Stephen Hunter

Only in its final minutes does it somewhat squander its grip on the moral imagination, in a climax that seems oddly to undercut all that's come before and return us to the hallowed sense of violence as cleansing which so animates the world's true killers.

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

The movie is almost devised like a rat-in-maze experiment at the Yale psychology department. Each few minutes some new obstacle comes up for Chris, threatening to obliterate his dreams, at which point the film stands back and watches him improvise brilliantly on the run.

You may feel like you need a drink and a shower when you come out of "Naked," but at least you'll know you've been somewhere new.

It's the last thing anyone expected: an old-fashioned monster movie with a heart.

Still, the movie -- as beautifully drawn, as sleek and engaging as it is -- has the annoyance of incredible smugness.

In its brisk way, it's a devastating piece of work, and very brave too.

In some ways Soderbergh does a much better job than Tarantino. He handles the time shifts more adroitly, always keeping us on track; he goes easy on the violence, and when he does unleash it, it's short, fast and ugly.

Whatever its flaws, Get on the Bus is fairly electric with hope and anger. [16 Oct 1996]

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

The movie has the sense of being embalmed, or pickled. With its stilted dialogue not quite kitschy enough to be funny and not quite authentic enough to be realistic, the whole movie feels as if it's taking place in formaldehyde.

You want a happy ending? You want sunshine, sentimentality, a sense of justice and honor and duty? Me too. But you won't find it here.

A crackpot Looney Tune, pretentious, abysmally slow, amateurishly acted and, above all, wrong.

I love the unsettling details.

It feels so real it hurts, and it's the perfect antidote to all those movies where all sorts of stuff blows up.

The film boasts all the hallmarks of the '50s historic epic save the presence of Tony Curtis.

Straightforward, droll, brutally honest and arresting.

It's wondrous, it's fabulous, it's -- all but unprecedented.

Phone Booth is 82 New York minutes long, all of them exciting.

11 minutes longer than the original, and 11 minutes worse. [2000 re-release]

Surely the most creative trick of the year and grimly funny throughout.

For my generation, Revenge of the Sith is a brilliant consummation to a promise made a long time ago, far, far away, in a galaxy called 1977.

The results are as riveting as any action movie ever made.

Out to Sea is out to brunch: It's got too much on the table, but if you look carefully and show some patience, you can pick out the odd treat. [02 July 1997, p.C10]

The cutting is so sinuous and breathtaking, the music (by Danny Elfman after too much coffee) so onrushing and the camera so penetrative of the depths and heights of midtown Manhattan at cloud level, that the illusion, despite its artificiality, works. You don't believe it but you "believe" it.

Ladybird, Ladybird is full of powerful, disturbing imagery. It offers a portrait of a woman victimized by a powerful and unfeeling bureaucracy, one that will literally rip a newborn out of the arms of its parents. But it's not didactic. [10 Feb 1995]

Profane, sacrilegious, pornographic, sadistic and Sade-istic, titillating and the most honorable movie of the year.

An eensy-weensy movie sustained by two utterly gigantic performances.