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.

The acting and writing is a cut above the ordinary.

Happy Together is Wong's most fully realized work. It is a pleasure to watch an interesting mind feel his way, and the result is something more than just a passing fancy.

Never has this war been filmed with such ragged glory.

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

Stooge-filled farce offers low laughs but lacks a point.

It is a visual tour de force, but as a whole the movie slowly deflates into a cross between "Arizona" and "The Hudsucker Proxy".

Groovy.

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

Revelatory.

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.

The real trouble with this movie is that it represents the continuing departure of Almodovar from the chaotic, riotous and anti-social roots that gave his best movies their zest.

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

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

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.

Gets diagnosably schizo.

The movie is an ill-advised work of egomania by someone who clearly has some talent, but not as much as he seems to think.

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

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

Binoche is the ideal creature for that kind of cosmetic expansion, and, here, her thorough modernity takes on an almost cruddy, Italian sadness.

Big swirls of computer-generated dirt, a bickering couple and the dead certainty that the fiancee will leave and the bickerers will get back together. An exciting night out, or what?

A tedious, soapy romp about overlapping lives and destiny.

The drawbacks to Little Voice might sink a lesser movie, but not this one.

The best-looking bad movie in years.

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

The comedy-drama is worth seeing for Christie's performance as a former B-actress married to a philandering handyman. She radiates a mature sexuality that's a rare treat on screen these days, and when the camera strays from her, you want to reach over and turn it back.

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

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.

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.

Implausibly dainty.

One of Lee's unsung gifts as a filmmaker is his discovery of that place between eye-popping surrealism and wrenching Greek tragedy.

Leans so heavily on its stars that their performances are marred by their emptiness.

It's too cryptic and unfulfilled to serve as a tool for anything beyond its own obfuscation.

Smart and unsentimental as it is, Shallow Grave is more than a little forbidding.

Everything you would want from a Big Brother film: Good-looking, preachy in an Old West kind of way, wobbling between humor and murder, hellbent and periodically brilliant.

Ronin shows the mark of a veteran hand and is entertaining in fits and starts.

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.

In general, the script is just slightly above sitcom level, but a few lines, owing to great delivery by terrific actors, raise this a few notches on the comedy scale.

An old-fashioned movie. It is simplistic, full of stock characters and easy solutions to difficult problems, and I absolutely loved it.

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

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

The film is alt-schmaltz, and it'll do.

The deft, hilarious Notting Hill finds Grant's dour-droll-deprecating affliction at its most dead-on.

The least opaque of Antonioni's films, unburdened by stylishness and his imagistic inflammations.

I tried to find in Paltrow what all her admirers in numerous magazine articles have reported. I tried to ignore a less than enchanting English accent and a tendency to be wiped off the screen whenever other actors were given much to do.

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

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.

It starts out well and winds up no worse than most of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood.

It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.

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.

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.

Director Eastwood favors naturalism and sometimes the effort to reproduce what it is like to meet someone new bogs the picture down irreparably.

If the idea is to teach us something about the 37th president of the United States, then you would think Stone would resolve to stick to what can be proven about the man's life, or at least indicate when he's speculating. But Stone is the Great Explainer, and facts have an annoying habit of mucking up his explanations.

While Blanchett glows with intelligence, passion and a quirky kind of beauty, the movie she is in fails her in a number of essential ways.

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.

You can't help cheering for Selena, but the good feeling is diminished by the sense that her story's been simplified and sanitized.

For all the blathering, heavy-handed pathos, we might as well be watching the Lifetime cable channel.

The film finally seems to stagger under the weight of its own significance.

On the one hand, you want to praise it for its stylishness and originality in tackling some fascinating subject matter. On the other hand, it's frustrating because it could have been so much better.

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

The End of the Affair's masterfully heartbroken final scene is scarier in its nightmarishly wry suggestion of ill fate than anything that ever happened on Elm Street.

A shockingly eloquent, nearly moving feat of Y2K-trendiness.

