We've moved away from being a culture of people who think about movies to one made up of people who believe that spouting a list of preferences is the same as registering an opinion.
Stephanie ZacharekYou can talk film theory till you're blue in the face, but in the end, the thing that may haunt you most about a movie is a pair of eyes.
Stephanie ZacharekEverything about Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, from its toy-box colors to its superb, hyper-animated Danny Elfman score to the butch-waxed hairdo and wooden-puppet walk of its star and mastermind is pure pleasure.
Stephanie ZacharekIt would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes.
Stephanie ZacharekIt's mournful and troubling in a way that goes beyond ordinary movie manipulation. It burns clean.
Stephanie ZacharekIt's a movie barely fit for a cretin, much less a King. ... If you hear a door slam in the theater, you'll know that Elvis has left the building -- in disgust.
Stephanie ZacharekI can't remember ever feeling so glad that a movie was finally over. [Director George] Lucas may have held my imagination hostage for two hours, but reclaiming it afterward wasn't hard at all.
Stephanie ZacharekOldboy makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion.
Stephanie ZacharekThis film Phantom takes everything that's wrong with Broadway and puts it on the big screen in a gaudy splat.
Stephanie ZacharekWhile 9 Songs is sexually explicit in the basic sense, its directness is what's most fascinating, and ultimately most moving, about it.
Stephanie ZacharekExtravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of [director Steven] Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.
Stephanie ZacharekChildren of Men is a solemn, haunting picture, but it's also a thrilling one, partly because of the sheer bravado with which it's made. It left me feeling more fortified than drained. [Director Alfonso] Cuarón, the most openhearted of directors, prefers to give rather than take away.
Stephanie ZacharekPan's Labyrinth works on so many levels that it seems to change shape even as you watch it. It is, at times, a joyless picture, and its pall of sadness can begin to weigh you down.
Stephanie ZacharekThe bigger question to ask about 300 is why, for a supposedly rousing tale of heroism, it's so curiously unaffecting.
Stephanie ZacharekThe most interesting character here is an animal, a sturdy-looking white and black bulldog, who appears throughout the movie, angel style, to speak the truth -- silently. In this load of mind-bendy bushwa, he's the only thing worth watching, or listening to.
Stephanie ZacharekThis sprawling epic is as lively as a natural history museum diorama.
Stephanie ZacharekIt's impossible to tell what's going on at any given moment in Tomb of the Dragon Emperor; it's even harder to care about being able to tell.
Stephanie ZacharekThis isn't a picture filled with wonder and a sense of fun; it's so jaded and crass that I almost wonder if it's a highly unscientific experiment designed to gauge how little audiences will settle for these days. Manic and multicolored, Speed Racer is an excess of nothingness.
Stephanie ZacharekDespite the bare butts and crude sex jokes -- or because of them -- this Adam Sandler vehicle addresses some of the biggest political problems of our time. ... At the very least, it's got to be the first picture to use smelly-feet jokes as a means of parsing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But more than that, it's a mainstream movie that dares to make jokes about the kinds of complex political realities that most of us don't dare bring up at dinner parties.
Stephanie ZacharekBatman Begins leaks existential phoniness from the first frame.
Stephanie Zacharek