William Arnold

Moves along its course and overflows at its climax with that indefinable but unmistakable assurance of a master filmmaker who knows just what he wants to say, is in total command of his medium and is in no mood to make any compromises.

It's a brilliant little microcosm of the '60s experience that, in a most gentle way, shows us how the counterculture probably was doomed from its inception.

For three-fourths of its journey, Adaptation is, for my money, the movie of the year: an incredibly audacious and original exercise that challenges the conventions of moviemaking and stretches the boundaries of fiction -- almost, but not quite, to the breaking point.

The movie grabs us from its heart-pounding opening sequence and pulls us inexorably along its trajectory with the grip of the last gruesome act of a Greek tragedy. Its fascination is not what happens but HOW it happens.

It's a chilling tale that leaves us with the fear that Latin America's exploding social problems may well be beyond solution.

Comes together with a wry sense of humor, a total lack of gratuitous movie nonsense and a graceful dignity that allows the humanity of his characters to shine through in a very special way.

Forget "Raising Helen" and "The Notebook," this is the movie summer's most touching young romance.

The film is your basic sensitive young people coming-of-age in the '60s formula piece. [29 Apr 1995]

Ken Loach's new film, "Ladybird, Ladybird," takes us deep inside the true story of a woman who is a long-term victim of brutal men, and examines her predicament with such intimacy and ambiguity that the experience becomes the very antithesis of cliche. [27 Jan 1995]

Though it's unflinching in its depiction of homosexual affection, the marvel of the movie is the dexterity with which it transcends the specificity of its characters and gay theme to be a universal human statement and profound political epic.

Its dazzling blend of rock magic and 3-D technology just may be ushering in a whole new kind of musical theater.

In a Fuller film, you're never quite sure where you're going. Whether Fuller was an authentic artist may be open to debate, but it's impossible to deny he was a first-rate storyteller. [15 May 1998]

In its defense, I can only say that, technically, it's an exhilarating piece of filmmaking; it offers a commanding comeback role for Carradine, and it serves as a summation, dead end and, perhaps, epitaph, for Tarantino's unique contribution to world cinema.

There's nothing harder for an actor to play than a thoroughly good character, and Staunton does it with a dowdy, sublime originality.

Perhaps because I expected nothing - the movie struck me as one of the better comic-strip translations, and one of the better films of the genre. It's fast, colorful, entertaining and a clear cut above its most immediate predecessor, 1994's "The Shadow." [7 June 1996]

In typical Fellini fashion, there is much frantic activity - no less than three films-within-the-film, several surrealist sequences that come out of nowhere, and many scenes that deliberately make reference to, and comment upon, the director's life and past films. [17 Jun 1993]

There are scenes in this movie that give you well, goose bumps, that make you proud to live on the same planet with creatures so exquisitely, instinctively and spiritually lovely. [13 Sep 1996]

Often distastefully juvenile.

A delicious one-time treat.

The best of several films about the Roosevelts, this adaptation of Dore Schary's Tony-winning Broadway play - which deals mostly with FDR's battle with polio and the difficult years that formed his presidential character - earned Greer Garson a best-actress nomination as Eleanor. [16 Nov 1995]

Mesmerizing and curiously satisfying idyll that gradually, slyly maneuvers us into a whole new way of looking at the delicate relationship between man, art and Mother Nature.

Based on a best-selling book by Fortune magazine writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, the film approaches Enron through the Horatio Alger saga of its founder, Kenneth Lay, the son of a dirt-poor Missouri Baptist minister.

Fernando Meirelles's MTV-grandstanding worked for "City of God," but it's just not necessary for, and gets in the way of, a script this literate and solid. In the end, The Constant Gardener works in spite of, not because of him.

It's absorbing and often excruciatingly suspenseful, and it gives Viggo Mortensen a strong, change-of-pace vehicle to follow up his "Lord of the Rings" triumph.

Potter 3 is, in its heart of hearts, a teenage angst movie...Cuaron has done a masterful job of bringing off this shift in the Potter paradigm without disrupting any disruption in the established style of the series and without any pandering concessions to the teen-movie genre.

A spellbinding action-drama, skillfully built upon a scary corporate conspiracy, chock-full of enjoyable downbeat performances.

Anyone in the market for an overblown and totally mindless adventure-comedy will certainly get his money's worth.

It's a gripping outdoor adventure and the movies' most inspiring epic survival story in years.

The movie whips itself into being a surprisingly effective love story. [16 Aug 1991]

An unusually engrossing World War II epic.

As energetic and irreverent as it is -- the movie never finds the inspired blend of edgy black comedy and gleeful journalistic adventure that it's after.

There's a satisfying craftsmanship to every sequence, the direction is stylish without being show-offy, the plot mechanics are convincing, the pace is breakneck and compelling, and the film does something unique and interesting with its Hitchcockian concept.

A first-rate student film, but not much more.