A poignant and racy movie. The dancing is pretty great, too.

Schnabel can't decide whether he wants to tell a traditional rise-and-fall morality tale or make an art film. His attempt at telling Basquiat's story straightforwardly collapses under its own banality.

Deceptively keen as both a paranoid political thriller and a caveat against the trustworthiness of your friends and neighbors.

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

Plays like a lost Rockford file.

Madhouse satire manages to disarm the second you realize it's laughing with you - and sometimes harder.

Just fascinating in an empty, trendy sort of way

While the premise is intriguing, the movie is gluey, bumbling and singularly un-thrilling.

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.

There must be nine or 10 thwacks to the neck throughout Sleepy Hollow, and Burton finds a different way to make the resulting severed noggin fall as though you'd forgotten the last one.

Freed from the demands of adapting an established and complex literary piece, the filmmakers seem to have relaxed - and so can their audience.

An artificial and hypocritical effort to escape the artistic limitations of teenage slasher flicks.

At 126 minutes the movie is excruciatingly long, but it is still too short to pack in all the subtle changes in character he means but fails miserably to convey.

A finely coiffed, cream-cheese "8 1/2" remix with Gere, a Marcello Mastroianni for Oprah Winfrey times.

Quiet, moving and beautifully shot.

Not entirely persuasive, not entirely schmaltzy, "The Tic Code" is one of those well-meant dramatizations... that mysteriously made it all the way to a theater near you.

The spectacle is huge; the animation, breathtaking. In many ways, it is the epic of biblical proportions the filmmakers hoped for. But, like the Good Book itself, The Prince of Egypt can also be tedious, self-important and at times exhausting.

Cop Land presents a fairly involved plot, and Mangold is not equipped to do more than blurt all the information onto the screen and let the nuances settle where they may.

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.

The entire film rings totally fake and the resulting dishonest sentimentality makes you fidget in your seat and count the seconds until the sweet but completely predictable ending.

Ultimately affecting mix 'n' match weeper.

Something in Hutton's wounded puppy look always communicates an untapped intelligence or wasted potential, both of which are perfect for this role.

Most of American Psycho just sits there, looking at trouble, rather than looking for it - complacent, overjoyed in fact to exist at all.

As formulaic, but occasionally outré multiplex-bound behemoths go, Gladiator is a foaming beast.

It fails to capitalize on its own gifts, coming darn close to greatness but never quite catching the brass ring.

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

Dern is nothing short of brilliant here.

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.

A mixed bag with the promise of a better sequel.

The maturity of the Star Trek saga and its remarkable fan base have combined to produce a polished film that shines like a crown jewel in the Star Trek firmament.

The title comes from Indian legend in which Lord Rama tests the purity of his wife by a flaming ordeal (which we see enacted in an open-air pageant with comic overtones of Bunuel). This bit of mythology too handily prefigures a major element in the film's conclusion.

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

The Patriot makes the Revolutionary War look like super-produced studio footage of the L.A. riots.

Most of the movie seems stilted and uncomfortably girdled by efforts to work around the cumbersome Brando, who is shot mostly from above the waist, where the full effects of gravity and avoirdupois do not seem so egregious as they do at belt level.

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

A slew of writers and an enthusiastic cast all do their jobs admirably enough to provide a couple of hours of unembarrassing entertainment.

If it's difficult to find straight laughs in a colorblind prison movie (It's difficult enough to find a colorblind prison movie), finding straight laughs in a black one is almost impossible.

Generates very little heat.

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.

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

This bloated, self-important and logically absurd movie, made by the director of the equally historically hysterical "Forrest Gump," pretends to the thrones of Serious Thinking, of Important Messages and of Intellectual Provocation. If there were truly anything serious, important or intellectual about this movie, this planet would be in big trouble.

Be that as it may, the movie offers the uplifting news bulletin that life is not about being happy with how much you weigh but with what kind of person you are. This is where the movie starts getting sloppy.

