Stephen Hunter

A caper film of such postmodernist pretense that it's almost a parody of itself.

Might be considered three action sequences and four comedy routines in search of a story.

Never manages to make its characters anything other than cartoons.

The movie is almost devised like a rat-in-maze experiment at the Yale psychology department. Each few minutes some new obstacle comes up for Chris, threatening to obliterate his dreams, at which point the film stands back and watches him improvise brilliantly on the run.

The most lethal weapon of all turns out to be the script.

The film has a kind of echo-filled emptiness to it that some will take as profundity and others as mere emptiness.

What's important is that Major Dundee, not a great movie but a great star-driven, big budget 1965 studio western, is back in all its fractured glory and confidence.

The director Vaughn has a flair not merely for action and ambiance but also for character.

Takes the story one more crank toward the literal. When the thing hits the bird, it turns out, guess what, it is a piece of the sky, the sky is falling. It's like saying: McCarthy was right! Sheesh, revisionist history: It's everywhere!

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.

Offers just about a kill a minute, but less than a thrill a minute.

Even the digressions are funny.

It's a handsome thing, familiar and new at once, thoroughly entertaining if hardly memorable.

Like the best horror movies, it doesn't beat you over the head, splatter you, or fold, spindle and mutilate you. Rather, slowly and subtly, it creeps you out. You may go home and throw out your computer and lock the doors.

Lord God, can she take control of a scene, dominate a movie, project to the last seat, radiate power and personality unto the rafters. It's a great performance. I love the way Knightley's eyes light with furious intelligence when she cuts the pompous Darcy a new something or other.

This feels like a cramped, TV-style retelling, with small groups of people, no special effects, in some ways almost cheesy.

So loud, so long, so dumb.

The story is so ridiculous and the acting so completely amateurish, the fights have no dramatic impact; you don't care whether good Jet or bad Jet wins – not that you can tell them apart anyway.

What the movie lacks in clarity, it makes up for in honesty, toughness, relentlessness and passion.

That's exactly the problem with this movie: It's not about a killer, or his victims, or the manhunt or the cops. They're all in it, of course, more or less. But it's about a writer.

You could run this film backward, soundtrack included, and it would make no less sense. --It's almost completely uninvolving, as well as being impenetrable.

Tasteless and without redeeming social value, and also dank with the stench of decomposition masked by not enough formaldehyde, Nightwatch is the best kind of movie pleasure, a completely guilty one. [17 Apr 1998]

Frank (Ben Kingsley) meets Laurel (Tea Leoni), a woman who has been around the block a time or 200, and she likes Frank's directness, while he likes her unflappability. This is one of the greatest screwball relationships in years.

It has the aspirations of an epic of crime and punishment, a superb feel for time and milieu, and an almost subliminal feel for myth.

A whodunit so bafflingly constructed that you can't even figure out what it is, so the whodun part is superfluous.

This is a great liberal movie, which is to say, it will be loved most passionately by great liberals, and despised by the conservatives it contemptuously fails to notice.

Lower City is sexy, but in a nice, dirty way. Everyone in it is deliciously low and sleazy, and so underdressed in the blazing heat that they are just dying to strip.

The director isn't much on orgies; he's all talk. But that's good, not bad, because his talk is so brilliant. Stillman is the Balzac of the ironic class, the Dickens of people with too much inner life.

The film is nowhere near the level of Pontecorvo's masterpiece, or even his subsequent flawed allegory on Vietnam, "Burn!," but is clearly the work of a natural coming into the full range of his powers.

Simple, earnest and workmanlike, it sings of Olof, glad and big, and how he lost his -- well, we can't say what he lost.

The creation of teen-girl culture seems almost pitch-perfect. The flaw is the flaw of most works of muckraking when they are held to artistic standards: It's a question of proportion.

The movie is -- how can I say this? -- funny as hell. It's like an old Mad magazine "Scenes We'd Like to See" put together by someone on crystal meth, with a vicious streak, an existentialist streak and no mercy anywhere in his soul and only the tiniest flinch at the end, which is probably, sigh, the best way to end.

Like every other second of more than 10,000 seconds in Alexander, it doesn't engage in the least.

The film has about seven minutes of good material, mostly provided by John Cleese.

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

It would be nice to report that director Stanley Nelson comes up with something new, some illumination, some revelation, some heretofore unglimpsed irony, but he doesn't.

