William Arnold

DiCaprio could hardly be better. He brings this outrageous character and his demons to life with skill, sympathy and a symphony of small, telling touches.

It's an entertaining and mostly intelligent movie that is grungy enough to appeal to today's rock fans and nostalgic enough to appeal to the aging baby-boomer fans of the Fab Four. [22 Apr 1994]

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.

It fulfills a lot of the criteria for a successful oater: spectacular scenery, an evocative frontier atmosphere, an ensemble of enjoyably tight-lipped performances, and plenty of stylish violence.

Eloquent and informative.

It's really Harris' movie, and he brings to it just the right blend of engaging affability, gruff strength of character and transcendent nobility of spirit to make it a genuinely enriching experience.

As clumsy as the movie is in many ways, it strings together maybe a dozen situations in which we are absolutely, excruciatingly, on the edge of our seats -- which is to say that the new Poseidon essentially does its job.

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]

Re-creates the era convincingly, and, as usual, Penn is mesmerizing: a consummate movie actor at the peak of his game.

There are hints of madness in all the characters, and it gets creepier and more surreal as it goes along until it finally comes to a showstopping climax that took me completely by surprise and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight.

A solid piece of storytelling that doesn't pander, skips the usual POW stereotypes and allows the film to work reasonably well as an epic of war, a survival story, a prison thriller, a murder mystery and a courtroom drama.

Fascinating and mostly sympathetic.

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

The directors have told the press that one of their goals was "to make horseracing -- a great sport that has gotten progressively less attention over the past 30 years -- cool again." The movie actually does this. It sure inspired me to make plans for Emerald Downs.

It's high melodrama all the way - a play written early in Shakespeare's career, filled with great poetry but lacking the sensitivity and complexity (and historical accuracy) of his more mature histories, and revived so often on stage over the centuries primarily because it's such a rousing, audience-pleasing theater piece. [19 Jan 1996]

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

The style is dated, and its neorealism seems forced and ineffective, but it's still delectable, and mostly for the things Pontecorvo hated about it: its delirious '50s color, and its stars, particularly Montand at the peak of virility.

Director Neil Burger manages to make his technical deficiencies and clumsy interviews work for the credibility of his story rather than against it, and he builds an eerie, naturalistic suspense that's believable enough to raise an authentic goose bump or two.

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.

The film's near-fatal flaw is its dialogue, which had to be invented wholesale from the Old English text. It alternates between sounding stagy and anachronistically hip -- with more overuse of the F-word than any two Samuel L. Jackson movies. It's a big mistake.

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.

A gripping, unusual and suitably harrowing -- if, in the final analysis, not particularly satisfying -- concentration camp drama.

Does a solid job of dealing with the problem but with enough originality that it's not an exact duplication of the Gore film.

A winning combination. By some bizarre quirk of star chemistry, their persona complement each other, the action scenes have comic flair and the movie is mindless fun.

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

It's getting hard not to think of De Niro as anything but a dead-pan comedian.

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.

The film is annoyingly sketchy on Thompson's early years and education, and it spends so much time on his coverage of the 1972 presidential election and his own race for sheriff of Aspen, Colo., that major aspects of his career get short shrift or go unmentioned.