At its best, "Hollywood" has the breezy irreverence and easy, sunny L.A. atmosphere of Shelton's 1992 "White Men Can't Jump," a buddy-buddy basketball-hustle movie.

The film manages to crack all its codes, and even when it sags a bit, it's never lacking grace and some wit. Not enigmatically at all, it pleases and teases us -- in high style.

A fairy tale comedy with the Holocaust as the background, a collision of terror and community, death and beauty.

One of the sharper, funnier, better-cast, better-written movies around right now. But there's something about it that, well, comes up short. [20 October 1995, Friday, p.C]

Most of the original play's magical speeches are preserved here, and however far this film may seem to stray from the original text, the delights remain. [14 May 1999, Friday, p.A]

Smith's story is a charmer: touching, funny, romantic, perceptive, absorbing and full of color and character. And the movie, which has been respectfully and affectionately handled by people who obviously love their source, captures most of those qualities.

The images are lustrous, the cutting is brisk and the acting of the two leads is right on the money.

Here is a film of staggering technical and visual virtuosity, filled with utterly amazing images, that's also entertaining and engaging for children and adults on several levels.

A horror movie with a Hitchcockian veneer of the everyday, a story that taps into our fear not only of the paranormal but also of insanity and the secret evil that may lie beneath ordinary lives.

A nostalgia movie that doesn't get sticky with false sentiment.

This movie lets you feel something. Like George's house, if not his life, it's built well and full of heart.

It's ludicrous, but it's fun. Besson is a filmmaker so in love with his own daffy excesses that he's able to pull us, laughing, right into his world of loony pop. [9 May 1997]

One of the most gorgeous science-fiction movies ever - and probably also one of the most realistic in detail and scientific extrapolation

Sometimes thrilling, sometimes suffocatingly tasteful adaptation of Stephen King's 1999 novel.

Few sports films catch their time, place and sport so well. For skateboard fans, this is a must. But it's also a great ride if you know nothing about the sport or what it meant. At the end of this movie, you will.

Proyas' movie lacks a truly rich or compelling story -- although the city secret is certainly a rich and compelling idea. All too often, Dark City seems a great production design in search of a movie, an ultimate modern film noir pastiche, in which the images are so strong they overpower the drama. [27 Feb 1998]

Haunts the conscience, troubles the spirit.

Exactly the sort of personalized, non-assembly line treat some audiences are always trying, in vain, to find.

This movie lets the characters and tropes borrowed from the original Stan Lee comic live and breathe.

It's fun, but not obvious fun.

Hannibal, riding the malicious wit of Hopkins' sophisticated fiend, is a gorgeous, wild, sometimes sick thriller, a feast for enraptured eyes and strong stomachs.

The sort of movie that both rewards and tries your patience.

Exquisitely designed, lovingly executed, beautifully scored and played, every hair and note in place, it's a movie full of irony, passion and bluesy riffs.

Not perfect, and neither are life or the movies. But you'd have to be blind yourself not to relish its qualities or laugh at its barbs.

It's beautifully shot on Cephallonian locations by superb landscape photographer John Toll.

It's surprising how much of the old mood Leconte manages to recapture, how sumptuous he makes the black-and-white cinematography and timeless Parisian and Mediterranean settings look.

The movie -- simple, pure and powerful -- makes us feel the intensity of both life in transit and life lived, if only for a moment, in another's skin.

This young writer-director's film seems more real and more moving than many recent political dramas from the Middle East - on either side.

It's a funny-sad portrait of fame and its junkies, and of an era and its music.

It's an entertaining picture, classy and well executed, but as much as any film I've seen recently, this lush new version of the 1969 Michael Caine thriller tends to prove that, where thrillers are concerned, "more" is often less.

One of my favorite U.S. fiction features at 1999's Sundance Festival.

I liked The Claim -- as much for its stark visual beauty and impassioned performances as its intelligent script and willingness to probe the tragic side of life.

Jam-packed mishmash of wall-to-wall music, trenchant character study, slick sociology and sly witty-Brit comedy.

This movie is a model of technique, beautifully crafted, often brilliantly acted by Cage and the others, but it's a bit hollow at the center.

I can't imagine a better actress for this part than Australian-born Cate Blanchett. Blanchett, who can be regal ("Elizabeth") or slutty ("The Shipping News"), manages to catch the feel of Guerin.

A slick, bloody thriller, but it's also, to its credit, a genuine whodunit.

Magnificently sensuous and macabre.

A unique portrait of modern crime and punishment, gives us terror without filters, a tragic event captured in all its initial immediacy and anguished aftermath.

On many levels, it hits its marks -- but it still misses the impact of some shorter, less-ambitious movies that play with our emotions more deftly or deeply, walk their miles, deadly or not, with a lighter, faster, more confident tread.

