Desson Thomson

Given the creative recession in the movies, you could do worse than sit through Patriot Games. If this would-be blockbuster slavishly follows summer movie guidelines, it does so well -- or adequately. Neither poisonous nor great, it never loses sight of its mall-movie mandate, to defend American hearth and home against invincible boy-toy bogymen.

The movie's nowhere near the inspired funniness of its predecessors. But it often displays the same spirit. It's strung end to end with sight gags. Some fall flat on their faces. But, by sheer weight of numbers, many of them work. It depends on your ability to lower yourself into -- or steer stoically clear of -- the idiocy pit.

A second-rate romantic comedy.

Compelling, if sometimes grittily depressing, viewing.

A gee-wonderful virtual visit to the arid orb, which uses ingenious technical sleight of hand to -- let's face it -- fake it beautifully.

Proceeds with an episodic pace, full of narrative twists and turns that clearly are not pretested by a Hollywood committee. Things feel sort of strange and original all at once.

Treat this project as you would a safari: It has its slow parts but the wildlife makes it worthwhile.

There's a lot in this movie, simple, big, small and exciting. It's the year's first serious contender for big prizes. What's not to like about this picture?

Quite unintentionally, Ildiko Enyedi's My Twentieth Century demonstrates the importance of a good story in a film. The movie doesn't really have one, but this shortcoming, which keeps the Hungarian film unmistakably shy of greatness, is its only fault.

A bad, unimaginative story posing pretentiously as the very opposite.

The writing (by Bill and Cherie Steinkellner) has a non-sentimental appeal for that young preteen (and early teen) crowd that fancies itself too cool for kiddie stuff.

Wonderfully silly all the time.

No matter what is going on in the story, these star-crossed lovers are always fascinating to watch.

There are extremely touching moments between Jesse and mystical Randolph, who seems to understand just about everything; and, more tellingly, between Jesse and mechanic Jim.

Watching "Henry" is very gratifying on a nonintellectual level. Director Mike Nichols moves through this story through the appropriate emotions with linear simplicity. Ford, who goes from control freak to powerless (but triumphant) child, makes the rather one-dimensional redemption work.

Another product from Industrial Light & Magic, this fire-breathing, soaring creature is a technical wonder to behold. But they've skimped on everything else. The script douses the movie's fiery potential and director Rob Cohen soaks all remaining embers with his cheap, made-for-TV direction.

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

A museum piece, something to be enjoyed for its historical value. [2000 re-release]

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.

Sitting through this is groan-inducing enough, but it's spiritually depressing to watch Djimon Hounsou, who deserves better.

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."

Works because of its heedless, heart-on-its-sleeve spirit.

We are amused. We are not sputtering into our teacups, but we are chortling lightly.

Never did sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll seem more shopworn and routine.

Extraordinarily poetic, suspenseful film.

Beaufoy and Cattaneo handle this potentially racy material with an engaging balance of good taste and outright slapstick.

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.

Polanski, himself a survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, has created a near-masterpiece.

Elle fans will likely ignore the narrative shortcomings in favor of a well-loved character.

Isn't just a fabulous seagoing spectacle. It's one for the ages.

Enlightening, if structurally relaxed documentary.

This movie, directed with precision and an appreciation for (relatively) rich character texture by Sam Raimi, remembers all the fine elements of the original film (and the comic book story). It reprises them perfectly, including wonderfully choreographed, skyscraper-hanging fights.

Within its narrow, unambitious, commercial boundaries, the movie is highly watchable. Lowther is appealing, and Costner is a likable rebel.

How much you enjoy this movie depends on how funny you find Sandler talking out the side of his mouth with a gravelly squawk -- for the entire movie.

Oddly compelling.

Want to see something strange, funny, twisted, brilliant and macabre? Sure you do.

It's a soap opera posing as moral outrage.

William Shakespeare would need a sense of humor to view Jean-Luc Godard's "King Lear" without getting steamed up in his bodkins.

Seems to avoid any kind of edgy, precedent-making attitude, some point of view that feels charged, divisive and consequently alive.

The story (adapted from Andrew Neiderman's novel by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy) is surprisingly well-handled, given its rather crazy premise.

The movie, which is deadly slow and full of Japanese-bashing, is also an undisguised merchandising promo.

With no real comedy to enjoy, it's torture to watch Diesel undergo a predictable change from emotionless soldier to loving family man. Makes you want to spit out your pacifier in disgust.

It sinks so deep and fast, you don't even see bubbles on the surface.

