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

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

Built on one of those particularly ludicrous plots in which, just before the end, we are meant to believe that a long succession of coincidences was really a diabolical scheme. [23 Feb 1998, p. 24]

Washington Heights, under De Villa's guidance, bubbles. Once more, as in comparable films, it creates a foreign nexus in a domestic setting -- a group of people who live in two cultures.

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 film is merely a succession of odd events. But those events are interesting, and the texture of the village's life is full-fashioned.

None of the actors completely satisfies.

The pace is fairly hectic, which it needs to be. (Mustn't linger on bubbles.) The performances are warm, especially the tender Judith Godrèche as the doctor's wife.

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.

The film holds us principally because of its Napoleon. Philippe Torreton doesn't perform the role: he exists.

In short, this squad is an ill-trained, slovenly bunch of soldiers. That such behavior exists, or can exist, in any army is surely commonplace, but that Israeli producers should want to make a film about the matter at this time is puzzling.

Precisely the point of films in this genre is to provide pleasant predictability. We collaborate, in a way: we chuckle silently as, so to speak, we make the film ourselves.

Harron's work here is unclear in its theme or purpose. Was she showing how a woman managed to find a woman's way to success in a man's world? Was Harron interested in Page's delusion about what she was doing? Or did she want to scoff implicitly at the customers who made Page's career possible? We are left wondering.

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.

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.

Eastwood has never seemed less the persona he has built through the decades, the calm yet commanding center of a storm.

Malkovich has done considerable directing in the theater, but nothing in the acting here shows acuteness of choice or subtlety of touch.

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.

A lively, long, intelligent documentary.

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

Crudup is whole. He creates the man who has pride in what he does, who is suddenly stripped of the work and the pride; and who makes his way, somewhat painfully, to another sort of pride. His story is a small but acute poignancy in the history of the theater, and Crudup realizes it completely.

The one attraction in the picture is DiCaprio's performance: easy yet strong, confident, humorous.

To play for an audience of one that is only a few feet away is different in concentration and shade from playing in the theater, and Madden, though the script lags a bit, has nonetheless helped his actors to render what were once theater scenes as film sequences.

Hopkins uncannily projects Adams's suppressed agonies as well as his querulousness, his zest for scholarship as well as his zest for political intrigue, his pragmatism as well as his idealism. [22 Dec 1997, p. 25]

The danger in Hong's procedure is obvious. Dramatists learned long ago that it is risky to include a static character because he may so easily bore the audience.

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

What Radford has retained of the original, he treats warmly and intelligently, and with a few welcome surprises in the acting. But he has produced a different work, moderately successful in itself, out of materials provided by Shakespeare.

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.