It's a gas, dude!

Tucci and Holm brilliant as magazine writer and artist.

A grand, old-fashioned movie of spies and Communist repression.

A knock-down, haywire ballad of the adrenalinization of love and despair.

Sunset Boulevard is noteworthy because of its fine sensitivity of things cinema. [24 Aug 1950, p.25]

Happy Together is Wong's most fully realized work. It is a pleasure to watch an interesting mind feel his way, and the result is something more than just a passing fancy.

This is the bluest film you'll ever see. The haunting color resounds throughout Empire like a sustained, melancholy chord...Empire is essential viewing for lovers of science fiction. [Special Edition]

A weird, wonderful and funny work that stands as a true original. As if that weren't enough, director and co-writer Anderson has given Bill Murray his best role in years.

Mike Leigh's great big, superbly performed homage to the creative process.

Despite the occasional uneven patch, the emotional punch of Slam leaves you wrung out as the credits unexpectedly start to roll. You want a happy ending, you realize the deck is stacked against it, but - thanks to the redemptive power of the spoken word - you have reason to hope.

Boys Don't Cry's intensity sneaks up on you like a snake.

Easily one of the best documentaries on any subject ever made. It is also one of the most cinematically influential.

Salles' solid narrative is only deceptively simple; there is a lot of dimension and depth to this gentle, sometimes painful portrait of two wanderers.

Handsome, well-acted, well-written and beautifully directed movie.

Segues from the merely quirky into the bizarrely unthinkable.

This movie has the jaunty good cheer of another great movie about hit men, "Prizzi's Honor." And that is high praise indeed.

More often than not the film casts an infectious, evocative spell.

Director Mark Pellington's spin on the transition from adolescence to manhood as viewed through the eyes of novelist and screenwriter Dan Wakefield makes "Going All the Way" something special.

It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.

Hysterical-depressing, vividly sobering.

Imbued with infectious pluck. It's also a lucid, competent, titanically entertaining movie loaded with workable gags.

Madhouse satire manages to disarm the second you realize it's laughing with you - and sometimes harder.

I'm not sure all of this works out as convincingly as Anderson intends in the movie's somewhat unsatisfying ending, but getting there is a wickedly enjoyable journey.

Staggering, gorgeously ambiguous.

If there's a granddaddy of breezy situationalism, it's probably Buñuel.

No-fat filmmaking aided by Berri's muscular formalism that, here, occasionally assumes the gritty focus of a taut, action thriller.

The Coens haven't been this sharp, focused and fluid since their first film. This is "Blood Simple's" promise fulfilled.

A 140-minute film masterpiece.

Jingoistic politics are not proper or prudent in the pluralistic human society of the 1990s. It's much easier to assuage these baser urges by facing a real nonhuman enemy that just wants to kill you. War is gore. You or them. That message is the real strength of "Starship Troopers," although many may find it morally flawed. No matter, this is powerful entertainment that appeals to our most basic instincts.

Austin is funny, extremely funny, because he is so ridiculous, and because Myers is a brilliant mimic who, like Martin Short, knows how to do ridiculous.

One of the qualities that makes "12 Monkeys" so good is the fact that it is almost too complicated to explain.

Superbly acted by its young cast, written and directed with great sophistication, Wild Reeds moves with a sad assurance through that domain that most American filmmakers explore only clumsily: the mysteries of the human heart.

Like laughing into a mirror for 113 minutes.

Shelton has a talent for using the specific to illustrate the universal. Avowed baseball haters loved "Bull Durham." And if watching golf sounds like an excellent insomnia cure, you will probably still enjoy Tin Cup.

Fly Away Home" is directed by Carroll Ballard, who made "The Black Stallion" and "Never Cry Wolf." In other words, it was directed by a filmmaker with talent, taste and subtlety, working from an understated script by Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin.

May be the funniest movie about parental and spousal abuse ever made.

Foster has whipped the actors into the sort of comic frenzy usually reserved for farce, and the ready-for-anything energy serves the material well.

Tennant and company do a fine job of retaining the otherworldliness of a fairy tale while at the same time explaining all the archaisms for a modern audience.

Dalmatians proves an apt playground for Hughes as one could surmise that his inspiration for treating comic bad guys in his movies so violently comes from a cartoon sensibility.

An army of rolled abs and their owners give the state of American race relations a beginner's workout.

A movie that features rich Mexican American characters and an uncompromising story line is always timely.

The End of the Affair's masterfully heartbroken final scene is scarier in its nightmarishly wry suggestion of ill fate than anything that ever happened on Elm Street.

Death doesn't knock in Theo Angelopoulos' Eternity and a Day; it raps softly, sitting patiently in the waiting room of its terminally ill poet's life until he's ready to let it in.

With all that has happened to the Soviet Union, and to the dreams of the Cuban revolution, in the years since "I Am Cuba" was made, the film can't help feeling like a relic of a discarded era. But it still has power to surprise and, occasionally, to enchant.

Priceless enough to flush "Metro," "Dr. Dolittle" and "Holy Man" from memory.

One of Lee's unsung gifts as a filmmaker is his discovery of that place between eye-popping surrealism and wrenching Greek tragedy.

After more than an hour of fun, the film turns dark as Solanas' mental state worsens. Not only does the brilliant kook wear out her welcome with Warhol, but the portrayal also grates on the viewer.

Eastwood is perfect as the bad guy (a thief) you root for.