Like the work of an expert tailor, it's done with unobtrusive skill, essential warmth and seamless grace.

Elegant, scary fun.

Playing a role of almost Bergmanesque intensity -- a tough, lonely woman dying of cancer as she examines her past -- Bisset is both convincing and radiant.

Another of his (McElwee) beguiling "personal chronicle" movies.

Solaris, an exploration of outer space and inner anguish, reminds us that science fiction can embrace adult ideas and human drama as well as technology and futuristic action.

The film has many strengths, but one of its major assets is its solid sight line. Though we might expect it to go sentimental - with its cute cat, torn families and sympathetic, pretty protagonists - it doesn't.

One of the best and funniest things that Martin, as writer and actor, has ever done.

A beautifully tooled action thriller about love and terrorism.

Skates over depravity when, like Crane, it should have dug down deeper.

This is Hollywood expertise and Hollywood civic idealism at high levels.

The movie is a journey into a land of wonders beneath the surface of consciousness -- but it's also a sexual ride of unabated heat. You may be confused by Sex and Lucia, but you won't be unmoved.

I don't think it's a great movie -- though Theron's is a near-great performance -- but it's not one you can easily forget.

It's good, hard-edged stuff, violent and a bit exploitative but also nicely done, morally alert and street-smart.

Sayles accomplishes another of his coups here. Eschewing all sentiment, avoiding all pathos, keeping his film and most of the women hard as nails, he manages to tell a compelling story.

Brilliant performances by DiCaprio as Frank Jr. and Christopher Walken as his fallen father - and an enjoyable one by Tom Hanks.

What gives the movie real flesh and fantasy is the actress playing this part, the incandescent Morton.

In the end, grips us precisely because its actors are so utterly absorbed in their roles, so unfettered and nakedly expressive. This is the kind of acting we always look for, but rarely see.

A gloriously giddy movie about theater, love and artifice, an unabashed art film.

There's a shallowness about The Good Girl that can't always be excused as an accurate portrayal of a shallow milieu -- in the end, just like Justine, it's not as good as it could have been.

A flawed film but an admirable one that tries to immerse us in a world of artistic abandon and political madness and very nearly succeeds.

A prime example of advocacy journalism--a form often criticized but perfectly honorable. Most importantly, it gives you a chance to ruminate on some crucial questions of human error, justice and life-and-death.

Entertaining, surprisingly well-written and often rowdily amusing picture. It is predictable in many ways but also full of heart, humor and personality.

Has what we usually want to see in movies like this: bravura action, tongue-in-cheek humor, but most of all attitude.

It's good, but not great -- despite the heights to which Dench and Broadbent drive it. But those heights are lofty, the pain still stings.

At a time when new westerns are in short supply, Devil a sight for sore eyes.

Like the frosty tropical drinks the people keep sipping here, it's refreshing and icy-cool, a sinful pleasure mixed by experts.

The movie has a nasty, creepy edge that never lets up, and the characters are deliberately grating and alienating. This is a thriller that, like some classic noirs, glories in its own mean aura, its casual profanity and grotesque violence.

Ozpetek brings a straight love story and world politics into the mix, but it's his brilliant cast which completes the connection.

Waterworld is often entertaining because it's screwy. Could even Ed Wood Jr. have come up with those cigarette-puffing villains, in a world with hardly enough dirt for a tobacco plant? [28 July 1995]

A daring, entertaining, but somewhat disappointing affair, something of an overreacher despite Lee's usual pyrotechnics and a brilliant cast.

A thrilling ride but also a thoughtful one, it's a movie that does manage to do more good than bad by the end of the day.

Probably the best thing you can say about We Were Soldiers is that it does justice to an awful conflict.

It's good stuff: a non-fiction film on weighty issues that also manages to entertain.

This is a movie that rocks and socks you, and has a performance by Washington that's ruthless and scary. But in the end, it leaves you unmarked.

A classy supernatural lady-in-distress thriller.

Though the film falls short of its aspirations, there's something magical about it. It's a poetic look at transience, betrayal, loss and doom.

A genre movie with an agenda that's too packed. Inevitably, some of the many balls it's juggling get dropped -- (but it's) one of the most entertaining and original actioners in several years.

The picture is written and acted as a lark and a romp.

The characters need more exploration, especially the killers. Yet this look at teen life and death chills you anyway.

Self-absorption is the vice of all these characters. That, not sex, is their sin--and Michell, Kureishi and their fine cast show this with a lucidity that cuts to the bone, a candor that draws blood.

The sights, sounds and traffic in Red Lights are oppressively ordinary; the people are unnervingly real. That reality doubles the suspense we might feel in a more slickly made but thinly plotted thriller.

