Stephen Hunter

In truth, I didn't care much for it, while respecting it a great deal. It's self-consciously childish and "innocent," and everything is overdrawn to cartoon dimension.

With a cast like this, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a superior performance vehicle and on that count alone is never less than riveting.

A movie carefully engineered for an audience of exactly nobody.

Palmetto, directed by the German genius Schlondorff, who memorably brought "The Tin Drum" to the screen, somehow never quite finds the right line through the materials.

What a jolly comedy theme: incest.

It's pretty funny. You don't actually watch it so much as indulge it and admire its cleverness.

A documentary on the F-word that manages to amuse superficially until it moves into its seventh hour, at which point it grows wearisome.

A passionate film buff's valentine to the two directors he loves most: Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma. The film that this worship has inspired is pretty amusing when the director apes Hitchcock, and pretty awful when he apes himself.

Lynch's new movie, Mulholland Drive, is a trip and a half: It's like playing Twister and Scrabble simultaneously while high on LSD. Oh, and it's dark out.

Enter the world of the sociopathic killer and enjoy.

You may not want to hang with the haunted Caouettes, but the movie is so compelling, it doesn't give you a choice.

As entertainment of a tawdry but compelling sort, The Contender certainly delivers.

Such a feast of outlandish pleasures it'll send you home steam-cleaned and shrink-wrapped.

There are complications, extremely cleverly worked out. Jones is in just about every scene in this taut, provocative film.

The plot feels arbitrary and seems driven to invent new places for its protagonists to go, as if to justify a budget on which Woody Allen could have made six much better films.

The movie is one of the best American films in months and months and the best comedy since I don't know when. It even makes you sorta kinda like Matthew McConaughey.

The movie is exquisitely directed by Anand Tucker in an anti-documentary style that sometimes fractures the time sequence, sometimes re-creates moments impressionistically instead of objectively and is vivid in style.

Ferguson builds a compelling case of bad judgment, error, stubbornness and arrogance.

Nuanced, exquisite and predictable.

It's a movie of great dynamism and energy, but very little discipline. It probes issues but it never really thinks about them. It seems smart, but it's dumb.

Though it's not as good as the brilliant "Capote," it's nevertheless a riveting, well-made picture.

Ocean's Thirteen is too complicated for its own mediocrity.

The movie made almost no sense whatever to me. I literally could not follow it, even as I was dazzled by it.

It has the big themes that obsessed Kurosawa at his greatest, and that alone makes it worthwhile.

Loud, stupid, unrealistic, overdone, without a thought in its ugly little head and kind of enjoyable.

Hoodwinked makes a little sense. Too bad, then, it's so crummy.

It's slight but in a haunting way, like a half-remembered dream.

The new Bond movie is pure nonsense art of the dadaist school; it follows the rules of the ridiculous as it turns narrative convention, thriller formula and special-effects set pieces into a manifesto of the purest gibberish.

The basketball sequences are the most magical in the film -- both Harrelson and Snipes can play -- but more to the point, he also has a great gift for evoking the needling hostility of athletes, the way the games aren't just about talent but about ego, will, self-esteem.

Tries so hard to be cool that it forgets to be alive.

The genius of the film is its utter commitment to the Pekar point of view.

The movie is both exhilarating and depressing. The trouble is, I can't figure out which is more important.

Modest and winning.

Possibly without meaning to, the younger Wexler has made a superb examination not of professional cinematography -- really, who cares? -- but of the eternal bad business between fathers and sons.

Here are old people in all the magnificence of their elderliness. The movie doesn't pretend like getting old is any fun. But it's about the transcendental power of -- well, yes, music; and each of these folks has a talent whose expression is a fuel to survive.

The kinetics aren't that good, the twaddle is off the charts and the characters seem written by monkeys on amphetamines with crayons.

What a waste of talent, time and money. And guess what else? Not only is The Legend of Zorro stupid and boring but -- ta-da! -- it's also really long!

