Stephen Hunter

What makes Lynn Littman's film so devastating -- beyond, that is, the power of Jane Alexander's brilliant performance as the surviving mother -- is its icy control and its complete disavowal of sentimentality and sensationalism. It's a small monument to the principle of understatement. [02 Dec 1983, p.B1]

An exceedingly bright comedy that never makes you feel stupid for enjoying its brisk pacing, smart lines, sound construction and superb comic acting, not only from Ashton Kutcher but from Cameron Diaz and well-chosen No. 2 bananas Rob Corddry and Lake Bell.

The new Dutch film Black Book manages to turn World War II into a large piece of cheese. A lurid, pulpy, slightly perverse potboiler, the movie suffers mainly from its utter lack of seriousness.

It believes, in the end, in the decency of most people.

An intense two-character drama that follows as the participants in an office flirtation attempt to go up a notch toward an actual relationship, with disastrously unforeseen consequences. [11 Nov 1994]

Marshall keeps the film lean and focused. He does have a nice taste for horror imagery.

It's a brilliant, profound movie, but it's almost no fun at all.

Political junkies will love this movie.

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]

These are great, primal stories that pull you in, make you care and put you on the edge of madness and violence.

Profane, sacrilegious, pornographic, sadistic and Sade-istic, titillating and the most honorable movie of the year.

If the movie is meant to uncover any "big scandals," it's a disappointment. The investigator, in one surprising sequence, goes through a number of alleged "torture" photos and acknowledges that the vast majority of them represent "standard operating procedure." That is supposed to be the film's kicker: not what was illegal but how much was legal.

The movie has considerable intensity, particularly when it views hunting as a form of counter-guerrilla warfare, with the gunboys wandering into the thickets, daring the big cats to come bite them and get a bullet for their trouble. It's best trick, though, is a straight steal from "Jaws" in which the lion -- I couldn't tell if it was "Ghost" or "Darkness" -- slides across the savannah in the high grass, just a form in the seething stalks, its tail alone visible, like a fin in the glassy water. There's a primordiality, a natural human fear of things with teeth and fangs, really provoked by that image. Too bad the movie couldn't have checked into that vein more often. [11 Oct 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.

The tension is never crushing, as it would be in an American job. Instead, it grows by increments, until you realize the movie, in its quiet way, has you snared entirely.

It's a stunner that sadly grows tiresome at the end.

By the time it winds down, U.S. Marshals has all but destroyed itself. It's gone pffft! in the night.

Its palette isn't primary at all: It's full of secondary shadings.

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

It's a celebration of young American women, finding them smarter, tougher, shrewder, more rigorous, more persistent and more honest than any movie in many a moon.

The creation of teen-girl culture seems almost pitch-perfect. The flaw is the flaw of most works of muckraking when they are held to artistic standards: It's a question of proportion.

Let it swindle you; it's part of the fun. In fact, it's all of the fun.

Crazy? Crazy is too mild a word by far to describe the twisted worm at play inside the skull of the Canadian director David Cronenberg -- And that craziness is given full vent in the vomitorium called eXistenZ.

The film is more of an anthropological essay on the way young Americans relate while they make war, not love, and try to survive in the meantime.

Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower is a kind of feast, an over-the-top, all-stops-pulled-out lollapalooza that means to play kitschy and grand at once.

Derived from the folksy, avuncular works of Jean Shepherd, it's a movie in search of a story, characters and a reason to exist. In this quest, it goes 0 for 3. It's like watching Jell-O harden, then melt, only not quite so much fun. [23 Sep 1994]

A lot of the film is illuminating; a lot of it is pointless.

The movie itself is a miracle: tough, smart, relentless, provocative and, above all, serious.