With the exception of Amelie's voiceover narration in French, Fear and Trembling is entirely in Japanese. And the Japanese cast is superb.

Doesn't always sizzle, but its stars do.

Shimmers and glows. But it also stings a little -- like the lovely flame that dies and the smoke that, in yet another Cole song, gets in your eyes.

In a movie that dwells so wittily and movingly on forgiveness, you have to grant pardon. Clarkson alone makes "April" a feast.

Red Dragon is very much a product, and a superior one, of our times. So is Anthony Hopkins' top-notch fiend, the bad doctor.

A gripping, very intelligent British thriller. Slowly, inexorably, it ties you in knots.

It's a winner with flaws.

A physically gorgeous production with a strong, clear conflict at its center. It's grueling but also exhilarating. Perhaps its ambitiousness is the film's biggest problem. Trying for dramatic sensitivity, historical scope, touching romance and shocking violence and suspense, it gets stretched too thin.

His (Dafoe's) re-creation of Schreck is an Oscar-level performance, but more than that, it's an unforgettable one: great, scary, horrifically funny.

The acting is primo and the cinematography, on high-definition video by the gifted M. David Mullen, is striking.

May fall short of its great model, "Seven Samurai" (almost all action movies do), but it's miles ahead of most of the gadget-ridden adventure epics around now.

It's a work for specialized tastes: for audiences who adore old movies, dark jokes and some high camp.

A movie that's underwritten, overdirected, overproduced and almost constantly over-the-top. But it's also, at its best, a big tongue-in-cheek extravaganza.

This film carries us so touchingly into their world, it would take a heart of stone, finally, to ignore them.

Unabashedly designed to blow its audience away.

It's the kind of copycat movie that becomes original through its cast and treatment.

Boasts a really spectacular cast to voice those reasonably funny jokes.

Signs -- though Shyamalan's most visually beautiful work -- seems thinner, barely more than a sketch for a movie, with characters trapped in formulas. Beautifully trapped perhaps -- but paralyzed nonetheless.

This toweringly ambitious picture confronts a brilliant director, Atom Egoyan, with a major historical event and a profound theme.

Fast and frenetic and so unvarnished that it can make you feel unclean watching it. The film rubs your face in glamour and filth. But in the midst of the blood and hysteria, Kilmer plays Holmes with the dirty-angelic looks and wheedling charm of a seedy golden boy on the brink of doom.

Good, expensive, easygoing fun. It's no masterpiece, but why should Soderbergh -- or anybody -- get three in a row?

Macabre, oddly gripping.

Pictorially sumptuous and sexually provocative.

A film driven by an elusive plot buried like a cryptogram under the action. It's a delightfully screwy ethnographic murder mystery, beautifully photographed in translucent naturalistic color.

Usually American marital problems are left to the soap operas; it's nice to see them tackled by experts, piercing personas and peeling open hearts.

Weird to the max, smart, sneaky as a Wall Street pickpocket and revved up with cruel wit and brazen imagination, Being John Malkovich is a dark movie comedy that you couldn't forget if you tried.

The movie's gentle humor and offbeat whimsy prove that humanity trumps bureaucratic foolishness, in Norway or anywhere else.

A work both rigorously stylized and deeply personal. Devotees of Kitano and Japanese cinema will admire Dolls.

Opulence almost interferes with the movie, weighing it down when it should seem lighter than air, surrounding the inarguably brilliant Carrey with too much frosting and frou-frou.

These two actors have a kind of genius for dark comedy: Stiller for suffering through crises and De Niro for creating them.

May be the most fascinating, richly accomplished screw-up you'll see all year. Von Trier, who has always had a talent for provocation, nails another heroine to the cross while playing his role to the hilt - a moviemaking rebel in his own dog days.

The imagination, energy, chutzpah and sheer affection shown for Darin by director-writer-star Spacey, who plays the singer, are admirable, kicky. This is a movie, that, like Darin himself, takes a lot of chances and delivers on many of them.

Kline, though, does give one of the great movie performances of the year so far.

What I did like unreservedly was the acting. Enid, as enacted by the sometimes astonishing Birch, is one of the more convincing, no-nonsense teens in recent movies.

It's a tasty but evasive treat, no matter what your taste in politics or movies.

It's a fast, funny picture, and the worst thing you can say about it is that it's no "Toy Story," no "Shrek." That may be true, but one thing Ice Age proves is that the new digitized cartoons are a form whose time has come.

This movie, which aspires to be a Christmas movie classic on the "It's a Wonderful Life" level, is overwhelming, enjoyable and impressive, without being really entrancing.