Reiner should have had faith in his sensational material to make its points without a minister in the pulpit. The movie would have been much better, and much shorter, too. [03 Jan 1997]

The movie's surrender to banality is all the more dispiriting because it gets off to such a good start.

This dame is as sick as a sick dog on a hot day, if still always perversely amusing, and the story is constructed as a survivor's ordeal, not a colorful picaresque.

For two hours, the bliss of the brainless fluff is yours for the asking. It cheerfully puts the escape back in escapism.

It's still got some panache.

The results are as riveting as any action movie ever made.

This film isn't so much a sequel to the original "American Pie" as a reduction of it.

It's got a subtext but not a subplot.

Imagine "The Godfather" through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy just in from the hinterlands of rural Jersey and his dad's pepper farm, and you have an idea of the originality, and the oddity, of the film. [16 Feb 1996]

Initially an amiable sci-fi thriller that toys with the paradoxes inherent in time travel, it finally gets drunk on them. It becomes an incomprehensible stew of versions and revisions, until there's no there there and no then then.

It is surprising that no matter how much we know what will happen, we never stop watching.

It lacks Altman's wisdom, but its sense of humor is corrosive, if dispiriting, and its willingness to show the human animal at his most disgusting has a kind of anti-grandeur to it.

The movie builds slowly to its grinding climax, and the suspense -- the standard by which a thriller must primarily be judged -- is first-rate.

A lamebrained American remake of the classic, bitter French farce "Les Comperes," Fathers' Day offers sporadic laughs of the lowest kind -- the old outhouse-bites-man thing -- but some conspicuous idiocy as well.

The genius of the film, besides Hoffman's stunning performance, is that it knows exactly how much is enough. It never overplays, lingers or punches up.

A brilliant film--vivid, haunting, intelligent and in good taste, wonderfully acted, wonderfully written and directed.

Nothing really connects; it's not fluid and roaring but a collection of set-pieces. [25 Feb 1994]

The movie's two instincts are at complete odds with each other. The first is to portray with compassion and understanding a young man of great gifts who is twisted by a cruel society into childhood's end. The second is to provide a rousing goose of vigilante justice more appropriate to the Death Wish films. How much better if Yakin had made up his mind; the movie wouldn't feel so split.

It's fast and furious, and it proves that crime doesn't pay, unless you know how to do it right.

In the end, Unfaithful leaves you dispirited and grumpy: All that money spent, all that talent wasted, all that time gone forever, and for what? It's an ill movie that bloweth no man to good.

Frequently funny, just as frequently repulsive, it's filmed in Waters's trademark deadpan style that some adore and some loathe.

An intense two-character drama that follows as the participants in an office flirtation attempt to go up a notch toward an actual relationship, with disastrously unforeseen consequences. [11 Nov 1994]

A considerable kick, though it would have helped if one of the boys had wiped off the lens of the camera once in a while.

It's funny and violent and fast and, er, Danish.

The movie isn't about anything except acting, and although the acting it shows is brilliant, it makes exactly the point that is the opposite of the point it thought it was making: Acting isn't enough.

So much love has gone into the physical details and the music of Robert Altman's Kansas City that it's a shame the movie isn't up to the effort. It's a movie you yearn to care for, but it refuses to allow you: It's too busy being singular to be good.

Out to Sea is out to brunch: It's got too much on the table, but if you look carefully and show some patience, you can pick out the odd treat. [02 July 1997, p.C10]

Relentlessly beautiful and wholly annoying.

Overblown and idiotic, this new "erotic thriller" is neither erotic nor thrilling; it's long, boring and self-indulgent.

Outbreak is fast on its feet and simple in its head.

Le Petit Lieutenant shows how good French movies can be when they stay French and don't try to go international.

Anyone who doesn't smile is probably either too adult to count or too dead to care.

But [Raimi]'s instructed his fabulous Style to take a hike, and, working from Scott Smith's brilliantly reconfigured script from Smith's own (much darker) novel, delivers a piece that is severe and disciplined in its evocation of the cold terrors of fate.

In its insistence on the centrality of the war to the collective consciousness of mankind, it's of a piece with "The English Patient," rather than "Saving Private Ryan."

