|
|
North
(1994)
|
Georgia Brown
|
Relentlessly vulgar, North can be see as yet another plaintive cry from, or cynical appeal to, the home alone generation.
Posted Jan 26, 2026
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The American President
(1995)
|
J. Hoberman
|
As comedy, no less than camp, the movie inspires little more than rote chuckles. It's too smugly mush-brained to be funny and may even be too snuggly mush-hearted to sell.
Posted Jan 21, 2026
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Bite the Bullet
(1975)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
The human competitors turn out to be so nice that one begins looking more intently at the horses for some trace of perversity.
Posted Jan 15, 2026
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Andromeda Strain
(1971)
|
Stephen Handzo
|
In a humanist blast at NASA, the film clinically details the obsessive compulsive decontamination of the human body, ironically to meet a crisis caused by the search for bigger and dirtier germ cultures.
Posted Jan 15, 2026
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Princess Bride
(1987)
|
David Edelstein
|
It's never outright parody, but it's rarely as exhilarating as a full-bodied swashbuckler. It perks along, disarming as it goes.
Posted Jan 07, 2026
Edit critic review
|
|
|
True Lies
(1994)
|
Georgia Brown
|
Mind-boggling firepower and cartoony over-the-top action.
Posted Dec 10, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Running Man
(1987)
|
David Edelstein
|
As an actor, Schwarzenegger makes Stallone look profound. He's pretty hilarious cast as someone called "the running man"; he's so muscle-bound he can hardly walk.
Posted Nov 07, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Predator
(1987)
|
Juliann Garey
|
Predator is an outrageous romp through boyland.
Posted Oct 30, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Tron
(1982)
|
Carrie Rickey
|
To say that Tron envisions technology as it has never been seen before is an understatement. No movie more deserves the praise, state of the art.
Posted Oct 06, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Casper
(1995)
|
Jeff Salamon
|
Lifelike is the word Universal Pictures used to describe Casper, and while that seems appropriate for a character who's, after all, not really alive, lifeless is the adjective that more readily comes to mind.
Posted Oct 03, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Hard Times
(1975)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
Hard Times turns out to be Charles Bronson's most effective vehicle since Sergio Leon's Once Upon a Time in the West.
Posted Sep 27, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Boogie Nights
(1997)
|
J. Hoberman
|
Treating the rise and fall of an adult entertainment star without flinching from its allegorical potential, Anderson has produced what may be the American movie of the year on what is surely the subject of any age.
Posted Sep 24, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Hard Eight
(1996)
|
J. Hoberman
|
As fastidious (and unbelievable) as enigmatic Sydney, Hard Eight has a precise narrative structure and a clean, vérité look.
Posted Sep 22, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Mortal Kombat
(1995)
|
Gary Dauphin
|
It's that simple and stupid but for fans of the game, Mortal Kombat transcends its obvious limitations by pushing a series of visceral buttons that have been hard-wired into our brains by too many hours in front of a game console.
Posted Aug 19, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Cooley High
(1975)
|
James Walcott
|
The surprise of Cooley High is that it is a schlock concept which transcends its limitation by becoming a celebration of black brotherhood.
Posted Aug 15, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Babe
(1995)
|
Michael Musto
|
[The film is] all lovingly done - there are gorgeous close-ups of the sheep that even the Michelle Pfeiffers of the world might envy.
Posted Jul 31, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Pee-wee's Big Adventure
(1985)
|
David Edelstein
|
Pee-wee's Big Adventure is spun out of childish delight and childish malice.
Posted Jul 30, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Waterworld
(1995)
|
Amy Taubin
|
Waterworld is a noisy, overbearing movie.
Posted Jul 28, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Red Rock West
(1993)
|
Julie Lang
|
The film itself wallows seductively in the twisted, consumptive murk of America's small towns.
Posted Jul 16, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Explorers
(1985)
|
J. Hoberman
|
The film is overplotted and rickety.
Posted Jul 11, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
(1987)
|
Juliann Garey
|
Superman IV seems like a sloppy, low-budget echo of the original.
Posted Jul 03, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
(1997)
|
J. Hoberman
|
Less story-driven than Jaws or even Jurassic Park, The Lost World eliminates transitional scenes, recapitulating its predecessor's thrills as if running down a checklist... Much of it is just unpleasantly nerve-racking.
Posted Jun 30, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Superman II
(1980)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
In Superman II, [Gene Hackman] supplies much needed comic relief with his sly asides in the presence of the overweeningly good and evil emissaries from the planet Krypton.
Posted Jun 25, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Day of the Dead
(1985)
|
J. Hoberman
|
Romero has remained true to the wise-guy left-liberalism that underlies the E.C. gross-out aesthetic.
Posted Jun 25, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Return to Oz
(1985)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
Walter Murch's Return to Oz can stand on its own as a creative children's entertainment, much closer, in fact, to the spirit of the Baum books than the wildly overrated Wizard.
