An exceptionally funny science-fiction comedy.

The weird thing about the films David Mamet has directed is that they have about as much emotion as a cyborg in a science fiction movie, yet by the end of the picture it isn't necessary; by then the audience has supplied their own.

At once a stifling exercise in thwarting emotional dynamics and a heated invitation to engage in the film's discourse on the shortcoming of sexual politics and justice in a media-saturated land.

Where most effects-laden extravanganzas aspire to be nothing more than a live-action comic book, The Matrix sees things with the venturesome clarity of a graphic novel.

Broadway-sized performances.

Flawed but scrappy, confusing yet exhilarating, the Brit-made Lock, Stock is far from a perfect movie. And it's not for anyone squeamish about violence. But it is, like Green Day, a rockin' good time.

While amusing and sometimes touching, Pleasantville is far from challenging.

Marshall has an astounding instinct for popular entertainment. He's done it again with The Other Sister.

I think the script by television writer Channing Gibson (no relation) is the funniest of them all.

Her first feature, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy, is a nicely directed, well-written debut.

That's not to say the entertaining Antz" was made by Woody, just that it's full of his personality.

One of the funniest movies to come along in awhile.

The delight of the movie is Keitel, who finally gets to play someone who doesn't look like he's about to mug you.

The script, by director Richard Kwietnioski and adapted from the Gilbert Adair novel, is poignant and well constructed.

Eastwood is perfect as the bad guy (a thief) you root for.

Think of this as "Die Hard" in a suit, with an election coming up.

Especially fine are Spade and Louiso, the latter possessing a quality of injured integrity that is priceless here.

Without much of a plot to speak of and relying almost entirely on the girls' star power and charisma - which they have in spades - turns out to be a truly entertaining movie for anyone with even a bare knowledge of the Spice Girls' history, which in this age of absolute over-saturation, is hard to avoid.

A great date movie: engaging enough to grab your attention while it's unfolding, thought-provoking enough to fuel cafe and cocktail lounge chatter long after the closing credits roll.

The acting and writing is a cut above the ordinary.

It's fast-moving, it's got fine special effects, the hero and heroine are pure and quick-thinking, the bad people die badly, and the script draws its fair share of laughs.

This movie has everything.

The ordinariness of the material gives way to the winning personalities of the stars.

Delpy and Hawke begin to grow on you and Linklater and his actors achieve a point midway through the film when the characters are so attractive and smart and emotionally daring that you'll be happy to spend the night with them.

Because the movie is otherwise so well made and so full of sweet emotion and "good" values, I was happy to ignore the shortcomings.

While I was watching "Lone Star," I realized that what makes Sayles a good and socially responsible person - his ability to look at one thing a hundred different ways - is exactly what makes him a muddy filmmaker.

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.

William H. Macy is fine as the detective Arbogast, wearing a hat he could have borrowed from Martin Balsam in the original role.

A smart, funny and endearing movie. It has enough cynicism to satisfy the part of DiCillo that would mock a blue-eyed superstar, yet enough genuine sentiment to make it possible for us to swallow the cynicism.

The disappointing ending aside, there is much to enjoy in The Game, a creation with a sheen so highly burnished that sometimes you feel you must look away.

The veteran Baker anchors the proceedings, and you would like to see more of her character.

The good guys metamorphose into bad guys and back into good guys with dazzling efficiency in Brian Helgeland's disturbing, comic script.

Gattaca is a welcome throwback to the days of good, low-tech sci-fi, stressing character and atmosphere over computer-generated effects and juvenile thrills.

Coppola again shines his intelligence on this bestseller material, rather than just shoving it through the Hollywood mill unsifted.

A charming and moving film about a slightly racy subculture in a highly rule-bound society.

Perhaps a bit miscast, and with a penchant for too many double-takes, Perry nonetheless is game.

Private Parts is a sparkling, nonstop entertainment written by Len Blum and Michael Kalesniko and directed by Betty Thomas, but sometimes it gives the impression that Stern is nothing short of Nobel Peace Prize material.

It's a testament to what happens when all the right ingredients come together. Wag the Dog is the best political satire in years.

What's best about this script is the premise: a lawyer who doesn't lie.

The sort of smutty scandalmongering the average moviegoer can really get behind.

This overall good feeling helps smooth over the sometimes shocking lapses in logic.

It succeeds because of the frenzied, kinetic direction by Mike Newell, one of the most interesting big-hit directors.

The finest element in de la Pena's carefully assembled account is how she doesn't simply state the obvious, but lets the meaty facts speak for themselves.