The movie avoids sensationalism. What it requires and what it delivers is performance.

It feels so real it hurts, and it's the perfect antidote to all those movies where all sorts of stuff blows up.

Stuck in that no man's land between comedy and banal movie mob action, and it delivers on neither of these impulses with any force.

Shamelessly manipulative in a crude, bullying way.

A character so real and poignant (yet hysterically funny), she'll linger for months or years.

Handsome but stilted.

Except for the two stars, not much is believable in the movie. The ice skating sequences are clearly hampered by Sweeney's lack of skill, and it's crushingly obvious when a skating double has slipped into the picture. He's the guy who never looks at the camera.

On the technical side, The Invasion has several first-rate, terrifying action sequences and grips totally from start to finish. But a subplot involving the Russian Embassy doesn't really pay off, and the relationship between Kidman and glum paramour Daniel Craig (another doc) isn't much.

It is not bad on its own terms, and it is certainly engrossing, but it comes nowhere near the power and sordid glory of the original.

It is one of those soap bubbles of a film, fleeting, ephemeral, seemingly there when it is not. As you leave the theater, it diminishes with each step, collapsing into shards of imagery and sensations of movement. It's the film that never was.

The movie's signal flaw -- that is, other than its degeneracy, its sloppiness, its love of dark things and pretty stains and arterial spray patterns -- is Moseley as the demonic Otis.

The movie is an epic adventure with a rigorously moral point of view.

The movie is small but sensational. I don't know what writer-director Frank E. Flowers might lose by trying to take his career international, but he has real talent.

The result is fascinating, if uneven and ultimately rather silly. Problems with the ending, so common these days, dog this visionary film as well.

The result is a big, gushy, emotional, secret-driven, family-obsessive casserole, perhaps facile in some of its resolutions, but so full of good heart and love -- the real kind, which is scratchy, awkward, difficult to express and doesn't conquer all but just some -- that the movie is difficult to resist.

Powerful, depressing and very, very long. At close to three hours, it virtually enslaves an audience, which may be part of the point.

They took the most famous tale in the world and broke it.

It's kind of -- hmmmm, less than good, a little better than not bad, almost all right, mediocre without being grating, sort of in the C-minus-to-C-minus-minus range.

Seems to go sideways as often as it goes forward. Altman can't help noticing things more interesting than the story.

It never answers the key question: Why should we care?

But for all the meta-movie excitement, the content danced somewhere between mildly interesting and moderately enjoyable.

Wes Craven, who started the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series, should know a lot better.

You may feel like you need a drink and a shower when you come out of "Naked," but at least you'll know you've been somewhere new.

That said, what must be added is that, disappointingly, Night Falls on Manhattan doesn't quite add up.

The movie is one of those brilliant and rare blends of paradoxical elements -- both the tragedy and the folly of history, the weight of inheritance, the pressure of the ideal, lots of fairly steamy sex, even a secret agent or two.

Nobody really cares about the plot, least of all the filmmakers.

City Hall has plenty of smarts; it just lacks real wisdom.

It takes the rock movie into regions it has never been before.

I can't recall the original, or even if I saw it or not. But this variation certainly makes its points effectively, in what must be a more superheated milieu.

So good it breaks your heart for not being better. It is kept from brilliance by a soggy climax and a clumsy central narrative device.

This film feels like a desperate attempt to squeeze a few last bucks out of what was once a very obliging cash cow.

Great sword fights, great acting, fabulous sword fights and, of course, really cool sword fights.

Hardly anything feels real, but what feels even more unreal is Hartnett with a cloying, sentimental, self-pitying performance. The liveliest thing in the film is the great Jackson, slumming again in a role miles beneath him.

The film is a soggy mess, essentially a loud, wild 100-minute battle movie bookended by an incomprehensible beginning and a laughable ending.

Miike's fans, those used to his strange ways, will certainly find Gozu an amusing addition to the oeuvre. All others will be bewildered beyond expression.

