Man on Fire, which starts off as a good example of super-glitz moviemaking, gradually turns into a movie on fire -- another helter-skelter, big-studio spending spree. Too bad. It could use a lot more of Walken, Fanning and some more honest drama.

It's an engrossing peek at an era that now seems as meteoric, crazy and distant as the Roaring Twenties.

This often entertaining movie mixes grand, epic effects and amazing visualizations of catastrophe with a sappy family-in-crisis plot that would look hackneyed in a '60s Disney TV movie.

Trying to be more antic and cuttingly funny, it misses the premise's shivery tension. The story loses us at precisely the moment it should put us in the vise.

Overall, King Arthur sinks into a grim, gray torpor - though it's an odd, not unentertaining movie. The approach is different, if not edifying or convincing.

The movie may lack a lot of things, but it doesn't lack comic timing--or, in its own way, a nose for the news.

A big, creepy dollhouse of a movie--a sometimes engrossing shocker with a surprise ending that isn't especially shocking or surprising.

Sweet-tempered, good-looking, goofy and not too sharp. The movie doesn't make much sense and neither does Danny, played by Welsh heartthrob Rhys Ifans.

The script isn't really good enough to worry about whether it's being over-directed; in fact, E. Elias Merhige's over-direction is one of the best things about this movie--along with Ben Kingsley's grimly unstoppable killer-of-killers, Benjamin O'Ryan.

Campbell and her character are willing to take chances. But Toback's tangled noirish plot, with Vera as a post-feminist femme fatale, isn't particularly clever or original.

The movie tries hard to duplicate the original's mood and story, but, like Gere or Lopez, is too much of a visual knockout to rope us in.

Likable as it is, suffers from that modern big-movie vice: overkill.

Good in many ways, full of talent and intelligence, and marks the debut of a promising young American writer-director, Dan Harris.

Melodrama triumphs. But here's at least some muted applause for a fine cast and filmmakers trying to confront the real world and its shadows.

It's a tribute to Penn's talent and guts that he manages to bring it off--even if the movie doesn't.

As a whole, though, the movie is much less magnetic or believable than its star.

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]

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.

Far too self-absorbed a picture.

A well-researched and well-illustrated, if often facetious, record of the U.S. government's longtime war on cannabis. And while it's a little too single-minded, it's both fun to watch and quite informative.

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

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

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

The movie isn't quite spry, warm or hip enough to carry out its very ambitious serio-comic agenda. Even for an ace like Levinson, Belfast is a long way from Baltimore.

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

Never really feels right.

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.

If you're looking for purple romance with a social conscience, it doesn't get much more purple than God's Sandbox.

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?

Like the cerebral palsy-stricken Irish artist Christy Brown of "My Left Foot," Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar-winning role, Ami is forced to fight such overwhelming odds to express himself that his very limitations become an aid to his vision.

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.

An offbeat, poetic piece that eschews the terse, hard-boiled style of the standard cop movie or TV show for something softer-centered and more nakedly emotional.

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.

Highway Courtesans carries a feeling of truth, of bravely facing problems that are pressing and real. It's a good, informative piece on the oldest profession--and on how the world differs from what we usually see in the movies.

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 movie, like Smith, is breezy, fun and keeps comin' at ya. [22 Dec 2006, p.5]

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

Mary Reilly is a thinking person's horror movie, done with such obvious intelligence and artistry that it feels strange to watch it and be so unmoved. [23 Feb 1996]

M. Butterfly, David Cronenberg's visually stunning but oddly cold and sparkless adaptation of the much-prized David Henry Hwang play. [08 Oct 1993]

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.

The movie contains its moments, charms and felicities-even its sharp stings of pleasure and pain. [20 May 1994]

Strikes me as something of an elaborate mistake, a wasted opportunity and a script Hartley should have discarded. But I liked it anyway.

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.

Director Suri Krishnamma, depends on Finney for its power. His great performance carries the film over its shallow spots, its wish fulfillment, its pull toward caricature. [03 Feb 1995]

There's something in Shallow Grave that is admirable, beyond its obvious display of youthful talent. [24 Feb 1995]

While the movie is never dull, its romantic fodder doesn't do justice to any period at all.

