Elvis Mitchell

The film uses morphing and Rick Baker's monster effects strikingly, but it also keeps its gimmicks well tethered to reality.

The cast never has much chance to shine. And the main attraction is kept all too understandably under wraps.

Combine two stars of this wattage with a lot of techno-talk and elaborate heist plotting and you get plenty of good reasons to pay attention.

Mr. Cage digs deep to find his character's inner demons while also capturing the riotous energy of his outward charm. [27 October 1995, p. C3]

Thanks to Glenn Close's delicious villainy, it succeeds in breathing archly theatrical life into the irresistibly monstrous Cruella DeVil. Otherwise, this remake goes to the dogs too often.

Something special.

Manages to have playful comic ingenuity of its own.

More often, the film is like a ride through a car wash: forward motion, familiar phases in the same old order and a sense of being carried along steadily on a well-used track. It works without exactly showing signs of life.

The film's mix of romance and reading matter is seductive in its own right, providing comfy book-lined settings and people who are what they read and write.

Eastwood directs a sensible-looking genre film with smooth expertise, but its plot is quietly berserk.

Mr. Bogosian's venomously funny play, which he adapted himself for the screen, is given warmth and generosity by Mr. Linklater, whose elegantly fluid direction and great skill with actors are accentuated by the play's spareness.

Smoothly directed and acted with glee... showing quick-witted comic spirit.

Cheerful, giddy fun.

An American remake with plenty of new pizazz.

When it comes to holiday films worth swooning over, here's the one to see.

A terrific offbeat cast operating on one shared, loony wavelength.

With unexpected success, Robert Altman plays a John Grisham mystery in a seductive new key.

Dwarfed by the enormity of what it means to illustrate, the diffuse Amistad divides its energies among many concerns: the pain and strangeness of the captives' experience, the Presidential election in which they become a factor, the stirrings of civil war, and the great many bewhiskered abolitionists and legal representatives who argue about their fate.

The film's greatest directorial success is in finding a thoroughly entertaining way of inviting the audience to share Valerie's point of view.

Having introduced the two principals and had some fun with their antagonism, the film has nowhere to go.

Jerry Maguire is loaded with them: bright, funny, tender encounters between characters who seem so winningly warm and real. [13 December 1996, p.C-1]

This film, like the dazzling but many-tentacled "He Got Game" before it, makes up in fury much of what it lacks in form.

Though Heavy begins beautifully, it isn't always able to sustain its balance between narrative subtlety and inertia.

It winds up illustrating the very emptiness it mocks.

Deep Impact confines much of its horror to television news reports and has a more brooding, thoughtful tone than this genre usually calls for.

Wag the Dog, the poison-tipped political satire that's as scarily plausible as it is swift, hilarious and impossible to resist.

But even after the documentary affectation gives way to a more conventional narrative, the film has trouble ringing true.

Grandiose and silly.