Desson Thomson

Let's make things perfectly clear. "Gladiator" is utter trash masquerading as an action picture with a message. You can listen to the lip-service about the importance of an education, about the evils of boxing, and laugh. It's a joke. The filmmakers know it. You know it. "Gladiator" is a fight movie, pure and simple. It's about breaking jaws, cutting eyes open and beating your opponent into a bloody pulp. It's about the joy of winning ugly. If you like your meat red, this one's for you...What makes "Gladiator" so watchable is the primal excitement of those life-and-death bouts. The fighting is choreographed convincingly by boxing coordinator Jim Nickerson and director Rowdy Herrington and it's filmed with gritty vitality by Tak Fujimoto, Jonathan Demme's cameraman.

May be one hundred percent sap, but its spirit is anything but cloying, thanks to persuasive performances, most notably from Rachel McAdams.

Although "Pluto" has a rollicky, endearing air, it's cooler than Jordan's other films.

Obviously, this was just meant to be a fun experience. But the movie fulfills those duties on the most mundane level. You have to treat Space Jam like that well-known fast-food Jordan loves to promote: It doesn’t matter how the movie is prepared, only that it’s served and ready to go.

Had The Cooler stuck to its dark guns and not turned into a treacly, love-conquers-all fairy tale, this movie might have gone somewhere. In the end, you're only watching this with a sort of mercenary interest in the actors.

There are no dramatic peaks and valleys in this story line, just a uniform, dramatic flatness.

Makes for interesting, rather than emotionally compelling viewing.

Bridges can't be a whole movie. But he's the main reason to watch.

You're hard-pressed to dislike the film.

Making a film about mob violence while showing restraint and humanism is a difficult procedure. Singleton and screenwriter Poirier search for some gradations within the white ranks, but for the most part, every cracker's a psycho with a short, smoking fuse.

If you're not rolling in the aisles, you're definitely in the wrong theater.

Wuornos was unambiguous about one thing: She wanted to die. In the end, that's the only assurance the movie provides. It's an odd kind of closure for her and for us.

Thanks to screenwriter Alan Sharp's fast-moving scenario featuring a healthy array of rape, pillage, burning, deceit, swordfighting, treachery and murder, it's a watchable hoot.

Sunrise feels more like an absorbing experiment than a supple success.

As Benny (short for Bernadette), a big-boned, headstrong lass who strains winningly against the restrictions of family, religion and just plain growing up, [Driver's] a comedic breath of fresh air, easily the best thing about the movie.

Although Mistress has the spirited participation of De Niro et al, the in-jokiness seems to wear itself out. The tedious journey the movie has to go through to get made is well-defined. But there's something hackneyed about the thematic plight of artists in this modern, commercial world.

But despite the overall thinness, there's a great spirit afoot. It's a TV-cultural guilty pleasure to see this charming, dust-covered series from the 1960s gussied up and ready to go. Which is why it will work better back on your TV screen.

As a satire on Tobacco Inc.'s outrageous ability to market carbon monoxide as the elixir of life, this movie should be packing more nicotine.

But this cruise is also a gruesome one. You may find yourself shaken -- not stirred -- by the screenwriting cruelty and cynicism behind the 16th "Bond."

There's nothing "wrong" with this movie but it feels like warmed-over business as usual.

Doesn't connect with its audience in the one place that matters most: the heart.

Aims for the fun and sensation of being inside a video game, but not a whole lot more.

Mulholland Drive is an extended mood opera, if you want to put an arty label on incoherence.

If watched from a mildly amused, forgiving distance, the movie has its enjoyable moments—good and campy.

Ultimately, the movie's too uneven to be totally satisfying.

Myers, who created the original characters, has to make a feature film out of a teeny sketch. With cowriters Bonnie and Terry Turner, he fares better than you'd expect.

Ron Howard somehow makes a great movie and an awful movie, all at the same time.

After 36 years of making movies, Polanski may be off his creative rocker, but he's still having fun.

Guerrilla' is an engaging film, but it's a documentary and nothing more.

The movie's about its own playfulness. But that playfulness, all too often, feels labored.

Anyone want to watch some guy pick up women? Especially a fat-lipped, insincere kid who says "Did anyone ever tell you you have the body of a Botticelli and the face of a Dégas?" Me neither. But luckily, there's a little more than that to James Toback's The Pickup Artist.

Glover (who shone as Michael J. Fox's father in Back to the Future) is riveting as Layne -- a speed-popping wacko more wired than AT&T And Joshua Miller, who plays Tim, the most malevolent child this side of the Styx, is alarmingly evil as the kid who wants to be part of the older gang, even if it means killing his own brother. But River stabs all-too-wildly in the dark.

