Stephen Hunter

There may be a plot somewhere in William Goldman's script, and there might even have been a structure, but Mel Gibson, James Garner and Jodie Foster are so highly charged, as they slide through riffs that have nothing to do with anything except their own enjoyment in being invited to the party, that it's magnetic -- at least for most of the time.

The only impressive thing about it is the monotony and thoroughness with which it replicates cliches from older, better movies and hammers them into pop alloy to an up-with-me beat beat beat of its musical score.

The fabulous Elizabeth reinvents English Tudor history as gangster movie.

A karate movie so devoid of inner substance that it threatens to suck all known life on planet Earth into the void at its center. [20 Mar 1991]

While the movie is stupid, it is -- hooray, and let's put this in all the national ads! -- not appallingly stupid.

It is the perfect modern product: loud, banal, empty, frenzied, plasticized, flavorless, drab, violent in a bloodless way and sexy in a sexless way.

But the movie has a great deal of zest and charm, and Yakusho gets so exactly that crest of melancholy that is a man’s early 40s, until he decides to go for another kind of life, that the movie is infinitely touching.

Lung-bloatingly funny.

The Pixar people have an extreme talent for conjuring imagery that is both soaring in its majesty but also resonant -- it's a stylization but acute enough to carry emotional meaning.

The movie isn't funny in any big way so much as recognizable in its patterns of dysfunction, delusion and futility. But you believe in it, because you believe in the small but decent lives of its characters, a rare experience for a hot weekend in June.

Seems to me, teenage suicide isn't that funny, and nothing in this movie changed my mind.

A celebration of the actor's art – but not the dramatist's.

Generally quite amusing, with a brilliant cast.

If ever a project seemed utterly unguided by a compass, it's "North," the dreary new film from Rob Reiner. [22 Jul 1994]

Folks, I really feel that seeing this one for you is the movie critic's equivalent of jumping on the grenade to save your lives. Send me medals.

It's a fine, old-fashioned 2 1/4 hours at the Bijou.

So those seeking a softer approach to the realities of both child- and animal-rearing should search elsewhere. The rest of us, meanwhile, are free to enjoy a well-made family drama pitched to young adults that's honest, tough and surprisingly engaging.

I like watching snakes eat mice just as much as the next fella, maybe even more, but The Strangers turns the gobble-'em-up into an ordeal. It's a fraud from start to finish.

You can make a good movie about a bad marriage, as countless directors, the latest being Ozon, have discovered.

Superb.

The camera, freed to glide, flows as if through the old man's memory, discovering both the glory of his life and the tragedy.

The film is one of those accursed self-styled "outrageous" comedies that play the horrific for broad laughs, with a comically inflated style of dialogue that's so hip one doubts it could have been conceived before 1997, much less 1847.

11 minutes longer than the original, and 11 minutes worse. [2000 re-release]

The Good Shepherd is serious adult moviemaking, a truly surprising effort from De Niro, a man deeply interested in the art, craft and psychology of espionage. He seems to believe that we'd better be interested in it, because it's interested in us.

Put another movie on the barbie, mate; maybe it'll be better.

Suffers from what might be called colonitis. It comprises too many equal parts, and they tangle each other up. Everything is important, which comes to mean that nothing is important.

This Tarzan doesn't bellow, he kvetches; he doesn't dominate, he persuades; he doesn't rule, he seeks consensus. He isn't the king of the apes, he's a citizen of the animal planet.

The director, Patricia Rozema, has a rare talent: She gets third-rate performances out of first-rate performers with almost startling efficiency. All are bland, some hardly exist at all, and as performance, the whole thing seems a waste.

Though R-rated, its real target audience is under 18 -- either in years or IQ points.

Unlike so many pagan entertainments that seem to have no moral center as they blow things up, this one in fact does. It's very small, but it's there.

There's some cool sword-fighting. But still, it's junk.

The acting is superb, particularly from the three principals.

It's like an enema to the soul as it probes the ways of death ? some especially grotesque in a family setting. You leave slightly asquirm. You know it will linger.

So rancid is Brooks's fury that it's clouded his judgment, so that each of his main characters is a stereotype of the most broad-brush, malodorous nature.

The cast is too good for the script and the script is too good for the director and the director is too good for the horny dog jokes.

