It is the central performance that holds us. Cillian Murphy glows.

We are left finally with a double response: it is hard to know exactly why the film was made, what its emotional and thematic point is, yet we are glad it happened because of Harris's performance.

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.

Candor about homosexuality is now so widely accepted as part of theater-film possibilities that plays and films offering not much more than such candor seem dated. In that sense Love! Valour! Compassion! is an important, if dull, milestone. [09Jun1997 Pg 30]

For me, the execution of the picture is so weak, so imitative, so facile that it makes all the thematic discussion seem idle. [25 Nov 1996, Pg.30]

His (LaBute's) work needs attention even at its nadir, which I hope this new film is.

I hazard the guess that quite small children--pre-science fiction, pre-heroics--will enjoy its fairy-tale quality.

The daring achievement of Jarhead is that it is not a film about war, about combat: it is about being a soldier.

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.

Little in [Connery's] character is explored or colored. It's not a highly complex role, but the man has qualities that could make him interesting; after all, it's his aberrant action that initiates the whole naval plot. Connery merely fulfills his contractual obligations to the producer-no depth in him at all. [26 Mar 1990, p.26]

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

As Freundlich surely knew, he must have counted, as do we, on the revelation of character to enrich the piece. It doesn't happen. None of the people is particularly interesting, not even the obligatory neurotic, well enough played by Julianne Moore. [6 October 1997, p. 28]

Schreiber's directing is ambitious, but it is nowhere near the originality and truth in his acting. Throughout the film we can feel him striving to control, to invent, to glisten.

The picture's effect: the sexual element is trenchant, while the status of Muslim youth registers strongly.

The tenuous conclusion is that all this metaphysical hugger-mugger was divinely ordered to reconcile Costner and his father. All those dead players were summoned from that Great Locker Room in the Sky in a painfully false move. [9 May 1989, p.26]

The real surprise, and Bertolucci's best achievement here, is the performance of Prince Siddhartha by Keanu Reeves. That is not a misprint. Reeves has done tolerable work in the past, except for his feeble Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, but here he carries off an extremely demanding role. [13 Jun 1994]

Meyer's screenplay has been called unsuccessful, and I agree; but, without glossing some bumps that are his doing, I'd say that in this case the trouble with the screen adaptation is the novel.

The picture as a whole lacks the energy and incisiveness --the sheer anger-- that have marked Costa-Gavras's best films. A pity, because it is a true Costa-Gavras subject.

Moreau's face is the base and the beauty of the film.

Imagine finding the will to get up every morning to do another day's work on this stale story tarted up with relevance.

This Jeffrey Hatcher-Kimberly Simi version, directed by Lasse Hallström, has a resemblance to some of Casanova's memoirs but is chiefly based on the assumption that, in a costume drama, anything goes.

The film's intent was presumably satirical in the vein of "Catch-22" or "M*A*S*H," but the satire is so weak, the action so devoid of comic perspective, that we are left with a naked gaggle of ugly episodes.

DeLillo felt he needed a plot, and he invented one that is shockingly bad for a novelist of his accomplishment. It isn't the use of a plot that degrades the picture: it is the degrading plot itself--which isn't even a good cartoon of a too-busy plot.

Two aspects stand out. Clint Eastwood is not the first person we might think of to direct a film of leisurely pace, concerned with ghosts and a transvestite...Then there's Kevin Spacey, who grows before our eyes. [29 December 1997, p. 28]

Christine Jeffs has directed it with discretion and intimacy, almost a paradoxical privacy.

When a spectacular film rests on at least a minimal armature of character and cogent action, as Troy does, we can just sink back and enjoy. What we enjoy is the sovereignty over time and place and the force of gravity that film has given to the world.

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

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