With the exception of some minor glitches in the sound synchronization and a nighttime performance of The Band's "The Weight" that is uncharacteristically grainy, the film looks and sounds great.

The film has a gorgeous, Grant Wood-ish visual style - it was photographed by Freddie Francis and designed by the late, great multi-Oscar winner Gene Callahan (to whom the film is dedicated) - and there are a smattering of effective scenes and ingratiating performances to go with it. [04 Oct 1991]

The rude naturalism of the opening scenes between Wilson and Jacob recalls the spirited vulgarity of "Clerks," with dialogue that would be hopelessly offensive were it not so funny and true to life.

Salles tends to explain rather than suggest, but he connects with the anguish and abandonment to give this ghost story an emotionally haunting core.

It offers no special insights into its subject, it doesn't connect on any higher level, and it left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied and let down.

The experience is fun enough that it's sure to be the summer's first blockbuster.

A warm exception to coming-of-age stories that accent the tacky and vulgar aspects of adolescent awakening.

It's so beautiful and moving and simple that I'm willing to forgive Majidi his contrivances.

Gorgeous re-creation of another time.

It's more than simply a well-crafted piece of fake history.

If the chorus was the sole focus of the documentary, it would have been brilliant. Unfortunately, director Stephen Walker makes the movie as much about himself as it is about the singers.

Her (Ardant's) diva-in-decline is funny, lightly campy and dead-on in the way it encapsulates the sadness at the end of a selfish life lived only for art.

But the movie soars as docudrama. Niccol's model seems to have been Scorsese's "GoodFellas" and, like that film, the blitzkrieg of images and rapid-fire narration takes us on a breathtaking inside tour of a scary world. It's an extraordinary expose.

The film manages to be an intriguing, grimly entertaining, strangely haunting little slice of heartland noir very much in the experimental tradition of such previous Soderbergh oddities as "Schizopolis" and "Full Frontal."

Cusack, who is beginning to look disturbingly like Dustin Hoffman, is not only the film's center, but its orbit as well.

An enigmatic but gorgeous film.

It's less a deconstruction of the heist film than an ambitious contemplation of our fascination with the genre, directed with a dispassionate eye at a ruminative pace and centered by a queasily emotionless figure wading through a swamp of moral ambiguity.

Isn't exactly adult animation but it's more complex and ambiguous than the usual Hollywood live-action blockbuster, and just as splashy.

It's all about waste and destruction, and not just the toxic waste -- illegally dumped in landfills -- that is poisoning the farmland and the aquifers in the region.

"Clouds" fills its exteriors with the glory of the Utah mountains and its interiors with the work of the late Hopi artist, Dan Lomahaftewa -- a pleasing combination that gives the film its own special visual style and magic.

What emerges is a funny and sometimes aching movie that treads familiar dysfunctional family turf but still manages to eke out an emotionally toned balance.

Journeys into a new heart of darkness, the destination of which lies outside the frontiers of humanity.

The movie is a relentlessly enjoyable star vehicle and a hard-charging action-o-rama full of the usual Bondian elements, for the most part well done. It's one of the year's better action films.

Although this is director Mark Obenhaus' first ski movie, it is every bit as exciting as the popular Warren Miller pictures, and boasts an unobstrusive soundtrack in place of the heavy metal racket that fuels most sports documentaries.

It's a chilling tale that leaves us with the fear that Latin America's exploding social problems may well be beyond solution.

The movie works amazingly well as a historical epic.

It's hard to imagine an upbeat movie about homelessness, but Dark Days is just that.

In many ways, a magical little movie in its own right, and a thoroughly pleasant experience.

(Fiennes's) Onegin is clueless to anything other than the sensual world, and is finally more repellent than sympathetic.

Allen does become quite likable, the cloud of his off-screen turmoil disappears, and his movie turns into a good time. [20 Aug 1993]

With his Jack Nicholson mannerisms extinguished and his boyish features made up to look worn and aged, Slater also makes us believe and care about this guy. A movie this marginal isn't likely to get much notice, but it's one of the very best things he has done.

What the film does extremely well is take us deep into the crime scene, and give faces to the victims so we can experience this epic, incomprehensible and somehow prototypically American act of violence on a more personal and intimate level.

Stunningly beautiful film.

