Roger Ebert: The Ultimate Film Enthusiast

"Here is a bold, beautiful, visually enchanting musical where we walk into the theater humming the songs. ... The beauty is in the execution. The experience of the movie is joyous."

"Sharp-edged, perfectly timed, funny and thoughtful. Spacey and DeVito are two of the smartest actors in the movies, filled with the joy of performance, and they exchange their dialogue with the precision of racquetball players."

"You can sense the difference between a movie that's a technical exercise ('Resident Evil') and one steamed in the dread cauldrons of the filmmaker's imagination."

"An exhilarating visual experience and proves for the third time [Zemeckis is] one of the few directors who knows what he's doing with 3-D."

"It fascinates in the moment. It's getting from one moment to the next that is tricky. Surely this is one of the most ambitious films ever made."

"One of those rare movies where you leave the theater having been surprised and entertained, and then start arguing."

"A film that grows in reflection. The first time I saw it, I was hurtling down the tracks of a goofy ethnic comedy when suddenly we entered dark and dangerous territory. I admired the film but did not sufficiently appreciate its arc."

"This is the kind of movie Frank Capra might have directed, and James Stewart might have starred in - a movie about dreams."

"The story is nuts-and-bolts space opera, without the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's 'A.I.' But the look of the film is revolutionary. Final Fantasy is a technical milestone, like the first talkies or 3-D movies."

"A darker, deeper fantasy epic than the 'Rings' trilogy, 'The Chronicles of Narnia' or the 'Potter' films. It springs from the same British world of quasi-philosophical magic, but creates more complex villains and poses more intriguing questions. As a visual experience, it is superb. As an escapist fantasy, it is challenging."

"McTiernan, whose previous films were 'Predator' and 'Die Hard,' showed a sense of style and timing in those movies, but what he adds in 'The Hunt for Red October' is something of the same detached intelligence that Clancy brought to the novel. Somehow we feel this is more than a thriller, it's an exercise in military and diplomatic strategy in which the players are all smart enough that we can't take their actions for granted."

"It's the kind of movie Hugh Grant might make, except for the way [Kevin] Smith has with his dialogue, which is truer and more direct than we expect."

"The suspense screws up tighter than a drum-head. The characters remain believable; we have a conflict of personalities, not stereotypes. The action coexists seamlessly with the message."

"Some of the gags don't work, and yet I laughed at the Farrellys' audacity in trying them. And the humor isn't just gags and punch lines, but one accomplished comic performance after another."

"Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome."

"'La Femme Nikita' begins with the materials of a violent thriller but transcends them with the story of the heroine's transformation. It is a surprisingly touching movie with the same kind of emotional arc as 'Awakenings'."

"Beautifully designed, intelligently written, acted with conviction, it's an uncommonly thoughtful epic. Its power is compromised only by an ending that sheepishly backs away from what the film is really about."

"Some kind of sweet, wacky masterpiece."

"It handles a sports movie the way Billie Holiday handled a trashy song, by finding the love and pain beneath the story."

"The film finds the right notes to negotiate its delicate subject matter. And Benigni isn't really making comedy out of the Holocaust, anyway. He is showing how Guido uses the only gift at his command to protect his son. If he had a gun, he would shoot at the Fascists. If he had an army, he would destroy them. He is a clown, and comedy is his weapon."

"This is a movie for those who sometimes, in the stillness of the sleepless night, are so filled with hope and longing that they feel like -- well, like uttering wild goat cries to the moon. You know who you are."

"The movie's only flaw is also a virtue: It's jammed with characters, stories, warmth and laughs, until at times Curtis seems to be working from a checklist of obligatory movie love situations and doesn't want to leave anything out."

"It makes us feel about as good as any movie made this year. ... It tells a full story with three acts, it introduces characters we get to know and care about, and it has something it passionately wants to say."

"That [Carrey] can evoke the complexities of Kaufman's comic agonies is a little astonishing. That he can suppress his own desire to please takes a kind of courage. Not only is he working without his own net--he's playing a guy who didn't use a net."

"The characters are allowed to be smart, to react in unexpected ways, and to be more concerned with doing the right thing than with doing the expedient or even the lustful thing."

"The director is Nick Cassavetes, son of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, and perhaps his instinctive feeling for his mother helped him find the way past soap opera in the direction of truth. "

"This is not a sermon or a homily, but a visualization of the central event in the Christian religion. Take it or leave it."

"This is a dark, dark, dark film, focused on an obsession so complete and lonely it shuts out all other human experience. You may not savor it, but you will not stop watching it, in horror and fascination."