Often, Requiem for a Dream is as technically inventive and daring as the Scottish heroin film "Trainspotting," but it has more resonance and feeling. And when Burstyn is on screen, it often becomes heartbreaking.

Wrings honest emotion and riveting dramatics from its tale.

Minghella's psychological redraft muffles the menace, squanders the tension, throws away the main character and plot engine and turns Ripley into something he never was or should be.

Zeta-Jones can belt out her numbers, Zellweger can purr hers, and Gere-a musician who played his own cornet solos in "The Cotton Club"-can sell his songs and even dance a spiffy little tap dance. They're better than you'd expect-and so is the movie.

Really two movies: a taut, terrific, realistic crime drama, and, by the end, an over-the top, high-tech extravaganza which tries to out-Woo John Woo and turn Cruise into another Terminator.

Flaws and all, it really does show a star being born.

It's a high-tech thriller that really works.

Demme's movie is just as sophisticated and knowing as Frankenheimer's, but it isn't as hip or daring. It doesn't haunt your mind or stir your sense of dread the way the '62 movie did--and it lacks almost totally the earlier film's piercing, oddball satire and humor.

Chan is so good, so much fun to watch, that he often transcends his vehicles. And that's the case with Rumble in the Bronx, his big bid to crack the American market. [23 Feb 1996, p.C]

Mrs. Winterbourne doesn't amount to much. But it's such a professional job, done with such glow and verve -- and the people making it seem to be having such an infectiously good time -- that it's hard to resist. Good comedies are easy to love anyway. [19 Apr 1996, p.C]

In French Kiss--a picture that isn't unusually funny or original but that has expert actors, smooth direction and ravishing French locales--we can get pleasure from the sheer, relaxed polish of it all, the effortless swing. It's a good time passer. [5 May 1995, p.C]

Girl 6 is a snappy, contemporary comedy about an aspiring New York actress who drifts into and out of the world of phone sex. It's an often sexy, funny show with interesting slants on modern New York culture and mores. [22 Mar 1996, p.F]

That conscious absurdity is at the core of The Quick and the Dead. It's a rousingly grotesque, often wildly entertaining western horror-comedy, with co-producer and star Sharon Stone as a sexy lady gunslinger taking on all comers in the gunfight tournament from hell. [10 Feb 1995, p.C]

Broken Arrow is much better than the average big-time action movie because Woo has blazing style and a unique, even eccentric viewpoint. [9 Feb 1996, p.C]

Director Guy Ferland, who has made one previous feature, handles this material smoothly and well, aided by the juke-box bright colors caught by cinematographer Reynaldo Villalobos. And Eszterhas, who has never shown much flair for comedy - except for the mother lode of unintentional laughs in "Showgirls" - puts humor into this story of surprising warmth and bite. [24 Oct 1997]

The film, despite some over-obvious stretches, is mostly sad, lovely, moving, haunting. It's a striking and promising debut from a fine new filmmaker. [21 Aug 1998]

there are times when Grease really kicks in. I'm fond of Channing singing "Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, rotten with virginity" and then telling an imaginary Troy Donahue, "I know what you wanna do." And most of the big musical numbers work, especially the showstopper: the sunlit Danny-Sandy duet to "Summer Dreams." Greasy kid stuff it all may be, but just like rock 'n' roll, it'll probably never die. [27 Mar 1998, p.A]

There's a lot of beauty and excitement in Legends of the Fall - not least from the actors. [13 Jan 1995]

May strike some audiences as even more real than Kiarostami's work, because the story is so luminously open. Watching it, we enter, without barriers, a world.

A highly provocative documentary.

A movie that celebrates and mourns heroism and friendship, while reminding us how seldom we truly see either on our big screens.

Shows us a filmmaker, unafraid of her emotions, unafraid to mine her past, someone clear-eyed, non-egoistic, full of life and warmth.

As solid as the earth, rich as a good meal and sometimes funny as hell.

Like the moving 1999 American "A Walk on the Moon," with Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen, Hard Goodbyes juxtaposes a family crisis with the excitement of the period before and during Neil Armstrong's 1969 moonwalk.

A "Chekhovian" movie that's closer to the master's mood than many, it's also a jazzy, rainy day film that makes serious and amusing points about life and people in the midst of its downpour.

In many ways, it's a painful story, but it's also full of curious triumphs and outlandish redemptions.

The racial and sexual politics of Heading South may trouble some audiences; Cantet is definitely not a moralist in the usual sense.

Fascinating as Buzz often is, the film obviously was made with limited resources, transferred to film from DV, with grainy clips from the trailers for Bezzerides-scripted movies rather than snippets of the movies themselves.

A delicately crafted, gently inflected, lovely little movie about the need for love, directed and co-written by Singapore's Eric Khoo ("Mee Pok Man").

