Phil Hartman wrote and directed the picture, which proves for the zillionth time that a low budget doesn't have to mean low quality.

Says Lauro: "This is about as close as you can get to the way it sounded during slavery days." Lauro and McGlynn understand, too, that these clips must be experienced whole. They let the music unfold in real time, not snippets.

It’s a universal story that is also, by virtue of its very particular time and place, a singular experience.

While this slightly edgy comedy has moments of offbeat charm, it would carry more conviction if the acting were richer and the characters focused on more sophisticated attitudes and ambitions.

It's dark, funny, ferocious, and vintage Wilder all the way.

Färberböck has directed the story with a canny blend of liveliness and taste.

I found much of it as emotionally rigged as a crooked horse race.

Quiet, mysterious, sometimes violent, ultimately close to sublime.

For most of the way this is an eye-popping, not blood-curdling, experience.

The accounting of his life story, as it unfolds in the film, is grounded in the brutal realities of corporate skulduggery. I’m a big fan of Balzac’s maxim that “behind every great fortune is a great crime,” and if nothing in Jobs’s history qualifies as a great crime, there is certainly a long trail of extreme misdeeds.

It's all a lot closer to melodrama than drama, but Thalbach is a dynamo.

The new Superman has its visionary charms, but there's only so far you can go without great characters.

Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith give uproarious comic performances as government agents ordered to keep New York's monsters in Manhattan, where they'll blend right in with the rest of the confusion.

Smoothly directed by Kevin Costner, who also gives a sensitive performance in the leading role. The screenplay is often trite, however, and there's no reason for the picture's three-hour length. [9 Nov 1990, Arts, p.12]

This intellectual allegory would carry more punch if it didn't slip into melodrama so often, but it marks Aronofsky as an exceptionally promising new filmmaker.

In reducing Presumed Innocent to a 126-minute film, director Pakula has necessarily stripped it of many complexities and ambiguities that lend the novel much of its interest. The performances are capable, if rarely inspired.

In keeping with this background, the movie boldly incorporates actual newsreel footage - with authentic images of human suffering, some of them seen in TV reports on the war - into its conventionally scripted and acted story.

Dark Money should set off warning bells for even those who believe that the Citizens United decision, equating corporations with people and money with speech, was a First Amendment victory for free speech.

A fascinating glimpse of family love and rivalry, if not a deep-digging documentary of "My Architect" quality.

The screenplay has flashes of real wit, and Perlman is perfect in the title role.

“Séraphine” was haunting; Violette, for all its writhings, is familiar.

The film is often​ sharp and amusing, but it’s a doodle in the Coen canon.

Hammers home its tragicomic points too heavily for either its humorous or dramatic aspects to gather much emotional steam.

It’s to Hall’s credit that, in the end, we see Chubbuck as a victim of no one so much as herself.

Since 9/11-style terrorism is very much on display here, I suppose it’s fair to say that Star Trek Into Darkness is a sci-fi blow-out with overtones of the real. Series founder Gene Roddenberry would, I think, approve.

Under Fire is not a gentle experience. But it offers more to think about than any other new Hollywood picture. [23 Nov 1983, p.42]

The film's predictability dampens its best parts. Having decided to make a movie about a dreaded subject, the filmmakers too often retreat into the comfort zone of easy assurances and flip quips.

The humor is uneven and sometimes crude, but much of the mock-documentary is surprising and amusing.