Stephen Hunter

The first and possibly the last Will Ferrell star vehicle. It's a clumsy, tedious ride that wears out its welcome as it wears out the seat of your pants and the circulation in your lower limbs.

It's a movie with the exciting parts cut out.

The basketball sequences are the most magical in the film -- both Harrelson and Snipes can play -- but more to the point, he also has a great gift for evoking the needling hostility of athletes, the way the games aren't just about talent but about ego, will, self-esteem.

If you're the sort of person who laughs at funerals, train wrecks, earnest political documentaries and stories about the rape of nature, you'll love Closer.

Haggis also appears to have no respect for his audience. At its crudest, the film settles for agitprop...it's no Hollywood guy's call, particularly as he's extrapolating from a single case that could have occurred anywhere, at any time.

Leconte is always a deliriously clever director; his "Ridicule" and his "The Girl on the Bridge" stand out as vivid films on subjects no one in America would even consider. Possibly he's trying too hard here to be liked, just like Francois. But as long as he's merciless, he's great fun.

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.

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.

It's a great family movie, if not historically perfect, and something that a lot of people are going to like.

It's fast and furious, and it proves that crime doesn't pay, unless you know how to do it right.

Nothing of much surprise happens and nearly everybody will feel twinges of the familiar. It's very specific, but also universal in the gentle way it watches two people who are attracted to each other, and what they do about it. [14 Mar 1997]

The result is fascinating, if uneven and ultimately rather silly. Problems with the ending, so common these days, dog this visionary film as well.

It's romantic manliness at its purest, almost but not quite schmaltz, ideally calculated to please true believers and ironic snorters at once.

Frequently funny, just as frequently repulsive, it's filmed in Waters's trademark deadpan style that some adore and some loathe.

A bitter, black and oddly beautiful story.

An end-of-the-world movie like no other.

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.

Riveting in its low way. It traffics in imagery profoundly disturbing.

The menace never becomes palpable, whether because of illogical plot lines or questionable casting. The stakes are so high, but the suspense never rises to the occasion.

Matthau was merely worthless, while Thornton, God bless his soul, rises to the actual level of sociopathic. I love it when that happens.

But for all the meta-movie excitement, the content danced somewhere between mildly interesting and moderately enjoyable.

For a movie, Michael Mann's Ali is great radio. It's almost better to squint, so that you see the film in soft focus, just fury and motion and blurred faces; meanwhile, with your ears cranked open wide, everybody sounds much more like they should than looks like they should.

Perhaps as a publishing phenomenon the concept works, but on-screen it's pretty dull, with good actors in bad roles and bad special effects.

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 denotes a minor movie miracle: how with intelligence, imagination and craft a small film can work in really large ways.

It's slight but in a haunting way, like a half-remembered dream.

As Shakespeare would have certainly written if he'd been on the movie beat, Double, double toil and trouble, movie stink and critic bubble/'Hocus Pocus' has no focus/has no rhyme, has no reason/ and is... out of season.

You don't really watch the film; you survive it.