




"I really love Casablanca."

"I do too."



"TITANIC," 1997



If its story stays well within the traditional formulas for such pictures, well, you don't choose the most expensive film ever made as your opportunity to reinvent the wheel.


Although the movie is three hours long, it absorbs us so effectively it never has to hurry. There is something in the measured passage of time as Don Corleone hands over his reins of power that would have made a shorter, faster moving film unseemly. Even at this length, there are characters in relationships you can't quite understand unless you've read the novel. Or perhaps you can, just by the way the characters look at each other.


This movie made my heart glad. It is filled with innocence, hope, and good cheer. It is also wickedly funny and exciting as hell. "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" is a movie like "The Wizard of Oz," that you can grow up with and grow old with, and it won't let you down.

"STAR WARS," 1977

Every once in a while I have what I think of as an out-of-the-body experience at a movie. When the ESP people use a phrase like that, they're referring to the sensation of the mind actually leaving the body and spiriting itself off to China or Peoria or a galaxy far, far away. When I use the phrase, I simply mean that my imagination has forgotten it is actually present in a movie theater and thinks it's up there on the screen. In a curious sense, the events in the movie seem real, and I seem to be a part of them.


"KAZAAM," 1996

As for Shaquille O'Neal, given his own three wishes the next time, he should go for a script, a director and an interesting character.

"ISHTAR," 1987

Ishtar is a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy. ... This movie is a long, dry slog. It's not funny, it's not smart and it's interesting only in the way a traffic accident is interesting.




SOURCE: Chicago Sun-Times and Universal Press Syndicate. The AP's News Research Center contributed to this report.