Barbara Shulgasser

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.