Stephen Hunter

A lot of White Oleander is heavy sledding of the waa-waa, touchy-feely kind. But just as much of it has the sting of something so real it hurts.

Slick, gripping and largely believable.

A funky, fun film version of the famous Marvel superhero concoction, one of the earliest of the revisionist wave of supes and in some ways the most lovable or at least the most knowable.

The movie feels more like a walk across campus than a movie. That's so depressing. On the other hand, each of these lost children is really looking for the same thing, ol' Mr. Love.

Any film where a beer baroness's glass leg (filled with beer) shatters when a high note is struck is okay by me.

A gimmick film, but it's brought off with such verve it's great fun.

Whatta movie: booze, unhappy French people, Alan Rickman and really cool pickup trucks.

A bitter, black and oddly beautiful story.

Surprisingly effective re-creation of a Latin American Bing and Bob on the Road to History.

After an hour of brilliant, bitchy dialogue and deceit, it simply runs out of energy; or possibly the budget ran out.

You keep waiting for the movie to clarify, to settle down to its archetypal purity: icon of psychotic evil against icon of neurotic good. Music by Wagner in his "Götterdämmerung" mood, screenplay by Nietzsche, with additional lines by Babaloo Mandel. Oh, what a great big movie wallow, what a transformational blast of cine-pleasure. It never quite arrives

There may be a plot somewhere in William Goldman's script, and there might even have been a structure, but Mel Gibson, James Garner and Jodie Foster are so highly charged, as they slide through riffs that have nothing to do with anything except their own enjoyment in being invited to the party, that it's magnetic -- at least for most of the time.

It's hardly brilliant. But it's easygoing and occasionally quite funny and ultimately satisfying.

But the movie really just sort of peters out rather than reaching a sublime point. In "Groundhog Day," there was an exquisite moment where the wonderfully horrid Bill Murray actually regained contact with his humanity and rejoined his species. No such thing occurs in "Multiplicity"; the movie just staggers toward a point where it's gone on long enough to do everybody the favor of ending it. Send out the writers. [17 July 1996]

Romeo Is Bleeding revels in its own trashiness. It aspires to join that small circle of near-outlaw works set on the grimy edges of film noir, along with "Reservoir Dogs" and "True Romance" -- defiant champions of ultraviolence, campy outrageousness and dime-novel nihilism. Alas, it's nowhere near as good as those two, but it has a certain zany charm. [22 Apr 1994]

Occasionally quite amusing, it just doesn't build.

By contrast, the most amusing character is the ever-affable John Mahoney as the patriarch of the wayward Fitzpatrick clan. He gives consistently terrible advice, which his sons follow, which messes up their messy lives even more. I like that in a father.

So much of "Thunderheart" is so good and its intentions are so noble that it pains me to reach the ultimate judgment that the movie is a mess.

The movie, in fact, is a lot like Willis' performance: impressive in an iconographic way, but really not nearly as much fun as it should be. It's like watching a spitting contest between totem poles. [20 Sep 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.

Nell doesn't jell. Earnest and well-intentioned, the film never quite breaks through a membrane into believability, and hence into empathy. [23 Dec 1994]

Yet what is most impressive about the movie are the odd notes of grace it provides its ostensible villains. [4 Aug 1995]

It's hardly great, but it's completely mesmerizing. [02 Feb 1996]

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]

As a visual adventure, "The Lawnmower Man" is great fun.

Beautifully mounted and shot, Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book still feels somewhat callow. Its title aside, it never really deals with the issues that the great Kipling raised continually in his distinguished body of work.

Dunston Checks In checks in somewhere between cute and zany. It's never really funny, but director Ken Kwapis has a low flair for slapstick that occasionally ignites a spark or two.

Where "Boyz N the Hood" cut deep, to bone, this one stays glibly on the surface. It's slick and routinely entertaining, if never quite persuasive. [06 Nov 1996]