More predictable than it ought to be - you can set your watch by the appearance of the mournful Nick Drake song on the soundtrack.

What's unique about this documentary is that it grips history with both hands, shakes it, examines it, and exits with the entire wrinkled contents bravely in tow.

There are moments when faltering levels of energy and inventiveness threaten to turn Too Much Sleep into a nonevent. But it signals the arrival of a promising filmmaker and is worth sticking with.

Screenwriter Kaufman is in fine meta-fettle here, even if he's still losing control of his material toward the end, and while it's too soon to tell whether Clooney has the stuff of a great director, he certainly knows who to hire.

What’s best about the documentary is all that Obama sun. It’s hard to come by these days, even in retrospect. The shade, however, and what occasions it, is all too available.

Hipsters is also kind of amazing, thanks to headlong enthusiasm and an endearing obliviousness to just how ghastly the whole thing keeps threatening to become.

There isn't a single chase scene in The Russia House. There's scarcely a love scene. And it dares to be slow. But it's attached to feelings as few spy movies are - and as even le Carre's book was not. The greatest compliment one can pay The Russia House is to say that it's the kind of spy movie that's making spy movies obsolete. [21 Dec 1990, p.49p]

To appreciate Solaris, the new film by Steven Soderbergh, it helps to downshift your moviegoing metabolism to a level approaching the cryogenically frozen: The movie's that cerebral, that contemplative, that slow.

Nicholson, Hunt, and Kinnear will win you over as they turn the film into a valentine to New York's walking wounded.

Weirdly enthralling film.

Rudo y Cursi is a grave and calculated affront to the men of Mexico, and that's the source of its roistering charm.

Hartley's spare dialogue cuts right to the characters' psyches; his terse, laconic style accentuates the everyday horror. [20 Sept 1991]

Nancy is an eccentric, pungent gift of a film about a woman without identity played by an actress without persona.

Begins with that invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz. But its chic indictment of empty materialist values fizzles.

The filmmaking is cool, watchful, and ultimately too distanced. Outrage isn't outrageous enough, and it hurts.

The film’s chief flaw is that it’s in the room but never really in the room — the key figures talk about passionate interoffice policy arguments, but we never actually see them. Still, The Final Year takes in setbacks, breakthroughs, gaffes, and a steady drumbeat of talking-head criticism from televised outsiders, heard on the film’s soundtrack but not seen.

The voice-over narrator (Perrin) recites environmentally pious platitudes that offer little enlightenment about what’s on the screen. This is annoying when something strange and unfamiliar is being shown.

Watching Jackson pop, lock, rock, writhe, thrust, and clutch his crotch, even at 50 percent, leaves a feeling of woe: This show really would have been major.

Watching them issue hugs produces an involuntary response. You want to hug them, too.

I can't say why Coppola wanted to spend time with this man. It's like following someone on Twitter who fails to generate many compelling tweets.

Enough originality and emotional weight to keep you engrossed even when it lapses into some pretty standard moves at the end.

Suffice it to say that Chris Smith's Home Movie is the most bananas episode of ''Cribs'' ever. The film is Smith's ballad of the wacky homeowner.

This time the not-so-idle talk is about taking a socially conscious stand against gang violence. And while some of this territory is covered too tritely and safely to have all the impact intended by director Malcolm D. Lee (“The Best Man Holiday”), the movie’s entreaties are compelling enough.

There’s a similar shared joy among the participants, a similar sense of discovery for the viewer, and, of course, a killer soundtrack.

The stakes in this story seem too low to justify its audience’s attention. If The Page Turner were a novel, it would hardly be a page turner. Why should we hold films to a lower standard?

A powerful film of suffering and sacrifice and desperation. But it's vacuous, banal, and, where its mix of sentiment and grisliness is concerned, rather despicable.

While Hartley, who made this movie on a shoestring budget, has avant on his mind, he's not nuanced enough to quite pull it off. [03 Aug 1990]

Halfway into this film, I wanted to smack the mopey bohemian couple played by July and Hamish Linklater; by the end, I realized the director was smacking them for me, and hard. In a case of biting the hand that feeds her, July has made possibly the worst date movie ever for trendy modern couples - a work that traps a pair of passive-aggressive hipsters in a drift of their own making.