A featherweight parlor-room French farce in need of an anchor to keep it from being blown away by the summer blockbuster gales.

Mangold's vision is bold. There is nothing cutesy or gimmicky about Heavy, which may be why something in its grimness recalls the work of Ingmar Bergman.

Constructed as a sequence of deepening, worsening bad dreams, Living in Oblivion sometimes runs the risk of feeling arbitrary, and the film loses some steam in its final section. But mostly it's a smart, funny send-up of the trials and joys of filming on big egos and low budgets - subjects that writer-director Tom DiCillo and his collaborators presumably know first-hand.

Nil by Mouth is slow to get going, and meanders before its impact scenes in the second half. Still, its final intensity can leave you exhausted. If you stay with the picture, it's a powerful experience you're unlikely to forget.

The finest element in de la Pena's carefully assembled account is how she doesn't simply state the obvious, but lets the meaty facts speak for themselves.

But then, just when it appears the race is lost, Steve James' love for his character and art form kicks in and wins the day, and, though flawed, Prefontaine is an engrossing portrait of a complex figure.

It isn't as charming as "Beauty and the Beast" or "The Little Mermaid" (especially musically), but it's an easy-to-swallow entertainment.

Less ambitious than the highly successful "Secrets & Lies," Career Girls has its own modest merits - a real sense of wit, much of it expressed in Hannah's sharp verbal sallies, and a melancholy truth that both women realize.

The Wachowski brothers are to be applauded for a film that is also nearly as stylishly funny as it is sexy and fast-paced.

Aspires to the boundlessness of a kid's imagination.

The ballad as it turns out is a duet between a dad and his girl, who'd often rather accentuate the positive than exploit pain, quietly proving that she is her father's daughter.

There's an unstable genius brewing beneath Mary Katherine's scarlet headband. As "SNL" women go, only Gilda Radner seemed as willing to rib so much of herself for our pleasure.

As formulaic, but occasionally outré multiplex-bound behemoths go, Gladiator is a foaming beast.

Ransom is every bit as taut and expertly directed, and it's another in the emergency genre, one in which Howard excels.

On the whole, the movie is a success. I still hope that children and their parents will read this wonderful book together, but it's nice that there's a movie they can see, too.

Perhaps a bit miscast, and with a penchant for too many double-takes, Perry nonetheless is game.

It is an important work, and a very good one.

While I was watching "Lone Star," I realized that what makes Sayles a good and socially responsible person - his ability to look at one thing a hundred different ways - is exactly what makes him a muddy filmmaker.

Quiet, moving and beautifully shot.

You find yourself absorbed in simply looking at them to the extent that it's hard to hear what they're saying. It's a nice dilemma for a movie to present.

An ecstatic sensory experience so overloaded it hardly matters that the narrative has been placed on a back burner.

Harris, Heche make unholy twosome.

Exists as a seldom represented American time capsule, and it's all good.

Some nice performances and modest laughs highlight this amiable British comedy.

It's as sunny as you would expect a Hanks project to be.

A demanding, rewarding (if overlong) and - yes - a personally felt experience.

Where Never Been Kissed succeeds is in its unabashed refusal to stoop to choosing sides in the high-school hipness war.

This movie has everything.

Lou Holtz Jr.'s script is a clever, half-serious indictment of television.

The delight of the movie is Keitel, who finally gets to play someone who doesn't look like he's about to mug you.

Resistant as I was to the idea of a remake, I have to admit that Pollack has made a movie that stands on its own, without odious comparison, as an entertaining love story, particularly if you've never seen the original.

Spacek and Walken are pure comic energy.

A film where suspense and exhilaration are incompatible, and a receding plot line is merely the platform for cars to fly through panes of glass.

A film that can be enjoyed by all ages and that insults no one's intelligence.

What's best about this script is the premise: a lawyer who doesn't lie.

A poignant and racy movie. The dancing is pretty great, too.

Forceful and well-acted. Fear truly lives up to its title.

Entertainment made well enough that you can overlook its absurdities.

There must be nine or 10 thwacks to the neck throughout Sleepy Hollow, and Burton finds a different way to make the resulting severed noggin fall as though you'd forgotten the last one.

Slightly more mature and better assembled, Road Trip goes one better on "American Pie" by teasing out the idiosyncrasies in four guys existing in a personality grab bag.

Like a Sally Field movie by Vittorio De Sica: Zhang wants to affect you with the subtle sting of his politics.

It was only natural that Allen would eventually have to make a Greek drama.

[Krishnamma] gives the story a dimension of pent-up anguish and melancholy.

Douglas Carter Beane's script is so wickedly clever (the title refers to an autographed photo the drag queens carry with them), you come away from this film with the impression that you've had a much better time than you've actually had.

In Winona Ryder's case, Girl Interrupted is a showcase in which her brittle, angry portrait shows she has graduated from ingenue to actress.

Prince-Bythewood's movie is an occasionally clunky, mostly engaging coming out party for herself.

Where most effects-laden extravanganzas aspire to be nothing more than a live-action comic book, The Matrix sees things with the venturesome clarity of a graphic novel.

An adrenaline-pumping, post-musical musical.

From both sides of the camera, Eastwood works the crowd better than he has in years.

Delightful but not serious suspense; audience hysteria -- and flame throwers guaranteed to scare the wits out of anyone who ever had a hot foot. [17 Jun 1954, p.37]