Nick Nolte plays a great shambling wreck of a wounded Hemingway hero in The Good Thief, a film that's like a descent into the funkiest dive on the wrong side of the wrong town.

As a source of information about his life and work, this interview is almost worthless, but as an insight into his style, it is priceless.

I have such an unreasonable affection for this movie, indeed, that it is only by slapping myself alongside the head and drinking black coffee that I can restrain myself from recommending it.

It's the kind of movie you know you can trust, and you give yourself over to affection for these characters who are so lovingly observed.

Stevie seems destined to end the way it does, and is the more courageous and powerful for it. A satisfying ending would have been a lie.

The movie is not quite successful. It is too secretive about its heart.

With style and energy from the actors, with every sign of self-confidence from the director, with pictures that were in focus and dialogue that you could hear, the movie descended into a morass of narrative quicksand. By the end, I wanted to do cruel and vicious things to the screenplay.

The underlying secret of the four comedians is the way they find humor in daily life, and in their families. In this they're a lot like the Kings of Comedy.

An imperfect movie, but not a boring one and not lacking in intelligence.

Adult audiences may be underwhelmed. Not younger teenage girls, who will be completely fascinated.

How could director Lawrence Kasdan and writer William Goldman be responsible for a film that goes so awesomely wrong?

Not that the film is outrageous. That would be asking too much. It is dim-witted, unfunny, too shallow to be offensive.

There is real wit in Glover's performance. And wit, too, in R. Lee Ermey's performance as the boss, which draws heavily on Ermey's real-life experience as a drill sergeant.

The movie is like the low-rent, road show version of those serious drug movies where everybody is macho and deadly.

Walking in, I thought I knew what to expect, but i didn't anticipate how William Friedkin would jolt me with the immediate urgency of the action. This is not an arm's-length chase picture, but a close physical duel between its two main characters.

A high-speed, high-tech kiddie thriller that's kinda cute but sorta relentless.

I saw more important films at Sundance 2003, but none more purely enjoyable than Bend It Like Beckham, which is just about perfect as a teenage coming-of-age comedy.

Troche's tone is so relentlessly, depressingly monotonous that the characters seem trapped in a narrow emotional range. They live out their miserable lives in one lachrymose sequence after another, and for us there is no relief.

Until it descends into mindless routine action in the climactic scenes, Tears of the Sun is essentially an impressionistic nightmare.

It is so rare to find a film where you become quickly, simply absorbed in the story.

Not a successful movie--it's too stilted and pre-programmed to come alive--but in the center of it McDormand occupies a place for her character and makes that place into a brilliant movie of its own.

Here is a movie that ignores the Model Airplane Rule: First, make sure you have taken all of the pieces out of the box, then line them up in the order in which they will be needed. Bringing Down the House is glued together with one of the wings treated like a piece of tail.

The fact is, the reverse chronology makes Irreversible a film that structurally argues against rape and violence, while ordinary chronology would lead us down a seductive narrative path toward a shocking, exploitative payoff.

The shame is that more accessible Iranian directors are being neglected in the overpraise of Kiarostami.

One of the things I like best about Poolhall Junkies is its lack of grim desperation.

The film itself is on autopilot and overdrive at the same time: It does nothing original, but does it very rapidly.

In today's political climate, this movie and its people all seem to come from a very long time ago.

The purpose of the movie is perhaps to show us, in a quietly amusing way, that while we travel down our own lifelines, seeing everything from our own points of view, we hardly suspect the secrets of the lives we intersect with.