The value of Romantico is that it lets us experience vicariously what Carmelo and others like him go through.

This is a comedy made for people who think, who like smart talk and who, like the Perelmans, know the score.

The movie--while it doesn't knock you out--doesn't self-destruct either. Besson may never rise to the level of his best American models here, but it's fun watching him try.

The French filmmakers lend it their special aesthetic/dramatic sense, and the Masai actors ground the story in everyday realism and humanity. Together, they create a film and a legend to remember.

Best of all though, we get to experience the whole fest itself, over four turbulent decades-an era from which Glastonbury, like Woodstock in its day, offers a halcyon "timeout."

One of the movie's most moving elements is the duo's famous prison correspondence, as eloquently read by Tony Shalhoub as Sacco and John Turturro as Vanzetti. But Miller's obvious passion and dedication shine throughout.

Surviving Picasso is an intelligent, beautifully crafted and engrossing Ismail Merchant-James Ivory biographical portrait of the century's most famous and successful painter. [4 Oct 1996]

A stark, painful drama about pregnancy--a subject rarely treated this fully, candidly or tragically.

Frederick is the key to the movie and she's definitely an impressive new talent, someone who can really hold the screen and who delivers something striking or memorable in every scene.

I liked Flirt better than any of Hartley's films since "Trust." The playfulness he shows here seems better integrated, more meaningful, than the strange narrative whimsies of 1992's "Simple Men" or 1994's "Amateur." [08 Nov 1996]

One of the most hopeful movies I've seen recently--not just for its humane, realistic story line, but in its very being.

It's interesting - in its own let-it-all-hang-out, shaky-camera way.

Even if you enjoyed the mean, funny 1995 John Travolta-Elmore Leonard crime comedy "Get Shorty"-and many of us did-this forced sequel isn't likely to help you repeat the experience.

Good action movies live on style and excitement. But they also need credibility, and in Hostage, ALMOST a good genre piece, plausibility keeps getting slaughtered.

But the film disappoints, partly because it inspires such large expectations.

As bizarre, provocative and almost deliberately off-putting an indie picture as anything that's popped up in theaters recently.

I don't think it will seriously disappoint longtime fans, but it made me itchy as I watched it unfold in ways that the comics never did when I read them in the '60s.

Sometimes one performance makes a film worthwhile, and Junebug has one: an astonishing, moving portrayal of down-home innocence and optimism by Amy Adams.

Is this the modern version of "Going My Way," with those squabbling, heart-warming Irish Catholic priests mixing up pop songs and hymns? Well, in a way it almost is, though its mood is far different and it's set in a far different world that moves to a different tempo and has graver and more troubling social crises.

In the third story, set in Asheville, N.C., that excellent actress Hunt guides us steadily through what could be a minefield of sentimentality.

Despite the actors, the visuals and Forster's directorial swagger, the movie lacks impact.

A bloody strange movie--and a surprise. Who would have thought that you could put together an anthology of "extreme" Asian horror featurettes by three cutting-edge Asian directors where the most tasteful, restrained contribution was the one by Japanese mad dog moviemaker Takashi Miike?

It's a bit too muddy, dismal-looking and smoky to beguile us, too fixated on filth and too dreary-looking to really shock us.

Thanks to the actors and the way the movie lets them loose, it's often funny or moving at all the right moments.

You either go for a movie like this or you don't. But though I didn't like it much, I've got to admit that The Descent is a nerve-jangler.

Hoodwinked treats "Red Riding Hood" as a detective story we've never really understood until now, with nuttier motivations, more complex characters and a screwier climax.

This Pink Panther really doesn't have to achieve the heights of the original; it just has to be funny on its own terms. But it pales there too. Kline, a master of comic hypocrisy, deserves more screen time, Emily Mortimer is wasted as Clouseau's adoring assistant Nicole and Knowles is over indulged as Xania.

Proves, unhappily enough, how U.S.-style media politics is spreading around the world.

In many respects, Forgiving Dr. Mengele is an ordinary documentary, stylistically and technically unexceptional. But its subject enobles the work. So does Kor : determined, indomitable, and by the end of the movie, a symbol herself of both survival and mercy.

Democracy might not really come from a bottle of shampoo, but "Beauty Academy" teaches us that, sometimes, mascara really matters.

As a director, Buscemi is drier than he is as a performer: more quietly funny, less intense and sometimes weirdly compassionate.

It's a depressing story made even more of a downer by the absence of any Stones-performed music from their prime '60s years.

A confessional film that's almost too confessional--is like getting buttonholed by a casual acquaintance at a party and then subjected to a flood of highly intimate revelations that just don't stop.

Robin Williams is such a great comic virtuoso that it can almost hurt to see him straining to pump life into a conventional, uninspired, sometimes-goofy big-studio comedy such as RV.

