Barbara Shulgasser

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.

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

The movie is a big fumble.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

Let's just say that not revealing this film's idiotic intricacies would be like not divulging that the fish is rotten lest the news spoil the surprise of food poisoning. [28 May 1999, Friday, p.A]

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.

Something in Hutton's wounded puppy look always communicates an untapped intelligence or wasted potential, both of which are perfect for this role.

Chain Reaction is one explosion after another, none of which seem to advance the . . . uh . . . plot. But, of course, in a movie this lead-footed you spend more time wondering what the filmmakers were thinking, or if they were thinking, than about the few plot-like fragments that do present themselves now and then.

Meets the low standards of a mediocre TV movie.

The boredom of the temporary office workers of the title was nothing compared to the boredom I experienced as this movie dribbled on before my eyes.

In Total Eclipse, directed by Agnieszka Holland, they fail to persuade us that their versions of the 19th century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine were great artists. They just seem like rattle-brained hedonists with superiority complexes. Genius ought to be as alluring as any other well-developed human attribute, like beauty or sexuality. If this is genius, we are in trouble.