Barbara Shulgasser

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.