Kika is kind of a mess. But it's a charming, stimulating, talented and ingratiating mess, none-the-less.

A shiny bauble full of dead weight, gloppy good feeling and airless cliches. And every time you try to grab onto "Bride's" characters, they run away. [30 July 1999]

Though they're a good pair (Hopkins and Rock), this isn't a very good movie. It's slick but hollow.

Tries for both civilized wit and primitive joy -- and mostly misses both.

Minimalism be damned; even a postmodern noir needs more than Minus Man gives us. So do the actors.

A feast of bad taste, a demonic hog-wallow.

A wild, wanton and wasteful western farce that's so overblown and underwritten it almost makes you cringe to watch it.

A business-as-usual blockbuster blueprint that rarely surprises you.

It's a Hitchockian "wrong man" story, but there's a twist.

Weighed down by the presence of Griffith. She plays her satiric part without much gusto or conviction - as if she were afraid we might believe she really is Honey.

Shot in Chicago, this is a picture that looks better than it sounds and is made much better than it deserves to be.

A pretty good film, acted powerfully .

A cute, well-acted film that tries to mix tones sharply.

A pumped-up, flag-waving, outrageously hokey and ridiculous -- but sometimes incredibly exciting -- war movie.

The trajectory of the film -- despite its excellent cast and intelligent mounting -- is too preordained.

An overblown, overspectacular, oversold movie without an original idea in its head.

This film has so many good ideas, it tends to seem better after you've left the theater. But the mock TV stuff is just too faux to be funny.

Much of this movie seems a crock.

Two gifted co-stars, Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, and the highly imaginative thriller specialist Phillip Noyce lend some luster and credibility to another borderline-absurd scenario.

Has heart, but lacks bite.

Has the air of a film and actor (Beatty)reaching clumsily for a golden past that's gone.

This rich, gorgeous music and the wistful pastoral scenes create a rhapsodic mood that the rest of the film doesn't really sustain.

May be the only movie in recent memory unworthy of its own genuinely hilarious Web site, www.finemanfilms.com.

Wacky and heartless, bloody and silly -- and it ends in a flourish of grotesque sentimentality.

Hobbled with pedestrian direction, a dull visual style and a last act awash in obvious bang-bang melodrama.

This one's worth the ticket price only if you are a showbiz-aholic.

All Center of the World has is the double entendre of its title, some unremarkable dramatic and sex scenes, and some embarrassing moments for its very game co-stars.

Written with such murderous gravity, certainty and gloomy solemnity - such an absence of real life or feeling - that it tends to kill our interest.

It's a movie that robs the story of its politics and point and never really matches the charm of the '60s film.

Ragged as some of it might have been, that old "Out-of-Towners" had a unified and surprisingly dark comic vision to go with its nifty one-liners. This big, glossy picture is set in movie-movie land, that shiny, peachy place where a celebrity -- like Mayor Rudy -- waits around every corner. [2 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

The sum of all snores until the moviemakers start blowing up Baltimore halfway through. Then the special-effects people take over for about 20 breathless minutes.

For about half its length, Ravenous is a fairly effective scare picture, with a laugh or two. Then it just goes sour and pretentious. [19 March 1999, Friday, p.D]

This seems to be a movie made by people who love the old classic movie swashbucklers but don't have a clue how to make or modernize them.

At least Reno is around -- and he's the only spice in this stale, slick stew

So fast, sleek and riveting it almost makes you expect miracles -- which never materialize.

A wildly expensive movie full of computers, nonsense and violence, a film where wit, romance, elegance -- everything -- is sacrificed on the altar of giganticism, cliche and over-the-top action.

A smorgasbord of bad ideas, sumptuously over-realized.

A funny movie, but like "Josh" himself, it's too self-absorbed, and maybe too nice, for its own good.

"Masked" is erratic and volatile, too, from scene to scene, moment to moment. The script is chaotic, but the top-flight actors play their hearts out.

A tasteful, intelligent, well-acted film about one of the most ghoulish serial killers in American crime history - and I'm afraid that's a good part of what's wrong with it.

Elaborate misfire, which misuses an unusually good cast.

A likable little movie without much to offer but cute tots, recycled gags and a talented cast amiably wasting their time and ours.