You keep expecting Shopgirl to get funny or sad or poignant; it never does. It just starts, then it's over.

One doesn't come away from it with any sense of what the victory cost in human terms.

It's not a great film, but in its reckless audacity -- an American director working from a British novel set in Latin America, dealing with the largest themes of Latin American art, politics and history -- it's reassuring. Someone's still willing to take a big chance.

The genius is in the writing and in keeping all gambits created by the individual writers in sync, so the piece has a tonal consistency and a narrative flow. A lost art in Hollywood? It's really one of the best movies of the year.

It's not brazenly bad or heroically bad or stridently bad. It's bad in all the old, dull ways of being bad: poor performances, absurd story, dreary special effects, witless dialogue and the excessive length of someone taking himself far too seriously.

The movie is so tepid and inoffensive: It reminded me of a '70s Disney live-action product, with clean-scrubbed "hippies" like Johnny Whitaker chafing harmlessly under the wise ministrations of Suzanne Pleshette, whose job was to keep the kids in hand.

With its brilliant cast, its creative pedigree, Don't Come Knocking seemed as close to a sure thing as possible, but it only proves the sad truth that there's no such thing as a sure thing.

In the end the movie goes nowhere a hundred movies haven't already been and tells us nothing we don't already know. It does so with so much violent energy, however, it's like four brutal years at film school crammed into an hour and a half.

After a fast, smart start, White Sands implodes like a black hole, sucking all goodwill from the atmosphere of the theater, turning those of us who started to love it into embittered cuckolds.

In fact much of Guilty By Suspicion takes place in a trashy roman a clef zone, with bigger-than-life versions of famous moments and people; the trouble is, the bigger they are, the less like life they seem.

A lot of bigger movies won't provoke you half as much.

But the film's most annoying error is the arrogant conceit of revisionism. It postulates a world that did not exist, because it exorcises the entwined concepts of communism and Cold War.

So insidey it's almost parochial.

It's got a lot of small movies bouncing around inside it, but there's no big movie on the outside.

The movie is very loud. It is pointlessly loud, arbitrarily loud, assaultively loud.

Maybe it's me, but I find it difficult to dislike any movie that has horses, guns and big hats in it.

It gets frenetic, in the French way, but it never stops getting amusing. This is what happens when you let grown-ups make movies.

You want a happy ending? You want sunshine, sentimentality, a sense of justice and honor and duty? Me too. But you won't find it here.

The summer's most rousing action picture.

It's all expectable, it's all enjoyable: British theatrical professionalism at the highest pitch.

Tells us nothing we didn't already know, and it tells it over and over and over.

Weirdly disjointed and uncertain as to tone.

It's nothing but style and noise, threadbare of content, empty of ideas. Is it anything? Not really.

When you think you've figured out Bielinsky's great game, that's when you're in the most trouble: He's the con, and you're just the mark.

As glossy and overproduced as the thing is, it's a GOOD Big Stupid American movie.

It takes what could be called the Chinese equivalent of chutzpah to make a movie with three of the world's most beautiful and talented women -- Gong Li, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi -- and to be more interested in the male character.

All in all, A Good Woman retains ye olde Wilde's zing, his sense of pace and place, but most of all his snappy one-liners, and it finds a new way to showcase them brilliantly.

Of The Good German, it can be said that the operation was a brilliant success, even if the patient is not merely dead but most sincerely dead. The movie, in other words, lies there as if on a slab in a morgue, while you admire the corpse for its beauty.

It's hardly brilliant. But it's easygoing and occasionally quite funny and ultimately satisfying.

Stunningly acted by Liam Cunningham and Orla Brady as the Cloneys.

Gilliam does two things well: mud and trees.

So phony it makes your gums ache.

Smashingly stupid.

If the movie were merely unfunny, one might dismiss it with an airy wave of the hand in a paragraph or two without breaking a sweat or digging into the old adjective tool box, but "Car 54, Where Are You?" is actively repulsive.

It's an astonishing movie, with a real-life feel.

It's a movie with the exciting parts cut out.

Now, they're together. You can't look at them, but you can't look away either. So it goes.

Stephen Frears's stunning Liam, -- a vivid, intense evocation of another British time and place.

From the very first seconds a viewer believes totally in Downfall.

The result is a cross between a hurricane and a tornado as run through a movieola dialed all the way up to 10.

