William Arnold

A pretty dreadful affair -- ludicrous as history and a veritable gallery of visual cliches.

Touching, transcendent love story.

Preposterous, empty-headed and tedious.

This may sound like a satiric comedy, and its intriguing setup carries a faintly comedic tone, but the movie becomes more straight-faced as it moves along and ends up being a fairly serious examination on the nature of, and necessity for, faith.

The finished film, while competently acted and staged, has missed the high mark Spacey set for it. It's self-important, tedious and ultimately pointless, with absolutely none of the sardonic wit that remains the most memorable feature of "American Beauty."

Likely to provide many points of identification for many women.

Inferior remake.

It has moments of effectiveness, some of the performances -- especially Whitaker and Robert Ri'chard -- are moving.

It's naturalistic, briskly paced and never overreverential. It's not a bit stagy, yet it manages to be dazzling theater.

More of a leisurely paced ensemble character-study than the slam-bang traditional action gut-buster that its trailer seems to promise.

The repulsive turn of events erased all my good memories of the first half, and makes the movie hard to recommend to a normal human being.

All told, this first Bond of the new millennium may be far from the best of the series, but it's assured, wonderfully respectful of its past and thrilling enough to make it abundantly clear that this movie phenomenon has once again reinvented itself for a new generation, and is very likely to outlive us all.

Its overall effect is distinctly underwhelming.

This moody, progressively enthralling little French psychodrama is very much it's own thing: a boldly conceived, impeccably crafted and wonderfully enigmatic two-character study that turns out to be a most powerful showcase for its two stars.

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.

It's very slick and small children will enjoy it, but it has little of its model's special magic.

It has some wonderful moments and a handful of delicious Maughamian characters.

To the movie's credit, the cast is better than average.

Apparently no one bothered to tell Stone the movie was a joke. She plays it without a hint of the tongue-in-cheek required, and totally against her strong star persona, so that she serves mostly as the unnecessary straight woman to all the giddy male comedy. [10 Feb 1995, p.3]

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.

A pleasant, old-fashioned kind of a love triangle.

To be truthful, the movie is not much, even by the limited standards of the genre. It's played almost too broadly for its own good. [07 Nov 1992]

The truth is this is an amateurish student film, marred by poor sound recording, stereotyped characters, heavy-handed direction, a mild racism (the two white characters - a shallow yuppie and an insensitive Jewish teacher - are harsh caricatures), and an unconvincing, tag-on happy end. [16 Apr 1993]

The film tells the story of Jimmy Hoffa in a refreshingly honest way. [25 Dec 1992]

The most noteworthy thing about the Iraq war home-front drama, Grace Is Gone, is that Clint Eastwood composed its musical score and title song, which have both been garnering all sorts of accolades, including dual Golden Globe nominations.

Like all of Hallstrom's American films, "Something to Talk About" has a distinct European "feel," and is less interested in being a star vehicle for Roberts than a freewheeling ensemble piece that balances her in every scene with strong supporting work from Quaid, Duvall, Rowlands and especially Sedgwick.

It really does communicate an optimistic sense that race is irrelevant and we can all live happily ever after together.

So witless, sit-com shallow and bad in every way that it's just not worthy of much discussion.

A moody adventure story set in Alaska that resonates with envrionmental overtones and is filled with delicate character studies, but ends up being a terrific little genre thriller. [04 Jun 1999]

It packs surprising punch as a biopic.

The holiday movie season's only epic fantasy adventure, certainly gets no points for originality. It's such a clone of "The Lord of the Rings," it probably could lose a plagiarism suit. There's also a heavy dash of "Harry Potter." All bases are covered.

As directed and produced by Steve Miner, the film is gory (eyes gouged out, a tongue bitten out, children murdered), but it also features better than usual actors (including Richard E. Grant as a 17th-century warlock-hunter who also jumps into the future) and has such a giddy sense of humor that it's hard to ever get too indignant about its splatter violence. [12 Jan 1991]

It's not "The Wizard of Oz," and its cotton-candy fantasy of a story line is definitely aimed at very young children. But it's well made, and adults likely will find themselves yielding to its gentle, whimsical charm.

Stars are particularly strong. Snipes' fatalism is totally appealing, and Rhames makes a curiously compelling antihero.

Overly familiar, poorly cast and often annoyingly crude New York comedy that never finds its groove.

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

A familiar but rewarding little parable.

The film's real feat may be in its production design, in the sumptuousness and veracity with which it re-creates central Saigon and the Vietnamese countryside of the '50s: an exotic lost world of brothels and opium dens, trishaws and ao-dai dresses, Ming-deco interiors and water buffalos in rice paddies.

A witty, literate, wryly sophisticated parable of American politics: just the kind of movie that Hollywood, in its search for the global audience, supposedly doesn't make anymore.

For most of the way, it's indeed quite a ride: a cumulatively exhilarating, visually mouth-dropping, somberly stylish odyssey crammed full of virtuoso animation sequences.

In a movie era when brand names mean very little, it shows once again that Pixar is a stamp of quality.

It's hard to figure exactly what the point of this movie is -- except maybe to expose the myth of samurai machismo.

Sandler and Barrymore generate some believable, if low-voltage, chemistry: they're both so shallow and conceited and dingy that you think -- yes! -- in real life, these two people probably would go for each other in a second.

There's not a vaguely sympathetic character in sight; Kureishi ultimately seems prudishly disapproving of his heroine's last gasp of sexual adventure; and what another writer might have found liberating and healing, he finds distasteful and destructive.

It's by far the most violent, most clinical and most sumptuously atmospheric.

The Sandlot is so exploitative of the myth of baseball and rings so false as a nostalgia piece - and is so unfunny as a comedy - that it makes "The Bad News Bears" look like "Pride of the Yankees." [7 Apr 1993]

Together, the two of them (Pitt, Roberts) are cute as a bug.

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]

Manages to squeeze by on Angelina Jolie's surprising flair for self-deprecating comedy.

Assuming the bulk of what we see is factual, it comes off as a gripping docudrama.

The film is magnificently mounted, it moves like a speeding bullet and it's so respectful of Superman traditions that even the pickiest of die-hard fans should love it. After a lapse of two decades, it revitalizes the franchise and makes it seem fresh and alive.

This is an actress (Streep) who can pull off anything -- including a shamelessly kitschy musical.

A frequently amusing and consistently outrageous but ultimately tiresome farce.

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.

It's a richly textured, leisurely paced, visually impressionistic epic of the American past that fairly hypnotizes the viewer with its tapestry of sights, sounds and colors.

The movie also is designed to be an actor's showcase for Norton and Giamatti, two of the best movie actors of their generation. Each has his moments of fire, but some element is missing from the script that would make this duel of the titans riveting.

Even with the good performances, the paces are just agonizingly familiar. [24 Oct 1997]

The film powerfully demonstrates the diversity, the adaptability, the resilience of the insect world. The rest of the animal kingdom (including man) may be on the brink of extinction, but these little guys are thriving. [22 Nov 1996]

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

A clumsy, heavy-handed and unnecessarily sordid occult thriller that somehow has managed to generate a big pre-release buzz.

More mediocre than magical.

It's by far the most inspirational sports movie to come along in many a month.