Movies made from serious novels are often ridiculed as unworthy of their sources, but this one may be too worthy -- too reverent, too showy, too earnest.

An expensive-looking new detective thriller that should have been much better.

Kirk Douglas' performance...is so strong and inspiring it's a shame there isn't a better movie around it.

American Pie 2, which brings back the same cast for more of the same, is just another by-the-numbers, money-hungry sequel with a lot of recycled shaggy-sex jokes and gross-out gags.

To say Enemy of the State is senseless is an understatement. This is a movie where logic is the enemy.

Fast-moving shocker, but it's a dull shocker, so morally dead that it deadens you to watch it. After a while you couldn't care less if anyone is slaughtered or raped -- including the heroines.

It’s a big, frothy, high-tech, cutesy-poo musical comedy.

Spectacular, fast, never boring. But it's also one of the more disappointing movies I've seen recently.

A limply derivative, disappointingly trivial and hokey fish-out-of-water crime comedy.

It's really a crock: a coming-of-age boys' prison film that has only a fanciful link with Behan's life. The film is a bastard grandchild of Tony Richardson's 1962 "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner."

Should have worked on our emotions like a scalpel, made us cry and bleed. But, though it's an affecting, polished film, it's not satisfying. [12 March 1999, Friday, p.A]

Strikes me as a pure, unadulterated crock. [12 February 1999, Friday, p.A]

It's one of those fast, slick, half-smart shows that can't decide whether to pay its debts to action or reality -- and winds up cheating both.

There are no surprises in this movie -- not even in the Bollywood parodies, when the hero and heroine finally, subversively kiss. There is talent, though.

Scientology or not, the movie is a battlefield bummer that makes you want to revolt.

A dark comedy that blows up like an exploding cigar, leaving nothing much behind but smoke, noise and a bad taste.

A light, breezy, often charming little film, with a good cast playing mostly shallow characters.

Sometimes funny, often strained comedy.

Lawrence and Zahn generate enough comic tension and mayhem to jump-start this mass of action-comedy cliches into a fairly amusing show.

Like too many movies these days, takes a clever little idea and all but pounds it into the ground.

Drably shot, unimaginatively written and shallowly acted, it's a poor example of the "daffy, goofy, sex-crazed guys" occupational comedies that flourished throughout the job-obsessed '80s. [19 Feb 1999]

This pretty but witless movie is well-produced, slickly directed -- full of jokes about hot dudes and hot babes pitched right at the "American Pie" crowd.

The movie doesn't deserve any of the talent bestowed on it, from Reiner's amiable direction to the occasional grace notes in the performances of Hudson, Marceau and David Paymer.

A breakthrough for karate comedy king Chan, but not necessarily the kind we've all been waiting and hoping for. It's an ultra-digitized DreamWorks show crammed with elaborate special effects, the kind that physical-stunt specialist Chan has always avoided.

An irritation, more fizzle than sizzle.

A bright and zippy, but alarmingly over-campy and lighter-than-fluff cartoon feature.

Tries to take us from heaven to hell but winds up leaving us in limbo: exasperated and dumfounded.

By creating a kind of politically correct version of Andy Griffith's "Mayberry," director Bezucha has drained the movie not only of bigotry but also of dramatic conflict.

Soft and predictable -- which might be OK if there were more laughs and insight.

A dumb movie, but it's also a knowing one: a cheap castle of lewd trivia and corny excitement built on The Rock.

Unfortunately, the humans only have scripts to support them. So for every bear triumph, Country Bears also features cliched jokes, corny sentiment, ludicrous shtick and the most flabbergasting set of star cameos since Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson wandered into "Men in Black II."

A lively little Australian rock movie hamstrung and sunk by one of the least successful story ideas I've seen recently.

Pearce and Bonham Carter are remarkably photogenic, but the movie is fitful and mannered to a fault, full of watery allusions and stormy scares.

Slick, expensive and filled with good-looking actors flexing muscles, but once it grabs our attention it doesn't really reward it...this movie doesn't have fear -- or sheer wonder and marvel -- enough.

A ravishing crock. Like its title character, a computer-generated movie star programmed to resemble a cross between Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Kim Basinger, it's beautiful but empty, gorgeous but spurious.

