Barbara Shulgasser

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.

Neither offensive nor inspired.

But in its own overblown, melodramatic way, complete with hideous and obtrusive music by Michael Kamen, clanging sound effects that will leave your ears ringing and a penchant on the part of director Paul Anderson ( "Mortal Kombat" ) for quick flashes of blood-drenched gore, Event Horizon is kind of a hoot.

The only remarkable feature about this otherwise routine movie is that it vilifies two current icons of American life. One is The Internet and the other is The Mall.

This is a piece of gloriously literary and serious filmmaking, but again it falls prey to misjudgments in pacing and rhythm.

This is the kind of story that might have been interesting had it not been populated with dreary characters played by actors who were clearly coached to be as dull as possible.

Most disappointing is the fact that the movie ends so abruptly that you can't help wondering what the whole story amounts to, moving as it is.

It's all quite inspiring, but despite the fact that this is based on someone's actual experiences, the whole thing has an unfortunate Hollywood ring to it.

One of the most blithely, giddily ridiculous movies to come along in ages.

There isn't much to hold onto with this movie. If anything, Cry trivializes the plight of the South Africans in its breezy treatment of apartheid.

The movie, directed by veteran Jonathan Kaplan, has enough in common with such American-in-foreign-jail movies as "Midnight Express" and the recent "Return to Paradise" to make you wonder why it ever got made.

Martin Scorsese is certainly one of the great living movie directors. Sadly, this does not mean he can't make a mistake. Kundun is a mistake.

There isn't much to recommend this movie until Pacino and De Niro finally share the first of their two scenes together.

What director Charles Russell ("The Mask") and co-writers Walon Green ("RoboCop 2") and Tony Puryear do right is supply the kind of non-stop action and laconic one-liners we live for in Arnold movies.

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.

Director Joel Schumacher and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman seem incapable of emphasizing what's important and relegating the rest to secondary status.

So while at times, Penn's film is moving and insightful about the way the heart survives tragedy, at other times it seems to have been made by a gifted schizophrenic who thinks that weird behavior is perfectly normal.

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.

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.

Director Simon West makes an impressive feature debut in this relentless action-comedy that is, more than anything else, about how funny it is to see hundreds of people exploded, shot, knifed, propellered and burnt to death, and how to land a plane on the crowded Vegas strip.

Leonardo DiCaprio? Excuse me, Leonardo DiCaprio? I know he makes teenaged girls cry, but, I mean, Leonardo DiCaprio?

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.

With this marvelous premise to launch it, the film fails nevertheless. The trouble is that none of the dialogue is funny enough to fulfill the expectations that Brooks' full-bodied stand-up comedian delivery promises every time he opens his mouth.

I'm not sure someone with Shrader's pessimistic outlook ought to be making comedies. I think the strain is too much for him.

The trouble comes when Woo's patented - that is, oft-repeated - style overwhelms any hope of discerning story or acting through the haze of burning, crashing, bleeding and exploding.

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.

Director Gary Fleder seems to be trying for the mood and atmosphere of "Seven," another Freeman film about murder and police work, but this movie isn't as stylish and the script by David Klass, based on the James Patterson novel, doesn't really hang together.

By the time you get to the end of the movie and our heroes and Regis' cop buddy Dennis Miller must sprint through a series of tunnels beneath the White House racing against evil to save the presidency, if your credulity hasn't been tested you'll probably find your heart racing pleasantly.

Director Lesli Linka Glatter, making her first feature, is another talent to watch. In addition to guiding the young actors to good performances, she sets up scenes knowingly, usually with a punchy comic touch.

I'm not really sure who would enjoy this movie.

Except for the casting, it would be difficult to find any substantial difference between this movie and the previous ones, or this movie and any number of high-tech adventure movies of the last decade.

Lee seems to think that all his major characters are basically good people who deserve another chance, and so for the sake of an inappropriate happy ending, everyone important gets one.

As always, Duvall is magnificent. Even in this small part, he manages to give one of the most stirring performances in the movie.

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.

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

A harmeless concoction.

It's hard not to keep thinking that this movie is basically "Yentl" with a nose job.

Now and then the script reaches admirable heights of humor.

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.

This movie may not be brilliant, but every now and then it's really funny.

The Frighteners is a gooey pastiche of Casper, Ghost, Poltergeist, Back to the Future (it's produced by Future director Robert Zemeckis), Ghostbusters, and episodes of Columbo.

Although most of the stars of this movie are real, live actors, Casper is mostly just a big cartoon in which those live actors must interact with some devilishly clever spectral animation.

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.

They have created a strange document about the unmaking of young lives, but it is a movie made without comment. Clark has stepped back into objectivity so far that he has neglected his role as interpreter for us.

A workmanlike effort. It's not startling and it's not incompetent.

Bilko and his gang are far less concerned with valve jobs and retreads than with greyhound racing, off-track betting, numbers, poker and pool, and most of the movie's gags reflect this limited premise.

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.

The script, based on British pulp writer James Hadley Chase's novel "Just Another Sucker," is a muddle, and no actors, no matter how compelling or talented, could make its silly dialogue work.

The movie's coda is completely ridiculous and, worse yet, boring.

Television sitcom-style directing and writing.

The direction by Roger Donaldson is facile and understated, as is, for the most part, the script by Dennis Feldman. Even the actors pitch in to play down the silliness of it all.

The best movie she ever directed was "This Is My Life," a biting comedy she also wrote that was soundly defeated by both critics and audiences. I think she's lost her nerve and her edge ever since.

The film itself never felt quite so densely plotted as Yimou apparently had hoped.

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

When you really think about Breakdown - and believe me, that would probably require spending more time thinking about the movie than the filmmakers did - it doesn't make much sense.

This movie would have had a chance of being interesting had it been about Sally Hemmings.

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.

Leigh plays the tragic and annoying Sadie as if she loved and hated the character simultaneously. And to the degree that this courageous movie succeeds it will elicit the same feelings in the audience.

What's pleasing about this movie is its enduring adherence to the Bondian ideal.

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.

In the case of Jon Robin Baitz's script, adapted from his play, in spite of the fact that he made considerable alterations in the text to open it up to cinematic possibilities, the movie disappoints in much the same way the play did.

Cronenberg has said that he made the film to find out why he was making it. You may watch it for the same reason.

A big, silly movie about the famed goatish painter that stars the nearly perfect Anthony Hopkins.

The plot falls with a thud, but the movie is surprisingly involving owing to performances by Connery, who is always an unfaltering standard of honesty and truth; by Fishburne, who has to flip-flop his meanness for frustrated indignation in the end; and by Harris, who actually seethes so hard the veins stand out on his bald skull.

Passably entertaining with moments of Grimm fairy tale gruesomeness.

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.

The adorable overacting of the twins [Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen] make this otherwise dopey movie watchable.

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

Becky Johnston ( "The Prince of Tides" ) did creditable work on the screenplay, but there are times when this story about a truly rotten fellow seems to be one big jump cut.

When Party Girl isn't being silly, it tries to be endearing and socially redeeming, and to a good degree succeeds.