Much of it is imaginatively directed (by Leonard Kastle, a one-time director who took over after Martin Scorsese was fired) and the film has the same distinctive, rather charming low-budget noir look of Night of the Living Dead, Hideous Sun Demon and other super-low-budget cult films of the '60s. [04 Dec 1992]

All told, it's a reasonably effective movie, but it might have been a lot more effective had it the guts to portray a Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden-like character as its villain instead of this rather unbelievable, but more politically correct, gaggle of cardboard neo-Nazis.

It's a rich, engrossing ensemble drama that reveals itself very slowly, is filled with multidimensional characters and multi-layered performances, and works toward an amazingly verisimilitude. [19 Jan 1996]

The Man Without a Face also manages to be an expression of Gibson's well-known political and sexual conservatism. It goes to some lengths to pay homage to John Wayne (three times) while the anti-war left of the '60s is brutally caricatured as a bunch of effete snobs, and the women in this movie are just in the way. [25 Aug 1993, p.c1]

The music, art direction and camerawork blend together with an integrity and scope that's wonderfully exhilarating. Every frame seems to communicate the grandeur, power and fatal pull of the sea.

The movie misfires: It's numbingly cold and soulless, and the zeitgeist stays far beyond its reach. But it's so visually striking you almost don't notice, its relentlessly somber mood has a certain masochistic appeal and, while hardly a career-redefining performance, Hanks is as winning as ever.

An almost documentary reality and voyeuristic appeal.

The film goes for a grainy, fast-cut, documentary look that is both a blessing and a curse.

It's never consistently funny enough to work as a comedy and never forthright enough to be a successful relationship drama. And, like a lot of films made by directors whose apprenticeship was served in shorts, it is so slight it never quite feels like a feature, more like a half-hour film that has been padded out to fill a feature length. [02 Mar 1990]

A sweet-spirited, extremely well-cast little comedy.

The journey comes together to be one of the very best of the "in search of" documentaries: open-minded, informative, immaculately crafted, full of moving and highly privileged moments of discovery.

Beneath its whimsy and sexual politics, there is a core of humanity in this movie that is deeply satisfying, and powerful enough to disarm even the most vehement homophobia. [06 Aug 1993]

In the end, we feel just what Branagh wants us to feel - a sense that, behind all its frustrations, there is a joy in this unavoidable battle-between-the-sexes that makes life worth living. So his film has it both ways: It is true to Shakespeare and his poetry, and it makes an almost perfect '90s date comedy. [21 May 1993]

Some of the scenes are gorgeous, but "Papaya" is so passionless and empty it has no real impact. [04 Feb 1994]

Harry IV is an intelligent, visually seductive and mostly very satisfying fantasy epic of the first order.

Broad and funny, its sensibility is very campy and it's out to be loved by everyone.

An absorbing slice of a lost world that's actually very reminiscent of Kurosawa's underappreciated 1957 film, "The Lower Depths."

Not only does it recapture -- and enhance -- the subtle emotional core that has made the film so beloved for the past three-quarters of a century, it delivers the most eye-boggling, hair-raising movie thrill ride since 1993's "Jurassic Park."

A funny, rousing crowd-pleaser.

That's Entertainment! III - which comes 20 years after the original, and celebrates MGM's 70th anniversary - is largely a rehash of its predecessors. Though it's not nearly as fun or exciting, it is still worth seeing if you're an old-movie buff. [03 Jun 1994]

A big change of pace for the bad-boy Spanish director. Like his other work, it's kinky and proudly gay, but this time it's not a comedy. It's a serious neo-film-noir, and a pretty darn good one at that.

Best of all, the film showcases Leconte's full range of directorial gifts: his sense of pace and suspense; his ability to make a scene come magically alive with a small touch of wry humor; his ingratiating belief that, as bad as people are in the aggregate, they are capable of an amazing nobility of spirit as individuals. [06 Dec 1996]

It's bleak, credulity straining and often stomach-turning, but it definitely works as a heart-tugging character study, and Rourke's performance as the has-been title character is golden.

Kidman's Virginia Woolf is already controversial -- Yet there's something fierce, noble and deeply affecting in her work that mirrors Woolf's prose style, and her turbulent presence is the soul of the movie.

Has a flag-waving dumbness at its core.

Flat-out one of the best Bonds ever.

Sayles has also gathered uniformly strong performances from his ensemble cast of mostly Irish actors; he creates a rural Irish milieu with a remarkable authenticity (remarkable since he is not Irish); and he keeps the mood nicely balanced on a fine line between whimsical children's fable and realistic domestic drama. [17 Feb 1995]

It's still primarily a showcase and offbeat star vehicle for Moore. It's a bravura role and she brings it off with a chilling malevolence and a strange, disjointed vulnerability that almost, but not quite, makes her sympathetic.

His film has a kind of lyrical and poetic beauty at the same time it's remarkably free of sentimentality and didacticism, and it tells its tale with the minimalist effectiveness of a first-rate short story. [3 July 1998]

It's an interesting and eye-opening journey.

As amateurish and fumbling as it is in every department, the sum total of the movie is pretty darn scary.

Not only is it an enormously entertaining study of a curiously American institution, it also manages to be a nail-biting competition film, an engrossing group character study and a wonderfully graceful comedy of manners.

