The same story was told vastly better in the 1949 melodrama "The Reckless Moment."

Contains extremely graphic sex and many twists that are unpredictable but not very compelling.

Halfway through the movie, I decided a better title for this weepie contraption would be “The Hurt Letter.”

Kline stands out in the dual roles of the heartless tycoon and his playboy son.

The acting is passionate, but the film would be more effective if it presented a more thoroughgoing lesson in the raging horrors that swept through European culture during the era of the French Revolution.

Figgis brings strong visual imagination to the first hour, but he can't rescue Richard Jefferies's screenplay from plot holes bigger than the manor itself.

While the story is sentimental, heartfelt acting makes its impact less manipulative.

Iñárritu does the actor no favors by putting him through the existential wringer every step of the way. Uxbal suffers for all our sins.

What's lacking in The Upside of Anger is a steady sense that we're watching real people cope with real, jolting emotions.

This feature-length sitcom episode is handsomely filmed, but not as funny as you'd hope with Steve Martin and Diane Keaton in leading roles, and some of the humor has a nasty edge. [8 Dec 1995, p.13]

Gary Oldman and Lena Olin give energetic performances, ably supported by Annabella Sciorra and Roy Scheider as a long-suffering wife and a high-powered mobster. But the movie's main distinction is its increasingly lurid tone, reaching heights of mayhem so bizarre they're almost surrealistic. [4 Feb 1994, p.12]

The costumes and design are gorgeous enough to distract us from the wildly erratic tone – some of the time.

Bassett and Diggs are appealing as the slightly odd couple, but the movie rambles on too long.

Liam Neeson and Alan Rickman give sturdy performances, but Neil Jordan's historically based drama seems oddly cool and distant with regard to its incendiary subject.

There has to be a good reason to put yourself through yet another junkie odyssey and Candy flunks the test.

This ghastly swatch of pulp horror is compelling at the most basic level, but so little is going on in it that you might as well be watching a sadistic lab experiment performed on mice.

Hollywood is notorious for giving its second-best roles to women, and the situation clearly hasn't changed when a superficial romp like Postcards From the Edge represents the best a major studio can come up with in exploring women's issues. [25 Oct 1990, p.14]

The Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai has an undeservedly high reputation as a master stylist. He's more like a master window dresser.

David O. Russell hasn't yet developed enough filmmaking savvy to juggle so many intellectual, emotional, and narrative elements. He's clever and ambitious, but perhaps too much so.

What begins as a twisted sex romp turns film noir-ish. Guthe is so anxious to show us what a larcenous tramp Mini is that he never shows us any other sides to her.

The best reason to see It Runs in the Family is the sight of unquenchable Kirk.

The story has more violence than brains, but Hong Kong action star Chow makes an interestingly moody impression in his first Hollywood role.

It’s the sort of poetic conceit that needs a filmmaker far more rapt and intuitive than Haynes, whose jeweler’s precision keeps everything at an emotional remove.

It's as forgettable as they come.

But the drama's attack on racism would be more persuasive if it rejected vigilante justice and recognized that hatred and violence of all kinds must be condemned if evils like bigotry are ever to be eradicated.

The most inventive aspect of the film, aside from a lovely, daffy romantic duet between hypernerds played by Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig, are the promotional tie-ins with which we’ve been inundated -- Ron hawking Dodge Durango trucks, accepting journalism school awards, etc.

Some of the suspense set-pieces are impressive, but the picture would pack a greater wallop if it were stitched together more tightly and consistently.

Allen has fun with all his roles -- The rest of the acting is bland, but the movie's preteen target audience won't mind, and adults will find occasional grown-up jokes to chuckle at.