Stephen Hunter

It never smirks or condescends as does, say, a Michael Moore; it never seems smug and superior, only committed and compassionate.

This movie gives it to you, as no movie has in some years. Okay, if that's not your part of the swamp, don't go into it.

The Lake House has the sensibility of something conceived by Stephen King after an overdose of chocolate-covered cherries and valentine cards. In other words, it's sugary sweet and based on a premise that's just -- no other word will do -- ridiculous.

This is one of the most becalming films ever made. The grasslands seem oddly serene, and to watch them is to feel your pulse rate flatten out -- yet another aspect of Mongolian Ping Pong's transcendent charm.

Makes "Conan the Barbarian" seem like Dostoyevsky in its complexity.

It's not great; it's also not idiotic.

As a terrifying example of what can happen when too many angry people are crowded into too small a space, it's a gripper.

One wishes the same wit and energy had gone into the story. That's Shrek 2 in a nutshell -- very pretty to look at, very hard to care for.

The audience is treated to one extraordinary vision after another; the sense of a world literally being destroyed around the principal actors, the sense of their flight through panic and destruction, the sense of concussion, collapse, rubble and ruin.

Blondes may or may not have more fun, but in this one case, they certainly provide more fun.

The result isn't merely ludicrous, it's something far worse. It's drab. It's uninteresting. It squanders Chan's uniqueness; it could even be said to squander Jennifer Love Hewitt!

But the movie really just sort of peters out rather than reaching a sublime point. In "Groundhog Day," there was an exquisite moment where the wonderfully horrid Bill Murray actually regained contact with his humanity and rejoined his species. No such thing occurs in "Multiplicity"; the movie just staggers toward a point where it's gone on long enough to do everybody the favor of ending it. Send out the writers. [17 July 1996]

Director Mary Harron may have more courage than talent -- and she's got a lot of talent. It's too bad Bettie's story isn't more dramatic.

Super Mario Bros. ain't no game, but it ain't no movie, either. The huge, busy, empty, uninvolving mess is marooned halfway between narrative and spectacle, neither fully one nor the other. [28 May 1993]

A lot of the film is illuminating; a lot of it is pointless.

The movie is so disturbing that it seems nearly blasphemous. I wouldn't wish it on an anthrax spore. After all, anthrax has feelings, too.

The story works, but I wish they'd teach these avatars to act.

This peculiar film is more than one beer short of a six-pack. It's part massive folly, part screwball tract and part steel nerve, even a little heroic. [25 May 1994]

You can't make an epic about a mouse.

Where is the suspense part? There is no suspense part. Suspense demands clarity of motive and action, and this screenplay never provides it.

If you don't fall in love with it, you've probably never fallen in love with a movie, and never will.

the movie comes on as a novelty item, meaning it's so full of disparate parts and so unable to approach coherence, it just sits there and burns out.

And that's the surprise of the movie, beyond even the humor and humanity of its inside look at contemporary American Indian culture. It's really the oldest and most primal story forms, the one about the old man and the boy.

About halfway through you'll get an incredible hunger to see a movie.

Profane, sacrilegious, pornographic, sadistic and Sade-istic, titillating and the most honorable movie of the year.

So childish it seems to arrive in diapers, and that's not bad; it's good.

A coarse, witless and stunningly violent black comedy.

You have to see this to believe it.