Jonathan Rosenbaum

This packaged tour through the great man's career is unenlightening and obfuscating, despite an adept lead performance by Robert Downey Jr.

This isn't a major Dante effort, but his ability to make a good-natured satire that allows an audience to read it several ways at once is as strong as ever, and many of the sidelong genre notations are especially funny.

A tiresome 1998 rip-off of The Hustler, with poker (in a New York Russian Mafia milieu) taking the place of pool, Matt Damon taking over for Paul Newman, and John Malkovich's scenery chewing supplanting Jackie Gleason's self-effacement.

This keeps one reasonably amused, titillated, and brain-dead for a little over two hours.

"Heathers" may view teenagers more caustically, but this movie, incomparably better, actually delivers the goods.

The style is so eclectic that it may take some getting used to, but Van Sant, working from his own story for the first time, brings such lyrical focus to his characters and his poetry that almost everything works.

The film is only superficially superficial, and it grows in meaning and resonance as it progresses.

I can't yet decide whether the film works or not, but it certainly held me for its full two hours.

At least (John) Waters cares about most of his freaks; for Lynch they're basically exploitation fodder for a puritanical "dark vision of the universe" that seems to come straight out of junior high, complete with giggles.

It's unclear whether this macho thriller does anything to improve the state of the world or our understanding of it, but it certainly sets off enough rockets to hold us and shake us for every one of its 99 minutes.

Maybe writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott were thinking of Tracy and Hepburn--assuming they were thinking of anything--but not even Roberts's smile can put this one over.

An entertaining comedy-thriller directed with bounce (if not much nuance) by Barry Sonnenfeld.

If you think 85 minutes devoted to a "difficult" French philosopher is bound to be either abstruse or watered-down middlebrow stuff, think again.

Essentially a one-trick pony.

This may not have gotten much publicity, but it's a lot more engaging than most movies that have; Forster alone makes it unforgettable.

The double crosses are so intricate and the cynicism so enveloping that it becomes increasingly difficult to care about the characters

Pretty enjoyable as a piece of campy sleaze--especially for the first half hour, before the storytelling starts to dawdle.

Well crafted and mindless in the best Hollywood tradition.

Howard lacks the sense of film rhythm --required to make such an exercise work. Just about the only clear triumph here is an underplayed performance by Angie Dickinson, though Winger and Rosanna Arquette also provide welcome relief from Howard and Le Mat's self-indulgent carousing.

A nervy as well as somber piece of work, not only for the way it confounds and even frustrates certain genre expectations, but also -- and especially -- for the way it confronts the viewer with the moral implications of that frustration.

Fortunately, this time around the Ivy League characters project less of a glib sense of entitlement, making them more fun to watch, and Stillman himself gives more evidence of watching rather than simply listening.

There's a mechanical desire to work in as many outlandish twists as possible, and shallow grotesquerie quickly takes over.

Characters remain stuck in their cliche profiles, and the direction -- by music video specialist Michel Gondry -- doesn't improve matters.

The modeling of human figures and the sense of depth are both impressive; the characters themselves are mainly idiotic.

A lot of uninteresting and unpleasant people torture, abuse, and fire guns at a lot of other uninteresting and unpleasant people, in a repulsive, interminable would-be crime thriller.

An entertainingly offbeat blend of 19th-century science fiction and Hope and Crosby Road comedies.

When the cast is shown during the final credits repeatedly cracking up in blown takes, one would like to think they were laughing at some of the lines they were expected to deliver.

A talking bulldog named Frank steals the show.