Although the movie adheres more closely to history than "Quills," it lacks dramatic punch and depth.

Has a refreshingly original attitude.

Brassed Off gets bogged down in sentimentality; and that political agenda is spread on thick.

The writer in Soderbergh proves the ultimate weak link. In sex, lies' last third, he seems seized with a compulsion to make sense of it all, bring everything to bear, give everyone their moral comeuppance, their screenplay payoff.

I can recommend the first two-thirds of this movie with great enthusiasm.

The first 60 minutes of this black comedy are brilliantly sustained, but then director and co-writer de la Iglesia loses his way.

Won't go down as Robert Altman's most memorable movie. But it's a pleasant affair, whose greatest assets are its unhurried, benevolent atmosphere and the quiet, gem-like moments that occur among its characters.

Mainly, Femme Fatale is really about De Palma's three favorite things: women, movies and women. And you can either share his guilty pleasures in all their living, breathing, power-edited, overextended glory, or you can get on with your life.

The movie's initial intensity is so great, it consumes itself. By the time we reach the final scene, which is clearly supposed to exude glorious rapture between offbeat lovers Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, it has all the warming effect of cold ash.

The more you lower your expectations, the more you'll learn to laugh.

It's doubtful that Depp's off-kilter interpretation will have any discernible effect on the movie's success. But it remains the movie's most disappointing aspect.

For all his legitimate laments and pithy documentary moments, Moore gloats too much over his treasure. Where Moore makes his mark is basically where he shuts up and, like a good documentarian ought to, lets the subjects do the talking.

Engagement simply disappears inside its own enormous, intricate and ambitious design.

Even by its own dark standards, the movie's conclusion is as dramatically dissatisfying as it is disturbing.

It offers a sort of Chinese food poignancy, the kind that may seem satisfying at the time but ultimately leaves us hungering for more, for something authentic.

Castro remains the star of the show. You can't stop watching him.

Williams has to break out of a second-rate "Tootsie" imitation, ankles clamped in pathos and face covered in latex. He pulls it off in the end, but it's not pretty.

Taking a courageous cue from Drugstore Cowboy, in which drugs are actually acknowledged to be enjoyable, Rush intoxicates the head for a while. But it peaks way before the movie's over. You're caught in a slow but steady decline, an unwanted comedown.

Never feels original, even though it's enjoyable to watch Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito and newcomer Peter Facinelli going at it with snappy patter.

In Milan Kundera's novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the characters are pawns on a complex, philosophical chessboard with Kundera's didactic commentary accompanying every move. In his adaptation, director Phil Kaufman films the pawns, even many of the moves. But without Kundera's connecting presence and voice, the result is closer to Chinese checkers than chess...Very attractive and watchable checkers, sure

Like President Kennedy, director Donaldson (who made "No Way Out," another pretty good Washington-seat-of-power thriller) has found a perfect balance of often-opposing forces: between recorded history and the demands of plain old entertainment.

Beautifully filmed and very atmospheric in terms of evoking the sights and sounds of modern-day Beijing, this Chinese movie suffers a flat tire about halfway through.

Although the movie has its moments -- particularly when our hero finds himself surrounded by a gimlet-eyed circle of futuristic detectives -- it's never really successful.

The road to stand-up Oz is littered with conventional, sentimental banana peel; writer/director David Seltzer avoids much, but not all, of it. His biggest slip-up is creating an unlikely relationship between Hanks and Field. Gold is a young, starving, responsibility-evading, med-school dropout who has psychic energy only for great comedy. As frumpy, mousey, older, married mother Lilah -- who thinks she just might be able to do that comedy thing -- Fields couldn't be more of a mismatch.

Playful as it is, Clare Peploe's adaptation of Pierre Marivaux's romantic comedy coughs and sputters on its own postmodern conceit.

Crash doesn't extend beyond its most immediate sensationalism. When the movie does attempt to find a theme, it slams into a brick wall of mumbo-jumbo.

In the end, we don't know what we're watching, an art-house superhero film or a computer-generated "King Kong." By trying to please both sensibilities, the filmmakers have pleased neither.

How great can an epic be, when it takes 30 years, including a whole sequence devoted to World War I, for Jean to realize he could be a little nicer to his wife? This is for diehard Francophiles and literate-movie fans only.

With its zany daily episodes, "Groundhog" gets stuck in a non-progressive repetition.

