It's a rare film that gets smarter as it goes along, injecting a satisfying dash of pragmatism every time it seems ready to slip into either unearned idealism or cynical fatalism.

It's a sumptuous mood piece.

Ends up being empty, anti-climactic and overlong.

This is an adrenaline-pumping, devilishly well-made thriller set against the downfall of an American family.

It's a superior film in every way to its predecessor "Kiss the Girls."

The movie constantly verges on being a parody, but Moore's performance stays miraculously away from caricature.

As good as the film is in so many ways, it also altogether rings a bit false and contrived.

For the most part, it's imaginatively staged and consistently entertaining.

Zhang is a master of detail and spectacle. There is also plenty of comedy, particularly in the scenes with linguistically challenged translators.

It makes for chuckling entertainment and it's fun to watch as it's happening. But its New York characters are not a bit believable, there's no real bite to the humor, and the film never adds up to be more than the sum of its parts.

Although the start of the movie is a little fragmented, and the last quarter turns predictably rote, the middle is heartfelt, wonderfully diverse and empowering.

Brooks has made a movie that is about separation from convenience and having to deal one-on-one with a stranger in a strange land. The result is a profound and moving movie.

It's by far the most faithful of the three versions, and beyond this integrity it also offers an ensemble of graceful performances and an epic evocation of 1920s China -- though, like its predecessors, it's far from a perfect crystallization of the novel.

Writer-director William Richert's black comedy about political conspiracy is an amusing forerunner of TV's "Dynasty." [02 Jun 1990]

Entertaining and eye-opening.

The script keeps to the point, the performances sparkle with originality, the direction of Jean-François Pouliot mostly has the right touch and the film ultimately generates some of the distinctively eccentric appeal of a classic Ealing Studio comedy of the 1950s.

Fernando Meirelles's MTV-grandstanding worked for "City of God," but it's just not necessary for, and gets in the way of, a script this literate and solid. In the end, The Constant Gardener works in spite of, not because of him.

An original, well-crafted plea that uses restraint instead of titillation to make a cautionary tale that aches with pathos and power.

Loaded down with gritty Glasgow atmosphere and authenticity, and works so well as an ensemble piece

The two young actors -- Hutcherson and Robb -- are terrific and unpretentious.

The joy is in watching a talented cast make something crisp and fresh out of material that -- though perfectly adequate and enjoyable -- trespasses little into territory that's new or out of the traditionally plotted points of the genre.

Panayotopoulou casts a transcendent eye upon her downbeat subject matter, never dodging the unsentimental truth that growing up is about learning to live with the loss of those things we have loved.

The Groomsmen, while as corny as a Staten Island marriage proposal, rings true on many levels.

John Sayles ventures into August Wilson territory with Honeydripper.

One of the Coens' more playful projects, much lighter and significantly slighter than "No Country for Old Men" or "Fargo," but it's put together with such perfection that you can't help but be won over.

It's an ambitious, eye-filling and thought-provoking work, but it manages to be frustratingly uneven and doesn't really represent Bertolucci at his most fluent. [27 May 1994]

Berlinger and Sinofsky, with their knack for penetrating the diabolical pretensions of weak and disaffected human beings, have brought Metallica to its knees.

Cage trots out all of this character's flaws in a form so raw and true you can't help but cringe in your seat as he careens from one self-inflicted interpersonal failure to another.