Stephen Hunter

For a movie, Michael Mann's Ali is great radio. It's almost better to squint, so that you see the film in soft focus, just fury and motion and blurred faces; meanwhile, with your ears cranked open wide, everybody sounds much more like they should than looks like they should.

Unfortunately, while Stallone can carry the weight, the movie can't. Too much of it is too busy -- too many undeveloped subplots -- and some of the main plotting feels murky.

The first section of Three Times is fabulous; the second is fascinating if remote; and the third a jangly, modernist mess.

What compels then isn't the overwrought plot, but the simpler things, the dynamics between the actors, the avuncularity between old pros Costner and Hurt and the class condescension between Costner and Cook. It has a fascinatin' rhythm.

It's frenetic to the point of crazy while achieving a mark that barely exceeds mediocre.

American director Jim Sonzero has taken the same campus setting and plot and added some rationale by "science-fictioning" it.

The film is visually mannered and full of posing and longueurs. But it is stylish, very French (despite its American origins) and diverting if well short of brilliant.

As for Damon, this may not be a performance so much as an appearance. But he cares so utterly, it works.

It's a pretty good sub movie, with some pretty good performances, that, alas, somewhat disintegrates in the last half-hour.

What's so good about the movie is Gyllenhaal's refusal to show off; he doesn't seem jealous of the camera's attention when it goes to others and is content, for long stretches, to serve simply as a prism though which other young men can be observed.

The cast and the direction are too good, in the end, for the rather desultory place the movie ends up.

Anthony Hopkins, with a toothpick and a slouch. Fabulous!

The script is adroit: It doesn't force the humor, and it steadily keeps track of Jim's growing maturity.

An enigma inside a conundrum inside an escargot shell, the French puzzler La Moustache will delight some people even as it annoys others.

A triumph of place over sense.

It's a great style, it's a fabulous performance, but it never quite finds what it's searching for.

Each moment feels real, but the movie wears you out in some way. High naturalism is just as much a stylization as High Stylization. The groping nature of the conversations comes to feel as artificial as iambic pentameter.

More political allegory than horror movie.

Demonstrates that a movie need not be good to be cool.

In truth, I didn't care much for it, while respecting it a great deal. It's self-consciously childish and "innocent," and everything is overdrawn to cartoon dimension.

It has the big themes that obsessed Kurosawa at his greatest, and that alone makes it worthwhile.

The movie's surrender to banality is all the more dispiriting because it gets off to such a good start.

This dame is as sick as a sick dog on a hot day, if still always perversely amusing, and the story is constructed as a survivor's ordeal, not a colorful picaresque.

It's funny and violent and fast and, er, Danish.

On the technical side, The Invasion has several first-rate, terrifying action sequences and grips totally from start to finish. But a subplot involving the Russian Embassy doesn't really pay off, and the relationship between Kidman and glum paramour Daniel Craig (another doc) isn't much.

It is not bad on its own terms, and it is certainly engrossing, but it comes nowhere near the power and sordid glory of the original.

Seems to go sideways as often as it goes forward. Altman can't help noticing things more interesting than the story.

It never answers the key question: Why should we care?

But for all the meta-movie excitement, the content danced somewhere between mildly interesting and moderately enjoyable.

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

Memoirs of a Geisha is everything you'd expect it to be: beautiful, mesmerizing, tasteful, Japanese. It's just not very hot.

Folks, I think I'm speaking for all of us when I say this is pretty darn fine American entertainment

More than watchable, if less than compelling.

But the best thing about Jakob the Liar is that it's not "Patch Adams at Auschwitz."

Cocaine is the most aggressively edited film in years: It pounds, it churns, it spurts, it spray-paints.

Reminded me somewhat of Archibald MacLeish's famous line that a poem "should not mean but be." That's the reality of The Apostle: It does not mean, it simply is.

Fitfully amusing but nothing remarkable

The movie is neither good nor bad, but in its clever packaging of boy fantasy and girl fantasy, extremely cunning. As for Princess Diaz, no force on Earth can stop her now.