Maddin keeps what could have been a one-joke theme interesting for an admirably long time. But eventually, it becomes, well, hard to breathe. There's something wonderfully unique about the project but the reasons for doing it remain buried.

The film's first half is easily the best and brightest. As the movie moves into the more saddening sections, however, it loses most of its power.

By its own deliriously rock-bottom standards, "Universal" ain't half bad. Of course, you have to be big on bloody slaughter, kickboxing, infrared gunning and impaired acting. But "Universal" executes its subtle-free mission with surprisingly watchable efficiency.

There's nothing beyond the bloodshed and gallows humor, just intellectually secondhand implications about materialism, conformity and misogyny.

Less-than-scintillating spin on "Life Is Beautiful."

Ironically, Alien is not a bad movie. In fact -- here's the rub -- it's too interesting to make an exciting summer flick.

At first blush, there's something vicariously liberating about Brosnan strutting through a lobby dressed only in Speedos and cowboy boots. But it also feels false. The actor seems to be theatrically slumming before his return to suave form.

Although it contains many visually compelling passages and some provocative moments, the movie is strangely banal and simplistic.

Its strength is the documentary-textured depiction of Native Americans in their social environment. Its weakness is a story that's a patchy combination of soap opera, low-tech magic realism and, at times, ploddingly sociological commentary.

It suffers from a dreary middle section. Great movie, mediocre script.

Nothing like the sight of thousands of scuttling, hideous, practically indestructible insects crawling up the sides of a fortress, hellbent on destroying the human race. As they keep coming and coming, they’re the only things in this movie earning your money.

What isn't so fascinating is this movie's absurdity of motivation. No one does anything that makes sense. No one seems real. When the actual perpetrator is uncovered, there is no enlightenment as to why the killing occurred.

Like the mysterious, bound package Goodman gives Turturro (the contents are never revealed), the Coens isolate a small area of interest, bind it with psycho-atmospheric finesse, then wait for something significant to emerge. Even after a second viewing of this movie, it doesn't.

This movie has all the same elements as other Grisham fare: raw young lawyer trying to make it in the South; helpless client treated badly; sleazy, star-chamber villains. Wake me up when the last-minute surprise witness comes out of her hidey hole to turn the case around.

The movie attempts to paint too large a canvas.

Sad, sobering film.

But forget the vet-cum-love interest and the fish. It's the canine (not to be confused with "K-9") stuff that really matters.

Vaughn can motormouth like a machine gun, spraying men, women and children with manic, rat-a-tat outbursts of toxic insincerity. It's often dirty, yes. But it's also manic and inspired.

For all its visual delights, however, Coraline remains more an engaging spectacle than a connective drama. That is chiefly because of the writing. Director-writer Henry Selick doesn't reach for the kind of universality that would enrich the movie.

It's the usual undisciplined, overextended Spike symphony: more fun than it is any good.

Of all ironies, "Strangers" occasionally takes a step in the direction of the after-school specials it's trying to twit; you'll catch it trying to make you feel warm and fuzzy about Jerri.

You're left, as with certain vivid dreams, filled with memorable images but not completely able to account for what you just experienced.

There's something diverting but not wildly stirring about this Italian drama.

I sat through "Courage" with interest, but I wasn't particularly moved or riveted with suspense.

Refreshingly free of the hyperbole of special effects...Ong-Bak will win no scriptwriting awards, but Jaa is definitely the real deal.

With a few elements drawn from classic weepers, and with fairly spirited performances from the cast, "Heart and Souls" has its moments

Although the movie is moving and even funny in many places, it's also overextended. And composer John Williams's syrupy score practically oozes from your ears on the drive home.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Its hackneyed themes prevent the sci-fi flick from feeling like anything more than well-directed mediocrity.

A great director's losing battle against a goofy script.

The movie Casanova, starring Heath Ledger, not only fetters the randy Venetian in political correctness, it condemns him to dwell inside the modern equivalent of a bad Shakespeare play.

Newton may not be a great actor, either, but she's full of life and charm. She's the only thing holding this movie together at all.

Fails to capture the spiritual hallelujah of the novel.

Ruben, at least, is adept with suspense tactics. He keeps Bergin lurking off screen for an agonizingly long time and he knows his suspenseful way around a bathtub. There's also some respectably scary business to do with neatly arranged bathroom towels and food cans in the pantry. But Ruben is merely modulating mediocre material.

The only reason this dilemma has any import is thanks to Bardem, who almost single-handedly drags the film along.

It's too bad the movie's intriguing effect wears off (so to speak) about two-thirds through.

