Stephen Hunter

It's handsome, well-populated and offers beautiful scenery and settings. But "House of Flying Daggers" it ain't; maybe "House of Fallen Arches"?

Meant to be a sleek, dark, disturbing David Cronenberg-style thriller, Olivier Assayas's film is just an annoying concoction.

This isn't a movie where story matters that much: It's a movie of character and milieu, both of which it evokes brilliantly.

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.

It's a classic story in form, and in this country it used to star Jimmy Cagney.

Writer-director Kirk Jones III keeps the movie resolutely brisk and light, twisting mildly this way and that but never detouring for long.

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.

There's not enough story in it to fill a shoebox.

Fun, if you're inclined toward cynicism, contempt, nihilism and cool stuff like that.

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.

It seems almost disrespectful to weave in a provocative re-creation of the killings -- somehow a massacre of unarmed innocents that shocked the world should be more than just fodder for ginning up the tension at the end of a commercial movie.

You have a movie in which sharks with triple-digit IQs hunt humans with double-digit IQs. It’s no contest.

It's hardly a muckraking piece but more a celebration of racing at the high end and the extremely prosperous folks who play it.

Jungle Fever is so many graceful things, so many angry things, so many truly moving things that its occasional faults are the faults of excess passion, not failure of imagination. Most importantly, it seethes with life, unlike nearly every other movie out of Hollywood these days.

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.

Here's the best thing about Stealing Harvard: A dog bites Green in the crotch for a really long time. Priceless.

It stays in character, small, human, bitter and sad.

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

An Irish lark that blows in, trailing daffodils and the sniff of spring, from that adventurous releasing company Shooting Gallery Films.

Memo to left-wing anti-Bushies: Stories like this work. Don't lecture. Tell stories! Much better!

A surprisingly lush, well-produced film.

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

Shakur is superb, as I said, but so is Belushi. Initially a kind of glowering Bozo whose very sleaze is seductive and whose efficiency is attractive -- he's very Dirty Harry-like in his solutions to criminal problems -- he drifts off, almost banally, into the most repellent of all evils, the criminal sociopath masquerading under the flag of authority and using the system to hide his tracks. He stops being funny and merely becomes horrifying.

It's pretty appalling, and it's boring.

This unpretentious little bit of superior craftsmanship will be utterly mesmerizing to two kinds of people in particular: those who love cell phones and those who hate them.

It's hardly great, but it's completely mesmerizing. [02 Feb 1996]

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