question: Overlong and superficial, A Time to Kill nonetheless succeeds on the strength of its skillful craftsmanship and top-notch performances.

numbered reviews: 1. Director Joel Schumacher and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman seem incapable of emphasizing what's important and relegating the rest to secondary status.
2. A Time to Kill has it all.
3. A skillfully constructed morality play that pushes all the right buttons and arrives at all the right conclusions.
4. Never has a 145-minute film been less thrilling and more predictable.
5. A handsome but riotously cluttered melodrama with maybe 145 subplots.
6. It's McConaughey's commanding performance (or the way scenes between him and the equally camera-friendly Bullock practically eat through the screen) that will make this movie one for the history books.
7. The hype is true. Matthew McConaughey is all that.
8. Sandra Bullock, given an extremely misleading first billing, turns in what may be her best work yet as the cocky legal prodigy who smells a ticket to notoriety in the much-publicized case...
9. Really not moving and perhaps not even greatly intelligent in the way that To Kill a Mockingbird was, but it gives a feel for Southern politics and law better than other Grisham films and it tells its story engrossingly.
10. The performances are strong, the issues provocative. I was glad I saw it, but I was also glad when it was over; my chest was sore from Schumacher aiming wallops at my heart. Sometimes he connected, but I wished he'd aimed more often at my brain.


question: Taking place in a hotel room, Tape has the feel of a play, but its engrossing psychodrama allows its stars to shine.

numbered reviews: 1. Easily, one of the best pictures of 2001.
2. Isn't anybody else bothered by the fact that these digital 'films' look like used toilet paper?
3. When all is said and done, it is still a filmed play, but compelling all the same
4. Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, and Uma Thurman all turn in very solid performances.
5. Worth watching, even if it never transcends its self-imposed limitations.
6. For the most part, Tape is smart and deftly executed, with Hawke, in particular, as the resentful Vince, making a vivid impression.
7. For a movie set completely inside a dingy motel room, Tape is a thrilling piece of experimental cinema.
8. If Tape's claustrophobia doesn't get to you, and if you've got the intestinal fortitude to spend nearly 90 minutes in intimate proximity with two equally unlikeable guys, the movie does exert a certain propulsive fascination.
9. There's a place in the world of the cinema for filmed theater, especially when it's done as well as it is here.
10. The performances are amazingly charged and fluid.


question: Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman make this predictable affair watchable.

numbered reviews: 1. Conventional, with a twist you'll probably guess, but absorbing because of Ashley Judd's forceful performance.
2. There's a reason why I walked out of A Few Good Men when it first premiered: so I'd never have to see it again.
3. High Crimes carries almost no organic intrigue as a government/ Marine/legal mystery, and that's because the movie serves up all of that stuff, nearly subliminally, as the old-hat province of male intrigue.
4. There are few things more frustrating to a film buff than seeing an otherwise good movie marred beyond redemption by a disastrous ending.
5. The plot, involving a military cover-up, isn't the most original, but the adroit cast and crew milk it for all its worth. ... You won't be disappointed.
6. Judd ... eyebrow-cocks her way through Carl Franklin's witless High Crimes.
7. In a movie like this, if you're not surprised, if you know what's going to happen and you can figure out everything then it ultimately falls flat and that's why it doesn't work for me.
8. Not only does the thoroughly formulaic film represent totally exemplify middle-of-the-road mainstream, it also represents glossy Hollywood at its laziest.
9. Undermined by too many problems -- contrivances, recycled suspense/thriller elements, some bad/rough editing, etc.
10. It becomes evident that the plot is just a machine to jerk the audience around, and a poorly oiled machine at that -- it clanks when it should click.


question: It has a dark sense of humor and a refreshing lack of sentimentality, but like its title character, Hesher isn't really interested in going anywhere.

numbered reviews:
1. Gordon-Levitt's Hesher is raw destruction and aggro comedy punctuated with a blast of crunching metal.
2. Hesher finds uncommon sympathy for people at loose ends, and although Hesher himself is sentimentalized and backhandedly inspiring, he never softens into an actual role model.
3. Warts and all, "Hesher" is still a good shot in the arm.
4. Rather than a character rooted in some sort of reality -- social, satirical, psychological, take your pick -- Hesher is an abstract notion animated by false energy.
5. Bad role models sometimes make the most interesting movie characters.
6. Unlike many films that hope to be called black comedy, it does not skimp on either the black or the comedy.
7. When the blessed credits finally roll, the first thing Susser shows us is Hesher's tattoo of a raised middle finger. Backatcha, dude.
8. At a future date, when some grad student writes a thesis on 'Wild Men of the Subconscious in Popular Culture,' there will certainly be a special place for 'Hesher.' Just as long as it stays there and is never in front of my eyes again.
9. A dark, weird, and wholly unique comedy that uses a bucketful of obscenity to help the sweetness go down.
10. Beyond the fact that Hesher is a character to be despised instead of admired, Hesher is distanced from its characters and their situation in its apathy toward them.