Boyle's new movie is mostly a zombie fiasco, closer to the vacuities of "The Beach" than the scintillating social satire of "Trainspotting."

Stolen Summer is no disaster, though. It's merely one more misfire fortunate enough to attract actors like Bonnie Hunt and Aidan Quinn, who almost make it work.

A sappy, often absurd disappointment, another would-be inspirational romance that, like Costner's overwrought "Message in a Bottle," is impossible to swallow.

Not a picture that makes you think very much -- except to wonder why the studios keep making movies like this.

Freaky Friday commits a lot of sins; luckily, it has Curtis and a few others to cover them up.

Fessenden cooks up a likably offbeat horror movie. But somehow, it never jells, never really scares us.

Does have heart and enthusiasm. But it might have worked better if it had been glitzed up and energized the way "Fame" was. It's not a script that can survive this kind of minimal, earnest, self-congratulatory treatment.

Likable but relentlessly trivial.

May try to revive the eerie spirit of the Gothic novel, but, unless you're suffering from amnesia yourself, it probably won't surprise or thrill you.

Unfortunately, after watching Paycheck, you may wish you had the picture's gimmickry at your disposal, so you could erase your own memory of it.

Should please its core audience, which includes anyone who might actually want to win a date with Tad Hamilton. Others may opt to wait for another date with Kate Bosworth -- or Nathan Lane.

An odd mix itself, of contemporary sexual realism and unabashed romantic fantasy. If "Days" works, it's mostly on a sheer fantasy level.

A neo-noir movie nightmare gone sadly wrong.

When the crashing chords and defiant lyrics of "Be the Rain" close things out, there's a burst of idealism and energy that redeems everything. If you see Greendale, treat the movie charitably and dig the music.

Isn't good satire or good slapstick. It does have those lyrical, catchy Menken tunes, and the film perks up whenever Raitt or lang sing one of them. But much of this movie is deadly.

A big, empty picture full of star turns, artificial energy and jokes that don't quite work, even if stars Willis and Perry do their best to slam them across.

This genuinely ambitious and accomplished Chicago production does have strong points, not the least of which is Lana herself. When the fiery, emotionally transparent Orlenko lets her talent and presence pour down on Lana's Rain, the movie springs to life.

It's a middling film that wastes a lot of good opportunities, as well as two fine, charming co-stars.

It's fairly entertaining--but not the second coming of indie comedy some notices might lead you to expect.

The movie goes too far on too little motivation - and the middle section, with its maggoty villains, roiling skies and native revolts, seems almost barmy. Yet Exorcist: Beginning does score a small victory. It's not as bad as you'd think.

To work, it has to make us feel crazy with love, like "Vertigo" did. Instead, it often just makes us feel crazy for believing any of it.

Slickly produced, well cast and very excitingly made, it's based on plot hooks so silly, most of them blow up in your face.

It's a harmless enough movie, and quite a good-looking one; Bettany and Dunst are an attractive enough couple, even if Lizzie has been written as a selfish little snip and he as a whining man-child.

Townsend seemed to me ill-matched as a romantic hero: way too moony-eyed and mushy to cope with the likes of the towering Theron and torchy Cruz.

A comedy that seems to have most everything going for it but the ability to make us laugh.

It's a nice little film, likable but not exceptional, and it will probably appeal most strongly to actors, would be-actors, wannabes and ex-actors.

There's barely a scene in this movie that taps his (Murphy) special brilliance.

For all Ricci's zingers, the actress who gets the most laughs here is Kudrow, who has an amazingly right-on offbeat comic sense and rhythm. Playing a bright, sexually repressed Indiana teacher, she displays priceless timing. [19 June 1998]

Won't make your day, but it won't kill it either.

The movie, like Hitch, tries to be cool, funny and sweet but falls on its face without generating any real sympathy, smarts or humor.

Though the story is potentially fascinating and the visuals sometimes spellbinding, the movie itself is stranded in the purgatory of the second-rate.

More an uninspired letdown than a flabbergasting turkey... One reason for this lack of bite lies in the werewolves themselves. They're a bit too teddy-bearish, even oddly cuddly, and the fright scenes work better when you don't see much of them.

