William Arnold

There's no denying the skill and flair with which director Paul Greengrass has restaged this unhappy event, creating an uncanny sense of immediacy and allowing us to be a fly on the wall at a seminal '70s tragedy.

There are some ingratiating moments in "Heart and Souls," but the comedy is mostly a misfire - derivative and emotionally calculated and never as cute or funny as it wants to be. [13 Aug 1993]

There's no disguising the fact that, beneath all its talk, this is a very traditional, very predictable romance; it's sorely in need of some comic relief; and, if you're a non-smoker, you will get very tired of its heroine blowing smoke in your face.

A warm-hearted and understated entertainment that's blissfully free of the heavy-handed crudity and other elements that have ravaged 21st-century Hollywood comedy.

It's incorrigibly unfunny.

It's a barrage of visual stimulation so excessive that it's hard to sort it all out. But it's often funny, its texture can be breathtaking and its pleasures likely will grow with repeated viewings.

In some ways, De Niro does a competent job in his second directorial effort but his characterizations are clumsy, and his members of the Power Elite always seem less real people than stick figures in a propaganda movie.

The characters are uniformly repulsive, the cliche-ridden script builds no real tension or psychological interest, and the bottom line is that Lee's innovative but ultimately tedious and even ludicrous MTV-style visuals add absolutely nothing to the story dynamics.

Legends of the Fall is one of those movies that is so sloppy and so poorly written and so clumsily directed that every dramatic scene seems to either insult your intelligence or come off as being unintentionally hilarious. [13 Jan 1995]

If the film has a weakness, it's an ending that's so vague and open to interpretation that it's not at all clear how director Andrew Wagner ultimately wants us to feel about these self-absorbed characters and their precious literary concerns. But the performances carry the day.

A delicious one-time treat.

Ferrell, of course, has his moments. But he doesn't have an engaging "center" as a comedian.

First-time director Ted Demme (no relation to Jonathan), also of MTV ("Yo! MTV Raps"), displays little flair for comedy or storytelling beyond a sketch length. He also seems to have the sensibility of a dirty-minded eighth-grader. [11 Mar 1994]

It never generates much interest in its story or affection for its characters, and it's simply not half as funny as it needs to be.

Sandler's frequent director, Peter Segal, also rises to the occasion, giving the proceedings some of the rough-hewn, hard-edged look of the original, and brings it to a funny, satisfying climax that -- happily -- doesn't cop out.

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

Always absorbing.

The script (by Richard Russo) is solid, the performances are witty and fun, and the movie is a most agreeable way to spend an hour and a half.

It is purely and fearlessly a girl-and-her-horse movie that isn't trying to be all things for all audiences.

While the film is intriguing as it's transpiring, it has very little impact. It's more intellectual than emotional, its message doesn't come through without a struggle and it was completely out of my mind five minutes after seeing it.

It is relatively suspenseless and often distastefully crude.

It's just one more competent but routine, midlevel ($70 million) late-summer action movie filled with the usual explosions, shootouts and male bonding.

Is Hollywood so disconnected from its past and bankrupt of ideas that it doesn't even know this movie is a screaming cliché?

In his first role since turning 40, Cruise displays a likable new maturity, and an unexpected willingness to look weak and foolish.

All told, Cars is a knockout.

The cruel simplicity of the atrocity is made needlessly chaotic by artless camerawork that swishes rapidly back and forth across the action, to the accompaniment of a syrupy soundtrack.

For all its other virtues, the supporting casting is lackluster, the script never quite kicks into place as a sports movie and Clooney the director seems to lack the touch that might have set the proceedings on fire as a zany ensemble comedy.

McCabe is simply one of the most poetic and beautiful films ever made. [18 Feb 1994]

A suspenseful, elegant entertainment.

It's a movie brimming with good intentions, solid production values and searing performances. However, it never quite clicks into place with any real satisfaction.

Thornton has made so many bad movies and become so notorious as a talk-show eccentric that it's easy to forget what a good film actor he can be.

The movie itself cannot begin to match its delicious high concept. It's offensively funny in places but it can't sustain itself for a feature length running time and it's not nearly as clever or as fun as it should be.

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.

Obree's psychology is fascinating and, even though the competitive scenes mostly involve him racing against himself in a spectator-free indoor track, the movie manages to give its audience a suitable adrenaline rush here and there.

The period detail, the makeup effects, the computer-generated transformations, and Jerry Goldsmith's brassy score are all excellent. The Shadow also manages to make fun of itself without ever letting the self-parody get out of hand, or disintegrate into camp. For what is essentially a summer slugfest, The Shadow also has unusually rich character performances. [01 Jul 1994]

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 movie undeniably comes alive and brings down the house every time it goes into one of its many outlandish, Mad Magazine-style spoofs of television commercials. [11 Apr 1990]

Lacks the driving unity that gave "Gettysburg" its focus, dramatic arc, climax and catharsis.

Did it move me? And the answer is no. I thought it has a certain ghoulish, voyeuristic fascination, but I found it strangely remote and uninvolving on both emotional and spiritual levels.

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.

Mercifully short -- a mere 80 minutes, plus the end-titles. That means I had to slap myself in the face fewer times than usual to stay awake in a movie this grindingly mediocre.

When the film suddenly turns into "Rocky" -- as all boxing films of the past two decades invariably do -- it invalidates its theme.

A first-class snoozer.

There's also a terrific performance from Collette, who, in only a handful of scenes, wonderfully communicates the unusual resourcefulness of a demented woman who has spent her life assuming a succession of physical handicaps as a survival technique.