Slightly more mature and better assembled, Road Trip goes one better on "American Pie" by teasing out the idiosyncrasies in four guys existing in a personality grab bag.

Comes on like an "After School Special'' psychodrama that's been taken off its medication.

Hamlet finds in Hawke's greatish performance a Great Dane for this, or any other, modern moment.

Sometimes the movie lacks a quietness, an omission most egregiously felt at the end.

After more than an hour of fun, the film turns dark as Solanas' mental state worsens. Not only does the brilliant kook wear out her welcome with Warhol, but the portrayal also grates on the viewer.

Softley and Amini say they consciously viewed Kate as a film noir kind of heroine, a beauty leading a good man astray. And that, added to the setting of the second half of the movie in canal-riven Venice, gives the story the kind of moral haziness that verges on Thomas Mann territory.

The standard noir trappings are here: the femme fatale, double-crossing, fatalism, broken dreams, innocence betrayed and the rest of it. But Stone pushes it all so far and so relentlessly that it becomes absurdist comedy.

Quiet, moving and beautifully shot.

Bay has two great assets in Connery and Cage. The special effects give The Rock a James Bondian feel so Connery's wry, world-weary devil-may-careishness looks right at home here.

To enumerate exactly how Bean messes up would be to expose the silliness of this movie, and since Bean's humor is terribly silly, rather, wonderfully silly, there isn't much point in going into detail.

You find yourself absorbed in simply looking at them to the extent that it's hard to hear what they're saying. It's a nice dilemma for a movie to present.

It is familiarly old-fashioned, complete with montages of newspaper clippings fluttering past and calendar days slipping by. The sets, costumes, old cars and general atmosphere all beautifully recall moviemaking of a bygone era. And for that, hats off to Duke.

It's a beautiful movie. Too beautiful for its own good, really.

But then, just when it appears the race is lost, Steve James' love for his character and art form kicks in and wins the day, and, though flawed, Prefontaine is an engrossing portrait of a complex figure.

Voight's Wright is one of many examples of how Singleton and Poirier succeed in suggesting the ambivalence and shadings that make movie characters believable.

The movie is well made by director Michael Winterbottom ("Jude"), with a minimum of overdramatics.

Ransom is every bit as taut and expertly directed, and it's another in the emergency genre, one in which Howard excels.

It's too slick to be truly disturbing, but it's that slickness that keeps you on the edge of your chair.

Director John McTiernan outdoes the previous "Die Hards" (McTiernan directed the first, Renny Harlin the second) with machinery, stunts, noise, bullets and guts. Hand-held camerawork tweaks the audience's sense of anxiety further, and for the most part it works well.

It is both the best-looking James Bond film and the best-looking James Bond.

The result is a thrill ride with enough plunges and turns and loop-the-loops to make it worth a spin. What the picture lacks is the magic and resonance you feel in the best of popular entertainments.

With an original score by Alan Menken and Gilbert and Sullivan-ish songs by Menken and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, the movie is the cartoon equivalent of a full-scale, high-quality Broadway musical.

Dalmatians proves an apt playground for Hughes as one could surmise that his inspiration for treating comic bad guys in his movies so violently comes from a cartoon sensibility.

The Wachowski brothers are to be applauded for a film that is also nearly as stylishly funny as it is sexy and fast-paced.

It's funnier, and bitchier, than Clare Boothe Luce's "The Women," and, best of all, it showcases three wonderful actresses who have rarely been better.

Even those unfamiliar with the entire "Star Trek" phenomenon (it's now been 30 years since the original TV show sprang from the fertile mind of creator Gene Roddenberry) will find this a clever action movie, with a well-written screenplay and tight direction of a fine cast.

Tyler is a find for a director like Bertolucci. She is a blank slate of prettiness with her unadulterated, thoroughbred, long-limbed looks.

Foster has whipped the actors into the sort of comic frenzy usually reserved for farce, and the ready-for-anything energy serves the material well.

Mangold's vision is bold. There is nothing cutesy or gimmicky about Heavy, which may be why something in its grimness recalls the work of Ingmar Bergman.

Tennant and company do a fine job of retaining the otherworldliness of a fairy tale while at the same time explaining all the archaisms for a modern audience.

Add to that a perfect cast and one's only complaint will be that this is, at heart, another tear-jerker about how good it is to love and be alive and all of that.

Driver, who is padded but not fat, is an actress with self-possession to spare. Her looks defy conventional rules about modern beauty, but the directness of her gaze and the honesty of her smile make it difficult to look anywhere else when she is on screen.

