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Scream
(1996)
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Paul Malcolm
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Scream is a meta-horror film that hilariously parodies the genre's clichés with smarts to spare.
Posted Oct 12, 2024
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Bram Stoker's Dracula
(1992)
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Steve Erickson
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The movie seethes with visual genius and imagistic segues so brazenly hokey that to call them kitsch would utterly trivialize the hallucinatory onslaught. The naive bravado of it all ravishes sense and subtlety.
Posted Sep 26, 2024
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Apocalypse Now
(1979)
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Ginger Varney
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More than any movie I've ever seen, Apocalypse Now lessens the distance between civilian and soldier. Simply put, it makes war on an audience, and this gives the film great power and great beauty.
Posted Sep 23, 2024
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Bright Lights, Big City
(1988)
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John Powers
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For despite its glitzy subject matter, the story is utterly conventional.
Posted Aug 21, 2024
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Beetlejuice
(1988)
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John Powers
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Here [Burton] encourages Michael Keaton to strut his stuff, and this crack comic actor gives Beetlejuice the kind of quicksilver lift that can only come from actors, never from effects.
Posted Aug 21, 2024
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Alien Resurrection
(1997)
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Manohla Dargis
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Jeunet's greatest sin as a director is that of pride: He indulges in his own playful design to the detriment of both the story and his main character.
Posted Aug 06, 2024
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Alien 3
(1992)
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Lucas Sussman
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Even though the regal Sigourney Weaver holds her shaved head high all the way through to the end, Alien 3 is a sad way to say goodbye to Hollywood's nastiest screen monster since Jaws.
Posted Aug 06, 2024
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Aliens
(1986)
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John Powers
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A noisy, hectoring, mechanical piece of filmmaking. It beats you like a drum, but there's no resonance.
Posted Jul 30, 2024
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Twister
(1996)
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Ella Taylor
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In the wrong hands apocalypse can be deadly -- deadly dull, that is -- but when it comes to cheap thrills, Jan De Bont is up there with the best.
Posted Jul 16, 2024
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When Harry Met Sally...
(1989)
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Elvis Mitchell
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Instead of sharpening an ax, Reiner sharpens Popsicle sticks to make into play knives.
Posted Jul 09, 2024
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Steel Magnolias
(1989)
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Ella Taylor
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It's worth the price of a ticket to see the poised Olympia Dukakis as the elegant, amused widow of the mayor.
Posted May 01, 2024
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Planet of the Apes
(2001)
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Manohla Dargis
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Wahlberg can’t obscure his incredulity at the words he’s made to speak or the sheer silliness of the whole thing. Without latex and a full-bodied shag there’s no hiding from this film.
Posted May 01, 2024
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Postcards From the Edge
(1990)
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Arion Berger
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Postcards From the Edge is self-congratulatory pink-and-blue piffle, with virtually no reason for being except to showcase two terrific actresses playing actresses.
Posted Apr 29, 2024
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I Think I Do
(1997)
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Hazel-Dawn Dumpert
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It hovers somewhere between Friends and Four Weddings and a Funeral, and while not as fully realized as even those, the film has a freshness that mediates the strained plotting and forced conviviality for a perfectly tolerable 93 minutes.
Posted Apr 17, 2024
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Spaceballs
(1987)
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Michael Dare
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Though I hate to review a film based upon its budget, I can't help but feel that there's something very wrong with satirizing one $25-million movie with another $25-million movie.
Posted Apr 12, 2024
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Little Women
(1994)
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Manohla Dargis
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Armstrong maneuvers Alcott's prose with sympathy and a cool head.
Posted Apr 11, 2024
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Seven
(1995)
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Manohla Dargis
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Each actor reaches deep and brings forth a character far greater than the one written; for all its disappointments, the film can pierce the heart. As for Fincher, he pierces the heart with genius.
Posted Mar 29, 2024
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Almost Famous
(2000)
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Manohla Dargis
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The film shimmers with the irresistible pleasures that define Hollywood at its best -- it's polished like glass, funny, knowing and bright, and filled with characters whose lives are invariably sexier and more purposeful than our own.
