Russell wants us to feel the itch of familiarity: it's part of his tonal plan. And he survives this structural hazard because he casts all the roles so well and gives his actors dialogue as fresh as the familiar situations would permit. [01 Aug 1994 Pg. 28]

The most important aspect of the stories about all five characters is the way they are told. Attal and his editor Jennifer Augé have found an attractive playful style: they never let the stories rest, almost juggling them, and keep them gamboling before us.

The real success of Duncan Tucker, who wrote and directed this debut feature, is that, through credible dialogue and sensitive performances, the basic idea overcomes its cleverness and is affecting.

The screenplay of Saraband feels concocted, not absorbed from life in sense and soul like so much of Bergman's work.

To see the flight captain and co-pilot checking the plane before takeoff, to watch the varied passengers settling into their seats, is more agonizing than watching passengers board the ship in all those "Titanic" films. With United 93 we see these people unknowingly stepping into a history that is still in terrible process. But as a work in (let's call it) the Akhmatova mode, it does not and could not succeed.

Softley worries a bit, quite unnecessarily, about keeping our interest; so he lays in a number of overhead shots and considerable zooming at the start of sequences. But his work with his cast is sure, except for the miscast Elliott, and he generates the right internal heat between the lovers.

Like many other Iranian films, Blackboards counters the generally broadcast ideas about this part of the world. It is a testament of quiet endurance, of common concern, of reconciled survival.

The chief pleasure in the picture (set in Los Angeles) is in watching Hopkins spin off another of his nutty self-possessed intellectual criminals--this time it's Hannibal Lecter lite.

The film is in one sense lifelike: in order to get the good, we have to endure the lesser.

The finish is so asymmetrical that it, too, seems a comment on the kind of film this might once have been.

Stone has concentrated on one of the catastrophe's stories and has fashioned it well--with almost palpable physical detail, and with performances that never sink to exploitation.

Pandro Berman, the producer, and Clarence Brown, the director, have made it into a conservatively exciting and engaging film whose chief virtue is its acting, especially a letter-perfect, beautifully felt performance by Mickey Rooney as the jockey.

At least we know this Allen persona, whatever his current name; the other characters, starting from scratch, don't get much past scratch. Although the picture spreads its attention fairly evenly among them, most of them end up as supporting cast because they are only life-size puppets. [Feb 10, 1986]

Tornatore has learned much from Fellini--especially in the long shots where someone suddenly appears close up. Let's hope he moves on to his own style. Meanwhile, he has given us a nice bask in Sicilian warmth. [Feb. 19, 1990]

Gross and trite as the material is, Kitano shows again that he is an ingenious, purposeful filmmaker. [27 Apr 1998]

Entertaining though The Hoax is, the film that I imagined before I saw it was better.

Jarecki says that his film doesn't precisely answer the question in his title. He is mistaken.

But the way that this picture has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming. [14 Nov 1994]

Wade, presumably with Nichols's urging and aid, has tricked up most of the picture with plotting that scuttles the realism of the beginning, strangles any serious view of the theme, and ends up ludicrously incredible. [30 Jan 1989, p.28]

So much of this adaptation is engrossing that the script's additions are jarring.

All four of the roles are written with pungency. There is even an implication that the two adults realize the triteness of the situation and that they--the characters, not Baumbach--want to speak from inner sources, not from a script. Baumbach pulls this off with some sting and wit.

But for those who can summon up the talismanic "what if," The American President provides chuckles and tingles, even a few sobs. [18 Dec 1995, p.28]

All political thrillers, good or less good, have moral implications...Walk on Water, one of the better ones, has grave moral implications and does not ignore them or merely utilize them.

The screenplay, by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, based on a French film, has enough sharp gags and plot twists to sustain it, with an ending that manages to be nice.

Admittedly, the setting does heighten interest, but this film is much more than an ideational travelogue.

The cast is so good that a kind of counterpoint arises between the riskily lachrymose story and the firm verity of the acting.

The most pleasant aspect of the picture is its relish of the moment in which it is set. Deville doesn't omit mention of the anti-Semitism in postwar France; still, this little tailoring shop is a good place to have reached after the preceding years.

Overall Nina's Tragedies is another instance of a subject discussed here lately--a foreign film that is seen one way at home and another way abroad.

It is the two leading performances that make the film seem almost to reach down and embrace us.