Disappointingly, X-Men: The Last Stand slides back between the first two episodes. It's not stuporous, and it's not super.

Russian Dolls, like "L'Auberge," has an excellent cast (mostly the same one, in fact) and an impish style and speed that gives it more obvious audience appeal than the average French film.

The King simply unsettles and bothers us -- and it finally misses both the true terror and the twisted redemption it needs for its wicked song, a would-be "Heartbreak Hotel" of horror, to really chill our spines.

Begins like a house afire and then fizzles out into a quasi-supernatural dead end.

A ridiculous but exciting action movie.

An independent American art film that seems to be masquerading as Victorian-era pornography--and it's not quite as interesting or provocative as that description might make it sound.

It's a slick, ambitious movie that doesn't always nail all the many moods and themes it's after.

A movie of such cheerful craziness and nonstop ferocity that you can't take it seriously for a second.

The subject of Iraq haunts and divides us so much these days that a film like Laura Poitras' documentary My Country My Country is valuable, no matter its level of achievement.

A stylish, nasty, very well-done Belgian horror movie.

The film's mood and style are pitched somewhere between '60s American indie and French New Wave and, as you watch these people, they seem painfully, amusingly on-target. They may irritate you a little, but that's the right response.

Probably the last movie to carry a credit for the late Christopher Reeve--as well as the last credit for Reeve's late wife, Dana.

Harsh Times, is almost a good, salty urban thriller.

Love can be a battleground, and, despite its homey-sounding title and gentle, almost nonchalant air, Jeff Lipsky's Flannel Pajamas gives us a series of messages from the front.

It's possible to admire or respect a movie without enjoying it too much, and that's partly the reaction I had to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. It's an incredibly ambitious film of sometimes thrilling visual achievement, but it didn't connect fully to my mind and nerves.

It's a fairly well-written piece and an even better acted one. And these days, when independent films are increasingly the salvation of the serious American dramatic movie, it's heartening to see something like The Architect, which tries to reawaken a major American dramatic tradition and sometimes succeeds.

Considering how good "Puccini's" middle often is, it's a shame it falls down fore and aft. But Maggenti, who loves Carole Lombard and William Powell in "My Man Godfrey," is tapping a likable vein here. She should open it up again.

The content may be dubious, but the execution is hypnotic.

The late U.S. Rep. Sonny Bono and his widow and successor Mary Bono have spent a good deal of time trying to save it. It's a hard task, but the film does suggest there's more to the sea than meets the eye.

So stunningly shot and visualized--and scored so hauntingly well by Anja Garbarek, the daughter of saxophonist/composer Jan Garbarek--that it works even if you don't pay attention to the story. Maybe it works better that way.

Pugach's selfishness, his inability to detach love from gratification, is the key to this crazy story.

Erratically acted and, at times, clumsily written.

Overall, The Brothers is glossy fun, but it should have given us more ideas and energy.

Turns out to be a Hollywood sequel of surpassing silliness and wasted talent.

Dark as it is, the humor makes it work, especially Greene's typically witty and compassionate portrayal of Mogie.

Cradle Will Rock is the masterpiece that wasn't, a magnificent opportunity blown to hell.

A wildly improbable story that neither Newman nor co-stars Fiorentino and Mulroney, for all their panache and chemistry, can make much sense of it.

Strong, hard, dirty, funny, moving atmospheric and laced with scabrously musical street dialogue.

Tries to blend old film noir and new high-tech thriller styles with only sporadic impact.

If Hollywood is really a dream factory, then it's the movie moguls and movie stars who live that dream to the hilt. In the late 1970s few lived quite as large as Robert Evans.

A flashy, splashy and violent chase thriller.

All too obvious, all too easy, the sort of tongue-in-chic L.A. comedy that mistakes glibness for high style, heartfelt pop choruses for wisdom.

Like an episode of "Friends" where the entire cast has been given aphrodisiacs and locked up.

Just because it's true to life doesn't mean it can sing.

I liked the idea of the movie more than the movie itself -- though sections of it are mind-blowing.

A bawdy comedy that convincingly celebrates the resilience of the urban poor and the power of friendship in the teeth of despair.

Seethes with cruel lust and brainy fancy.

Far too self-absorbed a picture.

Despite Fiennes' splendid moodiness and Tyler's radiant vulnerability, despite lovely settings... this movie is dull.

Disturbingly lightweight and emotionally risk-free.

Fun to watch it may be, but it's shallow fun. Like the drugs and booze the characters keep using -- and even the sex -- it's a passing pleasure.

A cranky failure with brilliant moments.

The movie loses its magic by the time the solution is revealed.