Posted Mar 26, 2024
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The Shawshank Redemption
(1994)
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Manohla Dargis
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Darabont, making his debut as a director, is swamped by ambition. There is just too much here -- too much plot, too many particulars, too many prisoners vying for attention.
Posted Mar 04, 2024
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Pulp Fiction
(1994)
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Elizabeth Pincus
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Like its source material, Pulp Fiction is comic and grim, sun-soaked and shadowy, tender and blunt. A pop-drenched dream reel, the film is both a reverential nod to the power of words and a stunning entertainment that more than lives up to its hype.
Posted Mar 01, 2024
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Forrest Gump
(1994)
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Kristal Brent Zook
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Forrest Gump is for big kids what playing Nintendo is for little ones -- that is, the neato thing about Robert Zemeckis' film is the clever techno-wizardry produced by Ken Ralston and Industrial Light and Magic.
Posted Mar 01, 2024
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Four Weddings and a Funeral
(1994)
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Elizabeth Pincus
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If "Four Weddings" is a stab at recovering -- or inventing -- an atmosphere of leisure and sunny innocence, then it's a facile effort that relies on glib banter and the upbeat fantasy of a classless society.
Posted Feb 29, 2024
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Teen Witch
(1989)
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Janice Drickey
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The message of the well-constructed but unsurprising script by Robin Menken and Vernon Zimmerman is practically lit in neon, and fails to adequately address the cruelty of the "haves" vs, "have-nots" caste system.
Posted Feb 16, 2024
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Dune
(1984)
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Michael Ventura
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Dune has been diluted, diminished and twisted. One of the great works of our time has been cheapened. Stolen. For nothing, or for a kind of aesthetic greed.
Posted Feb 14, 2024
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Quiz Show
(1994)
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Manohla Dargis
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A terrifically entertaining account of the tarnishing of television's Golden Age.
Posted Feb 13, 2024
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Grease
(1978)
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Ella Taylor
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Hang in there for the dance numbers and amuse yourself ID-ing the old-timers in the supporting cast.
Posted Feb 06, 2024
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Reservoir Dogs
(1992)
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Ella Taylor
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A fond genre move that's forever chortling up its sleeve at the puerile idiocy of the genre, a heist caper without a heist, an action movie that's hopelessly in love with talk and a poem to the sexiness of storytelling.
Posted Jan 12, 2024
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Heat
(1995)
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Manohla Dargis
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At its core it's actually about virtuosity... and, by extension, the virtuosity of Mann himself, of which there's no short supply. Too bad it's running on empty; if the film weren't so hollow it would be a masterpiece.
Posted Dec 21, 2023
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The Last of the Mohicans
(1992)
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Arion Berger
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As an amoral and anti-political period piece, deeply invested in the futility of war, the movie's brute splendor is all the more moving because it's so extravagantly doomed.
Posted Dec 15, 2023
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Home Alone
(1990)
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Helen Knode
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Basically, Home Alone isn't funny because it says Kevin must love his family even though they make his life unlivable.
Posted Nov 29, 2023
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The Duellists
(1977)
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Michael Ventura
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Keith Carradine finally proves he can act in his most demanding role yet, while Harvey Keitel struggles manfully against gross miscasting, but there can be no electricity while they strain to keep up with their parts.
Posted Nov 21, 2023
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Alien
(1979)
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Michael Ventura
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This thing scared the shit out of me. Alien's a masterpiece of fright.
Posted Nov 16, 2023
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Alien
(1979)
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Ginger Varney
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Unencumbered by any metaphysical freight, Alien is free to whack us silly with belly-buzzing, neck-pulsing genius.
Posted Nov 16, 2023
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Smoke Signals
(1998)
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F.X. Feeney
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From the start, you can guess this journey will make them whole, but writer Sherman Alexie and director Chris Eyre carry off the inevitable with infectious energy and humor.
