William Arnold

But the main reason you might find the film a bad trip is that its 30-year-old Holden Caulfield-type hero is so harrowingly unsympathetic: unpleasant, unappealing, self-pitying.

Charlize Theron, playing the one woman member of the team, handily steals the movie from the guys with her no-nonsense display of verve and vulnerability.

the film is well cast and the script is mostly faithful to the novel. Visually, it's probably the most accurate evocation of Hardy's world ever put on film. [01 Nov 1996]

Every frame of the way, it's eminently clear that Primer is the work of an engineer, not a film- maker.

It's a sumptuous mood piece.

It lives up to the hype. Gladiator has its creaky moments, but it delivers a particular kind of visceral historical spectacle that movie audiences haven't seen in decades.

Lee's control and storytelling flair have never seemed more assured and there are moments so powerful and thrilling we feel we're in the hands of a master filmmaker at the peak of his powers.

A mesmerizingly suspenseful drama.

A delectable must-see.

A perfectly titled and thoroughly engaging -- if at times gleefully violent -- black comedy.

It works as a fascinating and often very funny character study/satire of a famous author, though it loses interest the harder it tries to be profound and falls apart completely toward the end.

There's no question where filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter's sympathy lies, but he makes his case leisurely, without hysteria and with much playful screen time devoted to the various interviewees' pet dogs.

Unfortunately, the film assumes viewers have such a vast knowledge of Fellini's life and films that it's likely to play best to graduate film students.

(Bacon's) most believable, heart-wrenching and charismatic lead performance in many years.

Makes the translation with all its wit, incisive dialogue and eccentric characters intact, and then some.

The sum of all this is moderately rousing and deliciously irreverent in the Moore style, but not earthshaking as journalism, and devoid of anything that the average person doesn't already know from reading the newspaper.

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.

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

Its elements all come together with an unforced perfection, every scene feels real and alive in a way that many of his more surrealistic later films do not, and Leonard Maltin, for one, has argued that I Vitelloni is no less than Fellini's masterpiece.

It's a real pleasure to find a movie as calm, measured and dead-on in its impact as Finding Neverland.

A true gem: perhaps the most thoroughly charming, and completely satisfying, independent film I've seen in the past two or three years.

Martin, who hasn't really clicked in a movie in years, hits the target this time with an Inspector Clouseau who is even more relentlessly annoying (and strangely endearing) than Sellers managed to be in his last several outings.

It's a gorgeously atmospheric, perfectly cast, beautifully crafted oater of the old school, made with heaps of integrity, no gimmicks and few concessions to the box office. Its only real flaw is that it strains a bit too hard to be a "classic" western.

One of the American cinema's rare excursions into pure autobiography: the movie is Montiel's own coming-of-age story, with little or nothing disguised as fiction.

The bad news is that Ferrell's modestly likable performance is the ONLY good thing about this misguided comedy that's so tiresomely written, badly acted by a stellar cast and ploddingly directed (by art-house whiz Marc Forster) that it just never quite gets off the ground.

Even though he's strikingly played by Rockwell, Barris comes off as such a distasteful character and the silliness is so unrelenting that the movie wears you out. Long before it's over, you feel yourself reaching for that gong clapper.

Director Fred Schepisi has done an admirable job of making all the characters and their various interests clear, and he gets a fine, deglamorized and convincing performance from Pfeiffer as Connery's love interest. [22 Dec 1990]

Philip Messina's claustrophobic sets and Cliff Martinez's elegantly creepy score add to the film's distinction and work off Clooney's performance and Soderbergh's staging to create an hypnotic spell and suggest a cosmos full of spiritual possibility.

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

A suspenseful, fascinating movie that milks the premise for all it's worth.

The lack of stellar performances gradually becomes a virtue of the movie as we forget we're watching actors in roles, and Stone builds a documentarylike veracity that gives the saga of the trapped cops and their loved ones a riveting immediacy.

The kind of movie you're glad somebody had the guts to make, but you don't really want to endure.

Never quite builds the compulsive emotional power it needs to be an unforgettable personal drama.

Its script is sharp, its dialogue is acerbic, its stars could hardly be better and, in its more sparkling moments, it exudes some of the flavor and charm of the later Hepburn-Tracy comedies.

White Hunter, Black Heart may not be a spectacular success, but it contains Clint Eastwood's best work as an actor and director in years, and is worth seeing. [21 Sep 1990]

Develops its own unique charm.

The film is so explicit (endless swinging parties and porno scenes, more bouncing breasts than a Russ Meyer movie) that it finally becomes the thing it fears.

In its best moments, resembles a bad high school production of "Grease," without benefit of song.

The film uses '70s rock songs especially well to establish mood and act as the bridge between sequences. Director Zanuck's use of actors is also hard to fault. She gets strong, no-nonsense supporting performances from Gregg Allman, Sam Elliott and Max Perlich; and Jason Patric and the always-reliable Jennifer Jason Leigh could not be more believable as the tragic, doomed, criminally naive lovers. [10 Jan 1992]

It's an original and rather clever premise, but first-time director Chris Koch doesn't do anything with it.

What makes this film truly chilling is the fact first-time feature filmmaker Scott Elliott and his writers somehow make every step of this descent harrowingly believable.

As well-acted and well-directed as many of the individual scenes are, the movie itself is a mess. Lumet, who made the mistake of writing the script himself, apparently couldn't leave out anything that was in the book. It's a confusing jumble of characters and themes, with off-screen actions that crowd and diminish the movie's impact. [27 Apr 1990]

Crash can't rise from the ashes of its pessimism.