The highest accomplishment of Buffalo Soldiers is its wise invocation of that weirdest of all precincts, the post, and the odd culture it spawns.

Woody Allen's new film has a few shortcomings but it's a heartfelt cry from what may be the last serious man left in the America as he contemplates what his native land has become.

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

A celebration of the actor's art – but not the dramatist's.

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

The movie is so tepid and inoffensive: It reminded me of a '70s Disney live-action product, with clean-scrubbed "hippies" like Johnny Whitaker chafing harmlessly under the wise ministrations of Suzanne Pleshette, whose job was to keep the kids in hand.

With its brilliant cast, its creative pedigree, Don't Come Knocking seemed as close to a sure thing as possible, but it only proves the sad truth that there's no such thing as a sure thing.

In fact much of Guilty By Suspicion takes place in a trashy roman a clef zone, with bigger-than-life versions of famous moments and people; the trouble is, the bigger they are, the less like life they seem.

But the film's most annoying error is the arrogant conceit of revisionism. It postulates a world that did not exist, because it exorcises the entwined concepts of communism and Cold War.

So insidey it's almost parochial.

Maybe it's me, but I find it difficult to dislike any movie that has horses, guns and big hats in it.

Weirdly disjointed and uncertain as to tone.

It's nothing but style and noise, threadbare of content, empty of ideas. Is it anything? Not really.

It takes what could be called the Chinese equivalent of chutzpah to make a movie with three of the world's most beautiful and talented women -- Gong Li, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi -- and to be more interested in the male character.

Of The Good German, it can be said that the operation was a brilliant success, even if the patient is not merely dead but most sincerely dead. The movie, in other words, lies there as if on a slab in a morgue, while you admire the corpse for its beauty.

Smashingly stupid.

Now, they're together. You can't look at them, but you can't look away either. So it goes.

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

Two Woody Allens, two kvetching, whining, neurotic incompetents bungling their lives . . . that's one too many Woody Allens.

What we deserved was "The Island of Jeanne Moreau." That I'd pay to see.

A lot of the film is illuminating; a lot of it is pointless.

This peculiar film is more than one beer short of a six-pack. It's part massive folly, part screwball tract and part steel nerve, even a little heroic. [25 May 1994]

It's a diversion, well crafted by Mackenzie from a book by Alexander Trocchi, but little more than that.

Good message, mediocre movie.

As spectacular as it is dense and as dense as it is colorful and as colorful as it is meaningless and as meaningless as it is long.

The story fails to really engage on any level save the kinetic.

The result is a movie that feels weirdly disconnected from reality.

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]

It's so routine and predictable it grows quickly wearisome, its inventions are thin and its wit is witless. You feel the clumsy manipulations coming hours in advance, and when they come, they seem to take forever to finish. [20 Dec 1996]

In all, it's not too bad and it's not too long.

All this stuff is probably right. It's just that the director, Victor Salva, underscores his points with thunderous obviousness and manipulates us through ham-handed plot gambits.

As the movie's tag line has it, it's based on a hell of a story. Too bad they didn't just tell it.

This mid-level, pretty-but-not-hugely-funny Allen film slips into the top spot by regretful default. I enjoyed every single second of it, a little bit.

The movie is bittersweet, adult, with a fair eye toward men's eternal spirit of the infantile, and knowing. Possibly it's too slick, but in some awkward way it sums up the true essence of adult life, which is just sort of getting along without doing too much harm. [30 Apr 1999]

The movie is almost completely uninteresting on the story level but fascinating as a work of imagined reconstruction and anthropology and as a study of the theory and practice of Studio 54.

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.

Is it funny? Now and then. Stupid? Very. Racist? Possibly. Ugly? Profoundly. Wild? Undeniably. Singular? Completely.

