Stephen Hunter

Fitfully amusing but nothing remarkable

Seems to me, teenage suicide isn't that funny, and nothing in this movie changed my mind.

You keep expecting Shopgirl to get funny or sad or poignant; it never does. It just starts, then it's over.

Ocean's Thirteen is too complicated for its own mediocrity.

Takes its absurd premise and keeps itself narrowly focused, pushing its heroic cast through obstacle after obstacle.

The comedy is strained to the point of lameness, most of it exaggerated clumsiness, stupidity or inappropriateness.

It's pretty elementary.

City Hall has plenty of smarts; it just lacks real wisdom.

Puerile, pitiful, grotesque, offensive, immature, repulsive and, of course, extremely funny.

A mousy little nothing of a picture.

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

It's too film-savvy for kids who won't catch the allusions to Clark Gable and W.C. Fields, but it's too film-simple for buffs and too boring for adults and too magenta-bright for critics. It's completely human proof! [26 Mar 1997]

No, it's not great. No, it's not a disaster.

It pulps you, but it doesn't enlighten you.

What's important is that Major Dundee, not a great movie but a great star-driven, big budget 1965 studio western, is back in all its fractured glory and confidence.

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

[Craven's] stroke of genius is to offer the horror movie in an ironic mode. He's winking at viewers and inviting them to share a clever conspiracy that we on the cholesterol-clogged side of 30 cannot begin to understand.

Gets more and more complex until it's almost laughable; it has too many beats, too many reverses, and in the end seems unbelievable.

A whodunit so bafflingly constructed that you can't even figure out what it is, so the whodun part is superfluous.

The Good Shepherd is serious adult moviemaking, a truly surprising effort from De Niro, a man deeply interested in the art, craft and psychology of espionage. He seems to believe that we'd better be interested in it, because it's interested in us.

Of the pieces, two are first-rate, a few more are amusing or provocative, and the rest are actively annoying.

That tale gets a first-class Hallmark Hall of Fame treatment in Kevin Reynolds's swaggering The Count of Monte Cristo, which is old-form moviemaking at its best.

A sturdily entertaining vehicle, easily the little guy's best American-made film.

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.

Endlessly interesting. It's about people who thought ideas and art mattered, which makes it a rarity today.

The camera, freed to glide, flows as if through the old man's memory, discovering both the glory of his life and the tragedy.

Too simple for its own good.

It's not really a movie. I suppose it's what could be called a recorded behavior.