Dennis Lim

The Haases, whose previous films ("Angels and Insects," "The Music of Chance") evinced a remote, unfussy sensibility, are a poor fit for the melodramatic contortions that the story demands.

Bittersweet, haunting, and as original and eccentric as homage movies get.

It's hard not to wish that Chicago had taken place inside a more imaginative head.

Boorish and flatulent.

Darwin's Nightmare strings together cruel ironies into a work of harrowing lucidity. It illuminates the sinister logic of a new world order that depends on corrupt globalization to put an acceptable face on age-old colonialism.

The time-outs from wisecracking -- invariably, to impart a simplistic self-esteem lesson or two -- feature the most awkward silences you're likely to endure in a comedy routine.

Even the fast-motion effects and flashy graphics can't make this a spectator sport.

Spins in place with aplomb, generating exponentially more vertiginous doublings with each sweaty-palmed set piece.

Perhaps awed by the congress of Method men, director Frank Oz stands back as his actors phone it in.

Seeks to portray loss as a literal, convulsive nightmare, and it's not above resorting to horror-movie tropes and Grand Guignol trickery.

Essentially humorless, Me Without You manages some pleasing textures all the same.

If Birth succeeds more as a source of visual and aural enthrallment than as supernatural narrative, it's largely because the final third hovers uncomfortably between the mystical and the earthbound.

More exciting and truthful than most better-looking films dare to be.

Watching the film is like reading a Times Portrait of Grief that keeps shifting focus to the journalist who wrote it.

Set largely in empty public spaces late at night, Blue Gate Crossing supplements its slender narrative with disarming performances and plangent atmosphere.

It sustains its purplish, epic sweep by thrusting broadly etched characters into extravagantly hokey situations, and registers mainly as a flamboyant joke.

Star/writer Mike Myers and director Jay Roach struggle visibly with exhausted possibilities and diminishing returns.

The viewer, though unavoidably alert, is before long too numb to care.

But owing no doubt to the requirements of Sandra Bullock, the movie's above-the-line star, executive producer, and worst enemy, this potboiling procedural never stands a chance of disproving its title.

A disappointment after the droll, breezy suggestiveness of Fontaine's equally Freudian "Dry Cleaning," How I Killed My Father is rather less than the sum of its underventilated père-fils confrontations.

A numb, oddly dispassionate trudge toward predestined doom, inevitable in all the wrong ways.

The film is slight but sweetly inquisitive, and its participants are endlessly fascinating.

Guy Ferland directs with close attention to surface detail, but he never gets to the heart of the story - quite possibly because there isn't one to begin with. [21 Oct 1997]

The journey is a yawn -- an outpouring of backstory, punctuated by cute episodic diversions and ill-advised running gags.

Dreary adventure. Parents, be forewarned: No talking equines means more songs, and the viselike soundtrack might be someone's idea of a cruel joke: hoarse whisperer Bryan Adams.

Recoing's meta-performance is an unemphatic marvel, his placid countenance stretched tight over telltale flickers: a quickly suppressed smirk of incredulous delight, a nervous twitch of chagrin, an abrupt pang of guilt.

An overflowing septic tank of chicken-soupy sanctimony that proceeds from casually offensive hypocrisy to wretchedly inapt religiosity.

A nostalgic coming-of-age sex comedy tastefully lecherous enough to indicate that its intended demographic is several decades past puberty.