The movie has considerable intensity, particularly when it views hunting as a form of counter-guerrilla warfare, with the gunboys wandering into the thickets, daring the big cats to come bite them and get a bullet for their trouble. It's best trick, though, is a straight steal from "Jaws" in which the lion -- I couldn't tell if it was "Ghost" or "Darkness" -- slides across the savannah in the high grass, just a form in the seething stalks, its tail alone visible, like a fin in the glassy water. There's a primordiality, a natural human fear of things with teeth and fangs, really provoked by that image. Too bad the movie couldn't have checked into that vein more often. [11 Oct 1996]

Short of good, better than awful, it opens brilliantly, then just goes on, toward self-negating absurdity.

Sadly, the last 40-odd minutes are essentially one fight, pushed to the point of absurdity.

Mild pleasures are available in Mr. Woodcock.

All in all -- well, there is no all in all. There are just parts. Some fit, some don't. Some are cool, some aren't. It's the craziest thing you ever saw.

While the music slops and churns and the ground-level bathos rises, the aerial stuff is occasionally stirring.

The movie is gross but not unfunny as it covers the Zohan's rise through hair culture, aided by his steamy heterosexuality, his lack of inhibition and his stereotypical career aggressiveness, until the old ladies are lined up all the way to the Bronx for a few minutes of bliss in the Zohan's chair.

Still, if the movie is mediocre, the history it represents is not. For that correction to our collective Western amnesia, then, Annaud deserves some special award.

It's a rugged, almost chauvinistic celebration of American get-up-and-go that never acknowledges, even implicitly, that our get-up-and-go got up and went. It might be characterized by words begin with G: gusto, guts, gumption, gee whiz and gosharootie, though, er, never G-spot. [14 Jan 1994]

The movie's highest level of artistic expression was the ingenious Internet campaign that catapulted it to culture phenom months before it even opened. The thing itself turns out to be pretty much an afterthought, cheesy and not very well worked out.

Clever as it is, the film lacks charm. One problem: too many bugs. Second, bigger world for two purposes: to feed birds and to irk humans.

The good part about this okay, but way less than great, thriller is that you won't notice how cheesy it is until the heartburn from the popcorn has eased. In these jaded times, that's a bargain.

It's pretty elementary.

The rhythms excite expectations that go unanswered.

The film, therefore, is like a child's view of these events, untroubled by complexity, hungry for myth and simplicity.

The movie, directed by Steve Miner, a "Friday the 13th" vet, never quite gins up the giddy, sick, politically incorrect power of the more high-powered "Screams" of late.

Smith and Lawrence have great comic energy and for at least half an hour are sublimely enjoyable -- until the movie's spirit of bloated gargantuanism takes over. [7 April 1995, p.5]

There's just too much death, it comes too quickly, it has no moral import, it becomes ultimately meaningless. It's not that hyper-violent movies are axiomatically a bad thing, it's just that this particular example is so laden with shootings that it becomes somehow tedious.

The animation is first-rate...But the story needs to catch up to the magic. Otherwise, what's the point?

This is definitely a post-"Field of Dreams" movie, at home in an era that specializes in building ersatz old parks, like the honey at Camden Yards. I love that place, even if it's more theme park than ball yard (I also love theme parks). But "The Sandlot" isn't a theme park or a ball yard; it's a con job.

Benigni is no Peter Sellers, but the inanity of the film isn't really his fault. He tries hard, and his rubbery willingness to absorb any punishment and come up looking as if he's just swallowed a very cold carp isn't without comic potential. But he is continually betrayed by the lame setups.

Overpublicized and underbrained,Basic Instinct is a bitter disappointment, worth maybe a 10th of the hype that the media have so obligingly ladled out for its benefit.

The biggest disappointment in the film, however, is Piven's Adam. This film idealizes his character too much and thereby jettisons any case for serious respect.

It's like the longest just-say-no commercial in history, only you'd say no not because drugs are evil but because you don't want to get a serious foot fungus.

The movie is a feast of miscalculations. It turns out that neither a bat nor a ball make for an enchanting child's companion, lacking as they do the ability to move or express emotion.

The upshot is that the film is technically superb and quite enjoyable as long as you don't bang your head against the plot.