It's a bizarre but engaging fling.

Despite some impressive technical achievements, it too looks like a movie with little reason for being.

It would take the dark wit of a Billy Wilder or a Coen brother--or at least a Neil Simon--to put across this kind of material.

Has the worst happy ending I've seen in a while.

This romantic-comedy action movie is a fizzle.

An uninspired misfire of a TV-series knockoff that, despite its great cast and smart filmmakers, never manages to scare up much magic.

Though Stealth's strengths are obvious -- high-tech marvels and a good cast -- so are its flaws. At its worst moments, a mad robot seems to have taken over the movie, too.

This isn't a particularly good movie, and it's offensive in the way mid-range low-budget slasher shows usually are. But it works better than some, largely because Etheredge-Ouzts has a more original slant and a deeper sense of character than horror movies usually allow.

I found nothing likable or funny about either of these characters, who both deserve a pie in the face. (One of them even gets it.)

At its best, Transamerica made me laugh and feel for Bree. At its worst, it made me cringe at the potential creepiness of its central relationship.

Like its title heroine, it's sparkly, pretty and flirty--but often all wet.

In movies as in life, superior technology doesn't necessarily trump humor, magic or really shaggy dogs.

Though the movie is pretty stereotypical and sometimes crude, it also has a sweet laid-back temper. It has amusing moments.

As silly movies go, this one is at least pretty exciting. But in the end, Typhoon leaves you feeling as exiled from the two Koreas as Sin is.

For all its crashes and flash, this is a movie that drifts away as we watch it. Muscle cars and all, it's often a waste of gas.

One of those movies that promises much but doesn't deliver. Despite a lot of misplaced talent, this movie is as silly and forced as its title.

This is a picture in which the barf scenes standard in the usual crude youth comedies aren't gratuitous. They're logical climaxes.

There's nothing classic about Surviving Eden, even if it is better than reality TV.

Keith -- a consistent hit-maker who wrote the controversial 9/11 song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" -- has a future in movies if he wants it. Hopefully, they'll be better ones than this.

As sports movies go, Gridiron Gang isn't bad, just not top-line material.

The film's triple thesis is that elections are run badly, Democrats are often clueless and Republicans are clever. Maybe--but that still leaves too many unanswered questions.

A modernized version of that great sentimental horse movie, 1943's "My Friend Flicka," and it comes with the shiny trappings, high professionalism and glamorous accessories you might expect...Something is missing though.

The results aren't gothic and bloody, as they were in the Lauren Bacall film "The Fan," or elegant and ironic as in the Bette Davis classic "All About Eve"--though the plot suggests a bit of both.

A commendably brave piece, but less focused and powerful than you'd like. In the end, Garapedian might have been better off concentrating her energy on the 1915 Armenian story--which has been told on film various times (for example, in "Forty Days of Musa Dagh" and Atom Egoyan's "Ararat"), but never with the power of, say, "The Pianist" or "Schindler's List."

It's lively but chaotic and evasive. The period re-creation switches on and off. We get a sense of what the silver-walled Factory was like, but not the rest of swinging Manhattan in the '60s.

Happily was begun as an old-fashioned 2-D "flat" cartoon and then switched by producer John Williams (of "Shrek") and director Paul J. Bolger to 3-D during production. The style finally is an uncomfortable amalgam of both.

With his brazen gifts for mimicry, Eddie Murphy may now be the Peter Sellers of blockbuster toilet comedy movies.

The sense of the unknown that "Padgett" created are largely absent. And the movie fails to supply us with an antagonist to work up some dramatic conflict. Nor are the toys themselves very interesting and Mimzy is a toy bunny of no distinction.

For all its glitz and gadgets, is markedly inferior in everything but teen appeal.

A bizarre, bloody adventure movie.

Without Lemmon and Matthau, it's doubtful either "Grumpy" movie would be worth watching -- or even thinking about. But, because these two get much of their humor from reactions, the magnificent friction they create, they can say ridiculous things -- or even make up ridiculous lines (which they seem to be doing here) -- and make the scenes play. [22 Dec 1995, p.P]

Maybe Georgia Rule should be required viewing for Paris Hilton during her term in the slammer. But not for us.

