It ambles along gracefully, picking up points for subtle detail; but its conventions belong to light comedy, and they overwhelm most of the complexities the director has devised.

In terms of its title, Haywire doesn't quite go there; it's more "Haywire-ish." But it's eccentric, and the on-screen violence is sharp and exciting - brutal without being either subhumanly sadistic or superhumanly ridiculous.

A wry romantic comedy set among Bruno's targets, the Grenoble bourgeois.

What makes XX/XY so engaging; it attempts to define love through broken characters who know neither themselves nor the meaning of love.

Good, grungy fun.

Sex, lies, and videotape discovers a distinctive, laconic rhythm right from the start, thanks to Soderbergh's taste for holding his shots just a bit longer than conventional, slick editing technique would allow. [11 Aug 1989, Friday, p.A]

Delightful coming-of-age film that becomes universal by way of its subject matter.

This is not high art. It might not qualify as low art. But it is 90 minutes or so during which people can put their brains on the shelf and enjoy a few laughs.

Much to their credit, filmmakers Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields leave almost all the talking to band members and their inner circle. That gives this documentary--their first film--a brisk authority, humor and directness true to the band's scrappy story.

The chief limitation of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is an old story: However touching, Cooke's Rachel is there mainly to prop up the sweetly messed-up young male lead, and then to quietly guide him toward adulthood.

As a sheer ghostly thriller, it's mostly a spell-binder, but I was disappointed at the ending.

Now 94, Squibb takes care of business every minute in the enjoyable contrivance Thelma, which succeeds, sometimes in spite of itself, for reasons revealed in the first minute of writer-director Josh Margolin’s comedy.

Compelling and intensely provocative.

Badham uses faster cuts and cockeyed camera angles to give us Fonda's unsettled view of the world in the early scenes, then settles into a more conventional action vocabulary. He relies on stylish production design - Fonda's cell boasts a high-tech cantilevered bed - to suggest that this adventure is fantastic, even alien, to most sensibilities. (Besson used the opposite tack. His production design for the long training sequence of the film was naturalistic, his camera approaches quirky and alienated.) [19 March 1993, p.C]

Mantel and Skrovan's documentary astutely reminds us of why we need the world's Naders. It's a reasonable movie about an often admirably unreasonable man.

Anspaugh, whose "Hoosiers" showed he knows from feel-good movies, directs this story as if he were conducting "Bolero," carefully building climax upon climax as the story spirals to an underdog triumph every bit as tearful as that of "Rocky."

Starts out wobbly but ends up quite nicely, primarily because Carrey has a wonderful acting partner in Zooey Deschanel.

This is straight-up commercial comedy, low-keyed diversion, and while it can't hold a candle to recent, dark-comic Israeli achievements such as Joseph Cedar's "Footnote," the actors more than save it.

Nichols has yet to make an uninteresting film; this one’s a stimulating collision of myth and realism, and keeping Comer at the core was a very smart move.

You don't need to be a soccer fan to, like Cosmos fans, fall for this captivating tale, told in "Rashomon"-like style.

One of the most hopeful movies I've seen recently--not just for its humane, realistic story line, but in its very being.

A good summer movie, directed with great verve and imagination and filled with innovative, eye-popping effects. Cameron never relinquishes his grip on the audience, smoothly segueing from action sequence to action sequence and topping himself each time. [3 July 1991, Tempo, p.1]

It's a film that is mystifying and haunting -- a cool, brotherly vision of the last day and the coming flood, of American dreams and the vanishing frontier.

A preposterous but beautifully polished Danish thriller.

Respect runs into trouble when its own respect toward Aretha Franklin, the woman who gave us the voice of a century, settles for garden-variety adoration. But longtime stage director Liesl Tommy’s debut feature, working from a screenplay by dramatist and screenwriter Tracey Scott Wilson, offers plenty of compensations amid its biopic conventions.

Hogan is an appealing performer, and Kozlowski has a brisk charm as his love interest. Indeed, the film functions far better as romantic comedy than it does as social satire, building an entertaining sexual suspense as an unacknowledged attraction builds between the two leads.

The jokes, mostly bitter, deadpan asides in a depiction of U.S. anti-terrorist activity as its own form of domestic terrorism, arrive just in time. The pacing’s both swift and, in proud, sour comic tradition, Swiftian.

Some of the action (and violence) in A Cat in Paris borders on the jarring, and the slam-bang finale - set atop Notre Dame Cathedral - favors bombast over wit. But getting there is a lot of fun, in part because the animators take time to make Dino a truly charismatic animal.