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83Dark, funny, paranoid, arbitrary, humming with tamped-down eroticism and in love with all things weird: That's the good news.
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80Like the TV show, The X-Files movie is stylish, scary, sardonically funny and at times just plain gross.
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75As pure movie, The X-Files more or less works. As a story, it needs a sequel, a prequel, and Cliff Notes.
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75This is more than enough material for two hours of summer-movie fun, and The X-Files delivers said fun reasonably well. The action scenes are bigger and bolder than their small-screen counterparts.
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75Neither true believers nor newcomers to the phenomenon will be disappointed.
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In the movie, the truth will (and does) out itself. Mulder and Scully have seen the future and it's a giant leap for each of them to comprehend.
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75Offers two hours of solid entertainment.
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70It's the brilliance of The X-Files to have turned Mulder's paranoid style into a function of cool. Mulder and Scully aren't just beautiful, smart, well-armed and seemingly impervious to the banalities of everyday life, such as cheap haircuts and ruinous love affairs--they're cool.
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70It's a smart, exciting, involving film that's true to its source, which is all it really needs to be.
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70Though both stars are sometimes eclipsed when the film strains for big action episodes, Mr. Duchovny sustains enough cool, deadpan intellect and suppressed passion to give the story a center. Ms. Armstrong has the harsher, more restrictive role, but she plays it with familiar hardboiled glamour.
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67Solid, workmanlike stuff, and enough to keep the legions of X-philes sated until next September. And since I realize some of you are dying to know, no, Mulder's butt remains, as always, fully clothed.
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60The problem is, the main conspiracy of the show is so vast, you have to walk around it a couple of times before you can see what it is.
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60The X-Files can stand proud as a genuine movie with a beginning, a middle and an end, two charismatic leads and a franchise ahead of it.
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60With its shrewd mixture of paranoia and the paranormal, the way its elaborate mythology combines enigmatic phenomena with potent cabals intent on running the world, The X-Files experience resembles "Twin Peaks" crossed with "The Twilight Zone."
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60The X-Files isn't so much a bad movie as it is a crackerjack piece of television. It's crisply made--not sodden like many of the "Star Trek" pictures. But it's as annoyingly open-ended as the rest of the series' episodes.
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60The X-Files movie is really just a two-hour teaser for the series's sixth season. And little else. You will feel exactly like Mulder when he says, "How many times have we been right here before, Scully? So close to the truth?"
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50Truth is, it' not very good.
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50I entered the screening for The X-Files: Fight the Future with myriad questions... I left with disappointing answers. [19 June 1998, p. 7E]
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50What we have here is a pretty good TV show huffed and puffed into a rather mediocre film.
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50It's a two-hour episode of the show, except with better production values and a nicer wardrobe for Scully.
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50Falls somewhere in between standing on its own feet as a real movie worth the price of a ticket and merely being a glorified TV episode refitted for theaters.
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Ultimately disappointing--it's bigger budgeted, but somehow less engrossing when played outside the solitary intimacy of the tube. It'll be a great video flick.
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40Essentially a supersize episode that ignores a slew of fifth-season developments and adds yet another monster to the mix, one that owes a striking debt to "Alien."