"It is astonishing that 'Pretty Woman' is such an innocent movie - that it's the sweetest and most openhearted love fable since 'The Princess Bride.' Here is a movie that could have marched us down mean streets into the sinks of iniquity, and it glows with romance."

"The plot is as good as crime procedurals get, but the movie is really better than its plot because of the three-dimensional characters."

"There really is a little something here for everyone: music and culture, politics and passion, crime and intrigue, history and even the backstage intrigue of the auction business."

"Rendition is valuable and rare. As I wrote from Toronto: 'It is a movie about the theory and practice of two things: torture and personal responsibility. And it is wise about what is right, and what is wrong.'"

"'Return of the Jedi' is fun, magnificent fun. The movie is a complete entertainment, a feast for the eyes and a delight for the fancy. It's a little amazing how Lucas and his associates keep topping themselves."

"A first-rate, slam-bang action thriller with a lot of style and no little humor."

"The patter is always fascinating, and at right angles to the action. [Mamet]'s like a magician who gets you all involved in his story about the King, the Queen and the Jack, while the whole point is that there's a rabbit in your pocket."

"The ending is an explanation, but not a solution. For a solution we have to think back through the whole film, and now the visual style becomes a guide. It is an illustration of the way the materials of life can be shaped for the purposes of the moment."

"I saw it a third time. By then I had moved beyond the immediate shock of the material and was able to focus on what a well-made film it was; how concisely Solondz gets the effects he's after."

"Director Phil Alden Robinson and his writers, Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne, do a spellbinding job of cranking up the tension, they create a portrait of convincing realism, and then they add the other stuff because, well, if anybody ever makes a movie like this without the obligatory Hollywood softeners, audiences might flee the theater in despair. "

"Here's the animated space adventure I've been hoping for--a film that uses the freedom of animation to visualize the strangeness of the universe in ways live action cannot duplicate, and then joins its vision to a rousing story."

"One of the most complex and visually interesting science fiction movies in a long time."

"David Schwimmer has made one of the year's best films: Powerfully emotional, yes, but also very perceptive."

"The peculiar quality of Vanity Fair, which sets it aside from the Austen adaptations such as 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Pride and Prejudice,' is that it's not about very nice people. That makes them much more interesting."

"It's a compelling visceral film -- sound, images and characters combined into a decidedly odd visual experience that evokes the feel of a graphic novel. It seems charged from within by its power as a fable; we sense it's not interested in a plot so much as with the dilemma of functioning in a world losing hope."

"A splendid comic thriller, exciting and graceful, endlessly inventive."

"A movie unlike any other I have seen or heard. Some critics have treated it as ill-behaved, as if its originality is offensive. ... I celebrate these transgressions. 'Yes' is alive and daring, not a rehearsal of safe material and styles."

"'Blue Velvet' contains scenes of such raw emotional energy that it's easy to understand why some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. A film this painful and wounding has to be given special consideration. And yet those very scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to what's wrong with the movie. They're so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest and true. But 'Blue Velvet' surrounds them with a story that's marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it's all part of a campy in-joke."

"The filmmakers rely so heavily on cliches, on stock characters in old situations, that it's as if they never really had any confidence in their performers."

"The Flower of My Secret is likely to be disappointing to Almodovar's admirers, and inexplicable to anyone else."

"Regaled for 50 years by the stupendous idiocy of the American version of Godzilla, audiences can now see the original Japanese version, which is equally idiotic."

"I see so little there: It is all remembered rote work, used to conceal old tricks, facile name-calling, the loss of hope, and emptiness."

"Will I seem hopelessly square if I find Kick-Ass morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let's say you're a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the move does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in."

"There is a kind of studied stupidity that sometimes passes as humor, and Jared Hess' Napoleon Dynamite pushes it as far as it can go. ... I'm told the movie was greeted at Sundance with lots of laughter, but then Sundance audiences are concerned with being cool, and to sit through this film in depressed silence would not be cool, however urgently it might be appropriate."

"This film is about violence. All violence. Wall-to-wall violence. Against many of those walls, heads are pounded again and again into a pulpy mass. If I estimated the film has 10 minutes of dialogue, that would be generous."

"Like a cocky teenager who's had a couple of drinks before the party, they don't have a plan for who they want to offend, only an intention to be as offensive as possible."

"The story builds up to a blinding revelation, which shifts the nature of all that has gone before, and the surprise filled me not with delight but with the feeling that the writer, Christopher McQuarrie, and the director, Bryan Singer, would have been better off unraveling their carefully knit sleeve of fiction and just telling us a story about their characters - those that are real, in any event. I prefer to be amazed by motivation, not manipulation."

"There have been articles lately asking why the United States is so hated in some parts of the world. As this week's Exhibit A from Hollywood, I offer Zoolander."