There's a problem: This romance isn't developed enough to be truly satisfying -- it's fat-free SnackWell's when you want Godiva. It's not the original story we signed up for -- or thought we did.

With the exception of a few enjoyable action scenes, such as when Aeon and fellow operative Sithandra (Sophie Okonedo) flip and backflip their way across a lethal garden of bullet-spewing trees and spikes disguised as blades of grass, Aeon Flux is surprisingly draggy.

If you're looking to take your children to something harmless, that doesn't embarrass anyone, this light comedy (a gentle parody of those "Behind the Music" specials on cable TV) is your next outing.

Director Phillip Noyce has made a serious movie that switches to almost popcorn entertainment.

Disappointingly facile and unenlightening. Things are only interesting when Spacey is on screen, which makes a video rental worth it -- for that tour-de-force nastiness. [12 May 1995, p.N50]

Faraway...is vaguely deflating, a film that doesn't build to a powerful climax so much as gradually run out of air.

Taxes the threshold of acceptable cuteness.

It's simultaneously arty, arcane and nasty.

This muttering boatman seems to have lost his old-time heroism. No longer is Rambo killing for a cause, but for kicks. And his portentous blather, even by Rambo standards, becomes unintentionally hilarious.

You leave Creatures with the unsettling sensation of being highly tickled yet greatly dissatisfied.

Even by the art film standards it apes, Solaris lacks conviction. And although it's meant to be restrained and free of emotional hysteria, the result is a movie that pretty much lies dead on the screen for an hour and a half.

At its best the movie displays a vital playfulness. But at its worst -- and there's far too much of that -- Alice continues Allen's endless, banal quest for the Big Answers. All, of course, at the mild-mannered elbow of Farrow.

A fairly ordinary drama about young love, basketball, petty jealousy and high school politics. The movie also has one of the goofiest, over-the-top finales in recent memory.

Performances feel too manufactured to be charming.

The story moves episodically, almost painstakingly.

Death Sentence, directed by "Saw" co-creator James Wan, swings the pendulum too far. One day Nick is a mild-mannered nerd who spends his days making (and loving) risk assessments for his company; the next, he's Travis Bickle from 1976's "Taxi Driver."

Although this dialogue-free, mostly animal-action movie has its moments, Gerard (The Name of the Rose) Brach's man-meets-bear scenario is barely a soft, high-budgeted muzzle ahead of the Disney wilderness pictures. [27 Oct 1989, p.N43]

Director Jean-Jacques Annaud and adapter Gerard Brach provide more than a few effective moments. Beyond her corporeal qualities, March is thoroughly believable. When she walks up to Leung in his car and plants a kiss on his window, her swoonish tentativeness gives the act incredible weight. But the story is dramatically not that interesting. After establishing the affair and its immediate problems, "Lover" never quite rises to the occasion. Scratch away the steamy, evocative surface, remove Jeanne Moreau's veteran-voiced narration, and you have only art-film banalities.

This bizarre little diversion will soon scamper into the wild grass, never to be seen again.

Even though these characters are hogtied by the story's unimaginative conventions, at least their lively interactions feel genuine.

There is nothing worth getting steamed over or particularly excited about.

In this loser-and-the-whore story line, Allen's sensibilities have taken a turn for the nasty.

Works better as a subject for high school study rather than lasting art.

A mediocre comic romance.

Unfortunately, the idea for Dirty Dancing exceeds the execution...and the story resolves itself all too conveniently in that final scene.

Let’s just say that, for the right audience, Junior may deliver. But there’s a whole lot of pregnancy to go through first.

Sweet Land is as empty and beautiful as the picturesque Minnesota terrain it's so clearly taken with.

Girls is certainly fun for a time, and Goldblum, Davis, Wayans and others have their moments. But you may find your stomach rumbling from a certain emptiness under the glibness, and when it's time for that inevitable return to the planet Jhazzalan, you may hear yourself breathing a sigh of relief.

Even Posey -- who brightens most movies she's in -- fails to stir the movie's unresponsive tectonic plates.

The best moments occur when -- as in reality -- we're still in the dark. As soon as the movie gets to its version of a punch line, it turns into another Hollywood vehicle spinning aimlessly in space.

What starts out as a moody arthouse flick rapidly becomes an uneven B-movie yukfest (sometimes intentional, sometimes not), with low-budget concessions to the Hollywood cop-versus-killer industry.

An engaging battle between terrific acting and a flawed script.

The wacky incongruity works when debuting director Mamet has tongue in cheek. But all too often he's rechewing film noir, Hitchcock twists and MacGuffins, as well as the Freudian mumbo-jumbo already masticated tasteless by so many cine-kids.

