Stephen Hunter

Macabre and astonishing, Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas is a brilliant piece of technology, perhaps undercut a bit by the insincerity of its story and the blood-and-thunder music of Danny Elfman (every single piece he writes sounds like every other single piece he writes). But nasty kids and bored parents should love it.

It's exciting and satisfying, even if the chief villain isn't terribly original and the chase scenes are overlong. Bullock is plucky and believable as an average person who must marshal her strength and smarts to get her life back.

The Fugitive runs hard and true the whole way through.

Whatever its flaws, Get on the Bus is fairly electric with hope and anger. [16 Oct 1996]

Oshii is able to knit together action sequences with extraordinary power and conviction.... Ghost in the Shell is absolutely terrific.

The movie never seems to force its connections or its revelations upon us, but merely discovers them in their provocative places; in short, it doesn't seem to be working very hard, but the apparent simplicity is deceiving: There's a grand, clever and ultimately satisfying plan under all the running around and bumping into each other. [27 Sept 1996]

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]

You may feel like you need a drink and a shower when you come out of "Naked," but at least you'll know you've been somewhere new.

Ladybird, Ladybird is full of powerful, disturbing imagery. It offers a portrait of a woman victimized by a powerful and unfeeling bureaucracy, one that will literally rip a newborn out of the arms of its parents. But it's not didactic. [10 Feb 1995]

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]

Generally, Orlando is too busy having witty fun to turn into a cautionary tale against one sex in favor of the other. It's more like an extremely vivid drawing-room comedy imposed on the background of a historical epic.

The best -- the brilliant -- bits of Reality Bites etch in epigram, anecdote and brittle, dazzling dialogue the inner life of young people who want desperately to believe but haven't decided in what. It loves them but it doesn't pity or sentimentalize them. It's tough as nails.

While the movie is stupid, it is -- hooray, and let's put this in all the national ads! -- not appallingly stupid.

The movie isn't funny in any big way so much as recognizable in its patterns of dysfunction, delusion and futility. But you believe in it, because you believe in the small but decent lives of its characters, a rare experience for a hot weekend in June.

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

It's like an enema to the soul as it probes the ways of death ? some especially grotesque in a family setting. You leave slightly asquirm. You know it will linger.

It's not a great film, but in its reckless audacity -- an American director working from a British novel set in Latin America, dealing with the largest themes of Latin American art, politics and history -- it's reassuring. Someone's still willing to take a big chance.

You want a happy ending? You want sunshine, sentimentality, a sense of justice and honor and duty? Me too. But you won't find it here.

It's all expectable, it's all enjoyable: British theatrical professionalism at the highest pitch.

As glossy and overproduced as the thing is, it's a GOOD Big Stupid American movie.

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

It's not fierce, it's not angry, it's not radical, it's polite and what might be called "life-affirming." But it does have a couple of attributes most movies don't.

One of those movies that's great fun to watch, even if it decomposes more totally in your mind with each step out of the auditorium.

This is one of the most becalming films ever made. The grasslands seem oddly serene, and to watch them is to feel your pulse rate flatten out -- yet another aspect of Mongolian Ping Pong's transcendent charm.

Director Mary Harron may have more courage than talent -- and she's got a lot of talent. It's too bad Bettie's story isn't more dramatic.

The story works, but I wish they'd teach these avatars to act.

The two starring performances are spot on. Wilson gets the tone that screenwriter Don Payne so expertly evokes: It's a weird sort of self-aware despicability...Thurman is beautiful, fearless and perfectly believable as a superhero.

Cleverness can be overrated but it can be underrated too, and the best thing about National Treasure is how clever it is.