William Arnold

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.