Films about great theatrical divas (so temperamental! So divine!) all strike familiar notes. This Somerset Maugham adaptation is no exception. But Annette Bening, playing the queen of the '30s London stage, makes it worth another go-round.

A film of ideas; meaty ideas about Catholicism, faith, and the true nature of jealousy, love and hate, that are rarely contemplated in today's cinema.

Compromising Positions has acting talent to burn and enough drollery to pass the time quite pleasantly. [9 Sept 1985, p.90]

People seeing Peter Bogdanovich's version of Michael Frayn's clockwork farce might find it hard to believe that the Broadway show, under Michael Blakemore's direction, was twice as funny as the movie. It was. But the movie happens to be twice as funny as anything else around.

A brainy three-ring circus.

Plausibility is not the movie's strongest suit, but Phil Alden Robinson's enjoyable caper makes up for its gaps in logic with its breezy tone and its technological razzledazzle.

The result is fascinating -- a rich, strange, problematical movie full of wild tonal shifts and bravura moviemaking.

Arlington Road does a nice job of keeping things speculative enough to remain interesting.

Like Norma Desmond in "Sunset Boulevard," Indy is still big; it's just that, in the new world of movie franchises, The Crystal Skull feels smaller.

There's an ample sense of foreboding in Last Night -- but sadly, very little else.

Flirts throughout with cliches, and some of the more melodramatic plot devices creak at the joints. Still, the potency of this pop romantic can't be denied. [24 Aug 1987]

Director Walter Hill has only the faintest interest in realism. His New York City is merely the backdrop for a bone-crunching fantasy that has more to do with science fiction and musicals than social commentary. When it's good - which is not often enough - it suggests what The Wiz, under happier circumstances, might have been. [26 Feb 1979, p.81]

It has a lovely score by Thomas Newman, stunning production design, striking costumes and gorgeous cinematography. Unfortunately, it just doesn't jell.

School Ties doesn't offer much fresh insight on its subject, but it tells its familiar tale well, adapting the straight-forward virtues of '50s storytelling to evoke that mythical era to which Pat Buchanan and friends would like us all to return. Mandel isn't a bludgeoner; his young, fresh cast is mighty good; and, to its credit, the movie resists the impulse to wrap everything up with a smiley ending. Anti-Semitism didn't go away in the '50s; it just lowered its voice for a while.[21 Sept 1992, p.78]

It's punishingly dull for fully half of its two hours and 45 minutes.

With a volatile combination of passion and bad manners, Araki ushers an old formula into the age of AIDS, and gives it new meaning. [31 Aug 1992, p.68]

You may leave the theater with a bit of a headache, but you'll feel amply compensated by the sense of having seen a master inventor at work.

I respect it enormously, but it feels like an art film in search of a movie.

While the elements in this coming-of-age saga may seem familiar, Eszterhas brings a fresh, immigrant's-eye perspective to his tale.

A style so chic, studied and murky it resembles a cross between a Nike commercial and a bad Polish art film.

At its best it's a marvel: bold, exciting and full of visions.

Lange gets deep into these numbers, the sound and spirit of Patsy seeming to stream through her face, body and hands with the musical equivalent of that hunger for living. Hominy Harmonies: Lange's energy, sensuality and intelligence pump iron into Getchell's script, which doesn't have the bite and color of his "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore." [7 Oct 1985, p.88]

Altman has a sorcerer's ability to crack open scenes and invite us in to wander through them, and he keeps Vincent & Theo bristling with emotions and ideas.

A powerful and moving experience -- once it overcomes its clunky, badly written and clichéd first act.

A sweet and satisfying fantasy that reinvents the myth of the Fountain of Youth. [24 June 1985, p.70]

Technology has squeezed character to a few measly pixels on the digital screens. Explosions have replaced dramatic climaxes.

Greenaway uses the screen rather like the calligraphers of the story use the body so that the film becomes a kind of visual "pillow book;" a multi-layered series of inscriptions and reflections with almost hypnotic power.

This achingly funny film is a string of vignettes with no real plot, so it has periods of pointlessness--come to think of it, it's all pointless. But it has "cult classic" written all over it.