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

It all adds up to something less powerful and interesting than the original.

So I expect the Janeites who love the author will feel themselves ill-served by the film, which appears to have even less basis in fact than "Shakespeare in Love." As for the rest of us, the question is simpler: Is it worth the eight bucks?

The secret reptile part of you yearns to see Berenger's laconic Shale enforce classroom discipline with his Uzi and back up the no-talking rule with a Claymore mine. But no. Rather, Shale tumbles quickly enough to the fact that more than routine violence is afflicting the school, that there is, in fact, a conspiracy.

The New World is stately almost to the point of being static and thus has trouble finding a central story around which to arrange itself; it's not quite the thin dead line, but it's close.

The movie is untainted by surprise or originality. It seems built from a blueprint, not a script. Anyone who listens to sports talk radio could write just as good a movie, no kidding. [29 Jun 1994]

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]

This Psycho seems a little nuts.

It gets duller and duller as it turns out to have used up all its amusing tricks in that first 30 minutes.

It more or less self-destructs in a ridiculous last few minutes when it becomes a noble sacrifice-o-rama.

The effect for viewers is that of having inserted one's head in a kettledrum that is being pounded on by drunken monkeys.

In Proof of Life it's the same old story, a fight for love and glory, except that time goes by . . . slowwwwly.

Once the movie settles down to story, it turns out to play like an extended Twilight Zone episode that merely reiterates the theme of the first few minutes: that man is fundamentally a beast and he must struggle endlessly against his own worst instincts and that each victory over those instincts is merely provisional.

The end result of Shrek the Third is that you laugh a lot and you go home grumpy.

The key question the film raises: Is what happened to the Tipton Three an outrage? It allows us to draw our own conclusions strictly on an eye-of-the-beholder basis.

I appreciate No Country for Old Men for the skill in the film craft. I understand No Country for Old Men for its penetrating disquisition on narrative conventions and its heroic will in subverting them. I admire No Country for Old Men for the way it tightens its grip as it progresses, taking us deeper and deeper into a hellish world. I just don't like it very much.

Farrell appears to be a rarity in undercover culture, a vice cop who goes on the lowdown as an Irish beatnik. Oh, that's a good disguise for South Beach. As for Foxx, he's still channeling Ray Charles through squinty eyes and a kind of shaky head. They have zero chemistry.

Might be considered three action sequences and four comedy routines in search of a story.

The film has a kind of echo-filled emptiness to it that some will take as profundity and others as mere emptiness.

Takes the story one more crank toward the literal. When the thing hits the bird, it turns out, guess what, it is a piece of the sky, the sky is falling. It's like saying: McCarthy was right! Sheesh, revisionist history: It's everywhere!

That's exactly the problem with this movie: It's not about a killer, or his victims, or the manhunt or the cops. They're all in it, of course, more or less. But it's about a writer.

It seems to celebrate him more for his attitude, his fashionably leftist politics, his fame and his friendships than for any meaningful accomplishment.

As Shakespeare would have certainly written if he'd been on the movie beat, Double, double toil and trouble, movie stink and critic bubble/'Hocus Pocus' has no focus/has no rhyme, has no reason/ and is... out of season.

It's about half as much fun as the original.

Lohan brilliantly brings off her double turn and clearly believes in the picture, as do all who worked on it. These things used to be called B movies in the old days.

Meant to be a steamy erotic thriller, it's more annoying than anything else. Surely you will see its Big Surprise coming by the first 15 minutes, and it never begins to achieve the kind of sultry, mesmerizing fascination it so desperately needs.

Under its scope and reach and passion, Gangs of New York is pretty ordinary stuff.

It trickles and moseys about on its old good time, punctuated by guffaws and thigh-slapping and the occasional eyeball-blasting jolt from the white lightning, but never really manages to achieve the formal status of "story."

As comedies go, the unfunny Heavyweights sinks like a stone. [17 Feb 1995]

A Good Man isn't hard to find -- it's all over the place -- but it does grow hard to bear. [09 Sep 1994]

Youngsters who love the shrieky singing and don't notice the tapioca of the story will probably get their money's worth. Parents: Bring earplugs.

