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Michael Wilmington
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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I Think I Do (1997) |
Screwball comedy may be the source of some crown jewels of the American cinema, but the low-budget, low-inspiration American indie romp I Think I Do is a pasteboard geegaw. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Apr 17, 2024
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Spaceballs (1987) |
Some of the gags in Spaceballs are screamingly funny. Some are mildly amusing. Others seem forced, pokey or deliberately, of course flatulent. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Apr 11, 2024
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Showgirls (1995) |
Director Verhoeven, a brilliant moviemaker, keeps punching Showgirls across with such galvanizing speed and vitality, such roaring movement and dazzling visuals, that you're continually sucked into every scene, even the stupidest ones. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Mar 27, 2024
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Almost Famous (2000) |
It rocks hard and sweetly, making that past live and sing for us. I loved this movie madly, and so will many of you. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Mar 26, 2024
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The Shawshank Redemption (1994) |
The Shawshank Redemption may be working with stuff we've seen before, but it's surprisingly strong and engrossing. Even elitists in the audience who dismiss King as a shock schlockmeister may be amazed at this picture's narrative grip. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Mar 04, 2024
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Dune (1984) |
Brilliant as Lynch and his collaborators often are, one has to mine out the cinematic gems and moments of wonder and awe here -- like the precious water concealed below Arrakis' sandy surface. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Feb 14, 2024
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Quiz Show (1994) |
The movie hums, purrs and shines. But it's also full of contradictions. A big budget picture about mass media fakery that's somewhat rigged itself, a docudrama that stretches the facts, an exposé on class prejudice that almost succumbs to [that] vice. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Feb 13, 2024
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Grease (1978) |
On a big screen, with all the colors shiny and new, and Travolta and Newton-John looking just like they did when they were teenagers, in their 20s. Greasy kid stuff it may all be, but just like rock 'n' roll, it'll probably never die. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Feb 01, 2024
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Goodfellas (1990) |
It's staggering: a feast of virtuoso Steadicam tracking shots, ironically pell-mell editing, and a mix of baroque visual satire, off-key realism, and brilliant, scabrous dialogue that elevates gutter badinage to the high verbal style of a Jacobean drama. - Isthmus (Madison, WI)
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| Posted Oct 18, 2023
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Taxi Driver (1976) |
Made with feverish intensity by its white-hot, mostly young cast and crew, this is a film that can ravish, amuse and terrify you by turns. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Oct 05, 2023
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Shocker (1989) |
Ever since he directed the first “Nightmare on Elm Street” in 1984, abandoning the sequels to others, Craven may be haunted by the fact that he made what many regard as the single scariest genre horror movie of the decade. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Sep 05, 2023
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When a Man Loves a Woman (1994) |
Andy Garcia conveys an almost glacial calm and fortitude beneath which a reservoir of boiling rage consistently seems to simmer. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Sep 01, 2023
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The Last Boy Scout (1991) |
A story about lonely heroism in a sick age should be a little hipper to what’s really heroic and what’s really sick. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Aug 04, 2023
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La Haine (1995) |
Hate is a blast of movie outrage, a genuine shocker. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Jul 20, 2023
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Mapantsula (1988) |
The film starts as a racy gangster melodrama with an unusually pungent low-life city background, then builds inexorably to a moral reckoning, a ferocious, unforgettable denouement. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jun 30, 2023
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Yentl (1983) |
There's a core of Chaplinesque sweetness and self-pity here, but it becomes drowned in ambition, overlarded with spectacle. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 12, 2023
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Boys on the Side (1995) |
It's neither an entertainment genre piece nor a touching naturalistic drama, though it tries to be both. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Mar 14, 2023
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Wild Things (1998) |
Wild Things has such a complex story, and it forces so many shifts of viewpoint, that it begins to seem artificial, a stunt. And, when all its mysteries are revealed, the movie doesn't really parse or make sense. I felt cheated. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Feb 02, 2023
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The Big Lebowski (1998) |
It takes a largely undocumented chunk of reality and twists it into a surreal comic film noir wonderland, full of delightfully bent characters and darkly hilarious set-pieces, gasser performances, great lines and right-on portraiture. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Jan 20, 2023
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Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) |
The protracted scenes of eating, cooking and cleaning carry neo-realism to its end point and to a violent climax which emerges logically and terrifyingly from the welter of daily trivia preceding it. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Dec 06, 2022
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Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) |
Hollywood's great holiday musical is this sparkling adaptation of writer Sally Benson's memoir: a movie that takes us on a Currier and Ives 1903 holiday tour of St. Louis with the postcard-perfect Smith family. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Nov 10, 2022
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Platoon (1986) |
Oliver Stone's Platoon is a Vietnam War film that hits you like a rolling wave from a long-ago battle zone: a blood tide of rage and pain. - Isthmus (Madison, WI)
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| Posted Aug 19, 2022
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Mephisto (1981) |
An almost magnetically powerful indictment of political opportunism in the arts. - Isthmus (Madison, WI)
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| Posted Aug 11, 2022
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Terms of Endearment (1983) |
Brooks telescopes the lives of the two women with such skill and beguiling rapidity that, until the end, you never really feel the rush, never realize how much (almost 30 years and dozens of characters) the movie is showing you. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Jul 20, 2022
