Stephen Hunter

All in all -- well, there is no all in all. There are just parts. Some fit, some don't. Some are cool, some aren't. It's the craziest thing you ever saw.

The Crow, the death-haunted, mega-violent, pulpy, vigorous final film of Brandon Lee, may not qualify as much of a monument to a lost life -- what film could? -- but it's a hell of a movie.

Let's get Sarandon and Jones into another movie soon; they're wonderful. Schumacher can direct and there's probably even a part for Brad Renfro. As for Grisham, he needs a course in remedial plotting.

So twitchy, fidgety, skittery and wiggly that the drug it made me yearn for was Dramamine, followed by a chaser of bourbon, 12 years old.

There's a kind of liberating, almost transforming energy in this film; it lights you up and sends you out all giddy with silliness.

Far from great, but much farther from awful, Troy offers several popcorn buckets' worth of good old-fashioned time at the movies.

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.

While the music slops and churns and the ground-level bathos rises, the aerial stuff is occasionally stirring.

This one's a turkey as big as the Eiffel Tower but it's bad in a particularly American way: It's wildly overdone, it throws in everything in an attempt to appeal to everyone, it's gargantuan and anti-logical, pointlessly ornate and pointlessly violent.

Here's a film that so merrily thumbs its nose at propriety in exchange for visceral thrills, and at probability in exchange for the really cool plot twist, that it checks in as the guiltiest pleasure since "The 13th Warrior."

You may find some of the story developments melodramatic -- I did -- but the film itself is quite powerful.

The movie, in fact, is a lot like Willis' performance: impressive in an iconographic way, but really not nearly as much fun as it should be. It's like watching a spitting contest between totem poles. [20 Sep 1996]

Andre Hennicke is particularly chilling as the yappy mad dog judge who sends them to death.

Just what we need least: a warm family comedy about child molestation.That's Georgia Rule, which combines battleship actresses of the "Steel Magnolias" variety, fall-down-go-boom comedy that was obsolete in the '30s, Lindsay Lohan's cleavage and intergenerational fondling just for kicks.

What we have here is a genuine outlaw work of art.

The movie is gross but not unfunny as it covers the Zohan's rise through hair culture, aided by his steamy heterosexuality, his lack of inhibition and his stereotypical career aggressiveness, until the old ladies are lined up all the way to the Bronx for a few minutes of bliss in the Zohan's chair.

You are likely to encounter more surprises on the way to the bathroom each morning than you do in this film.

It's good fun for bad boys.

Some stories are eternal. They will not go away. They are told and retold for generations. Take the story of Jesse James --it is not one of them.

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.

In the end, we're about a third of the way through the great Khan's life; he hasn't even begun to take down the cities of Cathay or spread his seed. That suggests two sequels. I, for one, can't wait.

[Craven's] stroke of genius is to offer the horror movie in an ironic mode. He's winking at viewers and inviting them to share a clever conspiracy that we on the cholesterol-clogged side of 30 cannot begin to understand.

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

As an example of the art of casting, the movie is brilliantly engineered. It allows two major stars to each play the showy villain for a time, and also for each to do an imitation of the other.

Works far better as journalism than as drama. One weakness is that poor Linklater has to keep bringing in guest explainers, who lay out one policy or another but have nothing whatsoever to do with the story.

It's a cult movie in search of a cult. It'll probably find one. It certainly looks and feels like no other movie ever made.

A stunner -- as big and messy as a war, as small and perfect as a diamond.

No, it's not great. No, it's not a disaster.

It may stir you, it may make you laugh. I am of the stirred variety. I do not want to meet this guy in the dark, though I've been meeting him in my dreams for years. We all have.

That's not to say it's great; it's not. Maybe it's not to say it's good, because it's only sort of good. It is to say, however, that it's nifty.

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."

A vicious anti-Catholic diatribe disguised as an audition tape for MTV.

What a good movie. Sometimes you get tired of 'splaining and you just want to say: Hey, this one's really very good. That's all, folks. It's a damn good movie.

Certainly handsome, well made and for most of its running time gripping, the film ultimately turns into a $60-odd-million piffle.

Well told, handsome, stirring and loads of fun.

It believes, in the end, in the decency of most people.

Illustrates the law of returning diminishments.

The movie's stroke of sheer genius is its wondrous ending.

The rhythms excite expectations that go unanswered.