Just another in a long line of blue-collar-kid-at-prep-school movies, and it may be the worst of the lot. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is original in this movie.

Then there are times when the humor and the pathos of these losers catch you off-guard. Those moments are nearly profound, and elevate the film above the slacker cliches in which it wallows.

Determined to be inoffensively tidy and cute above all else.

Dogma' is Kevin Smith's fourth film and it looks like his first but I'm not ready to quit him -- there's a landmark in him. I just wish the crafty, raucous Dogma was it.

The journey's a kick.

Such an ambitious, well-acted film that it's easy to overlook its flaws as relatively minor.

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.

When the mystery is unraveled and the frame-up is revealed, I, personally, had no idea what anyone was talking about.

The most refreshing performance is by Mortensen.

Certainly it isn't about to give "Das Boot" a run for its money - but nevertheless it is irresistible entertainment.

Amazing comic performances...give this comedy its lovely manic pace, kept just within the realm of sanity.

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

A flyweight, humongously entertaining ensemble number.

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.

As titillating novelty turns into tired cliche, the dyke-psycho-killer genre may soon burn itself out, but in the meantime, we have the grim Brit art-film variation on the gruesome genre, Butterfly Kiss.

A movie too smart and too urgent to be categorically awful. Clinically insane may be another matter altogether.

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

A remarkable study of the corrosive effects of fear and power on an establishment insider who puts duty above all else.

A gorgeous sliver of grown-up ambrosia.

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

The Faculty deserves a week of detention, not so much for missing the point as for blunting it.

Broken Arrow isn't the ultimate fusion of Hong Kong surrealism and Hollywood realism, but it points the way to nerve-shattering possibilities.

Spirited, madly educational docu-quickie.

A shameless "Shawshank" redux.

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.

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

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

Dreamy and elegantly filmed.

No-fat filmmaking aided by Berri's muscular formalism that, here, occasionally assumes the gritty focus of a taut, action thriller.

Here he has Whoopi Goldberg, Mary-Louise Parker, Drew Barrymore and James Remar to distract us from the depths to which Ross habitually stoops in the never-ending quest to reacquaint an audience with its cheapest emotions.

Rumble in the Bronx has the explosive escapades that Stallone/Schwarzenegger followers crave - hair-raising free falls, hovercrafts out of control, crazed turf wars, collapsing buildings, gun-happy gangsters and other boy-film staples - plus the kind of oddball comedy and independent spirit usually found only outside the current Hollywood empire. Chan is a true artist of a genre that ordinarily does all it can to avoid art.

A harmeless concoction.

A grand, old-fashioned movie of spies and Communist repression.

Kaizo Hayashi's homage to noir B movies, both Japanese and American, is successful as a true labor of love.

As innocuous as the love songs on its soundtrack.

This splatter film is set in Norway, but rest assured, it sticks with the formula. The young people to be killed off are just as obnoxious as their counterparts in American gorefests.

It's the most liberated and alive [DeNiro]'s been since his deluded Rupert Pupkin tried to kidnap Jerry Lewis in "King of Comedy."

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

Call it "Rosemary's Nephew." Or, simply call The Devil's Advocate a muddled metaphysical thriller that takes a small eternity to engage the observer with its flimsy characters and its tired special effects.

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

Shelton has a talent for using the specific to illustrate the universal. Avowed baseball haters loved "Bull Durham." And if watching golf sounds like an excellent insomnia cure, you will probably still enjoy Tin Cup.

Funny and untouched by cynical, ironic bids to be taken seriously.

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.

Sandra Goldbacher, writing and directing her first feature, is a sure-handed filmmaker. The movie is a tableau of sensuality.

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

Where Never Been Kissed succeeds is in its unabashed refusal to stoop to choosing sides in the high-school hipness war.

Writer-director Mark Herman seems genuinely moved by the plight of the mining communities, but his attempt to translate those feelings into a story shows the effects of hard labor.

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.