The movie simply delivers too many colorfuls for its own good, none of whom establish a true emotional identity, and thus it isn't moving, it's busy. Busy, busy, busy.

Perhaps as a publishing phenomenon the concept works, but on-screen it's pretty dull, with good actors in bad roles and bad special effects.

As a piece of journalism then, Boiler Room is first class.

A greatly ambitious undertaking, but from the commercial point of view quite insane. The movie is ridiculously fragile: It's like a Faberge egg, and even a twitch of foreknowledge will destroy the magic of the movie utterly.

The movie is fussy and organized rather than moving. It follows a pattern so precisely, it's as if Lahti thought points would be taken off if she colored outside the lines.

You will laugh. Then you will laugh some more. Then you will laugh still again.

So tame and limp, it may actually give mothers-in-law a good name.

In noir, everybody's guilty, and that's one of the pleasures of Joy Ride. The three youngsters aren't exactly innocent.

It's not fierce, it's not angry, it's not radical, it's polite and what might be called "life-affirming." But it does have a couple of attributes most movies don't.

Endearing if slight, Superstar at least knows what it's doing the whole way.

Vaughn's con-man jive doesn't get much play in this one; he spends most of his time as a bitter creep, and the writing (by Dan Fogelman) isn't sharp enough to make the hipster-at-the-North-Pole theme pay off in any meaningful way.

Two Woody Allens, two kvetching, whining, neurotic incompetents bungling their lives . . . that's one too many Woody Allens.

What we deserved was "The Island of Jeanne Moreau." That I'd pay to see.

One of those movies that's great fun to watch, even if it decomposes more totally in your mind with each step out of the auditorium.

Directed by Vincent ("A Map of the Human Heart") Ward, who is either a genius or a crackpot, and derived from a long-ago novel by Richard Matheson, the film is overproduced and underpopulated, with either characters or ideas.

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.

This curious documentary is something rare, evincing opposites: It's both delightful and powerful.

It's too bloody to be funny and too silly to be dramatic and too self-indulgent to be anything other than what it is, one more bad movie.

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.

In the end, Gerry is beyond the simple question of pleasure. Seeing it may be no fun at all, but then discomfort is part of the price one pays in learning.

Let it swindle you; it's part of the fun. In fact, it's all of the fun.

Instead of gold-medal-winning, last-minute heroics, the movie weirdly becomes about the scandal of arbitrary gymnastics judges. Is it a movie or an episode of "Real Sports"? It veers into fresh territory but not dramatically satisfying territory.

The movie is hilarious...there's Rock's encounter with Viagra, which I can't describe but has to be one of the funniest scenes of the decade.

Surely the most creative trick of the year and grimly funny throughout.

He got too much movie. That's the scoring total on Spike Lee's He Got Game, which ultimately must be judged a mild disappointment.

As long as it stayed mainstream dirty it was okay, but when it got into perversions the American Psychiatric Society hasn't even named yet, it left me behind.

Like nothing else that's played in months.

All the King's Men hasn't been directed so much as over-directed, although the result, when you make an effort to filter out all the film school pyrotechnics, is an honorable run at Robert Penn Warren's classic novel.

The result is a movie that feels weirdly disconnected from reality.

Endlessly interesting. It's about people who thought ideas and art mattered, which makes it a rarity today.

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

As an example of smash-mouth environmentalism, you'd be hard-pressed to surpass Fire Down Below. As an example of right-thinking American compassion and concern for our precious natural heritage and all the fuzzy fauna and fernyflora of the great outdoors, it's extremely forthright. And as a movie, it's a piece of drivel...Ugh! What a distasteful, silly, egomaniacal movie. [6 Sept 1997, p.D03]

Great American movies are, these days especially, few and far between, so let's everybody take a deep breath and mark the moment: Hoop Dreams, all three hours' worth, is a great American movie. It's got the sting of drama and the ache of truth; it's even got the sting of truth and the ache of drama.

What makes the film so affecting, however, is its matter-of-fact evocation of character. Each person in the four-character cast is vivid and specific and believable.