Posted Jun 20, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Rollerball
(1975)
|
Molly Haskell
|
So confused and so poorly articulated is Jewison's vision of the future, that it's hard to know what the message is.
Posted Jun 05, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Night Moves
(1975)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
Night Moves bids fair to become one of the most underrated movies of the year.
Posted May 29, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Stepford Wives
(1975)
|
Molly Haskell
|
In trying to be more than science fiction, in aspiring to social commentary, "The Stepford Wives" winds up less.
Posted May 01, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
(1980)
|
Tom Allen
|
Let's have no more TIME talk of Lucas/Homer and Lucas/Bunyan. "Empire" is simply a minor entertainment, but I admire the moxie of betting $20 million on one-ninth of a matinee serial to be continued into the next century.
Posted Apr 23, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Supervixens
(1975)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
Supervixens represents another talent lost to pop attitudinizing.
Posted Apr 11, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York
(1975)
|
Molly Haskell
|
Every time Furie's relentlessly dreary movie gets anywhere near a laugh, it immediately swerves and plunges into bathos.
Posted Apr 09, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Capone
(1975)
|
Molly Haskell
|
The primary reason for seeing Capone... is Ben Gazzara's interpretation of the gangster... he plays Capone like an animal afflicted with hypertension.
Posted Apr 08, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Withnail and I
(1987)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
I am not sure that I like this unkempt evocation of druggy London town near the of the swinging '60s... But like many current movies I don't particularly like, Withnail and I manages to make me believe in it implicitly.
Posted Apr 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
At Long Last Love
(1975)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
What most disturbs me about At Long Last Love is not so much the clumsiness of its leading lady as the superciliousness the director displays towards the genre.
Posted Mar 25, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Tommy
(1975)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
Tommy is a profoundly unifying rock experience without malice or smugness.
Posted Mar 19, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Yakuza
(1974)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
The Yakuza is slowed down considerably by Pollack's solemnly eclectic direction and the endlessly expository dialogue which tends to make the whole exercise, bloody as it is, more explanatory than exclamatory.
Posted Mar 03, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Great Waldo Pepper
(1975)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
Hill has tried to jam too much into one picture.
Posted Mar 03, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Nashville
(1975)
|
Greil Marcus
|
Neither Altman or [Ragtime author] Doctorow are even for a moment implicated in the stories they tell, the lessons they draw, or the actions of their characters. When Gatsby lost, it is clear, so did Fitzgerald.
Posted Feb 27, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
(1975)
|
Molly Haskell
|
As for Nicholson, he is nothing short of miraculous.
Posted Feb 25, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Barry Lyndon
(1975)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon is clearly the most expensive meditation on melancholy ever financed by a Hollywood studio. From the opening strains of Georg Friedrich Handel's Sarabande... every frame in the film is a fresco of sadness.
Posted Feb 25, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Eraserhead
(1977)
|
J. Hoberman
|
Eraserhead's not a movie I'd drop acid for, although I would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the middle of Star Wars.
Posted Jan 23, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Kill, Baby... Kill!
(1966)
|
Alan Scherstuhl
|
The movie is an immersion as much as it is a narrative.
Posted Sep 27, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Conversation
(1974)
|
Andrew Sarris
|
Coppola never lets us in on any of the tactical details. Obviously, he opts for surprise over suspense, but even his surprises are muffled by his solemn gaze.
Posted Sep 24, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Apocalypse Now Redux
(1979)
|
Amy Taubin
|
Apocalypse has the expressive extravagance of a Wagner opera-and not merely because the swooping helicopter scene is set to the "Ride of the Valkyries."
Posted Sep 22, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Alien Resurrection
(1997)
|
J. Hoberman
|
At least Alien 3 had intimations of mythological grandeur. Too tepid to be satire, "Resurrection" has reached the point of diminishing returns.
Posted Aug 06, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Jaws
(1975)
|
Molly Haskell
|
It is a thriller, according to the classic distinction, of surprise rather than suspense. You feel like a rat, being given shock treatment, who has not yet figured out what to do to call off the buzzers.
Posted Jul 02, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Girl Is in Trouble
(2012)
|
Alan Scherstuhl
|
Columbus Short proves a sturdy, appealing lead in a fractured, low-key suspense thriller distinguished by novelistic detail about its New Yorkers and its New York.
Posted May 21, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Let It Be
(1970)
|
James Stoller
|
Let It Be is a very lovely spectacle -- a film to make you smile, and with its 16mm tawny colors and pastels, one that invites repeated viewings.
Posted May 09, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Zero for Conduct
(1933)
|
Jonas Mekas
|
Those faces of children in Zero for Conduct! In no other film have I seen faces like these. Those eyes, those motions, those smiles, those countenances, always ready for mischief.
Posted May 02, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Breathless
(1959)
|
Oliver Stone
|
Nine years ago, I fell in love with Breathless. Time has aged her since, but poems of chaos, having little structure, are gloriously free from decay.
Posted May 02, 2024
Edit critic review
|
Continue with Google
>