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.

Horror fans will twitch impatiently at those long stretches between killings. And audiences anticipating a feature-length "Girls Gone Wild" video will suffer withdrawal from the lack of loosened bra straps.

Has its funny moments, but all too often it's a corny, lackluster film in which humans pretend (not always convincingly) to interact with cartoons.

Part comedy of manners, and mostly gender warfare, "Something" is designed to get the partisan juices boiling. Screenwriter Callie Khouri, who wrote the marvelous "Thelma & Louise," has a gift for catching the oppression of women in everyday situations and putting a sanguine comic twist on it. But in her zeal to portray a world full of male scum, she creates a morally mismatched, pandering scenario.

Sometimes, the sincerest form of tribute is inferiority. Watching the Australian film Jindabyne, one soon embraces the conclusion: Robert Altman did this work better. And with fewer brush strokes.

What do we want in a sequel? Just a little taste of the original or a triple serving piled high? Dead Man's Chest opts for the latter. This Disney movie isn't a follow-up to the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" so much as its empty-calorie clone.

Well, the movie's dumber than a coop full of chickens, but Pauly Shore makes a funny barnyard animal.

Ultimately, Forces of Nature is more of a lull than a passionate storm.

This attempt to reproduce the old series still feels stilted -- a see-through marketing impulse more than a creative venture.

This is exactly the kind of weird, sardonic texture the movie is aiming for - and unfortunately, most of it occurs in the first half of the story.

Has its moments of fun, many of them having to do with Reilly's deadpan comic style. But the movie lacks the original edge of its better predecessors.

Even though we're caught up in his derring-do as he beguiles entire meeting rooms of jaded publishers and editors, we're kept at a dissatisfying distance from Irving and the movie.

Has its creepy moments, but also its cliches.

It telegraphs its emotions loud and clear, but somehow they don't reach us.

None of the characters are compelling, despite the star-studded vocal cast behind them, including Madonna, Robert De Niro, Snoop Dogg and Jimmy Fallon. Our attitude toward them is casual interest, not anxious concern.

A disposable intermixing of son-of-Satan and cop-thriller cliches, featuring the requisite string of murder victims (with bloody pentagrams carved into their bodies).

In this banal era of smart-aleck parodies and homages, Last Man Standing amounts to stylistic overkill.

An overture to the subject rather than a profound study.

It's too bad about the ending because, until then, Pay It Forward... is Hollywood feel-goodism at its best.

Another gate-crasher at the let's-do-a-mediocre-update-of-Shakespeare party.

Greenaway's narrative and his direction of actors -- two elements which only recently has he concerned himself with -- are without foundation. After the effects of the visual presentation have worn off, the film becomes rather tiresome to follow.

A leisurely paced, subtly funny, though verbally crude chamber piece.

Unfortunately, the message is made clear within the first 10 minutes, leaving us with about 80 minutes of thematic repetition.

Them knows something the makers of the "Hostel" and "Saw" movies apparently don't: Subtlety and suggestion are every bit as terrifying as slashing and sawing.

Unfortunately, Buscemi's film conveys the spirit of its source material but doesn't make a satisfying transmogrification out of its homage.

Despite the Sybil-like plot (and questionable Rambo mentality), there's something watchable about it all. Weird it is, flop it ain't.

Ultimately, we find ourselves looking for the wrong sort of clearing: a way out.

The movie refuses to descend into the cute smarminess of a mutual recovery drama, thanks to originally conceived characters. We're always wondering -- and wonderfully surprised -- by their choices.

Future II bombards you with more brand-name advertising than three hours of prime-time TV could muster, although repeat filmmakers Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis put a humorous twist on everything.

The storyline is so familiar ("Cheaper by the Dozen," et al), the audience can practically call out scenes ahead of time.

Imagine settles disappointingly for rom-com cliches. It doesn't even bother to explore its own premise.

While this HBO-produced, generically titled family caper isn't quite as dead as you'd expect, it doesn't exactly pulsate with comic originality. Borrowing from successful comedies of recent years, from Big to Risky Business, it bounces along with a familiar, pre-sold air.

Truth be told, none of it is actual living, and all of it is secondhand re-spinning of such better movies as "The Year of Living Dangerously" and "Welcome to Sarajevo." To use an antiquated newsman's cliche: Get me rewrite.

At it’s core, it’s just another youth-culture flick about the search for love. It’s also a mediocre bid to join the shoestring pantheon of such filmic self-starters as Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It) and Kevin Smith (Clerks).