The movie eventually settles down to become a routine thriller, but its first hour has moments of sheer brilliance as Andrew Klavan's screenplay and first-time director Jan Egleson build an agonizingly detailed satire of the hypocrisy and self-devouring nature of corporate America. [23 Mar 1990]

So Close is the film "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" dreams of being: sleek, silly, completely ridiculous and irresistible.

Less cartoonish and more generous than the original.

There is a heart-warming familiarity to much of its 2 1/2-hour tale, but the surprises around its edges gives Zelary a refreshing perspective.

What it lacks is an intensity, a passion at the center...It is, nonetheless, a lovely and often powerful film.

Hardly sophisticated, but it's as inspired as teen sex comedies get.

Don't let the title trick you. The British comedy Kinky Boots is probably the most kinkless film featuring fetish wear ever to strut its stilettoed heels across the silver screen.

Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) is real, and for all the dramatic license that writer/director Richard LaGravenese takes in his film, her story -- and the stories of her students -- are moving.

Director Emanuele Crialese captures a stifling, dead-end rural culture awash in nature's beauty but seething with pent-up sexual frustration.

The big downside of the film is that it always feels slightly contrived.

The earthy imagery is delicate while the drama is oddly elliptical, creating a lovely film of storybook images and parables. It's both obvious and elusive and, historical specifics aside, almost timeless.

Director Fred Schepisi has done an admirable job of making all the characters and their various interests clear, and he gets a fine, deglamorized and convincing performance from Pfeiffer as Connery's love interest. [22 Dec 1990]

A cogent, optimistic and mostly entertaining slice of ghetto life.

The film's take on media and personal responsibility recalls Brian De Palma's faux Iraq documentary, "Redacted," here dropped into a homefront turned guerrilla war zone.

Based more on rumor and supposition than fact. It's a highly entertaining set of hypotheses.

It's a rare film that's about social class in American life, and Bellingham writer-director Enid Zentelis explores its hidden structure and silent barriers in a novel, subtle way that makes its points without hitting us over the head with them.

A thrilling and scary ride.

A bit smarter than it seems at first glance, and ends up being a rather colorful and fascinating -- and often imaginatively Capraesque.

The first hour of the movie struck me as being truly inspired, and I haven't laughed so hard all year.

It's a little visually precious and obscure but still a marvelously wistful film of regret and retreat, in which even the magic wine of forgetfulness erases only the memories, not the pain.

It's a pleasure to see mature portraits of adult characters who put their vulnerabilities on the line. I enjoyed my time in the company of these strangers.

Surprisingly sweet and infectious.

As the film loses its focus on the "Protocols" phenomenon -- it becomes too scattered to have the impact Levin is after.

Chabrol's deliberate and drawn-out observations often work against the dramatic tension, but his gift is making the audience believe that emotion and obsession trump logic for these deluded characters.

The Pangs are at their best playing in the style sandbox, creating shivery imagery and eerie moods while exploring nothing deeper than irony and unease, as their climax so effectively demonstrates.

The movie goes down very easily.

It's Kang's first feature and it suffers from rocky moments and an unsure eye, but his sense of detail is rich with prickly contradictions and he resists tidying up the story.

Allen has avoided his usual stable of jokes and one-liners, and the result is a film that feels and looks fresh from the maestro of urban angst.

Foxx is magnetic in the lead, and the subplot in which he bonds with his Saudi police liaison (Ashraf Barhom, giving the movie's best performance) is touching.

It's an old-fashioned Soviet road movie, filled with kind souls of the otherwise desperate (and at times predatory) world.

The film is not without its flaws, but it sports a terrific production design that integrates magically into the story -- as well as another top-notch performance by Anthony LaPaglia.

What makes this film truly chilling is the fact first-time feature filmmaker Scott Elliott and his writers somehow make every step of this descent harrowingly believable.

Cronenberg is one of the cinema's true originals, and a trip to his spooky world is always a harrowing, thought-provoking experience.

The only downside is that Bier's vision of upper-middle-class America does not always seem authentic.

There's something essential and emotional missing in this character-driven piece. It's more an admirably performed and observed study -- of a time, place and three very different people -- than it is the heartbreaking and engrossing story it could have been.

A fresh, well-written comedy that doesn't lag, casts its actors against type and has a real love for its characters.

An utterly nihilistic, harrowingly upsetting vision of hell on earth.