As a visual adventure, "The Lawnmower Man" is great fun.

The movie is loud, dark, bumpy and not even a little fun. You emerge into daylight bruised and battered, suffering a case of movie abuse.

In its brisk way, it's a devastating piece of work, and very brave too.

A picture that is surely one of the oddest ever made.

Like the best of poems, it doesn't lend itself to easy understanding. But, like the best of poems, it's extremely provocative, to both imagination and intellect.

Equilibrium is like a remake of "1984" by someone who's seen "The Matrix" 25 times while eating Twinkies and doing methamphetamines.

It seems to celebrate him more for his attitude, his fashionably leftist politics, his fame and his friendships than for any meaningful accomplishment.

The moral purity of After Innocence is so overwhelming that it simply leaves you with nothing to say or do. It's kind of beyond criticism.

It's a great family movie, if not historically perfect, and something that a lot of people are going to like.

The best kind of genre filmmaking: It plays by the rules, obeys the traditions and is both familiar and fresh at once.

It's a terrific movie.

It denotes a minor movie miracle: how with intelligence, imagination and craft a small film can work in really large ways.

First-class in all departments except clarity.

The movie is full of invasions, assassination attempts, chases and escapes in seemingly random order, the result being completely chaotic.

Beautifully mounted and shot, Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book still feels somewhat callow. Its title aside, it never really deals with the issues that the great Kipling raised continually in his distinguished body of work.

Macabre and astonishing, Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas is a brilliant piece of technology, perhaps undercut a bit by the insincerity of its story and the blood-and-thunder music of Danny Elfman (every single piece he writes sounds like every other single piece he writes). But nasty kids and bored parents should love it.

A portrait of a hero.

The story the film tells ruins the movie.

As Shakespeare would have certainly written if he'd been on the movie beat, Double, double toil and trouble, movie stink and critic bubble/'Hocus Pocus' has no focus/has no rhyme, has no reason/ and is... out of season.

An eensy-weensy movie sustained by two utterly gigantic performances.

One False Move doesn't make a single false move its own self: It's as tough and gripping as they come. It's the first movie I've seen in months where, when I was walking out, I thought to myself, "Damn! I wanna see that one again!"

Talk to Me, with two great actors, tells that story, and it makes you feel not only the joy people experienced in the wash of Greene's raucous, truth-saying humor, but also his wisdom and calm. And many mourned his death at 55 in 1984.

It's about half as much fun as the original.

Afterglow is a lazy river of a movie that chooses beauty over sense and rhythm over reason. It goes nowhere slowly. [16Jan1998 Pg B.06]

Too busy trying to make remarks to be much fun in the end. But it really only has one remark, which it reiterates about a thousand times, and it's not all that remarkable: Fame is overrated.

Ultimately undone by its sheer busyness. The screenwriters never get the story to settle down, and it becomes a case of one damn thing after another.

Lohan brilliantly brings off her double turn and clearly believes in the picture, as do all who worked on it. These things used to be called B movies in the old days.

Meant to be a steamy erotic thriller, it's more annoying than anything else. Surely you will see its Big Surprise coming by the first 15 minutes, and it never begins to achieve the kind of sultry, mesmerizing fascination it so desperately needs.

A rambling wreck from computer tech and a helluva souvenir –- that is, for those interested in artifacts representing the American movie at its worst.

The movie is pure pro-choice agitprop, as it tracks Homer's conversion to the cause of choice and posits the heroism of the abortionist. Pro-lifers will hate it on that point alone.

Duvall is a great actor in the homestretch of a great career; it's hard to hold this trifle against him, and certainly nobody will.

Everything in it is a cliche including the end.

Of the many comic book superhero movies, this is by far the lamest, the loudest, the longest. Good Lord, what an epic sit. My rear end deserves a medal...I wish I could say it wasn't so, but for most of us, this "X" marks a splat.

Certainly no feel-good flick of the summer. But it's always tough and honest.

Although nowhere near the class of its equine hero, is quite a satisfying ride.

The performances are so monotonic that you understand depicting authentic humanity is not the writer-director's goal: Each character has been reduced to a single unpleasant primal trait from which deviation is not permitted.

The baseball half of the story just slightly works. ... Nothing in [the other] half of the film works.

Under its scope and reach and passion, Gangs of New York is pretty ordinary stuff.

The true crime is the eight bucks the filmmakers want to steal from you. Best advice: Don't let them get away with it.

