Tom Keogh

A smart marriage of modest technical ambition, sophisticated material, and a hang-loose presentation that belies the production's no-frills sacrifices.

A sequel from hell.

Looks plain silly without an appropriate tone or sustaining context.

This is still Ron Shelton in good -- not great, but good -- form here, and the rewards are plentiful.

If you're paying close attention, there is reason enough to find Up at the Villa a fascinating experience, almost an experiment in some ways, but it's not a fully realized work of cinema.

Merely reconfigures the same predictable gross-out jokes, sentimental platitudes, and decorative sex that figure into half the screenplays in circulation.

About two lives in which transformation is a constant, destabilizing threat to freedom and sanity. That's a very provocative premise, though halfway through the movie Doyle and Walsh abandon its potential to go for easy laughs.

Misshapen but magnificent vision of a soulful quest -- in the thick of misery and fear -- for the meaning of our lives.

The look, the feel, the brood-y, brilliant cast: This is an oddly affecting movie, all right, a jellyroll of Bronte and Hemingway.

A surprisingly vital film.

What the film doesn't have, ironically, is a soul.

Achieves a kind of beauty through its overlaying enigmas, and Carrey.

Pours on some of the most ridiculous dialogue heard in a feature film in a long time.

Overpraised, intellectually soft, narratively unfocused, and thematically ambivalent.

A very moving and surprisingly funny experience.

Rounders is more involved with the insulated, arcane world of a gambler than it is with the things that actually make a movie work, such as characters and relationships and a script that connects all its dots.

Beyond the fantastic contrivances of Gods and Monsters, these performances are startlingly human.

A dark comedy that squanders its potential and never quite, as they say, suspends disbelief.

In all, this film is a major disappointment with a few powerful highlights.

The kind of minor work that may very well speak greater volumes about (Stone's) thoughts and feelings right now than another masterpiece would.

Lots of movies deal with friends and lovers of a certain age growing apart. But few can hear, as Thraves does, the sound of death chains rattling in the background.

The film's bemused but genuine respect for the ingenious obviousness of a bygone cinematic language is quite moving.

It is an ostensibly serious story about being young and struggling to wrest control over one's life from the hands of fools, yet it doesn't behave like a serious drama that wants to lead us anywhere.

If you don't ponder too much the script's muddled, self-serving influences, Arlington Road succeeds at discomforting a viewer and making one apt to look over one's shoulder for a day or two.

It's a complete drag.

It certainly has a place among the year's more accomplished productions.

Mercury Rising could have been a terrific movie with a little more gumption. [3 Apr 1998, p.G5]

Simply a case of severe overreaching and the illusion that an overstuffed movie is an epic movie.