Doesn't always sizzle, but its stars do.

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.

A wry romantic comedy set among Bruno's targets, the Grenoble bourgeois.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

May be corny, but it's also absorbing, sweet and powerfully acted. It's a film about falling in love and looking back on it, and it avoids many of the genre's syrupy dangers.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Pictorially sumptuous and sexually provocative.

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

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.

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

Macabre, oddly gripping.

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

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

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.

Wrings honest emotion and riveting dramatics from its tale.

It's "knowingly" off-the-rails--and if you're in a tolerant or adventurous mood, very entertaining.

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.

Lucidity, austerity and quiet compassion are peculiar virtues to ascribe to a movie about a horrific real-life murder case, but those are among the best qualities of Jean-Pierre Denis' Murderous Maids.

For all its craft and achievement, The Gift -- which has a script that may have needed more rewriting and deepening -- is a good, minor effort; it has some real conviction, even anguish. And it has Blanchett, whose gift as an actress is sometimes transcendent.

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.

Inspirational biographical movie that really works.

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.

The film mixes unashamed kitsch, thrilling airfight scenes and dark historical drama. But what gives it a special charge is its portrait of the Czech RAF group: what happened to them before, during and after the war.

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]

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]

Like all good popular entertainments, the best of it sings.

The movie rips and roars.

Surprises with its intensity and grip.

Seems small in subject and scope, but it's large in spirit and implication.

It's such a knowledgeable work and so pleasantly obsessed with its subject that it will interest even audiences whose attraction to wine is only casual.

The diversity of the Beauty Shop ensemble is a large part of what makes it so much fun to watch;

Corny as it may sound though, it's all true-except, of course, for that mythical movie last-second championship bit.

An absorbing story. Even though it takes you to places you may not want to go, the film never loses its human touch--that feel of skin on skin or of the past inescapably invading the present.

Chicago-bred Haskell is such an intense, contentious, prickly figure, he would tend to take over any film portrait, and he definitely dominates here.

Capable of enthralling.

Though "Caterina" is unusually well-acted and crafted for this kind of movie--and both more than casually insightful and irreverent about modern Italian school life, teenage mores and politics--Giancarlo is the one character who makes the movie special.

Nolan is a fascinating, offbeat choice for a huge movie franchise such as this. Just as Bale turns Batman into a near-tragic obsessive -- a Scarlet Pimpernel with the soul of a Hamlet and Monte Cristo -- Nolan turns Batman Begins into something much closer to Miller's "Dark Knight" interpretation.

When you piece it all together, it becomes mildly fascinating.

As a sheer ghostly thriller, it's mostly a spell-binder, but I was disappointed at the ending.

In the end, it's a heartening, rewarding experience to watch this journey--and, especially, its end.

The new Bad News Bears may not make you cheer, but it should provide laughs and a good time. Isn't that what some movies are all about?

Writer-director Gary David Goldberg's script is full of complex and lively love patter, which Cusack especially rattles off with sometimes breakneck speed.

Beautifully shot and filled with gorgeous music.

The first 10 minutes of Lodge Kerrigan's Keane have a raw, hurtling reality that's as painfully engrossing as anything you'll see in a recent non-fiction movie, a searing portrait of one man's hell, from inside and outside.

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.

It's not a great movie, or one that should preoccupy you much afterwards, but it's certainly a good one. It's a fine debut for first-timer Mills.

The writing isn't always up to the actors, who all give the kind of expert, theatrically ingenious performances that often seem director-proof.

There's just enough neurotic or sharp badinage and Rodeo Drive realism to make it all go down easy.

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.

Quite affecting, even if it doesn't rank with classics like "Open City" or "Forbidden Games."

The new Israeli movie Ushpizin, a film about man's clumsiness and God's grace, is a touching and amusing tale that expands our horizon and also should open our hearts.

An inspirational movie about a inspiring figure: Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah of Ghana.

An unashamed art picture, the kind of film where extreme aestheticism mixes with nightmare dread, where the story resembles a bad dream and where Freudian symbols cluster around the events like a swarm of insects. It's a very pretty film, but it's also lean, enigmatic and so obscure.

It's an intricate, sometimes implausible ideological thriller that might be better as a smaller-scaled, less% preachy psychological drama. Still, "Paradise" catches and keeps your attention because of its daring subject, real-life backdrops and the intensity of its actors.

The kind of smart, realistic indie family drama the movies should give us more often, just as they should more often offer performances as full-blooded and rich as Aiello's and Curtin's here.

The movie's great end-title sequence redeems everything. Under the credits, we see and hear the real-life game veterans as they are now--including, movingly, ex-Lakers coach Riley.

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

The film, both light-hearted and serious, suggests that freedom comes more easily within restrictions--and that's true of Albou's approach as well.