Sumptuous, warm, continually amazing, it's a completely enjoyable couple of hours at the flickers.

There are many ways to define the shrieking awfulness of The Family Stone, from the general lack of wit to the cheap exploitation of cancer to its casual cruelty, but it's writer-director Thomas Bezucha's casting that really goes awry.

A profoundly disturbing -- and depressing -- look at the New Anti-Semitism of the post-9/11 world. Produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the film is remarkably restrained, given the outrages it documents.

Neither character seems especially insightful, and their intense focus on the self and the terrific delicacy of their feelings comes to feel narcissistic and annoying.

It trickles and moseys about on its old good time, punctuated by guffaws and thigh-slapping and the occasional eyeball-blasting jolt from the white lightning, but never really manages to achieve the formal status of "story."

A piece of pulp claptrap; it has no insights whatsoever into totalitarian psychology and always settles for the cheesiest kinds of demagoguery and harangue as its emblems of evil. They say they want a revolution? Then give us a revolution, one that's believable, frightening, heroic, coherent and not a teenagers' freaky power trip.

As comedies go, the unfunny Heavyweights sinks like a stone. [17 Feb 1995]

One of the year's best films.

Color Me Kubrick is like a nice, deep, clear cocktail of ammonia on the rocks: bracing, comic, astonishing, all of which hide its poison center.

It's a simpering, ineffective ersatz-drama, so simple-minded and unrealistic and so full of fussy stupidity, it exiles you.

The psychological darkness that underpins this film doesn't seem inappropriate to its wit and charm, but rather amplifies it, makes it more real.

Wang is working on your mind, not your body.

A Good Man isn't hard to find -- it's all over the place -- but it does grow hard to bear. [09 Sep 1994]

Youngsters who love the shrieky singing and don't notice the tapioca of the story will probably get their money's worth. Parents: Bring earplugs.

The whole thing is coarse and vulgar, as it hides its low fascinations behind a scrim of Holocaust piety until it becomes pure kitsch.

A nasty bit of counter-programming, Wolf Creek is for people sickened by the sentimental excesses of the day and the holiday season and want to hide from them in mayhem, slaughter, torture and degradation.

Isn't juvenile, it isn't even infantile. It's prenatal!

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

Manufactured Landscapes makes an inelegant point elegantly. The point: Humanity is altering the landscape drastically and by implication irrevocably.

An exceedingly bright comedy that never makes you feel stupid for enjoying its brisk pacing, smart lines, sound construction and superb comic acting, not only from Ashton Kutcher but from Cameron Diaz and well-chosen No. 2 bananas Rob Corddry and Lake Bell.

The movie, with its panorama of emotional epiphanies and its belief in the talent and grace of young women, is nevertheless bracing.

What compels then isn't the overwrought plot, but the simpler things, the dynamics between the actors, the avuncularity between old pros Costner and Hurt and the class condescension between Costner and Cook. It has a fascinatin' rhythm.

It's frenetic to the point of crazy while achieving a mark that barely exceeds mediocre.

What you get for your entertainment dollar in Lady Vengeance is Korean director Chan-wook Park's brilliantly orchestrated story of how Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae ) got her groove back.

American director Jim Sonzero has taken the same campus setting and plot and added some rationale by "science-fictioning" it.

Rock is such a consistent delight, and so powerfully amused at the profound pleasure of being Chris Rock, that he shares the wealth with all of us.

I found myself praying that the film would jam and melt and, well past the halfway point, it did, and I was sprung, 30 minutes early.

There've been dozens of shotgun movies, most of them directed by Sam Peckinpah ("The Wild Bunch," "The Getaway") but Berg is inventive...All this, and Christopher Walken too? What more could a fella ask for?

Though 45 minutes longer than the original release, still feels thinner, less complex, more mythic and far less compelling.

He gives these characters the time to develop, to display their nuances, to establish their relationships with each other, to talk out their destinies.

It is piffle done well. A (literally) lighter-than-air story, full of goofs and creeps and fools and silliness, it manages to delight without simpering, make points without lecturing and break hearts and mend them again without turning you weepy.

The film has no discipline, but that's okay because it has no suspense, either.

Halfhearted and unsure. They want it both ways and in so doing, don't get it either way. Cute just goes so far. [22 Aug 1997, p.N37]

It's exciting and satisfying, even if the chief villain isn't terribly original and the chase scenes are overlong. Bullock is plucky and believable as an average person who must marshal her strength and smarts to get her life back.

