Depardieu gives the story a firm center of gravity, aided by Joffé's eye for colorful settings and period detail.

Bravo works too hard at extolling Castro -- The film's historical footage is compelling, though, and provides plenty to think about.

Some touching moments, but too blandly inspirational.

This semiexpressionist fantasia is a botch.

Too often Churchill feels more like an exposé than a deep-dish psychological exploration

The action is dynamically filmed and Willis is at his best. Suspense is soon hijacked by outright gore and grisliness, though.

Funny dialogue, crisp black-and-white cinematography, and a well-chosen cast of mostly stage-trained actors raise this eccentric fantasy a notch above the ordinary.

the strongest emotion it whips up is an overwhelming desire to stop your ears against the stupid dialogue, bombastic sound effects, and atrocious music that assaults you every second - courtesy of Dynamic Digital Sound, a diabolical new development in technological overkill. Surely no good movie would feel the need to be so loud. [25 Jun 1993]

Kitano's first major comedy is loose and likable.

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

The pace of this Bolivia/US coproduction is slower than that of a snail, but it gathers some interest as the themes of the vignettes dovetail near the end.

Because most movies about Holocaust saviors feature Jews as victims rather than as rescuers, Walking With the Enemy, by contrast, has a special cachet. But the film is as dramatically inert as its origins are inspirational.

The acting is endearing and the story has great charm before predictability and sentimentality eventually take over.

I'd like Head of State better if it had less cartoonish violence, and if its gags weren't so predictable. Rock is in fine comic form, though, and his directing debut shows real promise.

Much of the movie exploits its subject for low-grade laughs, but in the end it takes a foursquare stand against the sleazy business it portrays, exposing its capacity for decadence and degradation.

The blue humor in We’re the Millers is just bland. And yes, Aniston performs a (modified) striptease. That’s pretty bland, too.

It's as if the filmmakers were hungover from the first film and wanted to make a violent action movie instead.

Weak acting, even by Hoffman. Aniston is so far above this material she should never, ever have signed on.

Philippe Rousselot's carefully shaded cinematography looks great, but the screenplay is pretentious and there's little to applaud in the top-heavy acting by John Malkovich and Julia Roberts.

Watts is wonderful, and the story's forsaken-child theme still has plenty of horrific power.

More psychological realism and less showy cinema would have made this offbeat melodrama more memorable.

Henderson steals the show as an elderly African-American man befriended by one of the main characters.

This visually inventive fantasy paints the wide screen with colorful effects, but its psychological and spiritual ideas rarely rise above "new age" fuzziness.

Shyamalan remains a stilted screenwriter, but Roger Deakins's cinematography is spooky, creepy, eerie all the way.

The movie catches occasional fire when Bridget suddenly says what's really on her mind. The rest is silliness.

The movie paints a vivid portrait of a time and place, but falls back on familiar formulas that diminish its value as both emotional drama and slice-of-life realism.

A promising premise and some very good actors are smothered in goo in The Answer Man.

Directed by Martin Sheen, the picture works hard to be socially and psychologically penetrating but doesn't quite make the grade. [15 Mar 1991, p.12]