LaBute's dialogue reminds us that, along with that of such others as Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch and Whit Stillman, the sheer writing, these days, of some American films is remarkably fine. LaBute has cast his film to match, with people who can handle his dialogue neatly. [31 August 1998, p. 28]

Leigh's directing is lean and tight. In Imelda Staunton as Vera, he has an actress who can make her only two emotions interesting.

A bit scattery, but it simmers with Shicoff's intensity in lending his faith and being to the role.

Beatty himself is high wattage, revved up, sharp in his comic timing, gleaming with eagerness to put his film across. As director, he carries on from where he left off in “Reds;” he is sure and fluent, and occasionally he tips his hat to the past. [June 8, 1998]

Nolte and Coburn are so powerful that they distort what, we are told, is the story's theme. [Feb. 1, 1999]

The story of the film is a quiet local tale; the directing is sophisticated.

Ford would probably have grumbled about some things in this picture--some moments of confusion about who is who--but he might have been pleased to see that his influence, so marked in many countries' films, had reached China and Tibet.

The present film-makers have retained the essences of the plot and characters but have moved the ambience toward the next stylistic era, romanticism.

The picture tries hard for addictive mystery, but it is full of scenes that promise insight and don't deliver.

Substantively there is no content. Everything we see or hear engages us only as part of a directorial tour de force. That force is exceptional, but since there is not much more to the picture, it leaves us hungry.

Especially in the moving moments, this film prods us into a kind of reproof. Kushner is now fifty, a prime writing age, and we want more.

If only Cantet and Robin Campillo (who based their screenplay on stories by Dany Lafèrriere) had balanced the sexual and political elements more acutely, the result could have been searing.

Sympathy for a pedophile is difficult, but surely comprehension may be possible, and Bacon evokes it.

The result is glib, often funny, sometimes bumpy, and ultimately depressing.

Burman is particularly good at the tiny details that become recognition points in daily patterns.

The performance that comes closest to capturing the Waugh elixir is Fenella Woolgar's as madcapping Miss Runcible, who ultimately commandeers a racing car.

Caouette has opened up a case history vividly, but he has left us without any conclusions, not even with much enlightening empathy. Something more than truth--dare one say "mere truth"?--is needed.

Unusually for a soap-bubble film, Après Vous runs almost two hours and very nearly sustains its length. Five minutes of condensation toward the end would have benefited it. But Salvadori floats everything, hammers nothing, and gets maximum buoyancy out of Camille Bazbaz's jaunty music.

As with much art of our time--music, painting, sculpture, theater--Caché in a certain way affronts us. Its deliberate contravention of our expectations, and not necessarily stodgy expectations, is part of its intent.

Cuadron, at the helm, wanted to pitch his film in a terrain accessible to modern sensibility yet different from what that sensibility is generally fed. And he might have succeeded, except for his casting. [2 March 1998, p. 26]

The Oxford English Dictionary says that an allegory is "an extended or continued metaphor." And to think that this definition was coined when a French film called Innocence was still very far in the future! But how aptly this film proves the point.

Melancholy but enjoyable.

Well-knit, generally lucid documentary.

That climax stretches credibility, but the whole point of the piece is that the Joe of the opening has become someone else.

A binding strength of the film is the performance of Choi Min-Sik as Ohwon: far from any fake-Barrymore antics, he makes us feel that we are intruding on the heat and genius of a man for whom life -- existence as is possible in the world -- is insufficient.

A slight conceptual nudge and Capote would have focused on (as the closing line tells us) its true subject: an American author's success story. That theme is there, all right, but because it is not centered it is repellent, as the film pretends to be an account of the author's descent into collateral agony...With the true theme of fame-hunger fully fashioned, the film would have been a more authentic American epic.

Still, flaws and all, we have to be grateful to Nunez for persisting in his independence.

Ardant is marvelously genuine: fiery, petty, exalted.

Throughout the film a question tugs at the viewer. Kinsey's work was inarguably important, but his life is not especially interesting.

Whatever the plot, it is soothing to be in the company of Fanny Ardant, who plays Catherine and whose twenty-five-year career is dotted with small treasures.

Mathilde's story is well enough handled by Jeunet to be endurable, and the rest of the film is a reward.

The film is emotionally and visually sustained, so it is pleasant.

The surprise in Jaws 2 is that, given the givens, it came out as well as it did. For me, in terms of sheer visceral zapping, it’s better than the first time around (or under).