The film is visually mannered and full of posing and longueurs. But it is stylish, very French (despite its American origins) and diverting if well short of brilliant.

Riveting in its low way. It traffics in imagery profoundly disturbing.

The new film by the phenomenally talented Scots-English trio of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and screenwriter John Hodge -- they did both "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting" -- is a failure so absolute and witless it deserves some kind of mention in the Hall of Lame.

This gives nobody, least of all me, any pleasure, but a truth must be faced: Scoop is the worst movie Woody Allen has ever made.

It's a loose reassembly of plot points from "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist" that never achieves the emotional intensity of either.

Culkin is -- well, Culkin is Culkin, cute and malleable, absolutely empty, absolutely precious, absolutely irritating. [17 Jun 1994]

Until a disappointing tailspin in the last hour, Pearl Harbor is the best piece of popular entertainment to come along in years.

With its sophisticated psychology, its brilliant story structure and its riveting performances, The Duchess of Langeais feels very new, even if everything about it is old.

Huge, sprawling, and utterly absorbing.

It's not a great movie, but Yu Nan's performance is superb without being showy or melodramatic.

I liked Coyote Ugly better when it was called "Flashdance," although I didn't like it very much then.

In all it wastes time, talent -- not least of all Reynolds's -- and money on an obscure mission. [30 Jul 1997, p.C02]

I had some trouble with the plot, but I'm not the only one -- so did the screenwriter.

Uneven but occasionally funny.

Like so many technological marvels, at the human level it's not only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead.

Here's what I really like about The Mod Squad: Nobody in it gives a damn.

The best thing about the movie is that it's interested in the soldiers, not the self-serving popinjays who seem to think the war is a big fat career-enhancing photo opportunity. The people who got shot at deserve most of the attention.

Do you Bean? If you do Bean, rejoice. Bean is back. If you don't Bean, here's a chance to start. Bean now, or forever hold your peace.

Its images of the destruction of the cities is far more powerful than in American films, where the cities are trashed for the pure pleasure of destruction, without any real sense of human loss.

The Fugitive runs hard and true the whole way through.

So the film has this weird postmodernist taint: It has a self-aware script that cleverly plays off the reality of its own cast and their famous real-life contretemps. It's smart and knowing.

Something fresh, clever and confident.

For the truth is, given the audacity, the organization, the seriousness of purpose, the movie isn't nearly as provocative as you think it might be.

It makes a great point: Love, honor and respect your father, but then get the hell out of town.

As for Damon, this may not be a performance so much as an appearance. But he cares so utterly, it works.

Whatever its flaws, Get on the Bus is fairly electric with hope and anger. [16 Oct 1996]

The movie, alas, is shackled somewhat by Waugh's original, pedestrian plot, which is too full of discrete incidents and slow to form an overarching story.

Like the bitter cold in which it's set, Affliction bites hard and true.

This is supposed to be funny? It was so depressing I almost started to cry.

The Village yields a trick ending quite lame, quite tame and quite old; Rod Serling thought of it 40 years ago and he did it better.

The movie's fundamental problem is that Cusack's character isn't very interesting.

Hanson delivers something ever rarer in film culture, not a new film noir but an old-fashioned total movie, somehow of a single piece.

As a piece of almost dadaist filmmaking, Spy Kids is great fun with its continual spirit of invention.

Of the pieces, two are first-rate, a few more are amusing or provocative, and the rest are actively annoying.

A magical child movie in which the child is magical, yes, but the movie is not.

Its magnificence is that it takes itself dead serious. It's not entertainment, but it's sure a piece of toughness.

In its way, the film is a piercing indictment, though it makes its point without much screaming, hectoring or preening. It's quietly terrific.

This is, after all, the kind of movie in which traffic accidents not only mess up getaways but also liberate goats to wander through the airport. We need more of that stuff.

As monotonous as Muzak, and when it comes to the plot, both bewildering and trite.

It's a pretty good sub movie, with some pretty good performances, that, alas, somewhat disintegrates in the last half-hour.

Genuine, amusing and, best of all, humanly scaled and humanely oriented.

What's so good about the movie is Gyllenhaal's refusal to show off; he doesn't seem jealous of the camera's attention when it goes to others and is content, for long stretches, to serve simply as a prism though which other young men can be observed.