Fallen Angels is proof that Wong will try anything, and the result is an eclectic mix of images and disjointed editing, sounds and rhythms that are at times as powerful as any piece of filmmaking likely to be seen all year. It can also, every once in awhile, be tedious and trying.

This movie has a first-rate script, and director Joseph Ruben ( "True Believer," "The Stepfather" ) knew exactly what to do with it.

The movie is strongest when Lee keeps his eye on the prize: the experiences of ordinary people in an extraordinary time.

It's as sunny as you would expect a Hanks project to be.

A sobering documentary.

Copycat is as steady and reliable as a pulse and as exhilarating as a surge of adrenalin.

Franklin juggles it all with wit and style, and suddenly you feel fine that this is only Mosley's first Easy Rawlins novel. Several more are just waiting to be adapted.

All the performances are good, the script is subtle and waste-free and Danny Elfman's score is evocative and appropriate, but the direction is what gives the movie its sweep.

In the attempt to rein in a cast playing a great assortment of exaggerated types, Schlesinger (who directed "Midnight Cowboy" and "Marathon Man" ) and Bradbury sometimes lose the tone of the movie.

Some nice performances and modest laughs highlight this amiable British comedy.

A hip, corrosive and often hilarious entertainment, the movie strikes another blow for the American independent film.

Of course, turning a novel by Woolrich into a light romantic froth is a little like turning King Lear into a musical comedy. But Benjamin has the right comic touch to pull this off.

A Little Princess is a delightful film. Bring your children, or just bring yourself.

The Spanish filmmaker goes back to what he does better than any other living director - post-modernizing the melodrama.

Forceful and well-acted. Fear truly lives up to its title.

Still, Singleton's willingness to take risks makes this a worthy, thoughtful film. Especially noteworthy: His sensitive handling of a love triangle between Kristen and her boyfriend and Kristen and another woman.

This is grim material, but director Hilary Brougher -- working from her own script that won a Sundance award -- examines the lives of these two suffering women without sensationalism or preaching.

Huston manages to bring the unavoidable brutality of this story to the screen without seeming exploitative. And she gets good performances out of Malone, Leigh and Eldard. Glenne Headly gives a great performance as Leigh's saintly sister.

From Juan Ruiz-Anchia's florid, eruptive photography to the pinpoint editing by Howard E. Smith that enhances it, everyone involved with The Corruptor understands that action is the bottom line - except Chow.

[Krishnamma] gives the story a dimension of pent-up anguish and melancholy.

An excellent human-interest documentary that unlike so many others has a genuine appeal beyond someone already interested in the subject matter.

Less ambitious than the highly successful "Secrets & Lies," Career Girls has its own modest merits - a real sense of wit, much of it expressed in Hannah's sharp verbal sallies, and a melancholy truth that both women realize.

A tedious, soapy romp about overlapping lives and destiny.

A movie drunk on its very existence, one that misses more frequently than it hits and couldn't care less.

It's handsome filmmaking that doesn't surface until the final 25 minutes during which Stevo and company's sense of marginalization achieves the palpable, emotional import that's more expressive than anything its characters' have to bitch about.

Sometimes, when you watch a Stillman movie, you can't help thinking that the guy ought to get out more.

Any movie that opens with a Goo Goo Dolls song and ends with a line like "I'm going to live -- just not as long as you" is bound to leave somebody reaching for a Kleenex.

The glory of the picture is the eye-popping, surreal backgrounds that blast the conventional characters off the screen.

The movie's primary narrative weakness is that its racism plot points seem ripped from the headlines of a "Geraldo" newsletter and stretched into a string of terribly executed car chases.

What could have been an insightful, irresistible movie is instead a simple, self-contained fable, pleasing to look at but meaningless

Woo delivers a vintage breakneck, break-arm, break-face 20-minute finale.

Leave it to Ron Howard to turn a plaintive Dr. Seuss ditty into a C-grade Tim Burton psychodrama.

This is not the addictive, hot-wired movie you want.

The vibe is acoustic-cafe: cute, catchy and ironic given its wimpy point of view.

A runny intimate portrait that doesn't trust Tammy Faye Messner and her story to enthrall you. So they've all but spelled it out: k-i-t-s-c-h.

There's a novel, engaging story trying to transmit through the storm of special effects and convoluted plot twists that mar the movie.

If Restaurant feels like a high-caliber TV drama, it's one that tries to pack an entire season (plus pilot, plus backstory) into one episode.

You're smarter than this, but occasionally it tricks you into thinking it might be up to something you haven't considered, like an above-average, extra-bloody episode of "Scooby Doo."

