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.