Stephen Hunter

It's an astonishing movie, with a real-life feel.

If you don't fall in love with it, you've probably never fallen in love with a movie, and never will.

After Life is really a celebration of before-death: It's a complete rarity, for movies in general, for Washington in specific--pure sweetness of spirt. [8 Sept 1999, p.C9]

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

Great American movies are, these days especially, few and far between, so let's everybody take a deep breath and mark the moment: Hoop Dreams, all three hours' worth, is a great American movie. It's got the sting of drama and the ache of truth; it's even got the sting of truth and the ache of drama.

A terrific piece of filmmaking. It's taut, believable as it unspools. It's charismatic, with a slow buildup of tension in near-real time that finally explodes into a blast of violence.

A beautiful story, told in measured cadences by a master of old-timey narrative compression and expression.

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

It's funny, it's heartbreaking, it's scary, it's exhilarating. It's got love stuff and lots of laughs and cool gunfights. It's really long and it feels like it's over in 15 minutes. It does something so few movies do these days: It satisfies.

Misanthropic, cruel, hostile, corrupt, blasphemous and basically pretty evil. I loved it.

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.

It is the most dynamic animated film ever made, and the prance of its camera, the sense of penetration into its action, the brilliantly paced editing pyrotechnics give it a crackle of life far more abundant than any feature that's come before.

It's the best sports documentary since "Hoop Dreams," a great piece of work."

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

This is the rare American film really about something, and almost all the performances are riveting.

Searing, heartbreaking, so intense it turns your body into a single tube of clenched muscle, this is simply the greatest war movie ever made, and one of the great American movies.

Payne is a comic miniaturist, who works in a small compass, as if through a magnifying glass with tweezers.

It's a celebration of young American women, finding them smarter, tougher, shrewder, more rigorous, more persistent and more honest than any movie in many a moon.

A superior adaptation that bypasses the Ann Reinking version now on Broadway.

It's that rarest of all films, the one that can unify, not divide, the generations, as both jaded teen-agers and their more innocent parents can connect with it. And of course for the kids, it's pure balm from heaven.

Jackson's big monkey picture show is certainly the best popular entertainment of the year. The film is a wondrous blend of then and now: It honors its mythic predecessor of 1933 while using sophisticated movie technology to seamlessly manipulate the fantastic.

It's brilliantly acted. But best of all, it's brilliantly made.

It's a terrific movie.

It remains one of the best-written and best-performed American films of all time.

A wonderful, piercing and hilarious examination of high school politics and how bitter and ruinous it can become.

Delivered with such high panache and brio, it's mesmerizing.

It's a strange enough film, yet weirdly great. No movie has quite gotten the clammy weight of fear, the sense of hopelessness that would necessarily haunt underground workers. To see it is to sweat through your underclothes. It'll melt the pep out of your weekend.

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