If P.S. I Love You proves anything, it's that Hilary Swank may be a great actress, but she can't do cute.

Fat Man seems unsure of which human story to concentrate on.

The story, such as it is, follows Renton's inconsistent attempts to kick his habit.

The best thing about the movie is its personable, amusing cast, all members of the five-man comedy troupe Broken Lizard. There's a chemistry among them, which obviously comes from having been together as comedians at Colgate University.

Attenborough's aims are more academic and political than dramatic. By following an initially wrongheaded white character, he clearly wants to reach out to similar audiences. Cry could have reached further.

In Things Change, the gangsters and bodyguards, the lounges and limos don't got, whaddya call, da same allure. You watch the whole thing with a detached amusement, like a goon cooling his heels in the lobby, just waiting for things to change.

Screwball romance, action picture. Summer movie.

The movie may steal a base here and there, but there are no homers.

As with most sequels, Addams Family Values is a thinner, airier reunion. For those who enjoyed the original The Addams Family, the flavor is still there. But you feel a little undernourished.

He's the anticop, one blood-soaked, quasi-psychotic symptom of Hollywood's desire to outgun, outkill and out-carchase itself.

Only moderately compelling.

Playing a mentally unhinged, almost wordless naif who finds true love with equally nutty Mary Stuart Masterson, he's supposed to invoke the silent comedian, with a little Chaplin thrown in. But he's just Edward Scissorhands without the scissors -- or the edge.

The best thing about The Island is this: Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, buffed and dressed in sparkling white, wondering how and when to kiss each other.

So pleased with its own spoofy conceit it stays in annoyingly self-amused, predictable mode.

In the end, A Tout de Suite leads to not much more of a point than one woman's loss of innocence.

Follows all these rules, which is why you'll get the enjoyable basic minimum. But not a whit more.

If it does nothing else, Music Within shows us how deeply Ron Livingston's amiable face can take us into a movie. But even likable mugs like his -- remember him in "Office Space"? -- need help from the movies around them.

To completely sabotage the work, there is an insipid affair between Manon and a young teacher, Bernard (Hippolyte Girardot). Their juvenile romance blunts the epic effect that Berri obviously is trying to create.

It's merely another violent art house picture, slumming modishly in the world of psycho-personalities, and exhibiting only occasional flashes of originality.

This picture is oddly un-charged, indistinct and even long-winded.

How about a well-sustained argument for saving the planet instead of this round-robin approach? And where are those holdouts of humanity who believe humans shoulder no blame for carbon dioxide buildup? Let's hear from them, too, and draw our own conclusions.

The finale isn't quite as chillingly nerve-wracking as one would hope. Schloendorff, who also made The Tin Drum, directs with a uniform dullness that creates little sense of suspense. In replaying the Atwood novel, he and Pinter ultimately fail to create a significant timbre of their own to make the transmogrification truly effective.

Storytelling like this weighs heavier than a standard diving suit, and it's really up to you, if you're ready to take the plunge.

You could be forgiven for thinking -- occasionally -- that you just stumbled into "The Silence of the Apes."

Hoffman blows costar Cruise right off the screen...Instead of playing off or with Hoffman (a greenhorn's smartest strategy), Cruise tends to play at him, flailing and swearing like a spoiled, grounded pilot in "Top Gun II."

Never gets as emotionally involving, or persuasive, as the moviemakers intend it to.

The film is all cliched atmospherics and no real insight.

Enjoyable in some places, but dreadful in others. It's boring here and exciting there. And it's almost always goofy.

Its use of minor expletives and a depressing chapter late in the movie will not satisfy parents seeking something sweet and lively for their children; nor will it charm art house audiences up for a smart adult fairy tale.

Even though he shows some master touches throughout the movie, Shyamalan flits a little too lightly across the surface, like a pond skater.

Then as now, visually pleasant and (of course) musically wonderful but, all-in-all, a mixed bag.

The movie is tentative, dramatically speaking...The most powerful moments come at the end -- documentary excerpts of Steve Saint, the son of one of the missionaries, and his friendship with Mincayani, the man who killed his father.

Unfortunately, screenwriter Sam Catlin and director Danny Leiner make the unexpected mistake of being too subtle.

Shelton's movie never quite transcends its cheap, baseball-card poignancy. You never get the feeling these pulp-fiction archetypes -- the young hack-writer and the aging bull -- are real people. [06 Jan 1995, p.N37]

Wind is about the huff and puff that's needed to win the America's Cup regatta. It's about tacking faster than your Australian competitors. It's about winning for your country and yourself -- to stirring music. It's also about an hour too long.