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Amadeus (1984) |
Shaffer, the (self-confessed) repressed British aesthete, and Forman, the hard-as-nails Czech expatriate, have together fashioned a stirring tribute to the mystery of artistic creation. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Jul 11, 2022
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Dont Look Back (1967) |
Both a great concert movie and an amazing documentary of mid-'60s cutting edge pop culture, - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted May 09, 2022
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Predator (1987) |
It's arguably one of the emptiest, feeblest, most derivative scripts ever made as a major studio movie. There's no need to do a Mad magazine movie parody of this; it's already on the screen. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Apr 22, 2022
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Thousand Pieces of Gold (1990) |
With remarkable skill, compression and economy, it takes art alternative look at American frontier life, lets us watch the mainstream of history from the smaller, more perilous currents outside. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Feb 16, 2022
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Wyatt Earp (1994) |
Wyatt Earp is a fascinating ride to a West where darkness and heroism mingle, a triumph for Kasdan, Costner, Quaid and the company. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Dec 21, 2021
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Poltergeist II (1986) |
Kane almost seems a thankless bogyman role, but Beck is great in it -- and if the rest of the movie were up to him, it would freeze your blood instead of curdling your spirits. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Nov 02, 2021
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Young Guns II (1990) |
Full of sound, gunfire, fury and scorchingly beautiful landscapes, Young Guns 2 generates more sheer visual excitement than any Western since Peckinpah and Leone were in their last '70s prime. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Nov 02, 2021
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Critters (1986) |
The movie has its moments, and it may even delight some sleaze-loving audiences largely because the cast is good, and first-time director Stephen Herek gives it some pizazz and pace. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Oct 27, 2021
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Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) |
This is a movie that pleases us and disturbs by turns -- a wonderfully satisfying entertainment. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Oct 20, 2021
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The Presidio (1988) |
Too much danger and glamour may dull your senses or make it hard to appreciate intimacy. That's what happens in "The Presidio." It's an ultra-slick, ultra-flat movie that cuts like a cellophane knife. No edge, no blood. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Sep 06, 2021
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My Family/Mi Familia (1995) |
There's a fearlessness about My Family that commands respect. It goes after both big issues and small moments. Most of all, it beats with an unabashed love of family that in the end, becomes admirable, even inspiring. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Aug 26, 2021
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Garbo Talks (1984) |
Garbo Talks is a comedy, and Lumet, as he's shown before, is a good comedy director; the movie keeps its slightly tart comic objectivity even in the warmest, runniest moments. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Aug 22, 2021
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Night Game (1989) |
"Night Game" answers the burning question: Would bad, improbably plotted slasher movies be any better if they had humor, strong characters and pungent dialogue instead of incessant car-crashes and blood-letting? The answer, surprisingly, is no. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Aug 19, 2021
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Cool as Ice (1991) |
It's one of those movies that seem fabricated for a shopping mall: decorative, pretty, vacuous. - Chicago Tribune
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| Posted Aug 13, 2021
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The Holcroft Covenant (1985) |
Is Caine believable as a Manhattan architect? Even one with a Cockney fixation? It doesn't matter, because Caine performances have become axiomatic: No matter what the movie, he's always good. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Aug 03, 2021
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A Touch of Zen (1971) |
Meticulously detailed, and suffused, at times, with a real (if totally screwball) sense of wonder... [though] the grandeur of the film is inseparable from its silliness. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Aug 02, 2021
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Big Trouble in Little China (1986) |
The director, trying for speed, spectacle and whimsy, seems hamstrung--like his pratfalling hero, Jack Burton. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jun 29, 2021
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Psycho III (1986) |
It fails any sequel's acid test: It feeds off the original without deepening it. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jun 29, 2021
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Delirious (1991) |
It's a movie about a nightmare, but instead of turning into some kind of bad dream itself, it just turns into a bad movie. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jun 29, 2021
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Sidekicks (1993) |
"Sidekicks" is amiable enough, even if cinematically, it makes "Cop and a Half" look like "8 1/2." - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jun 28, 2021
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Adventures in Babysitting (1987) |
It's one of those movies that, however well it works now, might have been pretty bad with a different cast and director. It doesn't really transcend its genre; it just stretches it in amusing and sometimes surprising ways. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jun 26, 2021
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Link (1986) |
Despite predictability and flaws, "Link" is surprisingly good. It's a tight, involving, "Beauty and the Beast" thriller, with more humor and intelligence than you'd guess. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jun 26, 2021
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Another You (1991) |
Producer-writer Ziggy Steinberg's script is like a stone tied around the movie's neck that sinks it, despite all those gaudy, glossy balloons pulling it up. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jun 24, 2021
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Troop Beverly Hills (1989) |
Long is an actress who can't throw away a line--though this is one case where she should have thrown away the whole script. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jun 24, 2021
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The Secret of My Success (1987) |
A misfiring comic fantasia on business success in the Reagan era. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jun 09, 2021
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Sugar Cane Alley (1983) |
A beautiful film. A classic. One that will stay lodged forever in the hearts and minds of its audiences (much as Bicycle Thieves or Pather Panchali did before it). - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 06, 2021
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