Funner, biggerer, brighterer, bolderer, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is not only okay, it may even be close to good. A lavish spectacle illuminated by Johnny Depp's swishing pirate captain, the movie has its dull moments, but not many.

At least it cares enough to steal from the very best. Unfortunately, that's about all it cares about.

I liked, too, some late plot reversals, sorely needed after the numbingly simple straight-ahead plunge of the first hour of the movie. Things aren't quite what they seem and the twists are neatly done.

Macdonald has a fetching feel for the continent, and the movie has a powerful sense of what Africa looks and feels like; you can almost smell it.

It goes so far -- way too far -- as having a known actor play Grant.

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

So smug and so proud of itself, and you can tell that everybody involved conceives of it as a civics lesson instead of a story, that they squeeze all the life out of it.

An exuberance, a celebration, a hoot, a kick and a half.

Amalric is low-key and immensely likable, but what makes his Paul a worthwhile companion on a three-hour voyage is his utter sincerity, coupled with self-aware irony. He's not a phony, a user, a Romeo or a slut. His earnestness is his best quality; he tries so hard to do the right thing, sometimes only failing by a little. [10 Oct 1997, p.N48]

It can only be said that if you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you like.

May be the most ruggedly decent film to come along in a couple of decades.

So predictable it could have been written by a chimp who's watched too much TV, the huge movie is as dumb as it is loud, and it's way too loud.

The movie, directed by Steve Miner, a "Friday the 13th" vet, never quite gins up the giddy, sick, politically incorrect power of the more high-powered "Screams" of late.

The occasional big moments are stunning, and kids from the ages of, say, 6 years to 6 years and 3 days will love it. Anyone younger will be scared; anyone older, bored.

Brilliantly played by Denzel Washington

The two women relate brilliantly, and the movie has lots of fun creating an erotic subtext between them.

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.

Cameron captures the majesty, the tragedy, the fury and the futility of the event in a way that supersedes his trivial attempts to melodramatize it.

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

Smith and Lawrence have great comic energy and for at least half an hour are sublimely enjoyable -- until the movie's spirit of bloated gargantuanism takes over. [7 April 1995, p.5]

Takes its absurd premise and keeps itself narrowly focused, pushing its heroic cast through obstacle after obstacle.

It's enough to send you home with jiggly knees and a tummy ache.

There's just too much death, it comes too quickly, it has no moral import, it becomes ultimately meaningless. It's not that hyper-violent movies are axiomatically a bad thing, it's just that this particular example is so laden with shootings that it becomes somehow tedious.

It's kind of like a hit man's Olympics. Isn't this grown-up? In a word, no, and that's what's so much fun about it.

Still, the movie -- as beautifully drawn, as sleek and engaging as it is -- has the annoyance of incredible smugness.

Too bad the plot held no surprises and the acting no revelations. No actor could be said to stand out and the movie never acquires much tension or momentum.

It orders you to love it. It demands love, which is the best way not to get it.

The animation is first-rate...But the story needs to catch up to the magic. Otherwise, what's the point?

This is definitely a post-"Field of Dreams" movie, at home in an era that specializes in building ersatz old parks, like the honey at Camden Yards. I love that place, even if it's more theme park than ball yard (I also love theme parks). But "The Sandlot" isn't a theme park or a ball yard; it's a con job.

One thing the makers of Saving Silverman do not have to worry about: Hannibal Lecter will never visit them to eat their brains. That is because they have no brains.

The film is more of an anthropological essay on the way young Americans relate while they make war, not love, and try to survive in the meantime.

Like too many Thanksgiving dinners, too much squabbling really wreaks havoc on the digestion. Football, anyone?

Oh, please. Stop and smell the manure.

Water, set in 1930s India, is something pretty rare in the world of movies: an artistic muckraker. It is superb and strange at once, a discreet and self-disciplined attack dog of a movie.

There's not a moment in Boiling Point that could be said to achieve a narrative temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Boil? This limpid pool of cliche and predictability never even bubbles.

Benigni is no Peter Sellers, but the inanity of the film isn't really his fault. He tries hard, and his rubbery willingness to absorb any punishment and come up looking as if he's just swallowed a very cold carp isn't without comic potential. But he is continually betrayed by the lame setups.

Friendship matters to those of us who still claim membership in the human race, and Goldbacher's merciless autopsy on it is both illuminating and dispiriting.

