Stephen Hunter

There are plenty of reasons to like the movie, such as its genuinely gentle wit, its occasional capture of the absurdities of aging and its endorsement of the permanence of lust, but one factor in particular is its brilliant cast of discarded '70s-era Hollywood stars.

A triumph of place over sense.

Unlike so many pagan entertainments that seem to have no moral center as they blow things up, this one in fact does. It's very small, but it's there.

A passionate film buff's valentine to the two directors he loves most: Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma. The film that this worship has inspired is pretty amusing when the director apes Hitchcock, and pretty awful when he apes himself.

That said, what must be added is that, disappointingly, Night Falls on Manhattan doesn't quite add up.

An Upper West Sidey exercise in narcissism and self-congratulation disguised as a tribute.

It stays in character, small, human, bitter and sad.

Everyone in the movie, from Dillane to (especially) Serbedzija down to the child actor Robbie Kay (as young Beer), is fabulous, and Podeswa has an ability to distill history into a few powerful images. The movie, however, is circular in structure and keeps reiterating points it has already made. For some, it will be a long sit.

Despite its brilliant evocation of this great city at this most provocative time in history, the movie just gets sillier and sillier.

But it's not what the Wayans brothers do, it's how they do it. They do it funny.

May be the most ruggedly decent film to come along in a couple of decades.

Simple, earnest and workmanlike, it sings of Olof, glad and big, and how he lost his -- well, we can't say what he lost.

Palmetto, directed by the German genius Schlondorff, who memorably brought "The Tin Drum" to the screen, somehow never quite finds the right line through the materials.

This unpretentious little bit of superior craftsmanship will be utterly mesmerizing to two kinds of people in particular: those who love cell phones and those who hate them.

An odd duck of a movie, it's really a British Labor Party television commercial bitterly shoehorned into the cheesy format of an American triumph fantasy, with a horn section.

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 result is a cross between a hurricane and a tornado as run through a movieola dialed all the way up to 10.

It's without posturing or phony outrage, and offers instead something far more affecting: a deep sense of melancholy. This is the way it is, it says, and not much can be done about it.

Boasts the purest of Disney raptures: It unites the generations, rather than driving them apart.