Stephen Hunter

What a superb job director Marcus Nispel has done re-creating, yet also revising, 1974's grisly, gristly, protein-centric masterpiece.

The backgrounds, it must be said, are the most impressive features in the picture: Vibrant with color and often deeply evocative, they make you wish something a bit more lively was happening in front of them. [18 Nov 1994]

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.

Director Ken Loach is full of astonishments. An avowedly leftist filmmaker, he has always seen beyond political cant to compassionate reality. He's also incredibly sensitive to what might be called the nuances of life, and he always brings a high sense of spontaneous reality to his films.

It grinds on and on without mercy. You're in the cross hairs. There is no escape. Where is that Secret Service when you need it?

You can feel Hoodlum hungering to be bigger than it possibly can be. It wants to be "The Godfather" of African Americans, a vast tale of crime and heroism and nerve and ambition. But it tries too hard and ends up feeling spotty rather than deep. [27Aug1997 Pg D.01]

While it's no good time at the movies, Wonderland is an excruciatingly authentic experience.

The movie is taut, fast, achingly authentic and terribly melancholy.

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.

Has a gritty authenticity to it … captures the spectacularly crazed quality of urban violence.

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

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.

It conforms to that twisted French genius's typical opus: grisly, ironic but minuscule and sordid.

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.

Enervated, torpid, slack, dreary and, oh yes, nasty, brutish and long.

It never makes you laugh that hard. Not even close. And so the thing becomes a bloody assault on the senses that commingles atrocity with tedium.

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.

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.

The movie itself is a miracle: tough, smart, relentless, provocative and, above all, serious.

Big Fish stinks from the head.

The problem is that director Peter Berg, aided and abetted by Smith and Theron and third banana Jason Bateman, seem to have made it literally, not realizing its out-of-whack tonalities and grotesque plot twists were meant to be played for laughs.

Utterly shatters the illusion with a trite plot, banal dialogue, clunky sentimentality and, worst of all, a sort of narrative arbitrariness.

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

Petersen leaves out, largely, character, back story, anecdote and warm personal relations. Poseidon isn't cute, funny, warm, nice, inspirational or uplifting. It's about the incredible labor of survival in a world turned totally sociopathic in an instant.

The Craft casts a spell with a cast of four kicky young actresses, atmospheric California settings, cool special effects and the attitude of a music video. [03 May 1996]

One of those rich girl/bad boy things that defy understanding and leave you on the outside. Fascinated, but on the outside.

Grant is casually fabulous and very amusing, but all power to Firth the actor. He's the compleat Darcy, and he never wavers.

The remake is directed by another slickster, the Irishman John Moore, who is no deep thinker (as his "Behind Enemy Lines" confirmed) but, like Donner, he's an able hack -- smooth, stylish, clever, soulless and a hoot. And so's his damned movie. And it is damned.