The film is in the key of "Romeo and Juliet," and it's a one-note tune.

As involved as Crudup and Connelly beseech you to be with this story, their very youthfulness, their nagging lack of adulthood, keeps the film from being anything more credible than a tight grad-school tryst.

As entertaining, charming and conceited as other Robert Redford joints, but it's also insufferably obvious.

Roth, though, is like a sociopathic arsonist, one enthralled with his ability to start little blazes and one who would even call the fire department, but wouldn't stick around to see whether anyone put them out.

Simply an endurance contest, one almost worth staying the 82 minutes to see who wins.

Things stay standard-issue French self-analytical from here.

Like a guy who finally gets what he wants, you just want to go home once it's over.

What makes Shadow Boxers special is how Bankowsky restores the woman's touch that always seems intentionally excised from coverage of the sport without comprising their participation in the sport.

An enervated adaptation of E.B. White's Stuart Little escapades.

Szabo doesn't bring the film to its senses until just past the halfway point.

Too smitten with the Eisenhower-era nostalgia.

Really just a lurid potboiler.

Some delightful surprises, but the sort of heavy-metal, high-definition sci-fi look that dominates the proceedings, plus the relentless pace and endless morphing, are somewhat tiring.

An unsteady stab at noir.

It's soft-edged fun that loses direction (or, given the scattershot plot, directions).

Dreamy and elegantly filmed.

A less confrontational, though positively gushing modernization of "Pierre, or the Ambiguities."

The welcome hints at emotional excess are compromised by the blunt force of the movie's political point-making.

Has a silly, insouciant glamour often employed to sell hair conditioners and perfume.

The writer-director has come up with a sumptuous, happy piece of fluff.

Demonstrates that sadomasochistic streak in von Trier that equates the raw with the experimental.

Overstays its welcome until the jokes curdle and the satire becomes a blunt instrument, but not before Busch throws some priceless one-liners.

Offers insights from a host of former players.

Fans likely to rave about Living.

It's not easy to wrench belly laughs out of contract killing, but Nine Yards does just that.

An enthralling special-effects tour de force with a lover's nook.

At its savviest, Scream 3 is a cheeky conceptual conceit, cheaply executed for the sake of achieving trilogy status. Instead, it's like a carnival that's been in town a week too long.

A wicked, light-headed first half dissolves into a bloody, head-bashing second half . The previews make it seem like a comedy. It isn't.

Queasy comedy.

In another universe - though it is difficult to imagine which one - Garry Shandling might be sexy.

Turturro tricks you into thinking there's magic realism streaming through this ode to art and commited love - despite there being little magic and not a trace of reality to speak of.

Crammed with such earnest belief in the power of love - even if it happens in the Chicago Zoo - it almost doesn't matter that O'Connor and Loggia have better chemistry than Duchovny and Driver.

The cast's control and Dobkin's assured pacing keep most of the funny things funny and make most of the scary things scary - while maintaining the tricky balance between humor and fear.

At its best the film serves as a music appreciation class taught by embattled artists whose cloudy livelihoods grow increasingly uncertain with each bittersweet symphony.

Now "Rod Tidwell," with Jerry Maguire as a supporting character, would be a movie to pay to see.

It's the year's funniest, most absurd sight gag.

Aiming to keep it real, the cast of the new dance casserole Center Stage sweats spunk.

Lindsay Lohan, 12-year-old veteran of commercials and television, is a frighteningly poised child who is truly impressive as the long-separated twins.

Too many questions are raised with no good answers.

You can see Bobby and Peter Farrelly bent over blowing violently into the sails of this toy boat, trying to get it to move.

A fun movie, with moments guaranteed to bring you close to tears. But, like most of Robbins' work, it's a cartoon, an emotional cartoon.

It's a truly strange coupling of mooning romanticism and rank stupidity that fairly screams, "Teenage America, we love your money!"

A supremely silly movie, which means that it has moments of boring idiocy mixed with moments of inspired hilarity.

Nowhere near as funny as "Spinal Tap," but fans of this kind of deadpan humor are guaranteed to get a few chuckles out of this one. All of the actors are marvelously horrible, and in this movie, bad equals good.

I can't help thinking, though, that maybe Thornton was too ambitious in trying to wear three hats.

Regardless of how cheated out of a full-bodied motion picture you feel, you're still left with the year's sickest bathroom humor.

A proudly unsophisticated demonstration of racial progress.

Powerful war spectacle neglects novel's heart and much of story.

If you buy the gross, it's surprisingly funny .

