Stephen Hunter

Some of the tropes of The Lost City are ineffective. What does work is the sense of loss. The late Cuban novelist and screenwriter G. Cabrera Infante finds a brilliant device in the love affair between Fico and Aurora (Ines Sastre), his sister-in-law, in that Aurora in some way becomes Cuba.

The movie ends not with a bang but a wimp.

For the most part, Daredevil doesn't take a single dare; it travels the road much trod, even if it's through the midtown air.

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

Delightful, delicious and destructive.

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]

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

All in all, it's like a bachelor's apartment: a complete mess.

The movie captures exactly why those of us who do this for a living can't seem to shed ourselves of it: that crazed, dizzying, exhausting sense of being, if ever so briefly, where it's happening; and the sense that somewhere out there in the great unknown landscape that is our readership is somebody who cares what we write. The movie understands what draws people to Suns both real and imaginary.

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]

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.

The film is a strictly no-bull proposition.

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.

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

The movie suffers from an uncertain structure, but it boasts an extraordinary naturalism, not particularly flattering. Sharon Stone has a brilliant, harsh turn as Zack's mom, and both Bruce Willis and Harry Dean Stanton have good turns as the elder generations of Trueloves. But the movie belongs to its youngsters, and it's a real eye-opener.

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.

It's tough, astringent, darkly funny and . . . well, it's also generic, untidy, condescending and mild of impact rather than stunning.

This movie, written in crayon by James Kearns, is too dumb to come up with a way of defeating the system by using its own rules.

It's not without moments of wit and powerful emotion, but somehow Stepmom never feels either real enough to move us deeply or bubbly enough to make us forget our woes.

A brisk, entertaining and even moving exploration of the sometimes frayed intersection where Christianity meets homosexuality.

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.

Stars Audrey Tautou, gaminelike, waiflike, vivid and completely adorable.

Incisive and possibly a bit melodramatic as it lays out the reasons and the results of the violent campaign and marshals indignation on behalf of the victims while crying out for Western engagement.

If you love the theater, you've got to see the film.

Now and then sputters to comic life but more usually wheezes along.

Yes, it's a hyped, hip "Sting" for our times, with goatees, mousse and attitude as part of the update package. It's also Burns's best film since "Saving Private Ryan."