Truly touching moments such as a surprise meeting between Ami and his estranged brother, Oscar, show us this movie didn't need any sentimental help.

Clearly enamored with the endearing brand of drawly sarcasm for which Thornton has become known, the filmmakers aren't sure whether to paint Dr. P as an uncompromising villain or a mischievous teddy bear. The upshot is that Dr. P's most menacing aspect is Thornton's rather obvious hairpiece.

Clearly targeted at Christians looking to reaffirm their faith. Its chances of crossover success with the secular crowd seem remote, given the dramatic shortcomings.

Edel, who supposedly fell in love with the novel as a Munich film student in the late '60s, has finally realized his adaptive dream. But for someone so devoted to the book, he (with screenwriter Desmond Nakano) ultimately betrays the novel's unrelenting brutality, its unshakably misanthropic point of view.

Despite amazing access to Seinfeld backstage, we don't get a peek into the real man.

It's a piquant story but unfortunately the movie creaks with European-style artifice. It tells its story in a rather cinematically stilted style, and some of the dramatic moments come perilously close to unintentional parody.

Entertainment more suitable for the living room than the movie theater.

Energetic and slickly done, but also somewhat soulless.

Tatum, the hunky object of Amanda Bynes's fancy in "She's the Man," and an engaging basketballer in "Coach Carter," is the best thing about this uninspired formula-thon.

Trapped in Paradise, a heist caper starring Nicolas Cage, Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey, gets lost in a snow flurry of subplots and formulaic run-and-chase -- right around the time you've settled in for a good comedy.

Radcliffe is good at showing vulnerability but without the skills to give it gradation. The magic doesn't work for him this time.

The Treatment gets this year's Rip van Winkle award.

Both Scott and screenwriter Roselyne Bosch provide absorbing period detail. You learn about garrotings and massacres, Indian hairstyles and Spanish royal gowns. But this cinematic scrapbook of Columbian highlights is as beautiful as it is empty.

It's good for a silly laugh, this stuff. And maybe this movie will draw renewed attention to Carpenter's eminently better movie.

A movie that clearly aims to be a cool, picturesque modern film noir becomes another moody banality.

Despite drawing from one of the most powerful and true stories from the Cold War, K-19 is only moderately moving.

Eugenio Zanetti's set design is wonderful. But the movie isn't enough to make people check the shadows when they leave the theater.

Co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, whose visual schemes lent a hypnotic aura to their previous collaborations -- "The Deep End" and "Suture" -- don't find the right balance of story and image this time.

There is but one reason to sign up for Driving Lessons: to watch Rupert Grint -- Harry Potter's redheaded pal Ron Weasley -- squaring off with Julie Walters, Queen of the English Scenery Chewers.

In this touching story of boy toys helping boy toys, it's almost impossible to root for characters who are dead in the first place.

Screenwriter Todd Graff makes an inept, quasi-formulaic rehash of everything. He duplicates many of the original scenes but does so mechanically.

Not surprisingly, everything feels begged, borrowed and stolen from other better movies, from Quentin Tarantino's exclamation-point violence to the slo-mo bullet trajectory shots from "The Matrix."

Amusing only for its performances, including those of Chittenden and Wilson. The cast cannot hide the movie's derivative shortcomings, which only remind us that we've seen better and funnier elsewhere.

It never attains full dimension. It pursues the De Niro-DiCaprio war so singlemindedly, everything else is left high and dry.

The film should at least be wise and three-dimensional enough to see Ann's motivations as a source of mystery as much as heroic self-empowerment. This one-dimensional ennoblement doesn't sit quite right.

The lower your expectations, the more you'll enjoy it.

Even though it’s mostly pleasant and sometimes funny, Zoolander could use some sort of boost.

The movie's ambitions (to pay tribute to the Czech pilots who fought for their country only to be interned later) are not matched by the actual story.

Nelson certainly passes muster for sincerity but, unfortunately, his movie doesn't have the same clear-cut quality.

A talented comedian, Lawrence has leaned all too easily on formula for his successful films. Imagine if he would test his flair against original and fresh premises, instead of the tried and trite. Why, he'd discover what it's like to take pride, not just profit.

Writer-director James Ponsoldt's film treats big subjects -- loneliness, coming-of-age and father-son relationships -- with such half-baked conviction, it's a wonder the screen doesn't redden with embarrassment. Which makes it all the more gratifying to watch Nolte pulverize the dramatic banality around him.