The film is so full of ideas and so dense that its narrative splinters, moving tangentially, and ultimately is weighed down by its rant and rhetoric.

Ken Loach's new film, "Ladybird, Ladybird," takes us deep inside the true story of a woman who is a long-term victim of brutal men, and examines her predicament with such intimacy and ambiguity that the experience becomes the very antithesis of cliche. [27 Jan 1995]

It's remarkably bright, funny and sweet for a film that wades through so much sleaze, though it can't escape all of the weirdness it worms through.

As good as it is in pieces, its protagonists are distancing, its story is tangled, its film-noir cynicism is oppressive and unglamorous, and it just doesn't leave us with the satisfying unity of the kind of great movie it wants to be.

It's absorbing and often excruciatingly suspenseful, and it gives Viggo Mortensen a strong, change-of-pace vehicle to follow up his "Lord of the Rings" triumph.

Not since Spike Lee's "Bamboozled" has such an irreverent carnival of African American stereotypes been so irreverently sent up.

A summer movie that knows it's a summer movie. You don't go to this film for the story, but for the scenery: Bikini-clad girls riding waves, surf photography as beautiful as it is breathtaking, sun, surf, sand, even a little PG-13 romance.

The overall saga is moving, the performances are first-rate, the production values (which do not rely on the usual cartoonish CGI effects) are strong, and Carion captures the special insanity of stalemated trench warfare with an unusual horrific flair.

An inspirational portrait of an unwanted kid who brought culture to a world that had known only violence.

Once the story moves up north to Indianapolis, things become pat and predictable. But for its first 80 minutes, Great World of Sound hits all the right notes.

In the film's stronger moments, the artist in her definitely seems to be saying that the impulse to retreat into cultural fundamentalism carries dire risks, that much of what is old and traditional needs changing and there are some things about the detested process of globalization that are wonderfully liberating.

Most films about illegal immigration are set on the Mexican border, and Frozen River is free of the stereotypical characters and situations of that familiar setting. It also offers a rare look at modern Native American life, exploring the ambiguity of what it means to say that the laws of the white man cannot be enforced on Indian territory.

After an excellent setup, the movie becomes bogged down in chase scene after chase scene on its way to its inevitable ending.

Brosnan pulls out all the stops in his quest to be the last word in crude boorishness, only slightly relieved by the midlife soul-searching. Whether the public will buy him in this extreme role is another question. But it's a fearless, and fairly skilled, comic performance.

The film uses '70s rock songs especially well to establish mood and act as the bridge between sequences. Director Zanuck's use of actors is also hard to fault. She gets strong, no-nonsense supporting performances from Gregg Allman, Sam Elliott and Max Perlich; and Jason Patric and the always-reliable Jennifer Jason Leigh could not be more believable as the tragic, doomed, criminally naive lovers. [10 Jan 1992]

Garbarski recovers from the melodrama with a final image that is so sweet, so simple and so understated that one is tempted to say it is perfect.

Perhaps because I expected nothing - the movie struck me as one of the better comic-strip translations, and one of the better films of the genre. It's fast, colorful, entertaining and a clear cut above its most immediate predecessor, 1994's "The Shadow." [7 June 1996]

Vividly captures the joy of sailing.

You have to admire Chen's fearlessness in chasing the taboo subject matter, and in unblinkingly depicting the horrors of China's recent past. [29 Oct 1993]

An effective political lampoon.

Never comes alive.

Sticks in the mind and simply won't go away.

Almost 30 years later, it's just as primal.

Scream 3 also has wit and intelligence, but at their core the Scream movies are still slasher films and this one is no exception.

In this film, the clothes and the city are characters as vital as the four leads, and they don't disappoint. But don't expect any trend-setting in the manner of the series. This is a runway that begins and ends with the movie.

Romero's satire is largely replaced by a sardonic gallows humor (the zombie-shooting contest is as funny as it is grotesque), but otherwise it's a bloody entertaining zombie apocalypse.

The film is stylish, the compromising elements that usually junk up a Hollywood "date movie" are nowhere to be seen, the ensemble of supporting actors is strong and, despite a certain woodenness, Hartnett is appealing and mostly very believable.

It's done with an agreeable confidence and flair, the actors all fit comfortably in their roles and the effects are fun.