Ultimately, The Fighter loses its courage and betrays the terms of its own story by fashioning an interpretation designed to please the people it portrays. It does a switch on us, by changing its focus from Micky's character to Micky's career and then pretending it was really about the career all along.

An action sci-fi blockbuster extravaganza that provides cartoon thrills for thinking people. It's the best movie of its kind since the second "Spider-Man" movie four years ago.

You leave Cinema Paradiso with that feeling that's kind of like getting kicked in the stomach, but nice. It's one of those breathless, swept-away-by-a-movie experiences that you might have once a year, if you're lucky. [16 February 1990, Daily Notebook, p.E-1]

Much of the film is so wrenching there's no time for idle thoughts.

At its slowest, the film has value as a historical document. At its best, the film gives a human face to stories of unimaginable suffering and unexpected triumph.

Riveting.

Powerful and outrageous.

It's a slow-moving fable, with enough story and substance to make for one amazing Imax short. Instead the material is stretched beyond its limits into a long, repetitive and often stagnant 127-minute feature film.

I Am Love casts no spell and creates no narrative urgency. It's as compelling as mildly interesting gossip about people you don't know.

It's excessive and psychologically imprecise, coarse where it should be refined and too much like a David Cronenberg horror movie in places where restraint and intellectual rigor are called for.

A new restoration takes a flawed bit of monster camp and turns it back into a strong, serious-minded and occasionally moving science-fiction film.

Wallows in bleakness and settles for sentimental gestures.

Though I wish Please Give were a little better, there aren't enough American movies like it.

Unique and courageous. It may be counted as one of the year's few steps forward in cinema.

A brutal movie, brutal in all the right ways -- brutally stark, brutally funny, brutally brutal. [30 Oct 1992]

One of the best films to open in the Bay Area in 2007.

Moments are stretched. Every recollection must be illustrated by a flashback. Character motivations shift on a dime, and if you understand even half of what's going on - not generally, but specifically - you'll be doing better than most.

Washington, no surprise, is terrific, his sensitivity offset with touches of knowing, self-deprecating humor.

Presents us with characters of such humanity and dignity that it begins to seem obscene that until now we haven't exactly given all that much thought to the Kurds.

Midnight Run has thrills, excellent performances, touching moments, slick plotting, lively dialogue, plenty of laughs, beautiful locations and finely detailed direction. It's an across-the-board success, the best new movie I've seen in years. [20 July 1988]

A rare film about the class and educational divide that can happen even within families.

As a screenwriter, Lemmons is able to keep all the plot elements in place. But as a director, she is unable to keep things moving.

Breillat is inviting us to really look at sex as it occurs in life, and to engage with it mentally, as a driving mystery of human existence.

Haunting psychological drama.

By the end, it is clear just how much in control Sayles has been all along. The resolution, though typically restrained, forcefully puts over the movie's point, that we're all more connected than we think.

It is all thoroughly entertaining and even, at times, gripping.

Never takes off, but it never collapses. At times, it becomes frustrating -- for example, about 30 minutes are spent pursuing a lead that goes nowhere.

The old saying, "It's hard to find good help nowadays" takes on a new meaning in Murderous Maids.