The movie offers one of the great lost pleasures, one we so seldom encounter at the bijou anymore. You watch this monster unreeling in its splendid vitality, its absurd ambition, its wobbly tone, its beauty, its stupidity, its immaturity, its tragedy, its grandeur, and before you know it, close to four hours has blasted by. And when you leave, you seize whoever is up close to you -- friend or foe, stranger or lover -- and begin to talk. You have opinions. You must express yourself. You must be heard. [5 Aug 2001, p.G1]

Quintessential film noir. [20 Mar 2005, p.N03]

You don't really watch the film; you survive it.

That tale gets a first-class Hallmark Hall of Fame treatment in Kevin Reynolds's swaggering The Count of Monte Cristo, which is old-form moviemaking at its best.

Friends, Washingtonians, countrymen, I come not to praise Gladiator but to bury it.

Thr3e needs help with more than spelling.

None of the killings has any suspense, and the capital I irony -- that these people make their living selling death in small mechanical packages and munitions to the world and are now being hunted down by the same devices -- never begins to produce any results. Put it on a level with a mid-series "Halloween."

Andrew Dominik's long and bizarre movie about the American outlaw appears to stick close enough to the facts so that historians won't be able to complain. But it languishes toward torpor.

It's too film-savvy for kids who won't catch the allusions to Clark Gable and W.C. Fields, but it's too film-simple for buffs and too boring for adults and too magenta-bright for critics. It's completely human proof! [26 Mar 1997]

It's so routine and predictable it grows quickly wearisome, its inventions are thin and its wit is witless. You feel the clumsy manipulations coming hours in advance, and when they come, they seem to take forever to finish. [20 Dec 1996]

A terrific piece of filmmaking. It's taut, believable as it unspools. It's charismatic, with a slow buildup of tension in near-real time that finally explodes into a blast of violence.

I love the unsettling details.

The dialogue is fast but bad, the acting is loud but awful and the morality is chaste but unromantic. As for the food, it looks vulgar.

A beautiful story, told in measured cadences by a master of old-timey narrative compression and expression.

[McGowan's] serene psychopathology is the movie's most consistent pleasure, and to see her is to both love and fear her.

About a third as funny as it thinks it is. Still, that's pretty funny and about twice as funny as most American comedies these days.

The acting in this ensemble is of such a high order that the movie simply takes you in and makes you feel these lives as real.

First and best, it's got a rip-roaring story. It sweeps you along, borne effortlessly by believable if flawed characters, as it flows toward the inevitable tragedy. But it's also got a heart: It watches as a child harsh of judgment learns that judgment is too easy a posture for the world, and it's best to love with compassion. [07Nov1997 Pg G.01]

In all, it's not too bad and it's not too long.

To see seemingly reg'lar guys utterly stripped of dignity and defense is cruel enough, but crueler still is the laughter that you cannot seem to stop from rupturing your lungs and aorta.

In this film, Nolan seems overwhelmed by the budget, the egos of the stars, the thinness of the script, and he doesn't impose much personality on the picture. It's all Pacino.

It's wondrous, it's fabulous, it's -- all but unprecedented.

It's funny, it's heartbreaking, it's scary, it's exhilarating. It's got love stuff and lots of laughs and cool gunfights. It's really long and it feels like it's over in 15 minutes. It does something so few movies do these days: It satisfies.

A somewhat formulaic if nevertheless crudely effective manipulation of the figure skating themes that all of us girls love so much.

It feels old, tired and given-up-on, maybe three drafts shy of minimal production level.

It's romantic manliness at its purest, almost but not quite schmaltz, ideally calculated to please true believers and ironic snorters at once.

Bleak and post-industrial, this is no easy film to watch. It hasn't a conventional image of beauty anywhere within its grim 93 minutes, being shot in harsh natural light that somehow plays up the grime and chill of back-alley life. But by the end, it's suffused with something utterly rare: moral beauty. [27 June 1997, p.D6]

A lot of it is low, crude, admittedly comic in the rudest positive sense, which involves a lot of falling down to humorous effect.

All this stuff is probably right. It's just that the director, Victor Salva, underscores his points with thunderous obviousness and manipulates us through ham-handed plot gambits.

I literally did not count a single laugh in the whole aimless schlep, except for the hucksters who made it, on their way to the bank.

May lack originality but makes up for it in sheer bravado and really nice clothes

As the movie's tag line has it, it's based on a hell of a story. Too bad they didn't just tell it.

It has no moments of athletic grace amid the chaos, no apparent sense of strategy. It's basically just mayhem set to rock music.