Ladybird, Ladybird is full of powerful, disturbing imagery. It offers a portrait of a woman victimized by a powerful and unfeeling bureaucracy, one that will literally rip a newborn out of the arms of its parents. But it's not didactic. [10 Feb 1995]

I don't think the ending is up to the rest of the movie, but Grant and Barrymore are great together, and the movie has both zing and song.

You may or may not like what you see, but there it is, indisputably, right in your face.

The most satisfying escape of the day was mine, from the theater, at movie's end.

The violence is muted and discreet, never appalling, and the sexual tension between Streep and Bacon has been dialed way down. What they want is what they get: a nice, tidy, polite thriller. [30 Sep 1994]

Memoirs of a Geisha is everything you'd expect it to be: beautiful, mesmerizing, tasteful, Japanese. It's just not very hot.

Lawrence is miraculous, as always.

It's of an odd genre: a formally scripted (by Tony Grisoni) feature with a musical score that adheres totally to journalistic accuracy and willfully ignores formula, melodrama and uplift. It's a real down-lift.

Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 commits a Code 1 violation: It's boring.

The Jackal is based on a fabrication so absurd that it almost made me laugh out loud.

I found it a rough night at the flickers.

More than predictable. It plods along with the inevitability of a doomed soldier going off to war.

This film is much more atmospheric; it builds, not so much logically as viscerally, until you feel you can't escape. Lurid and overdone as it is, it's still a real disturber of the peace.

Gripping, whole and nourishing. Certainly of the fantasy film series currently in American theaters -– I include "Harry Potter and the Secret Toity" and "Star Trek: Halitosis" -– The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is the best, and not by just a little.

A crass physical comedy of unrelenting irrelevance with a gag or two amid the many other examples of bad taste, extrapolating toward infinite on the theme of remote control reality.

As coherent storytelling, Skins isn't that tightly wrapped, but as an excoriating look at the plight of the modern American Indian, it bites hard.

Isn't much of a movie, but it's a whale of a story.

What saddened me, however, wasn't the silliness but recognizing the great Swedish actress Lena Olin under a lot of "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark" makeup. What a waste.

Folks, I think I'm speaking for all of us when I say this is pretty darn fine American entertainment

The suspense may be fraudulently manufactured but it captivates us nevertheless, and by the end we're reduced to the bloodlusting anonymity of the true culprits in all this jaded junk, and that is the TV audience.

A work of either a profoundly transgressive genius or a goofball high on Pez and patio sealant. It could come from no normal collection of brain cells.

Del Toro will probably get an Oscar nod for his Jerry, because the film is so full of Oscar moments, including a cold-turkey detox bit. He rumbles and shivers and screeches and bangs his head on the wall and takes a shower in his clothes. I never believed a second of it.

More than watchable, if less than compelling.

The film boasts all the hallmarks of the '50s historic epic save the presence of Tony Curtis.

Crazy? Crazy is too mild a word by far to describe the twisted worm at play inside the skull of the Canadian director David Cronenberg -- And that craziness is given full vent in the vomitorium called eXistenZ.

Turns out to be cracking good entertainment, as well as a fresh start for the perdurable 21-picture franchise.

Although almost nothing about The Eye is surprising, the movie is nevertheless engrossing, as it mutates from horror movie to ghost story to psychological drama to disaster flick (a late, stunning twist). It casts a spell strong enough that viewers won't want to look away.

So stupid it makes "xXx: State of the Union" look like it was written by Nietzsche.

Even as he reinvents, Aja invents. He's clearly working on a big budget for his first American film and has been told he can do anything he can think of. Visually, the movie is wildly alive, full of sure touches.

In an era of careful cost accountancy and focus-group testing, it's remarkable that a movie as truly, deeply, madly foolish as The Wicker Man escaped the asylum. But we must be grateful for the endless guffaws and gasps and outright stunned silences it unleashes on lucky audiences.

Too simple for its own good.

Stands with the best movies of this young century and the old one that preceded it: It's passionate, honest, unflinching, gripping, and it pays respects. The flag raising on Iwo might have indeed become a pseudo-event as it was processed for goals, but there was nothing pseudo about the courage of the men who did it.

