The premise is more interesting than the movie, which takes several wrong turns on its way to an unconvincing conclusion.

I hate to sound per-Snickety, but this lemon of a movie is a sadly unfortunate event.

Playing a cantankerous, beer-swigging human wreck of a man for the umpteenth time, Nolte is very good but very familiar.

Director Wladyslaw Pasikowski has made the mistake of going about his business as if he were fashioning a horror film.

Woody Allen wrote and directed this inventive comedy, which has some good laughs but a very nasty edge.

The picture has energy to spare, but children won't get the movie-buff references that provide much of its humor. [04 Apr 1997, p.13]

Little about Maverick lingers in the mind once the final image has faded from the screen. But it's cleverly crafted, and you can't help enjoying it even when you know it's manipulating you as brazenly as a poker dealer with tricky fingers and a well-stacked deck.

Like its predecessor, it's a hugely ambitious picture...But also like its predecessor, it cares far more about action, adventure, and violence than feelings, relationships, and ideas.

I’ve never been able to figure out if Reggio is an artist or a con artist. Perhaps, in some ways, he’s both. He has claimed in interviews that he intended to make a movie about “the wonders of the universe.” Whatever he’s made, for better or worse, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

In Beautiful Boy, Ku manages to take a new-to-movie subject and flatten it into something that, despite its harrowing contours, is often grindingly familiar.

Radcliffe's fidgety performance is convincing, and he does come across as an adult, though a very young one.

For a movie that is about a collection of oddballs, it can sometimes feel rather generic. But at its core, the film is not a comedy at all. The eccentricities issue from real adversity.

Too staid and stolid for audiences on the hunt for easy entertainment.

Full of old tricks - cuts between worried faces and overheated gauges inching into the red zone - but director Mostow pulls most of them off with conviction and pizazz.

The kind of breezy teen-pic that youngsters flock to nowadays, and this particular specimen is imaginative enough to explore an environment off Hollywood's beaten path. It's also broad-minded enough to portray the evangelical milieu with flair, satirize its foibles with restraint, and respect its ideals even as it shows how individuals may fall short.

Illuminating and alarming.

It's not a masterpiece, but its story of Civil War enemies banding together for battle against Indian warriors and French soldiers packs an occasional wallop.

Compellingly acted and rich in visual ideas, but a bit thin in its psychological approach.

Moving the action to a modern American city, the hyperactive movie seems goofy and gimmicky at first, but it acquires real power when the cinematography settles down enough for Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes to do some excellent acting.

I was expecting something raunchier. Instead, what we have here is a wistful, somewhat overextended but occasionally sweet comedy about a couple that can't – in more ways than one – quite get it together.

Spielberg has filmed Empire of the Sun with great care, paying keen attention to every detail of its time and place. If the film ultimately seems flat and superficial, it's because Spielberg just isn't the right filmmaker for this kind of tough historical subject. [9 Dec 1987, p.21]

The best part is that, amid all the hubbub, Jeunet, improbably and inevitably, draws out a love story between Bazil and Elastic Girl. Without it, Micmacs would have imploded. The romance, which is funny and sexy at the same time, anchors the shenanigans.

Directed by Tom Holland, who serves up the oldest horror-yarn clich'es with a straight face, keeping the action good-natured and even humorous until the gory climax.

Starts cleverly but becomes more preposterous as it goes along.

At least the film brings up a disturbing piece of history without sensationalizing it. And it does believably portray why so many Germans, with the war at last over and the economy beginning to boom, preferred to forget what many claimed they never knew.

It's a modest film in most respects, but Albert Finney as Alfie is a man of great importance indeed, reminding us again that he's one of the most towering talents in film today.

Compared with, say, Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto," which featured this sort of stuff in practically every frame, Marshall's film is downright Disneyish.

It's a carefully manicured, almost genteel piece of moviemaking. The film is paradoxically both rousing and lulling.