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.

A cold, protracted and unemotional affair.

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

In Chaos Theory, Reynolds's performance is taut, crabby and tense. And his beard and glasses, which intensify those already narrow eyes, suggest a mad bomb-builder rather than a hapless soul with whom we can identify.

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.

In Hollywood, imitation is the most profitable form of flattery. That is the only plausible explanation for 101 Dalmatians, Walt Disney's disappointing live-action remake of its own 1961 classic.

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.

Director Leonard Nimoy does not use his ears for comedy -- nor his eyes, even. His three leads recite their lines as though they wanted to take their jumbo-sized salaries and run -- which, given this movie, maybe isn't such a dumb idea.

The Batblast of the summer.

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

Manchurian, with its fatalistic, dreamlike quality, comprises two of [Frankenheimer's] finest hours. [Re-release]

It's a fascinating film, but after a while, the digital photography wears out its gritty welcome.

This is a movie about improbability, randomness and absurdity. It almost goes without saying, you can't get in a panic about having everything.

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

A film that's tender and disarming for its intimate honesty. It's also deeply refreshing to see a movie that dares to explore sexuality among mature characters.

A movie that dares you to slow down and enjoy the subtleties of life.

Devil leads us into that dark, uncharted valley where evil, genius, divine inspiration, insanity -- and other unfathomable mysteries -- commingle. It also examines the hyperbolic industry of instant celebrity and ultimately shows us the complex algebraic equation that is Daniel Johnston's life.

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

It yields surprisingly unspectacular results.

Cro-Magnon-dumb...Less funny than your own funeral.

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.

The exuberance of the Rugrats seems nullified by the effete quirkiness of the Thornberrys.

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.

Rather than the mad, kinetic video-game vigor you'd expect, the movie proceeds at a more leisurely and methodical gait. I rather liked that.

Lilya's struggle to make a life for herself is both heartbreaking and heart-stirring.

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.

The movie does present solutions, including its urging of consumer demand for more accountability from restaurants and the building of marine reserves.

The cast, all classically trained on the stage, is simply commanding.

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.

Imaginative, slightly creepy, but tremendously appealing to all ages. It's ripe to bursting with visual effects a heady combination of stop-motion and computer-generated imagery. And it has a delightful cast of personable bugs and larvae, all bound for New York City via floating fruit.

An uneven collection of bodily function jokes, facial gyrations, sexual jibes and pedestrian slapstick, Dumb and Dumber appears to have been conceived by the leading lugheads themselves.

This fictional documentary's films-in-miniature -- subdued, engaging grace notes that run from 45 seconds to several minutes -- create a subtle, appropriately unconventional portrait of this eccentric man.

Corbijn makes us achingly aware of the singer's talent, the haunting poetry of his songs and how, living in the gloomy culture he did, his passing was virtually inevitable.

The 11-year-old Osment evokes the boy's terror and awful predicament so memorably, you'll never forget him.

The film oozes sentimentality, soap-opera bathos and clumsy cribbings from the Frank Capra book of small-town values. Those are its good points.

To watch "Time" is not merely to marvel at the heavens we cannot yet know; it is also to admire Hawking, now 50, for approaching such daunting problems on a daily basis, despite every possible problem the cosmos can throw at him.

In this sprawling oglefest, such things as "narrative" and "story" are remote little abstractions indeed.

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.

What keeps "Cinderella" from complete hokiness is Crowe's utterly believable performance.

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]

A sort of romance noir -- spruced up in pressed white linens -- this British-made film is elegant, uncompromising and oh-so- veddy nasty.

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.

Robbins, who scripted and directed, creates more than enough on his own. Bob's un-hackneyed character is the prime case in point.

A beautifully textured, disarmingly simple movie about romantic devotion.

Sinfully watchable ensemble movie.

Although the movie -- falls occasional prey to pretension, it's a classic guilty pleasure.

What is surprising is the beguiling, unpretentious result: "Little Buddha," a modern fable about a Seattle boy believed to be a reincarnated Buddhist teacher, endears the audience to the Tibetan doctrine with a glowing, almost Disneyesque panache.

Kitano the filmmaker makes sure that everything is beautiful, from the wonderful colors and passing tableaux to the intricate fighting choreography. This blind swordsman, you realize, has vision to spare.

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.

One of the great movie satires. And if it isn't the funniest rock spoof ever made, it certainly shares the title with "The Rutles."

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.

It just doesn't work...This isn't a blend of modern and classic so much as a collision.