The acting has the bravura stage eloquence of Broadway Shakespeare and the movie is narrated, beautifully, by John Hurt.

It's an ensemble piece with a dark, salty mood that reminded me of Robert Altman and Robert Aldrich, with a touch of Francis Ford Coppola. It's notably non-"gung ho."

There's something a little absurd about this story, but for me, it's endearingly goofy.

This "Ice Age" is still a good movie (especially for kids) with top-of-the-tech CGI.

The talk is witty, the twists are ingenious, the look and the mood are drop-dead.

It has a good director, snazzy visuals and some really funny animals, and that's at least half the battle.

Directed by Julian Jarrold and co-written by Tim Firth ("Calendar Girls"), the movie is quite enjoyable, effortlessly well-done on every level, even moving at times, but relatively light weight.

Erotic, poetic and light on its feet. It's a portrayal of a runaway teenager's sexual initiation, and though it comes close to being exploitive, it keeps dancing away.

A tender, visually stunning comedy-drama.

Throbbing with music, seething with anger and romance, The Lost City is a film that breaks your heart, bewilders, alienates and ravishes you by turns.

A comedy of evil and strange redemption, Lady Vengeance makes sure that we feel the pain, that we know what it's like to unreasonably suffer, because those are the rules of its mad, wounding, vengeful world.

It's only a mild disappointment. The talent is still there, the film better than most. It just needs less crime, more love.

It's a fervent, topical political drama of extraordinary impact and ferocity.

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

Time to Leave may not have made me cry, but it's affecting nonetheless.

Jan Kounen, the maker of Darshan, is a French director with flashy credentials, including music videos, commercials, horror shorts, violent gangster movies ("Dobermann") and offbeat westerns ("Blueberry").

Creating a mood that suggests an unholy mix of Czech novelist Franz Kafka, American pulp fictionist Jim Thompson and French heist moviemaker Jean-Pierre Melville, Babluani's story is about the perils of get-rich-quick schemes.

Factotum, starring Matt Dillon and Lili Taylor in two of their best film performances, is a good movie about the L.A. underbelly, as recalled by an expert: Charles Bukowski.

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 fine, taut, tough example of the realistic police drama.

A realistic drama about life's uncertainties.

People who love Lennon will almost certainly like the film; his detractors will almost certainly howl "bias!" Even so, it's a movie that, at its best, makes you ache with the memory of an anguished era and its fallen pop culture hero.

One of those corny, lusciously mounted, almost predictably thrill-packed action movies you can't help but like.

The movie has a large theme, even if it's unspoken. Old Joy is about a particular friendship, but it's also about how American society changed in the '90s and the new century.

It only works about half the time, but it's an interesting half.

Martin Lawrence and Ashton Kutcher may seem like an odd-sounding comedy team, but in some weird way, they click as voice-actors and cartoon buddies in Open Season.

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").

It's crazy, dangerous and sometimes gorgeous: a feast of nuttiness that takes you, for a while, over the edge.

The film's most memorable performance is in another supporting role, by Alan Cumming as hapless Frandsen, Olaf's sympathetic neighbor and a hopelessly inept farmer.

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

Copying Beethoven, at its best, is a sort of grand cinema opera of the composer's life and music.

It's an almost overwhelmingly professional picture, murderously fast, slick and full of outlandish notions, painstakingly realized. And it's also surprisingly satisfying -- thanks to Washington, a good cast, Tony Scott's swift direction and that unyielding professionalism.

The Nativity Story surprised me. I didn't expect such an obvious art film approach. Yet the Bible, in the King James version, is great English literature.

One of the more intelligent, better-made new movies around right now, but, despite everything, it doesn't really connect with the nerves and heart. It's a romance without anguish, although the pain of love is really what it's all about.

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

The movie itself, defying all odds, comes close to a knockout.

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.

Hilary Swank gives a powerhouse performance as a maverick high school teacher in Freedom Writers, an often gripping and sometimes even inspiring film drama taken from the real-life story of Erin Gruwell.

A sports bio movie that I really enjoyed about a sport and sports hero I barely knew existed: the World Hour Record competition for bicyclists and its gutsy, tormented and most unusual champion, Graeme Obree.

The result is something so old it's new, so corny it's funny. And while Tears of the Black Tiger is nothing more than entertaining, at least it's that.

Becket, now richly restored, is one of those '60s British theatrical spectaculars that we always imagine as a bit better than they were.

Mantel and Skrovan's documentary astutely reminds us of why we need the world's Naders. It's a reasonable movie about an often admirably unreasonable man.

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.

Elaborately mounted, expensively produced and filmed with style and empathy, it's an adaptation of Paterson's Newbery Medal-winning book that manages to expand the original vision, yet preserve much of its intense emotion.

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."

Starter for 10 is cute and smart, just like its star triangle, and it's also well-written, acted and directed.

