Someone should send him (Kerry) a copy, if only to remind the senator of the days when he was willing and able to speak with the courage of his convictions, and when he had a lot less to lose.

Kidder's performance as Danielle is a highlight, creating a childlike woman who is beguilingly naive yet obviously fraught with peril. [22 Sep 2000]

The environment is one of unrelenting cruelty and misanthropy, which certainly brings out the novel's darker themes, but can be something of a slog to watch.

Despite a strong start, Only Human loses its grip on all that merry energy and comes to feel more like a sitcom than like "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" or "Some Like It Hot," to name just some of its forebears.

While a splendidly acted and worthily grown-up movie, too often has the feel of a potboiling soap opera, with twists and turns that range from the grimly ironic to the absurdly sensational.

Merchants of Doubt is an important film. It's a riveting film, a necessary film, one that every American should see.

Ellroy's bully-boy schtick is getting stale, and Moverman is overly beholden to it.

It's not without one or two missteps, but remains likely the most impressive juvenile acting you'll see this year.

The team did better later, but they did just fine with "Shanghai." [07 Sep 1988, p.E05]

Delirious. Hilarious. Absolutely one-of-a-kind.

The film is enthralling, even as the tale becomes more and more dire, with scores of millions dead and societal upheaval imminent. The circumstances depicted in Contagion are terrifying, but the power with which the film is made blends the horror, as only the best art can, with beauty.

Pieces of April isn't the biggest or best film of the year, but it's touching, witty, smart and well-made. You have to sort through a lot of chaff at the multiplex to find all those qualities in a single movie.

It's a film for those people -- and they are legion -- who recoil in horror from the very notion of Christmas cheer. If you're in that crowd, and you know who you are, you'll love it.

Feels like an iffy concept album with some great singles.

As a brief introduction to Belle and his amazing gifts, District B 13 is a treat. But as a movie its feet are dully planted on the ground.

It is a strange, fascinating hybrid film, but it is Madonna's film, and she plays her role to the hilt. [17 May 1991, p.05]

Though it somehow manages to be a movie about inner peace with crazy, incredibly staged fight scenes every 10 minutes, it is, first and foremost, a movie about inner peace.

An informative and frightening documentary.

The ensemble rolls gleefully with the script's twists (which aren't all that twisty, to be fair), and the film piles up laugh after laugh agreeably.

A good test of a movie like this is whether it would be more or less stimulating to hang out with people you really know for 82 minutes. If Happy Christmas is the time better spent, it might be time to find a new crowd.

The movie has "heart" in a way that doesn't feel cloying or dishonest. And the cast -- especially Janelle Schremmer -- just nails it.

Gosling is excellent playing a character who's fundamentally unknowable.

Waititi is still telling stories of offbeat, semi-delusional New Zealanders, and he's still sprinkling his work with cartoonish flights of fancy -- but this time he grounds the comedy in a big-hearted, bittersweet story about a boy desperate to connect with his father.

As it stands, the film is perhaps a tad low-key to catch the eye, but it's carefully enough made and, especially, acted, to keep a hold on the brain and heart long after it's over.

It's a film with many strengths, but it's not a knockout. And that's Tarantino's own fault, though not in the first way you might imagine.

An intermittently engaging and confused blend of biopic, chop-socky, dopey mysticism and, oddest of all, melodramatic weepie, is no ``JFK.''[7 May 1993, p.AE15]

The world depicted in Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go is among the more beautiful dystopias in film history.

Even as Inarritu has matured as a craftsman, he has stood perhaps one beat too long in the same place as a storyteller. In ways, Babel is his best work, but it's time to move on.