Big, bright, corny, muscular, beautifully photographed. [12 Nov 2000, p.27]

One of the smartest and funniest films of the year, at least for those who care about its subject. Every regular filmgoer should. Through the story of a talented but naive film school graduate (Kevin Bacon`s Nick Chapman) who suddenly becomes the hottest property in Hollywood, Guest assembles a deadly accurate sociology of the contemporary film industry-and its accuracy makes The Big Picture both hilarious and terrifying.

A talky, plodding film that seems likely to bore children and adults in equal measure. [11 Dec 1992, p.B2]

Cafe Society is a good-looking nothing, but there are times — thanks more to Allen's direction than his writing, and thanks mostly to the people acting out the masquerade — when "nothing" is sufficient.

It's as if the movie itself has been sprinkled with fairy dust, and good thing, too: The world of Peter Pan is, at heart, so troublesome that it might as well also be enchanting.

A weirdly old-fashioned affair. If it weren't for the explicit sexual encounters, this could be an Ibsen or a Strindberg play, unclothed and unmoored from the late 19th or early 20th century.

Wildly inventive, sweetly subversive.

Made after Visconti's second paralyzing stroke, in darkly splendid Roman interiors, this is a somber, meditative, confessional work about corruption and mortality, the ways the world and desire batter down even the most protected doors. [17 Oct 1994, p.5C]

It's a tribute to the quality of writing, direction and photography in this film that we willingly go along with the story.

It’s an actual, conflicted and sporadically insightful film, dramatizing what made Trump Trump at an especially impressionable period in his rise.

It’s consistent, and there’s enough juice in Hanks’ personal, human-scaled interest in ordinary heroism under fire to make the movie underneath the labels work on its own terms.

A warm-hearted gem of a film based on the V.S. Naipaul novel of the same name.

The movie plays like a very expanded version of what would make -- and likely has made -- a cute TV newsmagazine segment.

Filled with dazzling moments, Vengo never quite reaches the heights those moments promise.

You never lose awareness that Fraser and, particularly, Elfman are acting alongside creatures they can't actually see, and you constantly think you should be having more fun than you are. In the end, you want to ask the filmmakers: Is that all, folks?

A violent, improbable movie done in tersely elegant style, and it may be the last action movie for one of the cinema's great action stars, Clint Eastwood.

The Fourth Protocol was a great in-flight read, and it will probably be a great in-flight movie, too-though in a theater it looks a little pale and overextended. [28 Aug 1987, p.FC]

Silverado is a completely successful physical attempt at reviving the western, but its script would need a complete rewrite for it to become more than just a small step in a full-scale western revival. [10 Jul 1985, p.5]

A Selznick-produced Hitchcock: a courtroom melodrama of murder and romantic degradation for which Hitch wanted Laurence Olivier, Greta Garbo and Robert Newton, but had to settle for Gregory Peck, Alida Valli and Louis Jourdan. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

It wanders and putters and follows its main characters around.

It's refreshing to see a non-mainstream movie that wears its heart and lust on its sleeve, and has anything but violence on its mind.

Call The Grey "Deliverance" Lite, with snow, and wolves. And call it a solid January surprise.

Linklater's working-class mosaic is seriously interested in how most of this country gets by for a living. And that, sadly, makes it distinctive.

Serial Mom is a typically funny and cheerfully outrageous John Waters' comedy about the conjunction of suburbia and hell, perfect families and serial killers. [15 Apr 1994, p.C]

Those receptive to Godard's sense of humor will find Film Socialisme an elusive yet expansive provocation. Those less receptive will find it elusive, period.

What makes Synchronic sing is the two together, zinging each other with sardonic one-liners, their conversations meandering to the cosmic and the macabre after a few whiskeys.

The action in this live-action adaptation is sanded down and decidedly safe. Bobin loses the geographical thread in the film’s climax in and around Parapata, but it’s never about the visual thrills, it’s about the girl at the center of it all.

More explosive laughs from Leslie Nielsen, Pricilla Presley, and friends (George Kennedy, O.J. Simpson) in another madcap police farce that is often so funny you lose track of the terrorist story. Alas, the comic pace is not sustained to the finish, but maybe it couldn't be. [18 Mar 1994, p.C]