Something about baseball seems to bring out the silly side in moviemakers -- even in a movie like The Fan, which starts out well-crafted and deadly serious and seems to have good enough actors and a savvy enough director to stay that way. But halfway through this thriller things go haywire. [16 Aug 1996, p.D]

It's hard to create snap-crackling languor or laid-back frenzy. And there's also something condescending in the entire conception of Mixed Nuts. [21 Dec 1994, p.7]

Falls flat on its face.

A mind-numbing, bloody, ridiculous experience.

An almost terminally sappy youth romance.

In this bizarre tale of man among the apes and a psychiatrist among madmen -- an over-emotional hybrid of "Gorillas in the Mist" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" -- style buries substance.

How is it possible that actors as expert as Close and Depardieu can wind up together in a mostly brainless big-budget stinker?

One more movie comedy about how love can turn you into an idiot. And its major flaw, among many others, is that the idiocy takes over the movie.

An oppressively cute Manhattan time-travel romantic comedy that’s lost in time, space and cliches.

A grotesque slumgullion of kung fu, studio schlock and pseudo-Dumas swashbuckling that leaves you longing for Doug Fairbanks --or even Don Ameche and The Ritz Brothers.

Accomplishes something I would have thought impossible. It made me appreciate its 1994 predecessor, "The Flintstones."

A fast, slick, outlandish fiasco that starts out well and then seems to drop right off a cliff.

The best thing about star and co-writer David Spade's Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star is the end-title sequence, a big, sassy sing-along in which dozens of old TV child stars spew out defiant jokes about their old careers and fame's fickle fingers.

A comedy murder mystery gone seriously astray, boasts an immensely talented cast .

A gaudy yet grim science-fiction horror movie of such surpassing silliness, humorless intensity and stylistic overkill that watching it may actually put you in a state of paranoia.

Some movies should never have been made, and high on that list is the addled new remake of Rollerball.

Though I would agree it's original -- it's the first aboveground romance movie I've seen in which the heroine is repeatedly spanked, verbally tormented and tied to a chair by her lover--- it's not an experience I much enjoyed.

Turturro is the one thing that's right with the movie. Perhaps the weakest thing about the new "Deeds" is its utter lack of a strong viewpoint and real emotion.

An odd little ghoul too cleaned up to survive, a bloodless vampire movie that's mostly lifeless as well.

One hopes that this is Hollywood's last go-round with Swept Away. Watching this fiasco, I kept having nightmares about a possible cartoon version, co-starring Cruella de Vil and Shrek.

It's a movie that puts Samuel Jackson in kilts, Robert Carlyle in a red Jaguar, and the audience -- if they have any sense at all -- out in the lobby, looking for another picture.

There's almost no reason to see the movie, unless you have no qualms about wasting your time.

An unabashedly bad movie full of cliches, claptrap, fairly good rock 'n' roll and stomach-turning gross-out gags.

Superhero comic book movie with a script so feeble it might have been written with crayons.

Just withers compared with many older, better movies about teen alienation and nihilism, from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "River's Edge."

The idea may sound like fun, but the movie isn't. It's a travesty of a picture that's a disgrace to the memory of the great film from which it's remade. [5 February 1999, Friday, po.A]

It's outrageously stereotypical and weirdly personal, so loonily exaggerated it keeps surprising you.

Often ridiculous, mostly poorly written and, surprisingly poorly acted too. No matter how many flashy scenes the filmmakers shoot, the bad lines just keep dripping down. [21 Aug 1998]

Technically clever but emotionally bankrupt...it's an almost laughably opportunistic movie.

What we get, while rarely boring, is a succession of senseless scenes bathed in formula-thriller blue light, full of blazing Uzis, exploding helicopters and sentimental male bonding.

Outrageously vapid and overdone movie.

A good-natured but trivial Manhattan romantic comedy.

I can't think of much that might happen on a date evening that could be more annoying than this movie.

The crass sentimentality of American Wedding increasingly fits Norman Mailer's definition: "the emotional promiscuity of the basically unemotional." The jokes are unemotional, uncouth and mostly unfunny.

It may entertain you if you don't mind senseless stories and screaming soundtracks.