But the best thing about Jakob the Liar is that it's not "Patch Adams at Auschwitz."

Most of the fault rests with the script, which gets to this issue late and feels only perfunctory, more interested in the jolt of the image than the jolt of the idea.

Like the bad fight that ends the bad marriage: ugly, messy, loud, sometimes incoherent, but ultimately necessary. You're glad when either of them -- the marriage or the movie -- is over.

So programmatic, so dogged in hitting the right steps at the right time that it completely lacks spontaneity.

The movie felt slow and didactic; it lacked the kind of forward thrust that a narrative mechanic such as Spielberg would have engineered.

Far from an amusing romp.

Embraces reality, humanity and compassion, as leavened by wisdom and wit.

It never disconnects from two values: its honesty and its intensity.

While one might have wished for a better movie, and a few smarter decisions regarding the screenplay, generally it's a riveting, even inspirational account of an American feat of arms about which few know but about which many more should.

It's sad, funny, shocking and completely unlike any movie in a dozen years.

Cocaine is the most aggressively edited film in years: It pounds, it churns, it spurts, it spray-paints.

If the movie is meant to uncover any "big scandals," it's a disappointment. The investigator, in one surprising sequence, goes through a number of alleged "torture" photos and acknowledges that the vast majority of them represent "standard operating procedure." That is supposed to be the film's kicker: not what was illegal but how much was legal.

Reminded me somewhat of Archibald MacLeish's famous line that a poem "should not mean but be." That's the reality of The Apostle: It does not mean, it simply is.

What The Page Turner lacks in scale and ambition, it makes up for in precision. It's a small French delicacy, tart, acerbic and cynical, that focuses on three or four characters and yet manages to bring them and their dilemmas to vivid life.

Frequently fascinating, it never builds into anything profound.

But the most piercing thing about Heavenly Creatures is Jackson's refusal to forgive the girls. He indeed understands them and empathizes with them. But when he has to, he exposes the horrid squalor and ugliness of the crime, which, after all, was a blood-soaked execution, crude as anything done in Rwanda. [9 Dec 1994]

So drippy and slippery you'll feel that you're hiding in Kevin Costner's nasal passages during the filming of "Waterworld."

A brilliantly amusing couple of hours.

Manages to make sex look like no fun at all.

Fitfully amusing but nothing remarkable

The story is told so passionately that it demands as much of you as it does of its performers, all of whom are up there, giving everything.

In casbahs and desert villages, in kibbutzim and around the campfire, Spurlock has a way of getting people to open up, to use their real voices and express their real opinions, the likes of which never make it onto network news. That's his gift, and when he uses it, "Where in the World zzzzz-zzzz" opens up into a miraculous document.

The trick of this movie is that it's so changeable: You think you've got it nailed and it slithers away to become some other new, fabulous thing.

Friedkin still has it: The car chase is the best thing in the movie, though so unconnected to the plot it could have been added without changing Eszterhas' script a whit. But, that excitement over, the movie ultimately self-destructs in the matter of its own ending. [13 Oct 1995]

In the last half-hour, the story, like the Japanese, loses its way; lacking any clear-cut goals except survival, the film becomes repetitive. Letters From Iwo Jima is a necessary movie; too bad it's not a great movie.

In Evan Almighty, Mr. God goes to Washington. Frank Capra, stop rolling in your grave. At least they cared enough to steal from the very best.

The movie is neither good nor bad, but in its clever packaging of boy fantasy and girl fantasy, extremely cunning. As for Princess Diaz, no force on Earth can stop her now.

Two hours and six minutes has never seemed so much like two and six-tenths seconds. It's pure pulp metafiction.

Anyhow, either as history at its most inspiring or moviemaking at its most exciting, The Tunnel is a trip.

For my generation, Revenge of the Sith is a brilliant consummation to a promise made a long time ago, far, far away, in a galaxy called 1977.

None of it appears to be well thought out, or thought through, and it's consequently never remotely believable.