Halfhearted and unsure. They want it both ways and in so doing, don't get it either way. Cute just goes so far. [22 Aug 1997, p.N37]

Culkin is -- well, Culkin is Culkin, cute and malleable, absolutely empty, absolutely precious, absolutely irritating. [17 Jun 1994]

Uneven but occasionally funny.

The best thing about the movie is that it's interested in the soldiers, not the self-serving popinjays who seem to think the war is a big fat career-enhancing photo opportunity. The people who got shot at deserve most of the attention.

The Village yields a trick ending quite lame, quite tame and quite old; Rod Serling thought of it 40 years ago and he did it better.

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

What line is thinner than the one between confession and narcissism? Upon that line, exactly, does Elegy dwell, before tumbling off on the bad side.

The movie's deeper problem and its primary disappointment: its unwillingness to deal directly with the issue of colonialism.

After a sensational beginning, the movie loses its way in the late going and somehow doesn't deliver. [12 Mar 1999]

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we can agree on two things: The American health-care system is busted and Michael Moore is not the guy to fix it. His Sicko, an investigation and indictment of a system choking on paperwork, greed, bad policy and countervailing goals, turns out to be a fuzzy, toothless collection of anecdotes, a few stunts and a bromide-rich conclusion.

A modest comedy that does indeed stir a few chuckles out of its knuckleheaded trio of bad boys, it grows almost shockingly disturbing when it portrays armed robbery as amusing and the implicit death threat of the firearm as a joke. In this respect, it's the ugliest movie of the year. Or, no: It's merely the stupidest. [02 Dec 1994]

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh is a just-better-than-routine horror sequel that watches in chilly admiration as some sort of apparition steps out of mirrors and performs atrocities on the unwary. [17 Mar 1995]

As it plays, it simply feels like a kind of cop-out. Nobody changes that much.

About on the level of an After School Special put together by people in a real hurry to get on with their lives, Ed plays pretty dead for all except the very dumb at heart.

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

Killing Zoe lacks the incisiveness, the tightly controlled irony, and the blank verse power in the profane dialogue that enabled "Reservoir Dogs" to transcend its admittedly horrific violence. [25 Nov 1994]

The film feels as if it has a huge gap in it and the name of the gap is Bill Clinton. Who is this man who would be, and became, president? The film has no idea; Clinton himself is glimpsed occasionally, a completely charming fellow who can handle a press conference superbly, but who somehow is never there. As Carl Cannon wrote in The Sun's Sunday Perspective section, "It's as basic as this: Can his word be trusted?" The movie never bothers to confront such an issue or even, really, to acknowledge it; in documenting the Democrats, it clearly comes to share their uncritical view of the Hamlet-Bubba who carries their standard...Like the campaign itself, then, it's far too tightly wound up in details to examine a larger picture, which in the end may be the problem. [18 Feb 1994]

The remake adds 24 minutes and subtracts most of the suspense.

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.

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

Linney -- this has happened too much to her -- is once again the best thing in a movie that at most achieves a certain mediocrity.

Ruffalo is so squirrelly in the role that he seems like a dead giveaway from the start. You know exactly where the story is going, and, dang, that's exactly where it goes.

A movie carefully engineered for an audience of exactly nobody.

A documentary on the F-word that manages to amuse superficially until it moves into its seventh hour, at which point it grows wearisome.

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.

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

The movie made almost no sense whatever to me. I literally could not follow it, even as I was dazzled by it.

The new Bond movie is pure nonsense art of the dadaist school; it follows the rules of the ridiculous as it turns narrative convention, thriller formula and special-effects set pieces into a manifesto of the purest gibberish.

Initially an amiable sci-fi thriller that toys with the paradoxes inherent in time travel, it finally gets drunk on them. It becomes an incomprehensible stew of versions and revisions, until there's no there there and no then then.