A filmmaker of Jordan's capability is not likely to make anything less than a competent, watchable movie, and that Michael Collins is. I think content rather than form detracts from the cogency of the finished product in this case.

Several times during this film, you wish you were a bottle rocket so you could explode out of your seat and leave this tedious mess behind.

The artificiality peculiar to moviemaking rubs up counter-productively against the artificiality peculiar to live theater, making the movie version of Gray's material seem arch, contrived and starchy, not the spontaneous eruption that his theater work manages to resemble.

The emphasis is on comedic interaction, not plot - too bad, "48 HRS" had both - but the pair adds spice to the predictable opposites-detract gags.

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

The considerable appeal of this movie has to do with its roots in those nice, comforting love stories of the 1930s.

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.

There's enough sexual manic depression to justify house calls from Dr. Laura.

A monumentally graceful union of two extremely dissimilar stars, one inspired cinematographer and an exceptionally patient, curious, independent-minded director.

It was only natural that Allen would eventually have to make a Greek drama.

The thrill is most certainly not in the script by David Koepp, written from Michael Crichton's novel....Most of the writing is the blandest sort of twaddle, jokes you can practically recite along with actors.

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

But what McNally, director Joe Mantello and a cast brought straight from the original New York stage production all accomplish is the creation of an honest, clever, poignant work about men who also happen to be gay, rather than a self-conscious polemic about gays who it turns out just happen also to be men.

A collection of arbitrary sketches, bits and improvs jammed into a locker room-style variety show masquerading as some semblance of a narrative.

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.

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.

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

A romantic sitcom that never transcends its gimmicky plot, but offers enough screen time to Gwyneth Paltrow to satisfy even her most rabid fans.

Succeeds better than it ought to, largely because of the personality and prodigious talents of its director and star, the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni.

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

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

The World Is Not Enough, like a 19th version of anything, is inanely self-parodic. So much so that one wonders why Austin Powers need have bothered in the first place.

In Criminal Lovers, the "Bonnie and Clyde" model of killing-as-erotica gets a shrewd, funny, decidedly French workout.

Hot-blooded.

The seriousness and simplicity with which he approaches his subject in Night Falls on Manhattan are refreshing even if the vivacity of the thing never really has a chance to develop.

Particularly because unlike so many other boring movies one sees, Jarmusch films require many more words to explain the boringness than less certifiably artistic films would.

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

About as warm, pleasing and inviting as a film about divorce, infidelity and terminal cancer can be.

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.

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.

A fascinating, sometimes profound curiosity.

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.

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

A limp excuse for a coming-of-age flick, more interested in sexploits than sex, more adept at gross-out than girls.

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

Classic in feel and loaded with sumptuous performances.

By its hilarious, grotesquely over-the-top climax, Holy Smoke is ideologically, metaphorically out of control, as if it has risen from the '70s ashes.

Queasy comedy.

Like sitting on the beach under a cozy, warm afternoon sun. The view is beautiful, but not much is happening and soon you drift peacefully to sleep.

Beautiful. Simply, beautiful.

Linklater has less success telling a story; time passes amiably, but the film has no center.

An impressive low-whistle, hardscrabble look at the world of pool sharks and the people who crisscross their lives.

Too many questions are raised with no good answers.

The director bludgeons us dumb with her genius.

This is a movie that is wonderful on the peripherals.

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.

The shenanigans have been pared into 84 minutes of transgressive, potty-minded farce, that is often Waters at his most cheerful and most thematically focused.

The dramatic payoff is a bit disappointing; the movie is often overwrought; and its sense of its own importance finally wears you down.

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

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.

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.

It's a fun movie - full of laughs and touching moments.

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.

Particularly anticlimactic - the film itself seems sprung from molting yuppie catalogs.

What mystifies, too, is the complete absence of information about Salerno-Sonnenberg's private life.

It's fun, but the blatant, obvious kind that mistakes allusive cool for mature filmmaking and subtle ideasmanship.