An anti-capital-punishment polemic that won't change a single mind anywhere on Earth but will entertain well enough everywhere on Earth.

And though brilliantly acted, it's not. For some reason, the director and the writer (Paul Bernbaum) have chosen an exceedingly awkward path into the materials. They break the narrative into two strands and play them off each other in cheap and easy ways for insubstantial effect.

Though I don't think giving it a cuddly human personality and the vocals of Rachel Weisz helps much, the thing itself, part dog, part fish, part weasel, part dinosaur, is a terrific illusion, and the technical team manages to really sell the idea of flight. Too bad the acting is so lame, the story so derivative and the thing so long.

Overpublicized and underbrained,Basic Instinct is a bitter disappointment, worth maybe a 10th of the hype that the media have so obligingly ladled out for its benefit.

It's a very funny movie in that sniffy Brit way.

The movie, directed (and written) by Zach Helm in grotesquely bright colors, means to approach the creepy wonder of Roald Dahl but gets only the creepy part right.

The biggest disappointment in the film, however, is Piven's Adam. This film idealizes his character too much and thereby jettisons any case for serious respect.

"Lost" star Matthew Fox pitches in with a strong performance as a coach who, by the laws of whimsy, didn't take the final flight home and had to struggle with survivor's guilt.

A stunning documentary that examines life at the ground level in a patch of banally pretty but otherwise nondescript French meadow. [27 Nov 1996]

Puerile, pitiful, grotesque, offensive, immature, repulsive and, of course, extremely funny.

A meet-cute whimsy set among divorced fifty-somethings in New York, it blunders on toward oblivion, excruciatingly unfunny and pitifully unromantic.

Nell doesn't jell. Earnest and well-intentioned, the film never quite breaks through a membrane into believability, and hence into empathy. [23 Dec 1994]

An Upper West Sidey exercise in narcissism and self-congratulation disguised as a tribute.

A movie so bewildering and impenetrable that I believe it siphoned off a good 40 IQ points.

It's the last thing anyone expected: an old-fashioned monster movie with a heart.

We're supposed to adore Gibson's sang-froid and his toughness, but everything, a few good lines aside, is so witless and monotonous it becomes numbing.

This movie probably gets the Washington process better than any since Otto Preminger's underrated "Advise & Consent" in 1962. It's not about men of virtue doing the impossible, but men of flaws doing the doable, but just barely.

The comedy is strained to the point of lameness, most of it exaggerated clumsiness, stupidity or inappropriateness.

Isn't particularly scary. No, it's much harder on you than mere fright: It's . . . creepy.

It's a highly professional project complete with exquisite production details and superb actors, yet its subject matter is so far out of the mainstream, it feels almost radical.

It's a fine, fierce and nearly unforgettable movie.

It can't fake sincerity. It tries ever so hard, but it doesn't have a single believable second. Every word in it is a lie.

Yet what is most impressive about the movie are the odd notes of grace it provides its ostensible villains. [4 Aug 1995]

It's so gritty it'll get under your fingernails. And it harks back to one of Hill's greatest films from the '70s, "Hard Times."

Baby, when you walk out of a movie thinking, "Say, that Heather Locklear was pretty darn good," the movie's got some problems!

Let's blame it on poor Robin Williams, who tries so desperately to be likable, whimsical, lovable, smart and funny all at once that he just wears you out. Blame it also on the behind-the-scenes engineers at Disney who think that effects are more important than story and character.

Though it stops short of explosive comedy, the Ivan Reitman film is consistently amusing in its populist celebration of common sense and decency in the place of sophistication, power-brokering and cynicism.

It's like the longest just-say-no commercial in history, only you'd say no not because drugs are evil but because you don't want to get a serious foot fungus.

The movie falls from grace to clunkiness and continues its herky-jerky, way-unfunny trek around the amusement park. Who needs it?

By the time it winds down, U.S. Marshals has all but destroyed itself. It's gone pffft! in the night.

There are plenty of reasons to like the movie, such as its genuinely gentle wit, its occasional capture of the absurdities of aging and its endorsement of the permanence of lust, but one factor in particular is its brilliant cast of discarded '70s-era Hollywood stars.

The movie is a feast of miscalculations. It turns out that neither a bat nor a ball make for an enchanting child's companion, lacking as they do the ability to move or express emotion.

The movie streamlines much of Harris's book. It's a shame, because it results in the movie's fundamental flaw -- the one-dimensionality of Hannibal.