White Palace doesn't entirely work on this level (and is certainly no "Graduate"), but it carries a fascinating subtext. It dramatizes rejection of '80s values by a member of the '90s generation. Like several movies already released this year, it is a hopeful statement that the new decade will be - if not a return to the '60s - at least a clean break with the recent, shallow past. [19 Oct 1990]

An absorbing but somber drama.

Ponderously plotted, poorly cast, visually undistinguished and devoid of any real verve or charm.

It is Ferrell's best movie and the summer's funniest comedy so far.

An entertaining slice-of-life documentary that gets ever more fascinating as it moves along.

It doesn't, as they say, really work -- but it's enjoyable enough in spots to leave one feeling passably entertained.

As it turns out, the movie is still very much about two well-dressed undercover cops who strike sexy poses, express plenty of attitude and drive expensive cars and fast boats as pop music plays on the soundtrack and palm trees sway gently in the tropical night.

Anthony Hopkins is a great actor and he gives a resourceful, inventive, compelling performance that holds our attention over three hours. It never convinces us that he is Nixon: he doesn't look much like him, and he misses entirely that incredible shiftiness in his public manner. But it somehow works. [20 Dec 1995, p.C1]

A cogent, optimistic and mostly entertaining slice of ghetto life.

An endearing comedy that could well end up being one of the year's big hits.

While all the "Mission" plots are convoluted and slightly preposterous -- the keyword in the title is "Impossible" -- the latest is just this side of insultingly stupid. The longer you think about it, the less sense it all makes.

Mystery Men must have seemed magically goofy on storyboards, but has somehow turned into unappealing mush by the time it made it to the screen.

Eloquent and informative.

The movie year's most expensive and ambitious sci-fi spectacular, I Am Legend, is three movies in one: a futuristic effects-o-rama, a zombie thriller and a survivalist parable. Each is better than average, and the experience is fairly gripping.

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.

It's eye-filling, well-cast, often very funny and executed with great imagination and flair.

The whole enterprise is a colossal waste of everyone's time.

While its execution is fine, the movie is almost shockingly vapid.

Patrice Leconte's new film, My Best Friend, is probably his lightest and sweetest to date. Fans of his serious historical dramas ("Ridicule") or raucous farces ("Les Bronzes") may be disappointed, but others should find it a reasonably enjoyable feel-good comedy.

Not the most thrilling of competition films. There are only two short debate scenes, and each time the team gets to argue (in sound bites of rhetoric) the politically correct side of the issue.

An engaging but essentially routine tragic romance.

The film is also an impressive showcase for a large ensemble cast that also includes Josh Brolin, James Franco and Kerry Washington. The standout, however, is Hurt, who gives an almost unbelievably courageous performance as the movie's least sympathetic character.

The movie is exactly what it's billed to be: the successful blending of two distinctly different filmmaking sensibilities from two different generations. But the stronger, and more pessimistic, sensibility -- Kubrick's -- carries the day.

A clumsy and incompetent thriller for nine-tenths of its length, but it has an ending so clever and that goes so wildly against expectations it almost exonerates the film.

It's often surprisingly clever, dripping with respect for its model, and done with considerable wit and style.

It's crammed full of the dash, filmmaking flair, swashbuckling magic, impossible stunts and tongue-in-cheek humor that made the series such a phenomenon of its time, and -- for those versed in its traditions -- almost every frame is enjoyable on some level.

An unusually satisfying and inspiring historical epic from one of contemporary cinema's best filmmakers.

Rather incredibly ends up being a kind of inspirational upper.

Visually impressive but exceedingly unpleasant little nail-biter.

Absorbing, scary documentary.

Brosnan pulls out all the stops in his quest to be the last word in crude boorishness, only slightly relieved by the midlife soul-searching. Whether the public will buy him in this extreme role is another question. But it's a fearless, and fairly skilled, comic performance.

A highly original, often hilarious, what-if farce about Watergate.

Well-paced, well-structured nail-biter with precious little of the usual Hollywood nonsense, several virtuoso sequences, and a camera flourish that only occasionally gets silly.

It induces a serious case of sensory overload that left me drained and edgy.

The good news about Alan Rudolph's new film, Mortal Thoughts, is that it is dramatically engrossing, brilliantly acted by its big-star cast and filled with the touches of a virtuoso director at the top of his form. The bad news is that it leads us to one of the worst shaggy-dog endings of any mystery story I can remember. It's so totally unsatisfying, in fact, that it almost spoils all the good scenes that have come before it. [19 Apr 1991]

Could there possibly be a worse time for a movie celebrating a draft-evader who embraces Islam? You wouldn't think so.

I haven't been so captivated, chilled and surprised by a movie in years.

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

Director Emanuele Crialese captures a stifling, dead-end rural culture awash in nature's beauty but seething with pent-up sexual frustration.

It all comes together to be a remarkably dull movie.

The movie is 23 minutes longer than the Lean version, yet it somehow seems much less evocative of the novel's immense scope and texture. And its Cockney accents are such a strain to understand that as much as a third of the dialogue is indecipherable.

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]

Hocus Pocus also offers a slightly different kind of movie role for the Divine Miss M, which she carries off fearlessly. In fact, with her campy makeup and wildly extravagant gestures, she is probably closer here to her cabaret roots than she has been on film before - and her oldest, purest fans are sure to love her for it. [16 July 1993]

A powerful experience, filled with dazzlingly executed action sequences that generally avoid the rock music and drugged-out conventions of "Apocalypse Now," and even exude a certain core of humanity.

The cast is uniformly non-French, and restrained to the point of rigor mortis. Dunst is the movie's strongest and weakest element. Her natural charm carries us through the scenery, at the same time her distinct Americanness rings false in every scene.

Altman always manages to pop up with another masterpiece -- and darned if he hasn't done it again.

For 12-year-old boys, period.