The Cats of Mirikitani seems all too short; it has enough meat to be turned into an excellent dramatic film.

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]

Reign works better much better than "Upside" because of the cast and because Sandler and Cheadle together keep it lighter. It's an easy film to watch, but less easy to be moved by.

In Color Me Kubrick, John Malkovich has one of the roles of his life, and he acts it up like a haughty gourmet who's just picked up a succulent treat.

Movies like First Snow rise or fall on characters and atmosphere, and Fergus gets them both. But though the story's resolution does have irony and even a certain power, it lacks the charge, the Serlingesque "gotcha," that it needs.

Dercourt, a very fine filmmaker, is a musician himself, a music teacher and one-time solo viola player with the French Symphony Orchestra. And he directs, with a musician's precision and an insider's sly wit, the world of classical music performance.

When it enters the future, it's a new-fangled, old-fashioned jim-dandy of a show.

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.

Isn't all it could have been. But the filmmakers catch the right glittery look and paranoid intensity, and they make gutsy speculations about the story beneath the story.

There's nothing particularly original or striking about Ping Pong except its style. It's a breezy, likable story, and the director here, Fumihiko Sori, obviously enjoys his work.

A relaxed-looking expert piece that immerses us in another world. At the end, Hanson has a bonus. He and his producers hired Bob Dylan for the Oscar-winning "Things Have Changed" in "Wonder Boys," and Hanson brings Dylan back here, for a folky, bluesy number called "Huck's Tune."

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]

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 romantic comedy/social satire that, on a modest budget, manages to be hip, charming, funny and dressed to kill.

In Year of the Dog, there are dark moments that are both strangely poignant and bizarrely hilarious. The ending took me by surprise. In a way it's a cheat, a redemption that arrives out of nowhere. But it's also a cosmic joke, a perfectly funny, sincere salute to dog and pet-lovers everywhere.

It's a sordid but expert shocker.

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

The ending of Waitress is so beguiling and whimsical that it makes you, like its diner's patrons, hungry for more--and it makes you miss that red-headed movie auteur/pastry chef/heart stealer Shelly even more.

It's intellectual without being dry, dramatic without bombast, smart without posturing. Its characters and milieu are very well drawn, and Andre is one of the more intriguing and convincing fictional creations in recent film.

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]

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]

Ashley Judd as Agnes White, and a relative newcomer, the remarkable Michael Shannon, as Peter Evans. They're both spellbinding.

We've gotten perhaps too used to the computerized wizardry of our own cartoon features; Kon, like Miyazaki shows us some older ways that can still transfix us.

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

Though Day Watch seems less shocking and overwhelmingly strange than "Night Watch," it's another rocking mix of gritty thriller and glitzy sci-fi, once again in the vein of the director Bekmambetov's idols Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers.

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]

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]

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.

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.

As for Ramis, he's no Stanley Donen. He can make us laugh, but he can't make a movie dance.

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.

While it's done well enough here - written smartly, staged crisply and acted to the hilt - it doesn't last, except as a brief virtuoso piece for three players.

What pulls us along through the inky shoals of The Way of the Gun? Sheer style, plus the movie's refusal to play nice.

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

A classy but over-contrived topical thriller about bomb plots and anti-government groups.

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

Gives us a lot to enjoy and something most studio movies don't even try for: an attempt at the richness, density and sheer contrariness of life.

Girlfight, for its skill and theme, will please many. It's a shame it's no knockout.

Makes compromises itself, but only because of its small budget and its director's mixed dark-and-rosy vision, at once cynical and sentimental. Yet at least it has a vision -- of both life and cinema.

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

Disturbingly lightweight and emotionally risk-free.

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.

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

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

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

It's a real disappointment: too hasty, too scattered and superficial, and, in the end, disappointingly sappy and sentimental.

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

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.

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

Has a remote feel. It sometimes impresses but never soars.

Almost as uncompromising, and sometimes as funny, as "Dollhouse" or "Happiness."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A singularly cheerless trip, explicit but sterile, racy but dull.

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

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

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

No period of Italian history has produced more great movies than the WWII years . But, Malena romanticizes and even sentimentalizes those years.

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.

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

No revelation, but it’s a more honorable, interesting effort than many of the crass, dopey recent big-studio schlockfests like "Say It Isn’t So" or "Tomcats" that tell similar coming-of-age tales.

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

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

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.

A short film with a unique subject matter. But you won't soon forget its people, its places or its sad, surprising revelations about all the sexes.

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.

A gentle film, not very controversial despite its gay content, Chop Sue is valuable as a record of beauty and obsession, much less interesting as a human document.

A cranky failure with brilliant moments.

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

If its jolts were as strong as its chuckles, The Woman Chaser might really have turned into the cheap-thrill classic it pretends to be.

The movie -- directed in such a frenziedly self-conscious style you often wonder whether the camera will topple over on his actors.