The upshot is that the film is technically superb and quite enjoyable as long as you don't bang your head against the plot.

The movie's surface of bright, brittle patter, initially off-putting, comes finally to serve as camouflage for the sinister movement of large and powerful forces.

Then, finally, there are the endings, all six of them...For us outsiders, it seems like too much of a good thing...But all those are minor rants: The big fact is that The Return of the King puts you there at Waterloo, or Thermopylae or the Bulge, any desperate place where men ran low on blood and iron and ammo, but not on courage.

But it's not what the Wayans brothers do, it's how they do it. They do it funny.

The movie doesn't so much end as reach a stopping point and limp hurriedly off-screen, like a bad stand-up chased out by boo birds. But God, is it funny.

The creepiest, clammiest, twitchiest squealfest in months. It offers, among its many pleasures, the happiness of safe fear.

If you're the sort of person who laughs at funerals, train wrecks, earnest political documentaries and stories about the rape of nature, you'll love Closer.

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

The movie, though quite funny in parts, turns organically dark, and it refuses to paint a picture of a cotton-candy world. It prefers the real one.

This is a movie that understands the larger-than-life appeal of the old-fashioned movie star and one of the movies' most primal appeals: beautiful people doing amusing things while talking about it cleverly.

Yet as sophisticated a piece of filmmaking as it is, it seems hamstrung by the banality at its center; that's why it never assembles into a satisfying whole. It's pretty -- oh, what's the word? -- stupid in its dramatization of the silly little connections that unite us, and it's somewhat selective in its choice of them.

The movie never rises to the level of the professional, much less the comic. The gags are witless and surprisingly gross. The four actors, each accustomed to being at the center, never develop any rhythm, any chemistry, any anything.

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.

Not merely Pacino's over-mannered, near-histrionic performance, but the movie itself could be characterized as busy, busy, busy. It's so full of plot twists and revelations and exploding sports cars that its very perkiness comes to seem comic.

Derived from the folksy, avuncular works of Jean Shepherd, it's a movie in search of a story, characters and a reason to exist. In this quest, it goes 0 for 3. It's like watching Jell-O harden, then melt, only not quite so much fun. [23 Sep 1994]

It never makes much sense.

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

What a bummer! Certainly the meanest-spirited film ever associated with the Disney hallmark.

It all adds up to something less powerful and interesting than the original.

It's a brilliant movie, fluent, spectacular, breathtaking and basically, uh, wrong.

It's shallow as a puddle, but lots o' fun.

These are great, primal stories that pull you in, make you care and put you on the edge of madness and violence.

A devastatingly dishonest, tough look at teenage life.

So I expect the Janeites who love the author will feel themselves ill-served by the film, which appears to have even less basis in fact than "Shakespeare in Love." As for the rest of us, the question is simpler: Is it worth the eight bucks?

Mamet loves two things: scams and dialogue. This movie is rich with both.

Only in its final minutes does it somewhat squander its grip on the moral imagination, in a climax that seems oddly to undercut all that's come before and return us to the hallowed sense of violence as cleansing which so animates the world's true killers.

The effects are murky and the giant worm looks more like a smear on the lens than anything else. Most of the intensity is generated by sudden sound effects like ringing phones, alarm clocks or oven timers.

This is another unhelpful screed, uncontaminated by sense or perspective, that preaches loudly to the choir.

It's so spoofy it's difficult to call 'good' or even 'bad'; just say it's smooth.

Ghastly yet wonderful at the same time.

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 few others have compared this to a James Bond movie, but it's more of a piece with a Tom Clancy movie; it never leaves the real world that far behind, it has a fair sense of documentary reality, and the action sequences -- from shootout to car chase to a commando takedown of a tanker on the high seas to a final knife fight -- are extremely well managed.

It's sickeningly violent!

He still sees dead people, only now they're the best thing in the movie.

The secret reptile part of you yearns to see Berenger's laconic Shale enforce classroom discipline with his Uzi and back up the no-talking rule with a Claymore mine. But no. Rather, Shale tumbles quickly enough to the fact that more than routine violence is afflicting the school, that there is, in fact, a conspiracy.

You may not enjoy The Mother (I certainly didn't), but it's a movie so heavy on truth, its spell cannot be denied.