It's worth seeing simply to make the acquaintance of Tobias, a really extraordinary old guy.

A somewhat bewildering and unsatisfying film that nevertheless contains more inspired moments and brilliant scenes than many movies we call successes.

It's a good film but an over-obvious one. I wish I'd liked it more.

A paper-thin wish-fulfillment comedy about escaping small-town repressions and blasting conformity.

Pseudo art can be fun, though, even if it doesn't quite awaken all your senses.

Fghting your heart out at the end of this movie can't win the prize or the crowd.

Jolie and Banderas are two hot actors, in many senses of the word, and their scenes together have a lewd excitement.

It's still strangely remote, only fitfully romantic, never really convincing.

In some ways it's not a film that surprises us much. But it's a notable directorial debut anyway -- smartly written, very well cast and skillfully done.

Carrera's style is hard-hitting, lucid and technically superior (if unimaginative). El Crimen del Padre Amaro eventually moves and stirs you, even if it often resembles those steamy Mexican TV dramas/soap operas called telenovelas.

It's the equivalent of our "Gone With the Wind," Russia's "War and Peace" or, to take a more modest example, South Korea's "Chunhyang." Sheer ambition and grandiose make the film interesting -- up to a point.

The film is not exactly a documentary, and not quite a period horror movie either. But it has elements of both. At its best, it's hypnotic and provocative.

One of the most discouraging things about many big studio movies is the way they waste resources, mainly talent and money. Pushing Tin manages to waste an excellent cast, a glossy production and what initially seems to be a bright, funny script. [23 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

The whole movie plays like an improbable blend of "Repulsion," "High Noon" and the archetypal low-budget rape/revenge shocker "I Spit on Your Grave." Queasy audiences beware, but midnight-movie bookers take note.

This new heist movie by the great thriller director John Frankenheimer flails around like its own dysfunctional gang of casino robbers.

As beautiful as all the film's technology is, it needs more real human beings around - to pull the switches, man the pumps and scuttle through those corridors.

If you were forced to judge it simply on its action-movie visual and technical elements, you'd have to count it a roaring success... . But if you lay aside that action and watch the people instead, it's a morass of dimwitted family crises and hack action-movie cliches.

Starts like a house afire and then suffers an imagination burnout.

Don't expect a lot, and you'll probably enjoy Happy, Texas, as I did -- mostly. At the very least, Steve Zahn will make you laugh.

A movie best suited for a lazy afternoon or a languorous night, particularly if you're a Francophile. Charming, glamorous, emotionally suggestive but slight, it's full of beautiful and colorful people.

Just because a movie was inspired by real life and has good intentions doesn't mean it can't wind up as phony as a three-dollar bill.

Takes a fascinating true story and turns it into a conventional cop thriller, hoking up the provocative three-generation saga of the LaMarca family.

This is a movie that, for all its often high intelligence and skill, seems emotionally underdone, bogged down in tony literary and cinematic cliches.

It's a weird little movie that's amusing enough while you watch it, offering fine acting moments and pungent insights into modern L.A.'s show-biz and media subcultures. But it doesn't leave you with much.

Slender but surprisingly smart and pleasing.

Very much a looking-back movie; its most obvious model is "American Graffiti." But if you know that particular slice of early '80s Manhattan, you may be as amused as I was. [26 Feb 1999]

The role sounds like a sentimental trap, but Penn doesn't fall into it. It's a sensational performance, and he illumines a movie that sometimes seems in danger of descending into modish Hollywood political correctness.

Despite greater resources and high-tech whiz bang than the first movie, has a lot more turkey than dinner.

Something that gets your motor racing briefly, but which you've seen all too often.

This movie gives us mostly the "what" when we need a bit of the "why" as well. In her other, better work, Denis always supplies it.

Though it's sweet and likable to a fault, it's also a movie that never seems heartfelt or deep.

Despite intelligent, sympathetic direction by Gordon, a brilliant lead performance by Robert Downey Jr. and an adapted script written by Potter himself before his 1991 death, this "Detective" pales next to its predecessor.

Possession needs a sharp eye, a wicked tongue, less reverence and much more of its author's voice.

A comedy of bad manners with many punchy moments and many irritatingly glib ones.

Its fascination may be limited to those already very familiar with his works and collaborators - and his sensual, highly subjective style.

It's a movie that starts off nicely, offers two marvelous performances (by James Coburn and Mick Jagger) and then slowly, unaccountably loses itself.

It's just another case of mourning over what might have been.

Too expensive for its own good, too chic for comfort.

It's an extraordinary performance in an often brave and intelligent film that, unfortunately, tends to collapse around him in the end -- just as the world of Kline's character, tweedy but likable William Hundert, deconstructs around him.