Most of American Pimp feels like you've been slipped a Mickey.

Collapses under its own contempt.

Troubling and troubled.

What begins as unassumingly dull wanders into disarming chaos.

There are plenty of good sight gags here, and anyone who can work the phrase "ass clown" into a script is all right with me.

The director bludgeons us dumb with her genius.

With more sophisticated writing, one suspects they could really soar: Even here, slowed by clunky, character-establishing lines and an all-devouring plot, they hit more often than they miss.

A mixed bag with the promise of a better sequel.

Works more as an object of pop curiosity than as a work of popular entertainment.

Solondz's greatest success is the pederast, heartbreakingly played by Baker...Had Solondz reached that apex in the other stories, it would have been a masterpiece.

It's full of visual flash, and can be enjoyed as a giddy ride, but you would waste your time trying to puzzle out the nuances of the story.

The movie is meant to be uplifting and to the degree that you can ignore its unquestioning treatment of mental illness, I suppose it is.

Just fascinating in an empty, trendy sort of way

Nicolas Cage gives one of the best performances of his strange, courageous career.

It's one of the most beautifully unpleasant movies ever made - its reverse charge being that it is no fun at all.

A satire whose dead aim stops wounding - and starts making - stereotypes of white middle-classness.

The film is obviously a long-form episode of a show better digested in 22-minute segments.

Of course, there's little else of interest about Pokemon beyond the consumption factor. Buy more.

During this movie, every few moments the theater fills with the appreciative guffaws of 18-year-old young men. How old are you?

It's not as good as the original - which was fresher, funnier and scarier - but if it were, then by the criteria of the film's resident movie scholar, it wouldn't be a genuine sequel.

More about having a good time with some interesting people than it is about watching a fine movie.

Scenes go on and on in endless, witless dialogue, ever accompanied by John Williams' hideously gushing music.

Lacks the spark of the best recent Disney spectaculars, like "Beauty and the Beast."

Fans of sci-fi, special effects, big explosions, panicky crowd scenes and theater sound systems cranked up way beyond the capacity of the human ear to hear comfortably will love this movie. I am not among you.

Cher is an inspired bit of casting, while the talented Dench is underused. Smith seems to be going through the motions as the fatuous and deluded aristocrat, while Tomlin has a ball as Georgie. But what really stays with you is the work by Plowright - she is a beacon of good sense (both as actor and character) and plucky as you please.

You may find yourself weeping toward the end, and, later, you may also find yourself wondering why. The revelations are staggeringly obvious.

I like that Sheridan's girlfriend works at Starbucks. Snipes plays the part with the kind of high energy that large doses of caffeine would explain.

This is a movie that is wonderful on the peripherals.

Ultimately, though, the movie's charms are frustrated by meandering direction.

The most refreshing performance is by Mortensen.

If the movie crumbles under its own stiffness at times, at least it has the two old pros' good performances to cheer us along the way.

Even if the movie is not a work of comic - or philosophical - genius, its existence does foretell of tolerance gaining a foothold in a largely intolerant world.

Freundlich's problem is that he has made an essentially interesting movie that never seems brave enough to say what it really intends.

All the parts of Return that deal with Luke's faith in his father and his appeals for him to reject the dark side of The Force are very emotional. In fact, the best sections of Return are extensions of the melancholy implications of "The Empire Strikes Back." [Special Edition]

Leaves the audience on such a devastatingly dramatic ledge.

The chief terrorist is played nicely with war-weary desperation by Marcel Iures, a Romanian actor with the sucked-in cheeks and ennui of a Jeremy Irons.

Woody Allen's questionable toe-tapping faux-documentary.

The punch line isn't that funny.

A high-spirited, big-bottomed Polaroid of the comedian in a fat suit.

Half snappy, sardonic and incisive and half slow-moving, goofy and dense.

While Birdcage has many isolated funny moments, long bits of slowness interrupt the energy.

Hackman is, as ever, a master performer, an actor at the peak of his powers. However, he can't carry the whole movie.

There's not much mystery here; there's only one outcome that could possibly make dramatic sense. And once you realize that, there's not much to do besides watch some very adept performers chew on their lines.

Directing his first movie, Jack Green, cinematographer on several Clint Eastwood films, shows an ease with the material (written by Jim McGlynn), but there's something a bit dull about the movie.

Metroland is a provocative rumination on how relationships are warped by two people's inability to be truthful with each other.

The cliches are all here.... Eszterhas works around these scripting difficulties deftly enough, but the real pleasure here is in watching Bacon and Renfro as idol and adorer.