May be too much suspense for some, but it's vividly powerful.

The Third Man is so elegant, tiny and perfect that it feels more like a watch than a movie: It should have been directed by Patek Phillipe. [9 July 1999, p.C01]

It's a new new thing, classic myth from both literature and the movies, commingled, set to great folk music, and untrammeled by any sense of predictability, urgency, realism or believability but hypnotic, graceful and seductive.

The highest accomplishment of Buffalo Soldiers is its wise invocation of that weirdest of all precincts, the post, and the odd culture it spawns.

It's empty of ideas, which is fine, but it's also empty of heat.

It's all story, character and dazzling martial arts violence, as orchestrated by fight choreographer Donnie Yen at breakneck speed.

Checks in somewhere between a delight and a diversion.

Something between an indiscretion and an atrocity.

A Goofy Movie is filled with rock sequences that aren't hard enough to please real teen-agers but are too hard to attract any grown-ups. The music sounds like it was composed by Marie Osmond on PCP. [07 Apr 1995]

Generally, Orlando is too busy having witty fun to turn into a cautionary tale against one sex in favor of the other. It's more like an extremely vivid drawing-room comedy imposed on the background of a historical epic.

The sheer joy of letting go as a tale overwhelms your senses and drives the known world away -- that's the story.

It's zany. Actually, it's so zany it's almost creepy.

An end-of-the-world movie like no other.

The film's ardent sentimentality, as magnified by the schlurpy music, is straight Chaplin, but not as good. The Film's subtext of sight-gag and clown-dance is also straight Chaplin, also not as good. [16 Jan 1990, p.3C]

Statham isn't the best thing in Transporter 2; he's essentially the only thing.

Anyway, the movie turns out to be hyperslick, quite well made in the technical sense (beautifully photographed and designed) and somewhat shallow, another exploration of that perennial and passionate teen theme, fitting in.

Crazy, ugly and scary. In fact, a sense of the grotesque runs thought the film; an extended joke about Sandler's black, dead foot (from frostbite as a kid) borders on something you find in John Waters.

It is in fact a traditional mystery more reminiscent of Agatha Christie than the reigning film noir aesthetic of 1947. But it's fabulously entertaining.

Definitely stuck in the fourth grade.

But if the idea of tiny, little Sally Field in the Charles Bronson part strikes you as a bit silly, that's only the beginning of the idiocies. [12 Jan 1996]

Haggis also appears to have no respect for his audience. At its crudest, the film settles for agitprop...it's no Hollywood guy's call, particularly as he's extrapolating from a single case that could have occurred anywhere, at any time.

Not a second of it is believable; not a tenth of a second of it is refreshing; not a millionth of a second is worthwhile

Weekend at Bernie's II only proves what critics have known for years: that on the planet of the bad movies, there's no life after death.

The best -- the brilliant -- bits of Reality Bites etch in epigram, anecdote and brittle, dazzling dialogue the inner life of young people who want desperately to believe but haven't decided in what. It loves them but it doesn't pity or sentimentalize them. It's tough as nails.

All in all, High Crimes isn't worth the crayons it took to write the script.

It's meant to be harmless fluff. It is.

Cradle Will Rock is left in mid-rock, as it were, its energy squandered, its sense of history confused, its sound and fury ultimately signifying nothing.

It has great mood and a sense of the toughness of the London underworld, but it never really gets into gear.

This is a smart movie, full of astonishing reverses and switchbacks, and it adroitly walks the thin line between too clever by half and not clever enough by three-quarters.

It's too long to be great and it's too square to be great and it's too loud to be great and it finds homosexual effeminacy too funny to ever be called great, but I can't imagine anyone coming out sadder than they went in.

A lot of White Oleander is heavy sledding of the waa-waa, touchy-feely kind. But just as much of it has the sting of something so real it hurts.

It's all too silly to bother. Without style and attitude, nothing gets old faster than horror.

The movie's chief crime against the planet, other than the sheer wastage of time, is the trivializing of the great Freeman. This actor has such dignity and depth and humanity, he almost makes the film watchable.