Nothing really connects; it's not fluid and roaring but a collection of set-pieces. [25 Feb 1994]

The movie isn't about anything except acting, and although the acting it shows is brilliant, it makes exactly the point that is the opposite of the point it thought it was making: Acting isn't enough.

So much love has gone into the physical details and the music of Robert Altman's Kansas City that it's a shame the movie isn't up to the effort. It's a movie you yearn to care for, but it refuses to allow you: It's too busy being singular to be good.

Handsome but stilted.

The result is fascinating, if uneven and ultimately rather silly. Problems with the ending, so common these days, dog this visionary film as well.

I can't recall the original, or even if I saw it or not. But this variation certainly makes its points effectively, in what must be a more superheated milieu.

This film feels like a desperate attempt to squeeze a few last bucks out of what was once a very obliging cash cow.

Hardly anything feels real, but what feels even more unreal is Hartnett with a cloying, sentimental, self-pitying performance. The liveliest thing in the film is the great Jackson, slumming again in a role miles beneath him.

Miike's fans, those used to his strange ways, will certainly find Gozu an amusing addition to the oeuvre. All others will be bewildered beyond expression.

You may or may not like what you see, but there it is, indisputably, right in your face.

It's of an odd genre: a formally scripted (by Tony Grisoni) feature with a musical score that adheres totally to journalistic accuracy and willfully ignores formula, melodrama and uplift. It's a real down-lift.

A work of either a profoundly transgressive genius or a goofball high on Pez and patio sealant. It could come from no normal collection of brain cells.

Too simple for its own good.

Most of the fault rests with the script, which gets to this issue late and feels only perfunctory, more interested in the jolt of the image than the jolt of the idea.

Like the bad fight that ends the bad marriage: ugly, messy, loud, sometimes incoherent, but ultimately necessary. You're glad when either of them -- the marriage or the movie -- is over.

The movie felt slow and didactic; it lacked the kind of forward thrust that a narrative mechanic such as Spielberg would have engineered.

Frequently fascinating, it never builds into anything profound.

In casbahs and desert villages, in kibbutzim and around the campfire, Spurlock has a way of getting people to open up, to use their real voices and express their real opinions, the likes of which never make it onto network news. That's his gift, and when he uses it, "Where in the World zzzzz-zzzz" opens up into a miraculous document.

Friedkin still has it: The car chase is the best thing in the movie, though so unconnected to the plot it could have been added without changing Eszterhas' script a whit. But, that excitement over, the movie ultimately self-destructs in the matter of its own ending. [13 Oct 1995]

In Evan Almighty, Mr. God goes to Washington. Frank Capra, stop rolling in your grave. At least they cared enough to steal from the very best.

Checks in somewhere between a delight and a diversion.

A Goofy Movie is filled with rock sequences that aren't hard enough to please real teen-agers but are too hard to attract any grown-ups. The music sounds like it was composed by Marie Osmond on PCP. [07 Apr 1995]

The film's ardent sentimentality, as magnified by the schlurpy music, is straight Chaplin, but not as good. The Film's subtext of sight-gag and clown-dance is also straight Chaplin, also not as good. [16 Jan 1990, p.3C]

Anyway, the movie turns out to be hyperslick, quite well made in the technical sense (beautifully photographed and designed) and somewhat shallow, another exploration of that perennial and passionate teen theme, fitting in.

It's meant to be harmless fluff. It is.

Cradle Will Rock is left in mid-rock, as it were, its energy squandered, its sense of history confused, its sound and fury ultimately signifying nothing.

It has great mood and a sense of the toughness of the London underworld, but it never really gets into gear.

Firehouse Dog goes into the marginally watchable category, aimed as it is toward the middlebrow family trade, preferably dog owners with their own Sparky slopping up the station wagon windows.

This slap-- sequel is primarily for the cognoscenti -- that is, for other teen-age mutant ninja turtles, or very small children. The rest of us it happily ignores.

The movie is intermittently amusing, particularly when the American human part of the cast (Breckin Meyer and Jennifer Love Hewitt) are off-screen, the longer and farther the better.