The tension with which the picture starts soon dissipates, the contrast between Eliska's background and her present place is lost, and the film plods into a tale of village life, spiced only occasionally with a hint of German threat.

A story that is still healthfully discomfiting to remember.

Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky succeed. Their documentary Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust is, of all things, timely. It is also courageous.

The result can be--sometimes is--tedium; but, whether or not the work succeeds as Sokurov intended, it is an adventurous director's probe of cinema possibilities.

This multiplicity--of people, stories, settings--is both the weakness and strength of the film. It is not easy to follow all the various threads, to get the pith of every scene. Still, this very abundance gives the whole picture a sense of authority.

It opens fissures through which we can glimpse oddities and strains in film directing and acting.

McGrath says that he considers his film to be lighter in tone than TC 1, which is baffling. The reverse seems the case.

The result is almost like a film we have seen before but don't mind seeing again. The dialogue is generally fresh, the relationships ring true.

If you want glossy New York, see Woody Allen’s Manhattan. If you want the New York that makes people’s faces look the way they do in the subway, see Lumet.

It has almost no story: its claim on our interest is in the texture of family life, which is what really fills the screen.

Téchiné has a reputation in France as an especially empathic director of women--Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche among them--and he has understood this Odile very well.

The latest Chabrol is a bit bland, but by now a new film of his is almost like meeting a previously unencountered family member.

There's a great deal in black America that has yet to reach the screen, and Lee is a prime candidate, in gift and gall, to help fill the gap. [July 3, 1989]

At the last, despite the modern touches in Bennett's screenplay, The History Boys fills the traditional bill. Wellington would probably not be too upset by it. Eventually it tells us that Waterloo is still in pretty good hands.

The dialogue is bright, historically styled yet lithe; the characterizations are graphic even with minor people.

And Jesus Ochoa, the veteran actor who plays Diego, makes us jealous of Mexico. How easily powerful he is, how complex without pretense.

No one is expected to believe Pretty Woman . We're just supposed to enjoy it... Pretty Woman wants only to engage us for two hours, and it does. [16 Apr 1990, p.26]

This is a fictional film, but it is based on a novel by Stefanie Zweig that is autobiographical. The adaptation was done by the director Caroline Link, whose screenplay is serviceable and whose directing is generally sure.

Burns with sincerity and serious intent.

This film is a valuable signet of Wilson's carefully articulated independence.

It's relatively easy to convey the claustral in interior scenes, but [designer] Furst and the director Tim Burton do it even when the setting is a great flight of steps before the municipal building or the huge square where Batman and the joker confront each other. [31 July 1989, p.24]

Once we learn the story's terrain, we have a pretty good idea of the paths it will follow. Still, because the picture is tidily directed and acted--in one case, better than that--it has the comforts of well-made old things.

The result is not a quilt, just a succession of story snippets that keep interrupting one another.

Flies into the improbable at its big moments. [17 Mar 1997, p. 28]

The gem in this rag pile is Cameron Diaz as Mary: quick, witty, pretty, warm. There is something about Mary. [17 Aug 1998]

The story is multiplex and unclear.

Though there is plenty of action, particularly at the start and at the end with two blasting sea battles, much of the film is not sufficiently interesting.

More amusing than exciting. [19 June 1989, p.28]

Little more than the distended first half of a twisty, dark "Law & Order" script.

Many sequences, many moments, are turned skillfully, and the look of the film is much of the time breathtaking. Yet, for its entire two hours and fifteen minutes, we merely watch it. It is there. We are here, regrettably objective.

Mondovino is repetitious. The version that is being shown here runs 131 minutes and would be more effective with about twenty minutes of condensation.

The picture is so suavely made that we don't feel disappointed until it is over: what chiefly holds us is the quality of the acting.

What keeps us watching? Chiefly it is Edward Norton's performance as Harlan. It is hard to doubt his belief in everything he says, no matter how silly or dangerous it sounds.

At least we have the chance to see Sharif again, with our memory of the sun behind him, even though this film is not much more than a sweetmeat--Turkish delight.

The film is a pretty good picture show, as we used to say, but anyone who has read Nelson Algren’s wonderfully poetic novel is likely to make invidious comparisons and be otherwise distracted, particularly when the film strives to narrow itself to a problem of drug addiction. 

Sternfeld not only deals empathically with his cast, he seems to know that his screenplay is not very novel or stirring; nonetheless, he wants to present these human beings in their skins, so to speak.