As Almereyda unrolled his modern Gotham version, the story became gripping, the characters fascinating, the events mesmerizing, the resolution shocking and piteous.

Whimsy and wit are the saving graces of much British movie comedy, and Saving Grace has a decent measure of both.

Never really feels right.

One of those movies that starts like a house afire, catches you firmly in its narrative grip and then suddenly blows itself out, not really going out with a whimper but with a big, bad, ludicrous bang.

Freeman gives his overwrought, over-familiar scenes an unlikely shot of intelligence and dignity that cuts through the formulas and almost makes them work.

Completely successful or not, films like Saudade do Futuro are needed. And we need people like the Nordestinos.

Notoriety, they won. The revolution, they didn't. That perhaps is the secret message of the film. Dylan was right. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Though one can question the movie's quality as a documentary -- Broomfield is a dogged but often annoying interviewer, and Churchill's photography is sometimes slapdash -- Aileen raises such troubling issues that it stays, hellishly, in your mind.

There are better holocaust dramas than Grey Zone -- "Schindler's List" for one, and due later this year, Roman Polanski's magnificent "The Pianist." But few will disturb you like The Grey Zone -- mostly because it won't try for tears.

Most of Frailty is so good -- done in a low-key, realistic mood of genuine creepiness and dread -- that it doesn't need formula shocks.

An outrageously unlikely prison action movie made with lots of eye-catching pizzazz and undeserved expertise.

A real sentimental journey -- and luckily they've got both the right director (Darabont) and the right actor to squeeze our heartstrings.

Unlike other current D.C. types, Elle would never misplace or misidentify her own weapons of mass destruction. They're all in her wardrobe closet and makeup kit.

It's stylish, it's sort of smart, it's full of misplaced talent. But it's not funny enough, and maybe, in a way, not dark enough either.

This is a better movie than the vacuous "Insurrection," thanks largely to a sympathetic screenwriter, longtime "Trek" fanatic John Logan ("Gladiator"), and a crew (headed by Patrick Stewart's Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and Brent Spiner's android Data) determined to go out in glory.

Too loud, bright and shallow for its subject: a movie that pushes too many obvious buttons to build naturally to the big, heartbreaking climax it obviously wants.

Code Unknown is a film you think more than feel. Though each scene is executed close to flawlessly, the cumulative effect is often oppressive. But at the center of the film -- the real reason it was made -- is Binoche, one of the genuinely radiant presences in movies today.

It's a movie of elegant surfaces, great background music (by both the Mahlers), gossipy underpinnings and pretensions to romantic grandeur.

The film is De Palma's tribute to film noir, to Paris and to the cinema itself.

The Statement is an older man's film, and compassion is one of its strengths; Jewison and Caine make us feel pity and terror for the victims as well.

It's still a disappointment: a well-mounted and well-acted suspense movie that, thanks to its illogical script, falls off a cliff midway through.

Carpenter writes his own scripts -- here with past collaborator Larry Sulkis -- and their "Ghosts" screenplay lacks the density, character and humor of a Hollywood genre classic.

Packs so much hell-for-leather action, gorgeous Moroccan scenery and eye-popping Industrial Light and Magic visual effects into its two hours that, after a while, I began to get tired of it.

It's dispiriting to see Jolie wasting herself (and a good supporting cast) on a story that requires little more than an average pretty actress who can wear clothes well and laugh and cry on cue.

It's a shapeless, derivative-but-funny show with another loony parody plot about super-villain Dr. Evil.

For my taste, too much of the new Powers looks like bad TV and sounds like old burlesque.

Heartbreakers itself is something of a con game: an expensive imitation of older, better films from older, often better times.

There's something too slickly contrived and hollow about this film. It's a yuppified wish-fulfillment piece dangling between real world and fairy tale, and it's mostly the actors --especially Lindsay and Elaine Hendrix (as the conniving publicist who is trying to marry Hallie and Annie's dad) -- who manage to bring it off. [29 July 1998]

Though I wouldn't call He Loves Me a total success, it's smart, intriguing and quite ambitious, a first film by a talented young filmmaker that displays superstar Tautou's gifts in an eerie new light.

This is a movie that really has little to offer but performances and ideas. For a while, that's enough.

A second-rate nightmare: the Reagan generation meets Leatherhead with flickers of brilliance drowned in blood and snobbery, a corpse dressed by Bloomingdale's.

The movie -- even though it's based on real events -- seems unsatisfying and unconvincing.

This time around, the razors are a little duller, the clicks not as slick, the patter not as snappy.

A promising film rather than a fully realized one.

The kind of movie that gives sequels a bad name, even though, strangely enough, it's better than the 1995 hit that spawned it.

Another of many recent Hollywood plotless wonders.