Laurent's crime is really the crime of being European and conquering people of color. That understood, Cache is brilliant.

Political junkies will love this movie.

Its palette isn't primary at all: It's full of secondary shadings.

Manages to be profound without being pompous.

The cast and the direction are too good, in the end, for the rather desultory place the movie ends up.

Kind of like watching a John Waters film on fast forward with all the good parts cut out. It's empty of charm and meaning, but it certainly kills time, for those who wish it dead.

What line is thinner than the one between confession and narcissism? Upon that line, exactly, does Elegy dwell, before tumbling off on the bad side.

What is memorable is the film's portrait of a man of honor in a sleazy world, possibly a metaphor for the struggle of the artist to stay honorable in a world of backbiting, betrayal and hunger for easy money.

Dunston Checks In checks in somewhere between cute and zany. It's never really funny, but director Ken Kwapis has a low flair for slapstick that occasionally ignites a spark or two.

It gets at something exquisitely human, so human that even movie stars feel it.

Anthony Hopkins, with a toothpick and a slouch. Fabulous!

Surely the dullest of Hollywood's many comic-book-derived summer movies, "Silver Surfer" is drearier than corn dying in the Iowa sun, slower than molasses in Antarctica.

What Kalin fails to provide in the slightest degree is energy. The movie just sloshes along in a heavy, slightly overdone way.

It is a rabble-rousing cheerfest, based on a true story.

The movie's deeper problem and its primary disappointment: its unwillingness to deal directly with the issue of colonialism.

It's one of those "I-can't-believe-I'm-enjoying-this" kind of things.

Polanski, generally, has fallen farther than Lucifer, and into a more profoundly depressing hell, the hell of utter banality.

It just never began to work for me, and the sub story behind the ghost story is far more interesting than the ghost story in front of the sub story.

The next worst thing to being there. That's how real it feels.

The movie is completely beguiling, and it delivers joy, the beautiful spark of the gods.

Charlotte Rampling takes you so far inside the pain of Marie Drillon it leaves you stirred, shaken and a little in awe.

John Waters may not be a great filmmaker, but he's usually onto something, and A Dirty Shame is onto something big.

It's not the sort of film one can be said to enjoy, but it is the sort of film that has the clarity of a dream and lingers for hours.

A crackpot Looney Tune, pretentious, abysmally slow, amateurishly acted and, above all, wrong.

The last word you'd expect for it is "sweet," yet it is exactly the right one. That may come as no surprise to some, since the director is Jan Sverak, who brought sweetness to his breakthrough film "Koyla," but it caught me by total surprise.

Godzilla, go home.

In its quiet way, Ride With the Devil is terrific.

The interplay between Glass and Lane is riveting and rigorous.

An infectious (in a good way) documentary.

After a sensational beginning, the movie loses its way in the late going and somehow doesn't deliver. [12 Mar 1999]

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we can agree on two things: The American health-care system is busted and Michael Moore is not the guy to fix it. His Sicko, an investigation and indictment of a system choking on paperwork, greed, bad policy and countervailing goals, turns out to be a fuzzy, toothless collection of anecdotes, a few stunts and a bromide-rich conclusion.

The movie, while no fun, faces hard truths and asks hard questions.

The "Citizen Kane" of twisted-geek movies.

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

The movie alternates between cornball and ridiculous, and the frequent violence is extremely bloody if stylized. Love it or hate it, and I'm not sure which applies to me, you've never seen and never will see anything quite like Tears of the Black Tiger.

A modest comedy that does indeed stir a few chuckles out of its knuckleheaded trio of bad boys, it grows almost shockingly disturbing when it portrays armed robbery as amusing and the implicit death threat of the firearm as a joke. In this respect, it's the ugliest movie of the year. Or, no: It's merely the stupidest. [02 Dec 1994]

The movie has the sense of being embalmed, or pickled. With its stilted dialogue not quite kitschy enough to be funny and not quite authentic enough to be realistic, the whole movie feels as if it's taking place in formaldehyde.

Witherspoon's simply terrific, and it's amazing how quickly and easily she sheds speculation that she was too modern for the role.

Everyone in the film is mean-spirited, manipulative and repulsive, and I'm only talking about the women! The men are much worse, particularly Dan Aykroyd.

I can't remember a film that sees the here and now more precisely, one that offers total believability in the tone and motive of its characters and then goes further, showing us a whole and completely recognizable world.

