Stephen Hunter

The two starring performances are spot on. Wilson gets the tone that screenwriter Don Payne so expertly evokes: It's a weird sort of self-aware despicability...Thurman is beautiful, fearless and perfectly believable as a superhero.

The movie, as its title suggests, means to be one of those Tarantino-esque in-your-face jobs, amusing on the audacity of its outrageousness. Here's how "outrageous" it is: Zzzzzz-zzzz.

It's part travelogue in Hell, part ineffectual weepie.

Romeo Is Bleeding revels in its own trashiness. It aspires to join that small circle of near-outlaw works set on the grimy edges of film noir, along with "Reservoir Dogs" and "True Romance" -- defiant champions of ultraviolence, campy outrageousness and dime-novel nihilism. Alas, it's nowhere near as good as those two, but it has a certain zany charm. [22 Apr 1994]

It's a diversion, well crafted by Mackenzie from a book by Alexander Trocchi, but little more than that.

Good message, mediocre movie.

The new Dutch film Black Book manages to turn World War II into a large piece of cheese. A lurid, pulpy, slightly perverse potboiler, the movie suffers mainly from its utter lack of seriousness.

It's without posturing or phony outrage, and offers instead something far more affecting: a deep sense of melancholy. This is the way it is, it says, and not much can be done about it.

The chronological looseness is part of the pleasure of the piece, which magically reassembles in the last reel into something strong, lucid and compellingly powerful.

The nicest thing is the Asian American actress known as Maggie Q.

Cleverness can be overrated but it can be underrated too, and the best thing about National Treasure is how clever it is.

A veritable clinic in irritation. Just thinking about it irritates me deeply.

With all that going for it, one must ask, why didn't they just tell it completely straight? In other words, why did they feel so compelled to create an utterly bogus Max Baer for the virtuous Jim to fight in the movie's admittedly compelling climactic, championship bout?

As spectacular as it is dense and as dense as it is colorful and as colorful as it is meaningless and as meaningless as it is long.

Ultimately the movie disintegrates due to its own clumsiness. It's far too coincidence-driven to be believable.

The story fails to really engage on any level save the kinetic.

Down in the Valley is exactly what we don't have enough of: It's singular, unusual, unexpected, fresh and familiar at once.

I'll tell you what's gone in 60 seconds, all right: my attention.

The movie is content to be a kind of middling expression of human decency: It's never either terribly funny or terribly dramatic, but Latifah's quiet solidity and common sense root it in ways that larger, louder pictures never achieve.

There's nothing wrong with Uptown Girls that not seeing it won't fix.

An animated King and I? Now there's torture, especially in this wretched, lurid, absurd concoction which seems to have been conceived to annoy adults and bore children.

The first and possibly the last Will Ferrell star vehicle. It's a clumsy, tedious ride that wears out its welcome as it wears out the seat of your pants and the circulation in your lower limbs.

There should be a special room in Hell where the makers of films like Patch Adams are sent.

If you view it passively, as a well-crafted melodrama set in danger among passionate antagonists, The Boxer is rewarding enough. If you attack it intellectually, you see the degree to which it is informed by ideas and realize the power of its argument.

After Life is really a celebration of before-death: It's a complete rarity, for movies in general, for Washington in specific--pure sweetness of spirt. [8 Sept 1999, p.C9]

He (Tobias) had a life, however, that was way off the charts in its unpredictability, and sharing it with him is fascinating.

Nicely done, sweet, delicately comic and a complete delight.

If you attend the movie with your expectations lowered by Murphy's recent films, you'll be reasonably amused.