Posted Nov 08, 2023
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Goodfellas
(1990)
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Tom Carson
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All that's on the screen is a showy, humorless vaunting of directorial technique, and misplaced technique at that. Scorsese sets up the material as comedy, but he seems to consider it beneath him to let viewers find any of it funny.
Posted Oct 18, 2023
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Raging Bull
(1980)
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Ginger Varney
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The impacted hell of city life, the incessant noise and motion, seen and heard as it washes over and around one man, is bearable only because Scorsese makes it beautiful. Almost overbearingly beautiful, but not quite.
Posted Oct 11, 2023
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Alligator
(1980)
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Ginger Varney
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Full of knock-about wit and liveliness, Alligator is altogether a satisfying revival of what the form at its low-budget best used to be.
Posted Oct 07, 2023
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The Elephant Man
(1980)
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Michael Ventura
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It is a great film, if great means that, seeing it once, you see it forever. Great in the manner of Chaplin's City Lights, of Griffith's Way Down East, or Cukor's David Copperfield... like them, its beauties rise out darkness, struggle and shine.
Posted Oct 07, 2023
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Taxi Driver
(1976)
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Manohla Dargis
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It primarily traffics in the politics of nihilism... That doesn't mean Taxi Driver isn't one of the greatest movies of the last two decades, simply that its greatness is compromised by a narrowness of vision.
Posted Oct 05, 2023
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Traffic
(2000)
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Ella Taylor
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The pulsing heart of Traffic lies in the predicament of Del Toro’s Javier Rodriguez, an honest cop in a tangled web of graft.
Posted Sep 07, 2023
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Lone Star
(1996)
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Ella Taylor
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Nobody in Lone Star talks in any thing resembling human speech -- they're too busy pushing the narrative around and lecturing one another on the evil arbitrariness of boundaries.
Posted Sep 06, 2023
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Selena
(1997)
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Paul Malcolm
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For all its simplicity, however, the film is entertaining, even uplifting, with Lopez giving a stellar, confectionary performance.
Posted Sep 06, 2023
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Moulin Rouge
(2001)
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Ella Taylor
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Baz Luhrmann has stuffed every idea or image that ever entered his head, or pop song that tickled his eclectic fancy, into this likable but fatally cluttered and overwhelmingly red extravaganza.
Posted Sep 05, 2023
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When a Man Loves a Woman
(1994)
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Elizabeth Pincus
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Garcia, too, disappears brilliantly into his role, that of a well-meaning but inflexible man unable to cope with the transformations brought about by Ryan's attempts to sober up. [It's] a serious relationship study on par with the best of John Cassavetes.
Posted Sep 01, 2023
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White Men Can't Jump
(1992)
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Tom Carson
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It's rare for a Hollywood talent to be so sunny-minded yet intelligent; Shelton has better taste in what he enjoys about this country than anyone since Walt Kelly.
Posted Aug 31, 2023
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Hard-Boiled
(1992)
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John Powers
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Director John Woo's fifth collaboration with Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat is so deliriously action-packed that it verges on, and sometimes succumbs to, self-parody.
Posted Jul 27, 2023
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Batman
(1989)
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Elvis Mitchell
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Batman tries to span the uncharted area between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Blue Velvet, which is worthy of notice. That it fails may be because of Tim Burton's lack of narrative cohesion.
Posted Jul 25, 2023
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A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
(1987)
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Michael Dare
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I came to this movie burned out on the whole genre, but I left not only satisfied, but actually happy that the Freddy cycle was continuing.
Posted Jul 18, 2023
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In the Mood for Love
(2000)
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Manohla Dargis
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It is undeniable in its poignancy, an ecstatic vision of what might have been, though as much for its story as for the fact that the whole thing dissolves like a paper fan in rain, an evanescent masterwork.
Posted Jul 15, 2023
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The Matrix
(1999)
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Manohla Dargis
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There's more form than content in The Matrix, but Bill Pope's swooping, noir-inflected cinematography is wonderfully complemented by Owen Paterson's inventive production design, a great soundtrack and the best fight choreography this side of Hong Kong.
Posted Jul 13, 2023
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