William Arnold

Entertaining and eye-opening.

The script keeps to the point, the performances sparkle with originality, the direction of Jean-François Pouliot mostly has the right touch and the film ultimately generates some of the distinctively eccentric appeal of a classic Ealing Studio comedy of the 1950s.

The exception is Matt Dillon, who goes all-out to be arrogant and despicable. Indeed, building on his scary performance earlier this year in "Crash," he's shaping up to be quite the movie villain: definitely someone you love to hate.

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.

The film is downright repulsive in places, and otherwise pushes the envelope for an art film, but it's a dazzling piece of filmmaking that wins us over with its boldness and artistry.

It wants to be both an art-film homage and a rollicking, outrageous sex farce, and it's not really enough of either to make an impression.

As near as I can tell, it's the smallest-scale, lowest-budget, most experimental film Friedkin has ever made, as well as the most thoroughly unpleasant and off-putting -- though it builds a grisly, masochistic fascination as it powers along.

There are a handful of laughs, and maybe three solid scenes. Otherwise, it's an unfunny, relatively charmless, ultimately grueling excuse for a comedy that often plays like a 105-minute public service ad on why it's not a good idea to have children. [20 Dec 1996]

Loaded down with gritty Glasgow atmosphere and authenticity, and works so well as an ensemble piece

The film's single downside is a certain nagging sense of deja vu: the fact that so many of the elements of the story -- the dark force, the all-empowering object, etc. -- have been usurped over the years (by "Star Wars" and others) that you feel as if you've been down this road many, many times before.

It's not an instant classic, but it's imaginatively drawn, full of charming characters, alive with action sequences and blissfully free of the snickering scatology and endless pop-culture references.

Gradually and inexorably, the small crises of the children assume a poignant dramatic profluence, and the soothing patience of the teacher begins to have an almost hypnotically balming effect on the viewer.

This harmless but mediocre enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. Hollywood magic can do a lot, but it can't raise the dead.

Comes across as a fairly weak retooling.

This ill-fitting Tuxedo is strictly off-the-rack.

It's bleak, credulity straining and often stomach-turning, but it definitely works as a heart-tugging character study, and Rourke's performance as the has-been title character is golden.

It's an ambitious, eye-filling and thought-provoking work, but it manages to be frustratingly uneven and doesn't really represent Bertolucci at his most fluent. [27 May 1994]

Harris genuinely seems to be at one with the character, and his movie is eerily alive.

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

"James" is both genuinely exciting as an adventure and genuinely charming as a fantasy, plus it doesn't look quite like anything we've seen before. [12 Apr 1996]

The script consists largely of goofy little scenes in which various groupings of the four characters banter in that nervous, Woody Allen-ish, never particularly funny or endearing or believable dialogue style of the '90s dating movie.

It would be very possible for a reasonably intelligent person to sit through its tidal wave of imagery and not get this vision at all.

An exhilarating piece of epic filmmaking that it pulls you in, sweeps you up and works very much as its own thing.

Its concept is gutsy, its script is literate and intelligent, its visuals and cinematic craftsmanship are mouth-dropping, and its vision of the insanity of various religions vying to dominate the real estate of the Holy Land comes through with great power.

The filmmakers have wildly miscalculated the chemistry these real-life lovers generate on film.

Imparts its fair share of laughs but bogs down after a solid start and never makes anything special out of its premise.

This is still Reiner's worst movie since 1994's "North." Wilson is lackluster, the film's depiction of the collaborative process is (unlike "Adaptation") tortuously false, and it's so disrespectful to the realities of writing and publishing that it has no satiric bite.

Works best of all as a vehicle for Richard Gere, who has simply never looked better or held the screen more securely.