Is there anything new here? Honestly, not really. The content is the same, the plot the familiar litany of ordeals leavened by soapy interludes. But the fight that develops is taut, tough and extremely bitter; it's never showy in the grinding, big-movie Spielbergian way, but a portrait of the war's daily interface with hell in a very small space, as the four stand against a much larger unit.

It's a kind of "Miami Vice" with many more carz and numberz where all the adjectives used 2 go.

Phone Booth is 82 New York minutes long, all of them exciting.

What you get is the V trifecta: vile, vicious and violent. Oh, and incoherent and stupid. A mess. A mean-spirited completely worthless film that can never give back the two hours it seizes from you.

It seems such a waste to go onto the actual streets of Lower Manhattan and shoot a movie this stupid. Think of the money, the logistics, the interruptions in the city's life -- all that trouble for what? For this? For shame.

The most persistent question asked at When Do We Eat? will probably be "When do we leave?" This abrasive Passover comedy-drama is extremely difficult to sit through, and if its makers weren't all Jewish, it would be considered anti-Semitic.

The original was about social manipulation as blood sport. Amazing how easily it transports, themes intact, to our blighted decade, and to our children.

Sad and lovely.

It's just gunfights strung together, without a whisper of coherence or meaning. The fights are staged so that they all look the same, and the principle is always the same: The gunman's multiple antagonists never hit, and he never misses. John Woo at least had fun with this sort of thing 20 years ago. And Giamatti? What the heck is he doing here?

Despite its generic title and flat ending, tickles most of the way through.

This mid-level, pretty-but-not-hugely-funny Allen film slips into the top spot by regretful default. I enjoyed every single second of it, a little bit.

Just another thriller, utterly disposable.

The film, built of interviews with participants, is fast-paced, utterly absorbing and ultimately tragic.

Occasionally quite amusing, it just doesn't build.

Here, by its cooperation with the Disney factory, NASCAR says it's also warm 'n' cuddly, and that if you love your magic bug, it'll repay you with victory. Why does it allow itself to be co-opted by a story that diminishes the skills, experience and talent it takes to win?

The Blue Angel it's clear to Von Sternberg, and to us, that he's connected with some pure being of cinema, whose power to ignite an audience was unstoppable. She became a great star.

The movie becomes something quite rare and magical: a text about a text that is also full of life. In other words, it's a true first: It's both postmodern and fun!

The movie is bittersweet, adult, with a fair eye toward men's eternal spirit of the infantile, and knowing. Possibly it's too slick, but in some awkward way it sums up the true essence of adult life, which is just sort of getting along without doing too much harm. [30 Apr 1999]

It's like a summer stock "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," with the proviso that occasionally a giant snaggle-tooth monster slobbers onstage and eats George or Martha.

This is postmodern folk art, a tricky transaction in which the work isn't just a story, it's a genre survey, a homage, a meditation, a parody and, oh yeah, while it's at it, still a pretty good story.

Isn't quite a great espionage movie or a great Africa movie, but in a summer of heat and wind, it's the next best thing.

So closely observed, so funny and so true to the junk that is everybody's real--as opposed to movie--life that it comes to feel like some kind of a miracle.

A dead-on sense of how rich kids live and talk today, a sense of the melancholy of a dysfunctional family, and some great dark laughs.

By contrast, the most amusing character is the ever-affable John Mahoney as the patriarch of the wayward Fitzpatrick clan. He gives consistently terrible advice, which his sons follow, which messes up their messy lives even more. I like that in a father.

The movie is almost completely uninteresting on the story level but fascinating as a work of imagined reconstruction and anthropology and as a study of the theory and practice of Studio 54.

So unexpected and unpredictable and so full of tiny grace notes that its ultimate collapse seems almost irrelevant.

For the first half-hour, the movie is pretty crummy. Even Spielberg appears bored with the script's lame setup, its quick evocation of the first movie and its wan establishment of human villains and heroes. Like any 50-year-old adolescent, he can't wait for the dinosaurs. And when he gets to them, the movie ceases to bear any relationship to conceits of narrative and becomes a sheer adrenalin spike to the brain stem.

The movie may take five extra minutes to end and could do with one less sunset but . . . other than that it's damned near perfect.

The films are bloody, stupid and buoyant in a kind of infantile way, celebrating mayhem, flesh and gore. Planet Terror is by far the livelier.

