Director John Landis' comic timing is a little slow in spots - we get the joke before he thinks we will - but Oscar generates a solid pace of rolling big laughs and winds up as a pretty good time at the movies. [26 Apr 1991, p.C]

More of a physical achievement in moviemaking than a piece of storytelling, but I do recommend it on that basis. [15 January 1999, Friday, p.A]

After Dark, My Sweet does capture Thompson's characteristic mood - a sort of lurid fatality, where moral questions have long since dropped out and there isn't much use struggling - but it doesn't have much of his distinctive, disruptive texture. The film is much too smooth for that, much too professional and much too carefully executed. [24 Aug 1990, p.H]

The film struggles to capture what Hudson’s personality was like in private. Nor does it talk about his drinking, which reportedly became an issue later in life. But it’s a terrific portrait of how Hollywood once functioned — and the artifice of it all.

Good, expensive, easygoing fun. It's no masterpiece, but why should Soderbergh -- or anybody -- get three in a row?

Though the characters played by Martin and Hawn - a lonely architect and the confidence woman who moves into his country home, claiming to be his wife after a one-night stand - don't have much inside them but sawdust, their surface reactions are entertaining and engaging enough to make Housesitter a winning romantic comedy. [12 June 1992, p.C]

Lewis Milestone preserves more of the original play than Hawks in His Girl Friday, but it's a much thinner movie: more mechanical, less chilling or ripe in its cynicism, the pace less nimble and charged. Still, the dialogue is gritty, magical, top-flight. Modern screenwriters, see this and weep. [25 Jul 1999, p.43C]

I can't help but wish this new Far From the Madding Crowd came with the thrill of interpretive discovery, the way Jane Campion gave Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady" a good shaking-up or, more conventionally, the way James Ivory mainstreamed E.M. Forester in "A Room With a View" and "Howards End."

I hope Spacek gets a role as spacious and accommodating as Redford’s someday. By contrast, Spacek’s co-star delivers what he has been best at: a single, careful look, or mood, or understated note at a time. Redford is not a chord man. I wouldn’t call the film itself complex, but it’s sweet-natured.

Martin Lawrence and Ashton Kutcher may seem like an odd-sounding comedy team, but in some weird way, they click as voice-actors and cartoon buddies in Open Season.

One of the more intelligent, better-made new movies around right now, but, despite everything, it doesn't really connect with the nerves and heart. It's a romance without anguish, although the pain of love is really what it's all about.

Nick Kroll is shrewdly cast as the Lovings' ACLU lawyer, green but enthusiastic; my favorite of the supporting turns comes from Sharon Blackwood, as Richard's rock-solid midwife mother.

Neil Burger's sharply conceived, inventive movie is a highly involving piece of work.

Blast is as bleak as noir gets, packed with black-and-white images of '60s New York City that recall Jean-Pierre Melville's French thrillers, and a street-tough taste that suggests Cassavetes and points ahead to Scorsese. [29 Oct 2004, p.C2]

Instead of a modern classic, able to travel the globe with ease, Il Divo is merely a wonderfully cast, tonally assured achievement, with a uniquely strange tour de force at its core.

Sharp, well-acted film.

A smart, witty, sexy take on the perils of becoming an adult.

There’s nothing vague about the narrative of The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Its strangeness is crystal clear. It plays out in ways both sardonically funny and extremely cruel.

If you're looking for a rock star to carry a movie mostly by himself, though, Iggy (aka James Osterberg), now 69, is a good candidate.

The late '40s world Coppola has put together for Tucker is an extremely stylized one: Vittorio Storaro's cinematography has the bright, hard, almost lacquered look of old Technicolor; Dean Tavoularis' sets, built with slanting floors and surfaces, create an imaginary, compacted space in which actors and objects seem to be thrusting out toward the camera; and the transitions between scenes, based on visual rhymes and elaborate wipes, effectively remove the movie from the orderly flow of normal film time. [12 Aug 1988]

It's a good ol' boy version of "Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?," but whereas that classic had four characters in direct conflict, "Fool for Love" essentially is a two-character duel to the quick.

When Aimee and Jaguar gets on one of its frequent rolls, it can evoke memories of Bertolucci or even De Sica.

Luckily, Wilde has style to spare -- as well as the perfect player to impersonate the flamboyant Irish writer: actor-writer Stephen Fry. [12 Jun 1998, p.H]

It's Complicated isn’t: It’s pretty simple. It’s simply a good time.

It's not Maddin's best work -- it may even be the least of his four features to date -- but there's something mesmerizing about it all the same, a quality of perverse wit and unbuttoned imagination you see too rarely.

Has the literary richness, depth of character and tone that such a morally difficult, powerful narrative requires.

The interview sessions are all disastrous in one way or another; Let It Rain is at its wittiest when Michel flails around, grousing about his own divorce and child custody troubles without ever quite asking his interview subject an actual question

Factotum, starring Matt Dillon and Lili Taylor in two of their best film performances, is a good movie about the L.A. underbelly, as recalled by an expert: Charles Bukowski.