The Muppet Christmas Carol" isn't terrible, by any means. But it's resoundingly moderate, with merely passable songs by Paul Williams, and only occasional real laughter.

After some promising leaps, bounds and swings through a fascinating jungle of possibility, Charlie Kaufman's movie misses an all-important creeper.

There's nothing wrong, nor particularly right about the experience. It just sits there, like a Nike ad.

Springs from that childhood fantasy of being able to stop time and wander freely among the temporarily frozen. If only writer-director Sean Ellis had done more than use the conceit for a functional romance.

In Cadillac Man, the new movie by Roger (No Way Out) Donaldson, Williams certainly has his share of Robin-esque rejoinders, but he never quite reaches the feverish sales pitch most of his fans are likely to expect.

Spends too much time being convivial and not enough time looking for the kind of real conflict that begets a good comedy.

All credit to Carrey, whose one-man performance is almost enough to redeem the movie.

While you're enduring the usual formulaic yada yada -- at least there are yuks to enjoy.

This 138-minute film, comprising two thousand performers and a helluva lot of musketry, has several good scenes, including the well-known one in which Christian utters romantic praise to Roxanne from below her balcony, while de Bergerac feeds him lines. But it can't escape Rostand's structural shortcomings.

Adult humor in kiddie films -- of which there is plenty in The Wild -- is not only welcome but, for many adult viewers, essential.

I'm guessing even die-hard "Clerks" fans will find this only-in-America stuff only partially satisfying, like something they gorged on at the Eatery, then wished they hadn't.

This is fun and there are few kids who won't have a good time of it. But it's no Honey, I Shrunk . . . The first movie was more interesting and inventive, with the tiny kids facing the jungle terrors of a giant lawn and the aerial attack of a zeppelin-sized bee.

It's really weird. Has its share of visceral surprises. Slightly predictable and dumb when all is said and done.

James Earl Jones, James Caan and D.B. Sweeney turn in superior performances in "Gardens of Stone," but it's all for naught. Francis Coppola sabotages their efforts with a handsome but fragmentary film that can't decide which story to tell.

When Van Damme isn't duking it out with the English language, scriptwriter Chuck Pfarrer is filling Henriksen's mouth with villainous pseudo-profundities. Even in a second-rate action picture like this, and despite Henriksen's commendable efforts, they're painful to listen to.

Zellweger is certainly likable as Beatrix, but as an upper-class English lady of a century ago, she enunciates her words as if sucking a lemon -- you almost start to wonder if you've stumbled into a satire of "Masterpiece Theatre."

This is a movie for people more interested in the subject matter than its dramatic presentation.

Filmmakers John Hughes and Chris Columbus go for repetition over comedy.

Ejiofor was a revelation in "Dirty Pretty Things" as a Nigerian doctor forced to live illegally in London. Though he's charismatic as the husky-voiced Simon, he never transcends the movie's pandering agenda.

To take Showgirls that seriously (as either trash-art or appalling pornography) wouldn't be worth the exertion.

Please circle the sentence that most closely reflects your feelings: 1. To me, this scene sounds precious, cute, madcap, zany, lovable, heart-warming, poignant and funny. 2. I find this scene nauseating, despicable, moronic, simpering, formulaic, tacky and culturally dangerous.

Fans of bubbly romances can consider this a thumbs up. I call it a clenched-teeth concession at best.

A religious feel-good message, first and foremost. As for drama, well, it's a distant second. For the right audience, however, this reversal of priorities will work just fine.

Though the movie, made for $7,000, can claim the romantic mantle of "guerrilla filmmaking," its herky-jerky camcorder style, jump-cut editing and sustained takes soon wear out their welcome. And dramatically, it's not always convincing.

Burke's face is impressively scaly, his head is adorned with shorn horns. He makes a great monster. If only he had a better movie to growl in!

Intriguing, inspired, flawed, misbegotten and fascinating -- all of these qualities apply to the movie, at one point or another.

Like Cheung's ethereally plaintive voice, the movie is a siren song that's appealing at first, but held too long. It becomes an increasing whine.

There is one reason, and one reason alone, to watch Cet Amour-La. It is Jeanne Moreau.

One electrifying performance becomes the only saving grace of The Kingdom, a goofy action movie that tries to marry the blitzkrieg entertainment of "Rambo" to the cultural consciousness of "Syriana."

Works far better as an idea than its execution; this has to do with the difficulties of making profound statements with limited budgets and technology, and also grappling with the still-growing sensibilities of an emerging writer.

To enjoy it, however, you have to do the mental equivalent of squinting your eyes, so the credibility is only fuzzily ridiculous.