Barbara Shulgasser

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.

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

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.

Dern is nothing short of brilliant here.

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

Aside from avuncular Lewis and two-bricks-shy-of-a-load Dunaway, this movie's greatest asset is Depp. With his scooped-out cheeks, flower petal mouth and an innately balletic approach to communicating with the camera, he is as natural a performer as film has seen in many years.

This is a Seagal movie without Seagal and a Jack Ryan movie without Jack Ryan.

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.

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

The movie is a big fumble.

The most refreshing performance is by Mortensen.

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

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

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.

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

This is one not to be missed.

Director Cassavetes may want to cut back on the slow-motion stuff, but he's unquestionably a talent.

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

Largely a disappointment.

A harmeless concoction.

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.

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.

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.

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

Douglas Carter Beane's script is so wickedly clever (the title refers to an autographed photo the drag queens carry with them), you come away from this film with the impression that you've had a much better time than you've actually had.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Passably entertaining with moments of Grimm fairy tale gruesomeness.

Director Mark Pellington's spin on the transition from adolescence to manhood as viewed through the eyes of novelist and screenwriter Dan Wakefield makes "Going All the Way" something special.

First Knight has all the elements of a crowd-pleaser.

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.

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.

This flashy aloofness puts it in a league with the John Grisham racism-courtroom movie "A Time to Kill" rather than the more moving - and far superior - Harper Lee one, "To Kill a Mockingbird."

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.

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

The action moves along at a good clip, and Apted, who made "Gorillas in the Mist," "Nell," "Coal Miner's Daughter," and the "7-Up" series of documentaries, doesn't allow the plot to bog down in details. But the so-called moral dilemma that Myrick's work poses - kidnapping the homeless and torturing them to death in the name of medical science - is laughable.

This is a movie that is wonderful on the peripherals.

Resistant as I was to the idea of a remake, I have to admit that Pollack has made a movie that stands on its own, without odious comparison, as an entertaining love story, particularly if you've never seen the original.

A hokey summer entertainment that is full of big machinery, satellite dishes du jour, long embarrassing close-ups and gaps in logic through which large UFOs could hurtle. No need to go into that here. Anyone who might enjoy The Arrival would be impatient with logic.

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

Tedious, unfunny.

Lou Holtz Jr.'s script is a clever, half-serious indictment of television.

Somehow, although this film's unevenness tends to take us out of the action now and then, there's something kind of agreeable about it. Aiello is extremely funny and so, in his creepy way, is Spader.

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

It took four people to write the screenplay for The Relic. All I can say is that I hope these people have not quit their day jobs.

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.

Handsome, well-acted, well-written and beautifully directed movie.

Neeson simply has no spark here. He is good and honest and honorable until your face turns blue. He's just no fun.

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

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

Even overlooking the fundamental inanity of the movie, one is left to contend with some offensive racial stereotyping.

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.

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.

With a distractingly cute Quinn, a cartoonishly stern Giannini and woozily romantic Reeves and Sanchez-Gijon, this movie is overflowing with ditsy good will. But it just won't be everyone's cup of Chardonnay.

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

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

Giving especially good performances are Aniston, Mahoney, McGlone and Burns. Not that this movie is bad; it's just not as great as "McMullen."

It just doesn't work.

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

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

Nostalgia has no real point to make here. All that Famuyiwa can hope to accomplish is to tell his story well. In this area he is less than competent.

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.

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.

This sequel is much better than the original "Under Siege"...The real coup here is the discovery that when you eliminate dialogue, and thus eliminate Seagal's efforts to act in that rather high voice of his, the movie takes on a surprising gravity. When Seagal doesn't talk, he verges on the dignified. It's kind of scary.

The moment this movie began to go wrong, so wrong, was when the word "angels" started working its way into the script, coming out of the mouths of people we are supposed to respect and look to for hope.

The movie is, more than anything else, great fun to watch. The sets and costumes are stunning. The women are beautiful. The men are dashing. What's not to like?

Opening with a wearying series of nasty and violent episodes attesting to Bill's predilection for solving problems by shooting at them, and his nearly comic indignation at having his hat touched (men have died at his hand for committing that transgression alone), the movie quickly establishes a pattern of bad decision-making on the part of the writer-director.

This movie has everything.

While the original conception of The Saint gave us a debonair, sophisticated and roguish detective, the new movie, directed stiffly by Phillip Noyce ( "Clear and Present Danger" ), gives us Val Kilmer as a greedy high-tech daredevil thief with the moves of Batman, the clunky disguises of Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible" and the morals of an alley cat.

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.

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.

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

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.

It isn't as charming as "Beauty and the Beast" or "The Little Mermaid" (especially musically), but it's an easy-to-swallow entertainment.

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

The whole thing seems awfully familiar, not to say boring.

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

Ryan has an edge that is extremely becoming…This is her best work yet.

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.

Things to do in the movie theater until you mercifully die of boredom sums up this witness' response to the ordeal of sitting through this movie.

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.

A rather wan version of "Jurassic Park" - a series of setups featuring humans being picked off by bigger, faster and stronger carnivores.

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.

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

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.

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.

The best way to characterize "The Blues Brothers 2000" is as a fabulous concert film with incredibly bad patter between the songs. If you ignore the silly plot that links the extravaganzas together, you'll have a great time.

Neither offensive nor inspired.

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.