Sure, this movie is proudly profane, but it's also funny.

The perfect film for anyone who finds the Keystone Cops a little too understated and I mean that as a compliment.

This is a marvelous film, a look at the strange, exasperatingly labyrinthine process of adolescence and the diverse ways people find to deal with it.

Promises may want to unite the audience in humanitarian emotions, but it's more useful as a prod to examine what these children are learning from their schools, their leaders, and their media.

Viewers impressed by the fairly standard martial-arts action of "Crouching Tiger" will really be wowed after seeing this film.

Goes down like a single-malt aged for 25 years.

As close to a perfect piece of satire as filmmakers have seen in quite some time.

Offers a welcome perspective, reminding us that extremism in the name of a values system is nothing new -- not even on these shores.

Levinson's quirky caper is rich with laughs.

Turns the kleig lights around to produce a wry and dead-on commentary on the film industry and the journalists who cover it.

The whole plot is a shambles. And yet none of this matters much when you're laughing as hard as this film makes you laugh.

The glory of the movie is Depp, who achieves his own immortality.

The film -- florid, excessive, brash -- owes its success to bravura performances by Sean Penn as Eddie, Robin Wright Penn as Maureen and John Travolta as Joey, the third leg of a triangle. The three play their parts with an abandon that keeps the film buoyant and luminous. Most of all, these three superb actors give us permission to enjoy the film's terribly flawed characters rather than to judge them. [29 Aug 1997]

Well worth the wait.

The conventional and the cliche are slam-dunked in favor of a fresh, authentic take on passion, ambition and coming of age.

One of the year's most unsettling -- and perhaps most illuminating -- films.

A computer-animated burlesque fairy tale that generates more belly laughs than any live-action comedy since "Best in Show."

The true heartbreak of Maria Full of Grace is that it never comes.

The Cockettes is a grand place to visit, even for those who wouldn't want to live there.

Spring, Summer values life, beauty and even human fallibility, ascribing to humanity a nobility we neglect at our own peril.

Replete with so many wisecracks, puns, double entendres and visual jokes that you almost need a flow chart to keep up with them all. But try; the effort is definitely worthwhile, and the results are hilarious.

Monsieur Ibrahim is about people interacting as people, not symbols (one reason, Sharif has said, he took the role was to help his grandchildren's generation understand that idea).

It's a frustrating film in that its characters resolutely defy convention, and its story offers no epiphany, no one moment when everything becomes clear.

Le Samourai's take on complicity, betrayal and love is thoroughly original and as tough as a film can be. [06 Jun 1997]

Original, unfailingly entertaining marital-breakup movie.

The coincidences pile up in Career Girls, but by then Leigh has involved us so fully in the emotional lives of his characters that the contrivances are easily dismissed.

Takes 20 minutes to burst into fierce, inspired filmmaking.

The risks these guys take seem outlandish, their accomplishments otherworldly.