The movie has more cleverness than violence, and its breakdown of cliches is vivid and witty. Baesel is an extraordinary presence, holding the film together with his mesmerizing performance, charm and openness, and Goethals measures up to him.

It begins by scaring you to death by evoking a monster, and by the end it has seduced you into caring for him.

If you think it's worth it to sit there for 97 minutes for three or possibly four laughs, then you are beyond help.

Mad Max just sails off into nonsense.

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

The movie never transcended its elaborate production work to achieve an independent reality.

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.

It's just silly, loud and goofy. The dragon needed a bigger part and the two stars smaller ones.

A pocket of infection on the skin of the American body cultural.

What makes Lynn Littman's film so devastating -- beyond, that is, the power of Jane Alexander's brilliant performance as the surviving mother -- is its icy control and its complete disavowal of sentimentality and sensationalism. It's a small monument to the principle of understatement. [02 Dec 1983, p.B1]

A strictly by-the-numbers job that, sans Freeman, would be beneath contempt. So congratulations, Morgan Freeman: Your contribution to Chain Reaction is to make it worthy of contempt. [2 Aug 1996]

Hanks is great; the movie isn't.

The movie feels more like a thriller than a drama; it's paced like a thriller, building to a murder that never happens, exciting passions that are never unleashed, waiting for a crime to occur. The only crimes, however, are of the heart. Meanwhile, the movie knows exactly what it's doing, and does exactly what it intends, without making one false move.

Each plot twist trumps its predecessor into ludicrousness.

It's a document that suggests that the road to hell is paved with bad communication skills.

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh is a just-better-than-routine horror sequel that watches in chilly admiration as some sort of apparition steps out of mirrors and performs atrocities on the unwary. [17 Mar 1995]

Like a bouquet of poisoned flowers -- beautiful, delicate and lethal. A trio of horror films from three "extreme" Asian directors, it shows how much evil fun talented bad boys can have on a very small scale.

The script is adroit: It doesn't force the humor, and it steadily keeps track of Jim's growing maturity.

One of the excellent attributes of Shut Up & Sing is that it lets the cards fall where they may and really doesn't try to spin the Chicks themselves. It's quite possible, then, to watch the film and come to the conclusion that Maines has a big mouth. Spectacularly talented, the young singer is also a spectacular blowhard.

As for Hathaway, she's a revelation. Those eyes are still as big as Beamer hubcaps, but she's able to show more edge than her previous goody-goody roles have allowed.

Straightforward, droll, brutally honest and arresting.

Held together by the intensity of its focus.

Demonstrates that sometimes the simplest stories are the most profound, and certainly possess the most moral authority. It's a film that emphasizes loyalty and sacrifice, values that have become jokes in most other films these days.

Where "Boyz N the Hood" cut deep, to bone, this one stays glibly on the surface. It's slick and routinely entertaining, if never quite persuasive. [06 Nov 1996]

As it plays, it simply feels like a kind of cop-out. Nobody changes that much.

That's the movie: It's taking us inside the burqa to the woman.

It's too long, it's too dull, it's too lame.

Oshii is able to knit together action sequences with extraordinary power and conviction.... Ghost in the Shell is absolutely terrific.

Matthau was merely worthless, while Thornton, God bless his soul, rises to the actual level of sociopathic. I love it when that happens.

They made a movie without one basic ingredient: the story.

Represents such a professional nadir for each of its principals that you wish better for them in the new year.

Marshall keeps the film lean and focused. He does have a nice taste for horror imagery.

Despite its brilliant evocation of this great city at this most provocative time in history, the movie just gets sillier and sillier.

It has the overwhelming stench of a film afflicted by star ego -- Michelle Pfeiffer is never wrong, which is exactly what is wrong with The Deep End of the Ocean.

About on the level of an After School Special put together by people in a real hurry to get on with their lives, Ed plays pretty dead for all except the very dumb at heart.

Feels as if it's inspired by the old "Road" comedies of Crosby and Hope. Except that it's "On the Road to Hell."

A mousy little nothing of a picture.

It's nothing less than a spiritual journey set in New Jersey.

An enigma inside a conundrum inside an escargot shell, the French puzzler La Moustache will delight some people even as it annoys others.

What's funny to Broken Lizard? Let's try: What's not funny? The answers are, everything and nothing. They'll do anything for a laugh, no matter how puerile, silly or offensive.