The result is a panorama of European radicalism. Depending on your politics, you may think "long live the revolution" or "curse the day the CIA ended its assassination program."

So much of "Thunderheart" is so good and its intentions are so noble that it pains me to reach the ultimate judgment that the movie is a mess.

Overblown, overheated, overdirected, overacted, overlong.

The documentary is fascinating, but hardly enjoyable. It's like watching ants eat an elephant.

Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower is a kind of feast, an over-the-top, all-stops-pulled-out lollapalooza that means to play kitschy and grand at once.

It could hardly be called rip-roaring. I should report that it drives about a quarter of the audience out of the theater before it is half over. That's because it's slower than molasses in Siberia.

Everyone in the movie, from Dillane to (especially) Serbedzija down to the child actor Robbie Kay (as young Beer), is fabulous, and Podeswa has an ability to distill history into a few powerful images. The movie, however, is circular in structure and keeps reiterating points it has already made. For some, it will be a long sit.

Beginning with an intriguing premise, which it manages to squander in record time, it turns out to be a thinly imagined, thinly acted, silly exercise in car crashes, chases and nasty outbursts of generic violence.

This one has crossover hit written all over it.

This baby takes place in Tim Burton's id. It's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

The movie is as tawdry as someone else's lingerie, yet not without a certain prurient watchability.

It continually crashes and burns on its own banality.

Is it funny? Now and then. Stupid? Very. Racist? Possibly. Ugly? Profoundly. Wild? Undeniably. Singular? Completely.

The movie has considerable intensity, particularly when it views hunting as a form of counter-guerrilla warfare, with the gunboys wandering into the thickets, daring the big cats to come bite them and get a bullet for their trouble. It's best trick, though, is a straight steal from "Jaws" in which the lion -- I couldn't tell if it was "Ghost" or "Darkness" -- slides across the savannah in the high grass, just a form in the seething stalks, its tail alone visible, like a fin in the glassy water. There's a primordiality, a natural human fear of things with teeth and fangs, really provoked by that image. Too bad the movie couldn't have checked into that vein more often. [11 Oct 1996]

So primitive, it must have been written in lizard blood on animal skin.

Suffers from all the excesses of the genre: gunfights that go on and on and on, a plot that is almost incomprehensible.

It is kept watchable and empathetic by the energy of the superb performances and the sense of complete freshness.

Deep Cover is good fun.

It's not really a movie. I suppose it's what could be called a recorded behavior.

Between bad hair and tonal irregularity, the movie doesn't give you much to like.

What's most pleasing about That's Entertainment! III is the numbers themselves. I almost wish they'd done away with the concept of "documentary" and simply offered the snippets as pure cavalcade. [29 Jul 1994]

It's clean and transparent, with no movie director tricks. The characters, not the montages, speak the loudest.

Short of good, better than awful, it opens brilliantly, then just goes on, toward self-negating absurdity.

It manages to find an almost pitch-perfect accumulation of ill-matched tones, sheer grotesquerie, near-heroic absurdity and self-canceling folly.

The film occasionally drags -- a money transfer scene set in a department store lasts longer than several geologic epochs -- but it's so funny and the plot twists are so sudden and violent it's great fun.

The two guys are potentially amusing but the screenplay is so naked in its manipulation of emotion that it feels infantile.

Full of astonishments, not the least of which are its ideas.

The movie is simply not professional. It's not, even by the lowest standards of Republic B-westerns in the '30s or bad, cheap horror films in the '50s, releasable.

About as good a picture of a writer's real life as we are likely to get. It is wide-ranging, it is fair, it is thorough, and although it admires, it is also tough enough to condemn.

Sadly, the last 40-odd minutes are essentially one fight, pushed to the point of absurdity.

Mild pleasures are available in Mr. Woodcock.

I don't think "Queimada" is as great a movie as "Battle of Algiers," but it retains its vitality, its outrage, its savagery and its spirit.

You feel yourself sinking deeper and deeper into a whole universe that's been put together with almost anthropological intricacy and feels convincing to its tiniest detail. [20 Apr 1995]

A deft, tense, pure thriller, the movie has great star turns and is brilliantly directed, but it began as an extremely well-crated screenplay by Russell Gewirtz. It's professionally entertaining.