It isn't Austen, but it's delicious fun.

This is an absolutely brilliant film but in a quiet way.

Jon Heder in the magnificent Napoleon Dynamite, is one of the most winning movie creations in years.

Delightful, delicious, de-lovely.

Slick, gripping and largely believable.

A funky, fun film version of the famous Marvel superhero concoction, one of the earliest of the revisionist wave of supes and in some ways the most lovable or at least the most knowable.

She is so funny she should come with a seven-day waiting period.

Firehouse Dog goes into the marginally watchable category, aimed as it is toward the middlebrow family trade, preferably dog owners with their own Sparky slopping up the station wagon windows.

The cutting is so sinuous and breathtaking, the music (by Danny Elfman after too much coffee) so onrushing and the camera so penetrative of the depths and heights of midtown Manhattan at cloud level, that the illusion, despite its artificiality, works. You don't believe it but you "believe" it.

What is so impressive about Welcome to Sarajevo is its cool restraint: Like the best of journalism, it never stoops to sensationalize or sermonize, but merely observes. It's about the facts rather than something called The Truth. [9Jan1998 Pg. D.01]

The movie feels more like a walk across campus than a movie. That's so depressing. On the other hand, each of these lost children is really looking for the same thing, ol' Mr. Love.

Woody Allen's new film has a few shortcomings but it's a heartfelt cry from what may be the last serious man left in the America as he contemplates what his native land has become.

Any film where a beer baroness's glass leg (filled with beer) shatters when a high note is struck is okay by me.

The trouble with The Ref is that it keeps running out of steam, so it seems to develop a new plot wrinkle every seven minutes. Typically, it'll run through the new idea until it runs out of steam again, then invents yet another one. One feels it continually re-imagining itself, and as the minutes flee by, the re-imaginings become thinner and thinner.

This slap-- sequel is primarily for the cognoscenti -- that is, for other teen-age mutant ninja turtles, or very small children. The rest of us it happily ignores.

Strayed has the strange clarity of a fable. It strips everything away until only instincts and emotions are left.

Parker stays with and even streamlines Wilde's clever manipulations of betrayals and lies and plots and counterplots. Yet the film never feels stagy.

The movie itself may be a species of Montezuma's revenge.

The movie is intermittently amusing, particularly when the American human part of the cast (Breckin Meyer and Jennifer Love Hewitt) are off-screen, the longer and farther the better.

This is a modest documentary, actually made in 2002 but only now gaining national release, which celebrates Attucks and that particular team, but most important Coach Crowe, by all accounts a remarkable man.

Will seem a classic if you're stoned, and only slightly less funny if you're straight.

The film is slick, beautifully acted and completely entrancing.

Watching it is like being forced to listen to bad heavy metal music turned up to 11 while fat guys in Bermuda shorts compete in a puking contest in the john.

A gimmick film, but it's brought off with such verve it's great fun.

It's fun. Hey, it's almost spring, Rickman is fabulous and so is Richardson. Warren Clarke is continually funny. And Heidi Klum alone will melt the snows of yesteryear.

Derived from a novel by former Miami Herald reporter John Katzenbach, it might be described as an inversion of the treasured '50s genre known as the Crusading Liberal Movie, as pioneered by, say, Stanley Kramer. But Just Cause doesn't just invert it, it turns it inside out, on its head, upside down and backward, then kicks it in the tail. [17 Feb 1995]

Whatta movie: booze, unhappy French people, Alan Rickman and really cool pickup trucks.

A bitter, black and oddly beautiful story.

It's just a loud, derivative grade-Z horror film of no particular distinction.

What emerges is quite extraordinary.

It's not new. It's not interesting. I wish it would go away.

This one is dumbest. And funniest, as if that matters even a little bit!

More in the dumb and dumber tradition of "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" sequels.

Surprisingly effective re-creation of a Latin American Bing and Bob on the Road to History.

After an hour of brilliant, bitchy dialogue and deceit, it simply runs out of energy; or possibly the budget ran out.