It's a real shame that most new boxing movies try to copy the crowd-pleasing, sentiment-choked tactics of "Rocky" rather than the stark drama of "Raging Bull" or the realistic grit of "On the Waterfront" and "The Harder They Fall." Against the Ropes is only the latest sorry example. The sad thing is that, with this real-life story and subject, it could have been a contender.

Despite a big budget, lots of technical flair and a good cast headed by Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames, it's mostly a bloody mess.

It's one of those movies where talented filmmakers waste time with stale, phony material.

Some film premises are so outlandish, so thinly worked out and so deep-down ridiculous that they wind up sinking the show -- and White Chicks collapses under a real doozy.

Sweet-tempered but superficial.

It's a murky, empty-headed dive into the depths of the Antarctic and the heart of monster movie cliches that leaves you praying for most of the cast to get killed off fast, to put them (and us) out of our misery.

It's a glossy, well-mounted, slickly done but almost stuporously predictable affair, both formula-bound and utterly illogical.

This clunky remake can't rise from the ashes, nor would you want it to.

Fairly well done but deadly dull futuristic thriller.

A flabbergasting waste of time and talent.

Sluggish and preposterous, full of violence and cliches.

A bad, bad movie...It's loud and dumb and it wastes a good cast on a ludicrous script.

In White Noise, Hollywood and Michael Keaton try to make a decent thriller out of ghosts in the machine but come up with lousy reception and static.

Wedding Date is neither good art, good entertainment nor even good trash.

The film may be bad-and mad-but it's not predictable.

Cheerful but mind-numbing.

What isn't scary--or exciting, amusing or fun--is XXX: State of the Union, a movie so preposterous, cliché-packed and over the top that it makes the original "XXX" seem as good as the original "State of the Union."

The movie suffers from a devastating flaw for a comedy: It isn't very funny.

A contemporary teen summer romance with a modern sexual twist--though in many ways, it's just the same old malarkey.

Final Destination 3 is a gorefest that should either slake your worst appetites or drive you to the exits.

A flashy-looking low-budget indie about drugs, love and crime in small-town Iowa. But, speaking as an ex-small-town Midwesterner, I found it hard to buy.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh at some of this--though it's not as funny as Laurel and Hardy as toddlers in "Brats." But I wanted to slap myself whenever I did.

The Favor is a sex comedy without sex-and pretty much without comedy. [29 Apr 1994]

Sometimes, you can use a smaller devil to catch the Devil, the movie suggests. But in this case, the entire movie goes to hell in record time.

Just another self-absorbed teen chronicle, with the added twist of a little time travel and a surprise ending.

To say this movie's premise is bonkers is putting it mildly.

Think about the worst movie ideas you've had in your life, the ones so embarrassing they make you wince. Now imagine this: a modernized version of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" titled Scotland, Pa.

The first half hour of Hot Chick, before the switch, plays like soft-core porno from the '60s. The rest plays like a bad "Saturday Night Live" sketch stretched to the breaking point.

The political movie satire from hell.

Some movies are a joy. Some are a chore. And some are sheer torture. A good example of the latter is Virus. [17 January 1999, Metro Chicago, p.8]

It's hard to believe how bad this movie is.

A big techno-dud.

A staggeringly bad picture: a shallow, cliche-ridden mess that keeps blowing up on screen.

Mind-numbing sequel to "Pokemon the First Movie."

You have to have faith that kids will recognize a bad movie when it's foisted on them -- and they don't get much worse than The New Guy.

An almost mystifyingly bad movie.

The kind of fascinatingly bad film only a really gifted and fearless moviemaker could make: a 92-minute long raggedy-raunchy vision of sex, transit and alienation in which Gallo focuses on himself so obsessively, it's as if he'd become his own stalker.

Serves up horrendous lead acting, murky cinematography, bland atmosphere, unengaging romance, mug-crazy cameo performances, bash-on-the-head satire and ill-timed slapstick gags that look like outtakes from a Bozo the Clown show gone berserk. [20 Oct 1995]

Devotees of awful filmmaking can't go wrong with this one.

That this bit of pustulence is based on a video game of the same name is no surprise. It explains the thin plot, characters and abundant gunplay.

Bewilderingly bad.