William Arnold

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.