Stephen Hunter

When you think you've figured out Bielinsky's great game, that's when you're in the most trouble: He's the con, and you're just the mark.

Turns out to be cracking good entertainment, as well as a fresh start for the perdurable 21-picture franchise.

What Kalin fails to provide in the slightest degree is energy. The movie just sloshes along in a heavy, slightly overdone way.

The movie is maddeningly plain...I found the movie infuriatingly underdone, but what is clear about it, and perhaps what reaches sensibilities more sublimely tuned than mine, is the utter seriousness of the piece. It cares about eternal issues and faces them head on. [15 May 1998, p.D05]

He treats jocks like humans, not stars or superheroes, and in the end has managed something unique for documentaries these days: It's as entertaining as it is fair.

The movie rides the very thin line between art and trash, between exploitation and illumination. It's true, certainly, that it takes one into a universe of such moral squalor that one feels tainted afterward.

The genius is in the writing and in keeping all gambits created by the individual writers in sync, so the piece has a tonal consistency and a narrative flow. A lost art in Hollywood? It's really one of the best movies of the year.

It's pretty funny. You don't actually watch it so much as indulge it and admire its cleverness.

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

Far from an amusing romp.

This Tarzan doesn't bellow, he kvetches; he doesn't dominate, he persuades; he doesn't rule, he seeks consensus. He isn't the king of the apes, he's a citizen of the animal planet.

Great picture? No. Cool picture? Oui. Not as good, I must say, as the sort of thing we moron yanks were doing on our own over here – "D.O.A." is much better.

It's not a great film, but in its reckless audacity -- an American director working from a British novel set in Latin America, dealing with the largest themes of Latin American art, politics and history -- it's reassuring. Someone's still willing to take a big chance.

It would be nice to report that director Stanley Nelson comes up with something new, some illumination, some revelation, some heretofore unglimpsed irony, but he doesn't.

It's a trip to Hell and back, and testimony for embittered cynics of all that a movie can be.

Demonstrates that sometimes the simplest stories are the most profound, and certainly possess the most moral authority. It's a film that emphasizes loyalty and sacrifice, values that have become jokes in most other films these days.

In the end, I'm wondering what's so special about a film that has but one guilty pleasure and that's Ben Kingsley spraying saliva-lubricated variants of the F-word into the atmosphere like anti-aircraft fire for 10 solid minutes.

Stands with the best movies of this young century and the old one that preceded it: It's passionate, honest, unflinching, gripping, and it pays respects. The flag raising on Iwo might have indeed become a pseudo-event as it was processed for goals, but there was nothing pseudo about the courage of the men who did it.

A brilliantly amusing couple of hours.

Its images of the destruction of the cities is far more powerful than in American films, where the cities are trashed for the pure pleasure of destruction, without any real sense of human loss.

Held together by the intensity of its focus.

Isn't much of a movie, but it's a whale of a story.

Like the bitter cold in which it's set, Affliction bites hard and true.

May be too much suspense for some, but it's vividly powerful.

It gets frenetic, in the French way, but it never stops getting amusing. This is what happens when you let grown-ups make movies.

Manufactured Landscapes makes an inelegant point elegantly. The point: Humanity is altering the landscape drastically and by implication irrevocably.

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.

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.