If nothing else it's a wonderful essay on the meaning of freedom and the courage it takes to wrestle it from despots. In that sense, it feels more political and cultural than religious.

The sad truth is that Wonder Boys is little more than a sentimentalized encomium to the disheveled, childish life it ascribes to writers.

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

The tension is never crushing, as it would be in an American job. Instead, it grows by increments, until you realize the movie, in its quiet way, has you snared entirely.

Ultimately, The Guardian veers off into slobbery touchy-feeliness, and the tone becomes mock-religious, almost liturgical.

It's hard to hate, because as a rabble-rouser it is superbly effective, driven forward by two powerhouse actors.

It's a terrific film because each of the characters is so fiercely felt.

The New World is stately almost to the point of being static and thus has trouble finding a central story around which to arrange itself; it's not quite the thin dead line, but it's close.

A few minutes of inspired lunacy aside, The Yes Men is largely a case of the same old preachers preaching to the same old choir.

The much ballyhooed movie, far from great and far from short (2 1/2 hours!), is still great fun.

First Knight is sublime summer entertainment, from the passion and beauty and grace of its stars to the thrust of its drama to the awe of its spectacle. [07 Jul 1995]

In this movie, the sense of charm has been obliterated.

It's like a "Saturday Night Live" sketch on a $60 million budget.

Tried hard to honor the spirit of the franchise, not exploit it, and take it to a new level and a surprising destination.

The movie is powerful, if numbing. What movie about a massacre isn't?

Give Woody Allen credit for ambition. Failing at one movie wasn't enough. Nearly anyone can do that; it happens all the time. He's chosen to fail at two simultaneously.

Janet McTeer doesn't imitate Mary Jo Walker, and she doesn't act her. She becomes her. It's almost spooky.

It's such a great story, you have to ask two questions: Why didn't they make this movie before? And why did they make it this way?

It's not a great movie by any means, but it grips tighter than a chokehold and it cuts as deep as a knife.

It pulps you, but it doesn't enlighten you.

Short is a professional choreographer, and his dancing seems unstuck in time. How he can break his movements down to such small elements, keep them so precise and in such rigorous rhythm, yet keep the whole thing on track and moving forward with Nureyev's beauty and discipline is something to see.

A big, fat, gorgeous, mesmerizing mess.

The film turns out to have nothing going for it at all, except a small charge for soul-deep Madonna haters.

Awake is a pleasing if negligible diversion.

Until that sugar coating at the end, Out of Time is clever, believable and gripping, and seems to be headed to a wondrous, bad place as it carefully modulates classic '40s themes.

The movie is untainted by surprise or originality. It seems built from a blueprint, not a script. Anyone who listens to sports talk radio could write just as good a movie, no kidding. [29 Jun 1994]

Sahara is a mediocrity wrapped inside a banality, toasted in a nice, fresh cliche.

Its pleasures aren't so much in the inevitable plot complications, but in the passion of the performances and the spare beauty of the elegant framing and photography.

Big, dull and empty -- nobody associated with this production appears to have thought hard about storytelling.

It's a long and relatively underdramatized film, but it's powerfully true.

When a burning rat is the funniest thing in your movie, I think you're in big trouble, even in Miami.

Poor Roberts, pretty and perky as the day is long, hasn't a hoot in hell of bringing Julianne off. She's simply not actress enough, she doesn't have that suppleness that would enable her to sell the complexity of emotion, the jealousy, the irrationality, the meanness and the intelligence.

A well-acted first effort written and directed by Jamie Thraves.

Nothing is real, but at the same time, nothing is fake. Nothing is, period. You don't believe a second of it for a second, so banal and predictable is it.

The movie has trouble getting beyond the winking stage and is always letting you know that these are the soon-to-be famous Beatles. [22 Apr 1994]

A sturdily entertaining vehicle, easily the little guy's best American-made film.

Nothing of much surprise happens and nearly everybody will feel twinges of the familiar. It's very specific, but also universal in the gentle way it watches two people who are attracted to each other, and what they do about it. [14 Mar 1997]

It's funny and human and really pretty damned wonderful, all at once.

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.

Leconte is always a deliriously clever director; his "Ridicule" and his "The Girl on the Bridge" stand out as vivid films on subjects no one in America would even consider. Possibly he's trying too hard here to be liked, just like Francois. But as long as he's merciless, he's great fun.

Hatched by screenwriters watching "The Sixth Sense" on methamphetamines

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.