An insufferable piffle.

Boasts the purest of Disney raptures: It unites the generations, rather than driving them apart.

A triumph of place over sense.

It's the best kind of movie: so alive in its storytelling that only in retrospect do you realize that the ideas represent a metaphysical inquiry.

It's a brilliant, profound movie, but it's almost no fun at all.

Killing Zoe lacks the incisiveness, the tightly controlled irony, and the blank verse power in the profane dialogue that enabled "Reservoir Dogs" to transcend its admittedly horrific violence. [25 Nov 1994]

It's a great style, it's a fabulous performance, but it never quite finds what it's searching for.

The film feels as if it has a huge gap in it and the name of the gap is Bill Clinton. Who is this man who would be, and became, president? The film has no idea; Clinton himself is glimpsed occasionally, a completely charming fellow who can handle a press conference superbly, but who somehow is never there. As Carl Cannon wrote in The Sun's Sunday Perspective section, "It's as basic as this: Can his word be trusted?" The movie never bothers to confront such an issue or even, really, to acknowledge it; in documenting the Democrats, it clearly comes to share their uncritical view of the Hamlet-Bubba who carries their standard...Like the campaign itself, then, it's far too tightly wound up in details to examine a larger picture, which in the end may be the problem. [18 Feb 1994]

Fast and furious, shallow, empty, casually racist, merry, jaunty, silly and utterly weightless.

In the end, I can't think of a movie that matters less than Just My Luck. It's just negligible.

Far from great but greatly entertaining.

The remake adds 24 minutes and subtracts most of the suspense.

An odd duck of a movie, it's really a British Labor Party television commercial bitterly shoehorned into the cheesy format of an American triumph fantasy, with a horn section.

What an amazing little film. God love the French. They make movies with ideas in them, other than: How many cars can we blow up?

It's a small, amusing movie that's long on charming affability. [03 Feb 1995]

It's like a music video of Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" filmed in the Chevy Chase Pottery Barn.

Gets more and more complex until it's almost laughable; it has too many beats, too many reverses, and in the end seems unbelievable.

The French now proudly prove they can make a big stupid violent cop movie, just like our gifted Hollywood professionals.

Gibson may not be much of a deep thinker, but he's a heck of a storyteller. Apocalypto turns out to be not a case of Montezuma's revenge but of Gibson's: It's something entirely unexpected, a sinewy, taut poem of action.

It's kind of a ghastly hoot, and while I suppose it does no harm, it also contributes nothing. It's a guilty unpleasantness.

It's not as good as "Eat Drink Man Woman," for no imitation ever surpasses its original; but it's so brimful of life you can't say no.

Linney -- this has happened too much to her -- is once again the best thing in a movie that at most achieves a certain mediocrity.

The movie never seems to force its connections or its revelations upon us, but merely discovers them in their provocative places; in short, it doesn't seem to be working very hard, but the apparent simplicity is deceiving: There's a grand, clever and ultimately satisfying plan under all the running around and bumping into each other. [27 Sept 1996]

Crank" is "D.O.A" on methamphetamines.

It's funny as hell, and I am proud to say that as a card-carrying white guy, I got three, or possibly even four, of the 239 jokes.

Each moment feels real, but the movie wears you out in some way. High naturalism is just as much a stylization as High Stylization. The groping nature of the conversations comes to feel as artificial as iambic pentameter.

More political allegory than horror movie.

Demonstrates that a movie need not be good to be cool.

Thankfully, after its terrific start, Don't Say a Word transmogrifies so totally into Hollywood hooey that it's actually a relief. I'd hate to see a disturbance in the karmic perfection of Douglas's pitch-pure mediocrity.

It's a stunner that sadly grows tiresome at the end.

It's a whimsical tale of war and redemption, of faith, hope and even some charity...It's quite a treat, as a matter of fact.

An ordeal for all save the most ardent Treksters.

You may have as much fun tearing it apart in its aftermath as you do watching it, but the fun is still genuine.

It's about women, but as written and directed by a man, it appears to make no emotional sense at all. It treats women like idiots.

The longest, hardest sit of the season -- you are stuck there, a single tube of puckered muscle, waiting for the extremely ugly violence to occur -- but it is driven by performances of such luminous humanity that they break your heart.

No American film this year can touch it. [28 Feb 1992, p.10]