This is a modest documentary, actually made in 2002 but only now gaining national release, which celebrates Attucks and that particular team, but most important Coach Crowe, by all accounts a remarkable man.

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

Suffers from what might be called colonitis. It comprises too many equal parts, and they tangle each other up. Everything is important, which comes to mean that nothing is important.

It's got a lot of small movies bouncing around inside it, but there's no big movie on the outside.

So phony it makes your gums ache.

The movie simply delivers too many colorfuls for its own good, none of whom establish a true emotional identity, and thus it isn't moving, it's busy. Busy, busy, busy.

The Lake House has the sensibility of something conceived by Stephen King after an overdose of chocolate-covered cherries and valentine cards. In other words, it's sugary sweet and based on a premise that's just -- no other word will do -- ridiculous.

One wishes the same wit and energy had gone into the story. That's Shrek 2 in a nutshell -- very pretty to look at, very hard to care for.

The nicest thing is the Asian American actress known as Maggie Q.

Ultimately the movie disintegrates due to its own clumsiness. It's far too coincidence-driven to be believable.

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."

[McGowan's] serene psychopathology is the movie's most consistent pleasure, and to see her is to both love and fear her.

In this film, Nolan seems overwhelmed by the budget, the egos of the stars, the thinness of the script, and he doesn't impose much personality on the picture. It's all Pacino.

It feels old, tired and given-up-on, maybe three drafts shy of minimal production level.

A lot of it is low, crude, admittedly comic in the rudest positive sense, which involves a lot of falling down to humorous effect.

It could hardly be called rip-roaring. I should report that it drives about a quarter of the audience out of the theater before it is half over. That's because it's slower than molasses in Siberia.

Suffers from all the excesses of the genre: gunfights that go on and on and on, a plot that is almost incomprehensible.

Here's the lowdown, the q.t., the true gen: The Black Dahlia is a big nowhere.

Will this film do Kerry any good, or the Swifties any harm? My bet is: Not a bit, one way or the other.

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

It can only be said that if you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you like.

The occasional big moments are stunning, and kids from the ages of, say, 6 years to 6 years and 3 days will love it. Anyone younger will be scared; anyone older, bored.

Too bad the plot held no surprises and the acting no revelations. No actor could be said to stand out and the movie never acquires much tension or momentum.

Like too many Thanksgiving dinners, too much squabbling really wreaks havoc on the digestion. Football, anyone?

Though I don't think giving it a cuddly human personality and the vocals of Rachel Weisz helps much, the thing itself, part dog, part fish, part weasel, part dinosaur, is a terrific illusion, and the technical team manages to really sell the idea of flight. Too bad the acting is so lame, the story so derivative and the thing so long.

A movie so bewildering and impenetrable that I believe it siphoned off a good 40 IQ points.

By the time it winds down, U.S. Marshals has all but destroyed itself. It's gone pffft! in the night.

The movie streamlines much of Harris's book. It's a shame, because it results in the movie's fundamental flaw -- the one-dimensionality of Hannibal.

Yet as sophisticated a piece of filmmaking as it is, it seems hamstrung by the banality at its center; that's why it never assembles into a satisfying whole. It's pretty -- oh, what's the word? -- stupid in its dramatization of the silly little connections that unite us, and it's somewhat selective in its choice of them.

The movie never rises to the level of the professional, much less the comic. The gags are witless and surprisingly gross. The four actors, each accustomed to being at the center, never develop any rhythm, any chemistry, any anything.

The effects are murky and the giant worm looks more like a smear on the lens than anything else. Most of the intensity is generated by sudden sound effects like ringing phones, alarm clocks or oven timers.

The sad truth is that Wonder Boys is little more than a sentimentalized encomium to the disheveled, childish life it ascribes to writers.

Ultimately, The Guardian veers off into slobbery touchy-feeliness, and the tone becomes mock-religious, almost liturgical.