A fairly predictable musical-comedy vehicle for the rap duo Kid 'N Play that saws off much of the hard edge of the comic style they displayed in their lower-budget first outing, House Party. [05 Jun 1992]

And the mostly stage-trained Sinise - who draws double duty here as director and co-star - distinguishes himself with an especially sympathetic performance and a lean, sensitive, almost delicate directorial debut that mark him as an industry force to be reckoned with.

Plenty of visuals but little of the rhythm, flow or characterizations that made the earlier film an instant children's classic.

As a caper movie, it's a travesty that's impossible to understand or follow, but it's quite funny and clicks along nicely as a giddy, self-deprecating showcase for its gaggle of stars.

It may be emblematic of new-millennium Hollywood that this movie has turned out to be one more emotionless, brainless, overproduced action film.

Sadly, it's a disappointment. Nicole Kidman could hardly be more enchanting in the lead, but the script is one of writer-director Nora Ephron's weakest.

It's impossible to praise too highly the verve, skill and authenticity with which Spielberg brings off his alien invasion.

Without the saving grace of comedy, Martin's natural abrasiveness is off-putting, and he just doesn't have the stuff of a romantic lead.

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]

To be fair, Aronofsky has a knack for stylistic overkill, and his hammering onslaught is undeniably riveting, at first anyway.

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.

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

Somehow the elements do not add up to by anything especially memorable.

It's by far the most uncompromising and unapologetic gay-themed drama ever made for a wide release by a major Hollywood studio with name stars.

Unfortunately, the goofiness never quite finds its groove. The romantic chemistry is tepid, the comedy misses as often as it hits, the picaresque plot keeps dogging down and even actors as skilled as Platt, Irons and Lena Olin fail to register strongly in their roles.

The air of deja vu is thick as molasses in Glory Road, a lively but overly slick and grindingly predictable sports drama.

The thing is far too absurd and broadly played for its own good.

Winner of the top prize at the last Berlin Film Festival, the film is sporadically powerful, sensitively acted and full of music, used with imagination and flair.

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]

The flaw in the movie is that it can't give a plausible reason WHY this patriotic Catholic family man turned traitor, and the script annoyingly addresses this lack several times by saying, "The why doesn't matter." Actually, it does. We want some reason.

It's an absorbing, progressively unsettling and ultimately very inspiring biographical reflection that, in the interest of creating its subject's internal landscape, plays some chilling tricks on its audience.

Boyle gives us some truly harrowing sequences and a succession of images that stick in the mind like a bad dream.

A passionate, well-made documentary that stresses how time is running out for a peaceful solution.

Too dumb and improbable to even go into.

A rather dull movie.

In fact, when not kicking butt, (Li)'s kind of a blank spot in the center of the screen.

The script's labored efforts to push the proceedings into a thought-provoking military drama -- and draw some clear moral issue -- are, at best, flimsy.

The script (by Cheryl Edwards, who wrote "Save the Last Dance") is shallow and dumb, the conflict (success goes to Jackie's head) is especially unconvincing, and director Charles S. Dutton shamelessly allows his own small part (as Jackie's mentor) to hog the camera.

Although it's often uneven and rambling, its sum conveys an unusual richness and satisfaction. While most films these days are about nothing, this film seems to be about everything that's plaguing the human spirit in a relentlessly globalizing world.

Its animation is simply glorious, but its story and characters are trite.

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

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.

Anyone who goes in this movie expecting a rollicking comedy is in for a shock. Its scant humor is dry as the Sahara and, like all Dickens stories, its upbeat ending is never quite convincing enough to offset the horrors of the journey toward it.

One more bloated effects-o-rama lumbering through a formula plot (super-villain out to rule the world) without much zest, imagination or awareness of its own absurdity.

It's so irrelevant, unambitious and lazy it almost seems to be thumbing its nose at the daring filmmaker Woody once was.

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

Far from the worst movie of 2006, but it may be the most disappointing. It should have been wonderful -- a delicious tribute to classic Hollywood -- but it simply doesn't come off.

It's routine, TV sitcom fodder, but the supporting cast is better than average.

Predictable and agonizingly politically correct.

Together is a likely candidate to become that one foreign-language film that jumps out of the art houses each year to become a mainstream phenomenon.

Definitely deserves points for trying to be something thought-provoking and different, but it doesn't really stand up to analysis and it comes off as a pretentious mess.

Stiller and Black have the chemistry of fingernails-on-blackboard and the movie is disastrously unfunny.

It's an eye-filling, sumptuously detailed historical epic that grandly re-creates the bloody gladiatorial spectacles and smoke-filled, spit-flying, claustrophobically crowded arenas of its bygone era.

If not cinema magic, The Dinner Game is still a workable screwball comedy.

Hypnotic and fun.

The film has an exciting visual texture that gives body to Brown's bestseller-ese prose, and uniformly strong performances that give dimension, depth and interest to characters that the author never entirely brought to life. In this sense, I found it much more entertaining and satisfying than the novel.

Visceral, alive and very scary.

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

It's cumulatively entertaining, and a fascinating and nostalgic time capsule of its era. Watch for the cameo by Brigitte Bardot.

An unpredictable, unusual, consistently engrossing drama of a kind that has almost disappeared from Hollywood.

Some of it works, most of it doesn't. But the real problem of the movie is that it's so utterly lacking in freshness and originality. This is exactly the kind of formulaic indie gay comedy that was so overdone in the '80s and '90s that it became a film festival cliché.

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.

The film plays like a Hollywood-influenced Japanese samurai movie, though nothing as subtle as Kurosawa's best, and with white subtitles that often are hard to read against the white of the Gobi.

It's overblown and greedy and feels like more of a merchandizing scheme than a movie.