Barbara Shulgasser

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

DENIS LEARY may be a funny guy when he's standing on stage spraying invective at a live audience, but as a movie star he has a lot to learn.

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.

Unfortunately, the movie never really goes anywhere. It's all pleasant enough to watch, but you never feel that Danny and Arthur's craziness (eventually Danny is committed), Sid's stoicism, Selma's selflessness and Steven's despair coalesce to mean anything significant or illuminating.

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.

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.

The movie is a big fumble.

While Birdcage has many isolated funny moments, long bits of slowness interrupt the energy.

Sympathizing with Moreau would be difficult in any case. But with Brando in the role, there is the added obstacle of needing to suppress laughter every time he opens his pursed mouth.

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.

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

I suppose Kusturica can justify the 167-minute length by the historical breadth of the movie, but it simply doesn't sustain one's interest, significant or not.

It was the adult in me that wept when the movie ended. Take the kid and have a good time.

Mangold's vision is bold. There is nothing cutesy or gimmicky about Heavy, which may be why something in its grimness recalls the work of Ingmar Bergman.

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.

Hush, which is an absurdly bad mixture of "Rosemary's Baby" and any Bette Davis movie from the 1960s, seems to be a classic case of a grasping mother trying to possess her beloved son.

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

In order to like Striptease, you have to be a pretty serious Moore fan because although director Andrew Bergman's script (based on the book by Carl Hiaasen) has a few funny lines, this is otherwise one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen.

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

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.

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

On the whole, the movie is a success. I still hope that children and their parents will read this wonderful book together, but it's nice that there's a movie they can see, too.

Here and there, a good idea or scene erupts, as when the antagonists accidentally switch cellular telephones and start taking each other's emergency calls. And Jack keeps his shrink appointment but must speak in code so his daughter won't understand. But these are anomalies and subside just as suddenly as they appear.

The most refreshing performance is by Mortensen.

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.

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.

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

While I was watching "Lone Star," I realized that what makes Sayles a good and socially responsible person - his ability to look at one thing a hundred different ways - is exactly what makes him a muddy filmmaker.

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.

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.

You find yourself absorbed in simply looking at them to the extent that it's hard to hear what they're saying. It's a nice dilemma for a movie to present.

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.

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

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.

Not even his gap-toothed charm and willingness to make fun of his usual take-no-prisoners persona made it easier to swallow the mess of pottage that is Jingle All the Way.

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

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

Most of these scenes are long, boring shots of the men aiming their rifles nervously into the mist. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is more artfully arranged.

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.

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.

It's as sunny as you would expect a Hanks project to be.

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 movie has everything.

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

Leaves the audience on such a devastatingly dramatic ledge.

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.

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.

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

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

There may be better ways to waste your time than seeing this movie.

Tom Lazarus and Rick Ramage should be ashamed to have written such nonsense.

The movie is magnificent and stunning the way few spectator events are.

Although Where's Marlowe abounds with many supposedly clever ideas, it's about as badly made as anything you'll see anywhere on television.

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.

Unfortunately, this movie needed an attractive, irresistibly charismatic performer to give us some reason for watching. Madonna is made up to look like Eva, but this is hardly enough to carry the movie.

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.

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.

A handbook on cinematic lucidity. All events are described clearly. Motives of all the characters are set right there on the table next to the pasta for our consideration.

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.

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.

Caruso doesn't leave much of a mark in the movie. On the smaller screen he smoldered. He seems to need the cramped space to seem sexy. The big screen isn't claustrophobic enough to pinch and squeeze the talent out of him.

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?

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.

It is by far Bogart's most successfully playful role.

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

I like that Sheridan's girlfriend works at Starbucks. Snipes plays the part with the kind of high energy that large doses of caffeine would explain.

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.

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

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.

The script, by director Richard Kwietnioski and adapted from the Gilbert Adair novel, is poignant and well constructed.

This is a good-hearted movie that unfortunately is wildly implausible and makes no sense.

The ordinariness of the material gives way to the winning personalities of the stars.

In stupidity, this movie ranks up there among the greats.

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.

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.

Scott treats the material as if it were grist for a 30-second spot or a rowdy music video.

Hytner uses 360-degree camera turns and strange angle shots to inject this largely lifeless business with some drama. Ryder tries to do the same by nearly working herself into cardiac arrest in several monologues. Day-Lewis is acting so hard you can see his lower teeth, which, by the way are sometimes horribly decayed and other times white enough to blind a dental hygienist...See this movie at the peril of your soul.

Unfortunately, it stars Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz, so it has, more than anything else, a sense of ridiculousness.

Copycat is as steady and reliable as a pulse and as exhilarating as a surge of adrenalin.

Softley and Amini say they consciously viewed Kate as a film noir kind of heroine, a beauty leading a good man astray. And that, added to the setting of the second half of the movie in canal-riven Venice, gives the story the kind of moral haziness that verges on Thomas Mann territory.

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.

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.

Get On the Bus might just be Spike Lee's best work yet.

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.

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

Trash is trash, even if it used to be in French.

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.