In Mercury Rising, the mercury may rise but pulses never do. A promising thriller with tough guy Bruce Willis wearing an ever-more radiant tapestry of bruises on his face, the film ultimately surrenders to the entropy of stale plotting and familiar formula.

Offers just about a kill a minute, but less than a thrill a minute.

Tasteless and without redeeming social value, and also dank with the stench of decomposition masked by not enough formaldehyde, Nightwatch is the best kind of movie pleasure, a completely guilty one. [17 Apr 1998]

The movie is full of invasions, assassination attempts, chases and escapes in seemingly random order, the result being completely chaotic.

Afterglow is a lazy river of a movie that chooses beauty over sense and rhythm over reason. It goes nowhere slowly. [16Jan1998 Pg B.06]

Too busy trying to make remarks to be much fun in the end. But it really only has one remark, which it reiterates about a thousand times, and it's not all that remarkable: Fame is overrated.

The performances are so monotonic that you understand depicting authentic humanity is not the writer-director's goal: Each character has been reduced to a single unpleasant primal trait from which deviation is not permitted.

Though 45 minutes longer than the original release, still feels thinner, less complex, more mythic and far less compelling.

Riveting in its low way. It traffics in imagery profoundly disturbing.

I had some trouble with the plot, but I'm not the only one -- so did the screenwriter.

A magical child movie in which the child is magical, yes, but the movie is not.

Kind of like watching a John Waters film on fast forward with all the good parts cut out. It's empty of charm and meaning, but it certainly kills time, for those who wish it dead.

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

What's funny to Broken Lizard? Let's try: What's not funny? The answers are, everything and nothing. They'll do anything for a laugh, no matter how puerile, silly or offensive.

The French now proudly prove they can make a big stupid violent cop movie, just like our gifted Hollywood professionals.

You may have as much fun tearing it apart in its aftermath as you do watching it, but the fun is still genuine.

It's a movie of great dynamism and energy, but very little discipline. It probes issues but it never really thinks about them. It seems smart, but it's dumb.

Loud, stupid, unrealistic, overdone, without a thought in its ugly little head and kind of enjoyable.

It's still got some panache.

It is one of those soap bubbles of a film, fleeting, ephemeral, seemingly there when it is not. As you leave the theater, it diminishes with each step, collapsing into shards of imagery and sensations of movement. It's the film that never was.

It's kind of -- hmmmm, less than good, a little better than not bad, almost all right, mediocre without being grating, sort of in the C-minus-to-C-minus-minus range.

The Jackal is based on a fabrication so absurd that it almost made me laugh out loud.

More than predictable. It plods along with the inevitability of a doomed soldier going off to war.

In an era of careful cost accountancy and focus-group testing, it's remarkable that a movie as truly, deeply, madly foolish as The Wicker Man escaped the asylum. But we must be grateful for the endless guffaws and gasps and outright stunned silences it unleashes on lucky audiences.

If the movie is meant to uncover any "big scandals," it's a disappointment. The investigator, in one surprising sequence, goes through a number of alleged "torture" photos and acknowledges that the vast majority of them represent "standard operating procedure." That is supposed to be the film's kicker: not what was illegal but how much was legal.

Haggis also appears to have no respect for his audience. At its crudest, the film settles for agitprop...it's no Hollywood guy's call, particularly as he's extrapolating from a single case that could have occurred anywhere, at any time.

All in all, Jennifer 8 is about four bricks shy a load and two hours too long.

In all it wastes time, talent -- not least of all Reynolds's -- and money on an obscure mission. [30 Jul 1997, p.C02]

The only impressive thing about it is the monotony and thoroughness with which it replicates cliches from older, better movies and hammers them into pop alloy to an up-with-me beat beat beat of its musical score.

Put another movie on the barbie, mate; maybe it'll be better.

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.

There's some cool sword-fighting. But still, it's junk.

So rancid is Brooks's fury that it's clouded his judgment, so that each of his main characters is a stereotype of the most broad-brush, malodorous nature.

The cast is too good for the script and the script is too good for the director and the director is too good for the horny dog jokes.