stunning twist). It casts a spell strong enough that viewers won't want to look away.

Even as he reinvents, Aja invents. He's clearly working on a big budget for his first American film and has been told he can do anything he can think of. Visually, the movie is wildly alive, full of sure touches.

Embraces reality, humanity and compassion, as leavened by wisdom and wit.

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

In the last half-hour, the story, like the Japanese, loses its way; lacking any clear-cut goals except survival, the film becomes repetitive. Letters From Iwo Jima is a necessary movie; too bad it's not a great movie.

It's all story, character and dazzling martial arts violence, as orchestrated by fight choreographer Donnie Yen at breakneck speed.

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

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

Strayed has the strange clarity of a fable. It strips everything away until only instincts and emotions are left.

Parker stays with and even streamlines Wilde's clever manipulations of betrayals and lies and plots and counterplots. Yet the film never feels stagy.

Will seem a classic if you're stoned, and only slightly less funny if you're straight.

The film is slick, beautifully acted and completely entrancing.

It's fun. Hey, it's almost spring, Rickman is fabulous and so is Richardson. Warren Clarke is continually funny. And Heidi Klum alone will melt the snows of yesteryear.

This one is dumbest. And funniest, as if that matters even a little bit!

About a third as funny as it thinks it is. Still, that's pretty funny and about twice as funny as most American comedies these days.

This baby takes place in Tim Burton's id. It's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Deep Cover is good fun.

What's most pleasing about That's Entertainment! III is the numbers themselves. I almost wish they'd done away with the concept of "documentary" and simply offered the snippets as pure cavalcade. [29 Jul 1994]

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]

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.

Let's get Sarandon and Jones into another movie soon; they're wonderful. Schumacher can direct and there's probably even a part for Brad Renfro. As for Grisham, he needs a course in remedial plotting.

Amalric is low-key and immensely likable, but what makes his Paul a worthwhile companion on a three-hour voyage is his utter sincerity, coupled with self-aware irony. He's not a phony, a user, a Romeo or a slut. His earnestness is his best quality; he tries so hard to do the right thing, sometimes only failing by a little. [10 Oct 1997, p.N48]

The movie rides the very thin line between art and trash, between exploitation and illumination. It's true, certainly, that it takes one into a universe of such moral squalor that one feels tainted afterward.

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 a fine, fierce and nearly unforgettable movie.

Though it stops short of explosive comedy, the Ivan Reitman film is consistently amusing in its populist celebration of common sense and decency in the place of sophistication, power-brokering and cynicism.

Only in its final minutes does it somewhat squander its grip on the moral imagination, in a climax that seems oddly to undercut all that's come before and return us to the hallowed sense of violence as cleansing which so animates the world's true killers.

First Knight is sublime summer entertainment, from the passion and beauty and grace of its stars to the thrust of its drama to the awe of its spectacle. [07 Jul 1995]