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.

One funny movie - for at least half the time.

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

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.

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

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

It's not that the movie is bad; it's merely uninspired and relatively clueless about Kaufman.

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]

It's a misfire--but a fascinating, magnetic misfire, a film full of first-rate talents forced into absurdity, struggling to bring believability to nonsense. [22 September 1995, Friday, p. C]

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.

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.

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.

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.

The movie is dedicated, in a nice touch, to early Farrelly fan Gene Siskel. And Gene was right: The Farrellys are often very funny filmmakers. .

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

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 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 film of almost paralyzing gravity and large ambitions that, almost inevitably, it can't quite meet.

A blend of the classical and the trite, the beautiful and tawdry, the genuinely moving and the cornball. Oddly, producer-director-star Costner often can't seem to tell the difference.

A smart, sprightly little movie with beguiling actors and few inhibitions. Though there's nothing startlingly new here, there's a freshness and vigor to the acting, and the crisscrossing love affairs hold your interest.

A promising film rather than a fully realized one.

Almost nothing new to offer -- despite its good actors, flashy visuals and well-textured New York gloss and grit. But there are teasing hints of another, better movie buried inside somewhere.

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

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

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

Fairly entertaining and often exciting, expertly done in a way, but not especially engaging or new, and not as emotionally involving as its title suggests.

For sheer laughs, Willard and Piddock take the trophy.

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.

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.

Most novels can't be encapsulated well enough in a conventional two-hour movie format, and Dreamcatcher may be one of them -- a miniseries gone wrong.

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.

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

All these good actors and all Crystal's sass and witty candor can't bring back the heyday of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges. Or even, most of the time, their off-days.

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

A flashy, splashy and violent chase thriller.

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.

Seethes with cruel lust and brainy fancy.

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

Always watchable and cinematically lively, but it never quite engages the emotions -- despite torrents of sentimentality and would-be heart-tugging scenes interspersed with the carnage.

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

Erratically acted and, at times, clumsily written.

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

Doesn't have the negative qualities of many big-studio romantic comedies, but it doesn't quite take flight.

It suddenly morphs into one more overly slick, empty show.

As is often the case in Loach's films, all the acting is exemplary. Padilla, who learned English only shortly before making the film, is a natural actress, a smoldering presence.

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.

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

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

It's another slick-and-quick muscle car of a movie, racing along for a couple of hours, taking you nowhere as fast as it can.

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.

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.

A movie meant to explode off the screen -- and it's at its best when those explosions are going full blast.

If you're in the mood for something strange, this film may please you, twice over.

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.

The whole film, in fact, seems too fast for its own good. It plays like a synopsis, jumping from scene to scene, grief to grief, and it doesn't let us relax into the various worlds it's creating.

The movie, one of those surprise-twist detective stories, doesn't really stand up to scrutiny in the cold light of the theater lobby.

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.

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

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

The movie doesn't really jell. Glossy, good-looking and well-produced, it affects you and even sometimes moves you, but it doesn't really convincingly connect.

By turns brilliant and simplistic, moving and preposterous, the movie takes one of the ultimate hot-button American issues -- the morality of capital punishment -- and dissolves it into a volatile mix of psychological thriller and socio-political fable.

There is a thrill in seeing them wooing and pursuing each other through the streets of New York, a city that here again, for a while, becomes a movie isle of joy.

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.

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

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.

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

Has the unfortunate effect of overtipping the dramatic scales in favor of the Southern generals and turning almost everybody into waxen idols who spout flowery rhetoric.

Louiso has a confident touch and a good eye, and there isn't a scene in the film that wasn't intelligently done. Besides Hoffman's near-great performance as Joel, there isn't a bad or mediocre acting job on view either.

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.

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

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.

The movie overflows with action, slapstick and cliches, but the cliches never impede the action, and the slapstick is so expertly performed, it doesn't annoy you -- much.

What's wrong is the decision to let all the actors improvise their lines...At the end, Irreversible looks less like captured or even distorted life than an acting class.

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.

Another of many recent Hollywood plotless wonders.

At least the movie Pirates of the Caribbean is fun -- but only as long as you don't expect much. Take it from me: The ride is better.

Slender but surprisingly smart and pleasing.

An epic unhinged, and while its best sections suggest a Loony Tune done by Sam Peckinpah and Emilio Fernandez, "Mexico" needs to be even crazier than it is.

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.

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.

There's something light and insubstantial about this movie. It almost floats away as you watch it.

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.

The men here are negligible, but all the actresses are good -- especially Dunst, who shows a previously unrevealed gift for blending cold conservative roots, starchy appearance, forgiveness and unexpected redemption.

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.

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

More spirit and grace and less blood and guts may be what Passion needs.

A sometimes stirring, sometimes preposterous movie.