Stephen Hunter

Checks in somewhere between a delight and a diversion.

He (Tobias) had a life, however, that was way off the charts in its unpredictability, and sharing it with him is fascinating.

It's a highly professional project complete with exquisite production details and superb actors, yet its subject matter is so far out of the mainstream, it feels almost radical.

In the end, Unfaithful leaves you dispirited and grumpy: All that money spent, all that talent wasted, all that time gone forever, and for what? It's an ill movie that bloweth no man to good.

The movie has trouble getting beyond the winking stage and is always letting you know that these are the soon-to-be famous Beatles. [22 Apr 1994]

Until that sugar coating at the end, Out of Time is clever, believable and gripping, and seems to be headed to a wondrous, bad place as it carefully modulates classic '40s themes.

Full of astonishments, not the least of which are its ideas.

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

Certainly handsome, well made and for most of its running time gripping, the film ultimately turns into a $60-odd-million piffle.

What an amazing little film. God love the French. They make movies with ideas in them, other than: How many cars can we blow up?

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.

You will laugh. Then you will laugh some more. Then you will laugh still again.

It grinds on and on without mercy. You're in the cross hairs. There is no escape. Where is that Secret Service when you need it?

Big, dull and empty -- nobody associated with this production appears to have thought hard about storytelling.

The violence is muted and discreet, never appalling, and the sexual tension between Streep and Bacon has been dialed way down. What they want is what they get: a nice, tidy, polite thriller. [30 Sep 1994]

The movie builds slowly to its grinding climax, and the suspense -- the standard by which a thriller must primarily be judged -- is first-rate.

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.

Del Toro will probably get an Oscar nod for his Jerry, because the film is so full of Oscar moments, including a cold-turkey detox bit. He rumbles and shivers and screeches and bangs his head on the wall and takes a shower in his clothes. I never believed a second of it.

One of those rich girl/bad boy things that defy understanding and leave you on the outside. Fascinated, but on the outside.

The psychological darkness that underpins this film doesn't seem inappropriate to its wit and charm, but rather amplifies it, makes it more real.

Feels as if it's inspired by the old "Road" comedies of Crosby and Hope. Except that it's "On the Road to Hell."

The director, Patricia Rozema, has a rare talent: She gets third-rate performances out of first-rate performers with almost startling efficiency. All are bland, some hardly exist at all, and as performance, the whole thing seems a waste.

The result is a big, gushy, emotional, secret-driven, family-obsessive casserole, perhaps facile in some of its resolutions, but so full of good heart and love -- the real kind, which is scratchy, awkward, difficult to express and doesn't conquer all but just some -- that the movie is difficult to resist.

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

None of the killings has any suspense, and the capital I irony -- that these people make their living selling death in small mechanical packages and munitions to the world and are now being hunted down by the same devices -- never begins to produce any results. Put it on a level with a mid-series "Halloween."

A piece of pulp claptrap; it has no insights whatsoever into totalitarian psychology and always settles for the cheesiest kinds of demagoguery and harangue as its emblems of evil. They say they want a revolution? Then give us a revolution, one that's believable, frightening, heroic, coherent and not a teenagers' freaky power trip.

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

And though brilliantly acted, it's not. For some reason, the director and the writer (Paul Bernbaum) have chosen an exceedingly awkward path into the materials. They break the narrative into two strands and play them off each other in cheap and easy ways for insubstantial effect.