Desson Thomson

Amid the violence, the one-liners ring out. Nobody speaks for real. It's as if they all know they're in a movie.

Instead of an originally conceived movie that reflects Nash's troubled but brilliant mind, we have one of those formulaically rendered Important Subject movies -- the kind that seem exclusively designed for Best Picture nominations.

Unfortunately, "Youth" becomes so lost in its own conceptual, convoluted vortex, it becomes virtually incomprehensible. Coppola proves that even the best of our film artists can lose sight of what this medium is all about: entertaining, enlightening and including its audience.

Rather like the faltering way Dennis runs the race, Pegg the performer insists that we keep watching, ever hopeful for a decent gag. And we spend most of our time thinking back to movies that better showcased his talents, such as "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz."

Hoot may be warm and fuzzy with its adorable owls, triumphant kids and inviting Florida groves. But its forced, innocuous humor is unlikely to amuse anyone but the very young -- and the extremely forgiving.

It's clear this sequel (directed by Darren Lynn Bousman) doesn't have the same smartness (I speak relatively) of the original. Nonetheless, "Saw" fans can still look forward to involuntary incineration, wrist and throat slashing, bullets through brains and the bashing of someone's head with a nail-festooned club.

Creepy and truly suspenseful in some places, unintentionally comic or plain awful in others.

This is a movie that knows its audience and realizes it doesn't need much of a story to hit that audience, literally, where it lives.

A British black comedy, saves its best for last -- and God bless Maggie Smith for, well, being Maggie Smith -- but that requires sitting through a frustrating, uneven hour of sluggish preamble.

Only fitfully amusing. More often, it feels like a mediocre attempt to reprise the central elements of the infinitely funnier "Napoleon Dynamite."

Ultimately, SLC Punk! doesn't have enough dimension to maintain dramatic interest.

In the end, we're treated to an overture of possibilities rather than a satisfying film.

It yields surprisingly unspectacular results.

The worst mistake is the screenplay, which not only cuts everything into superficial pieces but fails to make authentic moments of anything. In the end, White Oleander isn't an adaptation of a novel. It's a flashy, star-splashed reduction.

While director Aronofsky pistol-whips your attention with his style, the characters (mostly relegated to human mannequins in Aronofsky's visual schemes) suffer big time.

The problem is, Europa is episodic rather than cumulative. Europa is about the highlights in Solly's wartime life. But it's not about Solly.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a tad too precious. One of those movies that wants to address life's quaint wackinesses, it's full of characters who are quirky, lonely, bizarre or retarded. There's something intensely earnest about the project. But there's something equally manufactured, starting with the casting of Johnny Depp and Juliette Lewis.

Although this film about a zebra who aspires to win horse races has a marvelous premise, it slows to a mediocre canter right out of the starting gate.

There's grist here for a genuinely stirring film. But writer-director Bruce Beresford -- who created the screenplay from interviews with real-life World War II prisoners (who also performed music for the Japanese) -- reduces everything to its most uninteresting banality. [18Apr1997 Pg. N.44]

The best element of the movie is a subplot involving Noah's spiritually obsessed teacher (Rainn Wilson) and his wacky girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn), whose bumbling eccentricities give the movie an emotional liveliness it otherwise lacks.

A blithely unfunny, low-budget comedy from director Barry Levinson.

If any element takes us through the movie, it's him (Depp).

Aiming to blur the distinctions between truth and illusion, it simply blurs its own effectiveness by relying on predictable and not particularly convincing mystery-thriller formula.

The movie loses all authority, despite wonderful work from cinematographer Peter Menzies and composer Patrick O'Hearn. In screenwriter Daniel Pyne's hands, every character becomes a disappointment. Even Dafoe loses his zest as the movie progresses.

Intriguing, oddly banal and ultimately deflating.

Isn't much more than another conveyer-belt romantic comedy.

Amazingly stilted before accelerating into its exciting finish.

Another sentimental mushfest disguised as a movie.