A happy surprise: a timely antidote to the comic-book mindlessness of "Spider-Man" and repetitive space fantasy of "Star Wars," and an encouraging bid from the top of the A-list to once again reach very high and spit in the face of the gutless formula filmmaking that rules Hollywood.

As much as I enjoyed the movie -- and I laughed all the way through it -- the truth is that the big screen adds nothing special to the "Simpsons" experience.

The film's story - about a gringo loser (Warren Oates) who digs up and decapitates a body to claim a reward - seems much less gratuitously shocking today, and its dated brand of macho pessimism has a nostalgic appeal. [14 Jun 2002]

A paragon of subtlety. Yet this message is exactly what we carry out of the theater, and it lingers on with a powerful resonance.

An extraordinarily absorbing neo-realistic tragedy.

In the best tradition of Annaud's work, Two Brothers works as an engrossing outdoor adventure and quasi-documentary.

It's a buoyant, often thrilling piece of animation that more or less does for the Central African rain forest what "The Lion King" did for the East African savanna.

It's not so much a sequel or even a remake for a new generation of moviegoers as it's a retranslation for the old one: an irresistible statement that "Yo, life ain't over till it's over."

Throughout, it's clouded -- for me at least -- by a nagging sense that it's straining too hard to build the media clash into more of an historic event than it was.

The new movie year's poignant love story to beat.

It's in English, but the actors speak it with tortuous accents that are a constant struggle to understand and make them seem like foreigners in their own land. Spanish with English subtitles would have served this story much, much better.

There's an enjoyably literate style here and some humorous moments.

A marvelous piece of cinematic storytelling, acted to perfection by Sihung Lung (the father in "The Wedding Banquet"), fueled by an ingratiating sense of humor and so infused with the sheer joy of Chinese cooking that it will probably make you rush right out for a Chinese meal. [05 Aug 1994]

Not quite up to the exalted level of the two predecessors ("Toy Story" and "Toy Story 2"), be assured it's still the most eye-popping and thoroughly entertaining animated film to come down the pike so far this year.

It takes a strong stomach to sit through its two-plus hours of non-stop brutality (much of it involving very small children).

Several times, Hotel Rwanda teeters on the edge of making a unique, visionary statement about our times, but can't quite do it. Too bad. If it could have pulled itself together in one brilliant scene, this may have been a great movie, instead of just a very good one.

The second-class status of women in Korean society is a reminder of Confucianism's dark side. For all its pretty cinematic images and well-meaning bows to a vanishing literary tradition, this movie is a celebration of that dark side.

It's aimed squarely at a young dating audience, and is not likely to be hugely captivating for anyone out of that demographic.

Condon's direction is steady and fearless, Neeson and Linney are individually excellent and together they create an inspiring chemistry for a truly adventurous marriage.

It's a consciousness-raising personal odyssey in the tradition of such recent indie hits as "Sideways" and "About Schmidt" -- only less obviously comedic and, as always with Jarmusch, blissfully unresolved.

The movie offers one authentically terrific performance: Beach as Hayes. He's so painfully sympathetic in the role that he absolutely breaks your heart, and he looks like the front-runner in the best-supporting actor Oscar race.

The movie is never engaging on anything but a superficial level, and it gradually gets decidedly tiresome.

Gradually, it becomes clear that Campion is taking an experimental, almost documentary approach to movie biography - avoiding clear villains, grandly dramatic moments, and the kind of phony movie dialogue so characteristic of the traditional Hollywood biopic. It's a bold and risky method, and sometimes it induces boredom. But somehow it works, giving us a extraordinary sense of one woman's life and the forces that made her, and a subtle, powerful feminist statement. [21 Jun 1991]

The new black-and-white print is gorgeous, the film plays well in this broader key and it sets the historical record straight.

It works on several levels, and stands out as a wistful meditation on the psychological cost of 9/11.

Is it possible to have yet another expensive excursion into this genre that seems in any way fresh, original and alive? The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

Control Room is even more effective in showing the dilemma of the people who make up Al-Jazeera. In a sense, these are "our" Arabs, in that they're Western-educated, conduct their business in English and seem to believe in the basic American principles.

It would be easy to categorize the Lebanese women's picture Caramel as a Levantine combination of "Sex in the City" and "Beauty Shop," but it's actually a lot smarter, sharper and deeper than that.

Witherspoon shines. She's never looked better, and she carries herself with both her usual comedic flair and a surprising elegance.

An absorbing and fulfilling experience -- even though it ends with a question mark.

The formula has rarely been done as well as it is in this goofy, audacious, visually stylized omnibus of what-ifs that operates on its own peculiar logic, and powers along with the force of a truck on the Autobahn.

The mayhem is presented sparingly enough to be suspenseful, some of the sequences are genuinely terrifying and, compared with Hollywood's last zombie movie, the Robert Rodriguez half of "Grindhouse," it's a masterpiece.

In the lead, Anderson ("The X-Files") is competent but never quite makes the character come soaring to life.