Desson Thomson

Ishtar is an unabashed vamp for a pair of household names, and as such it works, often hilariously.

The trouble is, this is Hartley all over again. What seemed cutting edge and sharp in the 1990s -- the smart-alecky references to obscure filmmakers (Werner Herzog, Andrei Konchalovsky), the self-mocking tone in the actors' voices, the overall sense that this movie is subverting itself -- feels rehashed and old.

The story, a half-baked one about treachery and greed, meanders to an unsatisfactory ending with a punch line that, well, doesn't punch very hard.

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.

Even in this conglomerate era of marketed, predigested mediocrity, this Disney movie slips instantly into the humdrum.

The more you watch, the more you are committing yourself to watching "56 Up" and beyond.

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.

It's resounding bunk, candied over with the lush music of Johnny Clegg and hyped to death by director John ("Rocky") Avildsen.

Spike Lee had something in mind while he shot School Daze, his follow-up to the cult hit "She's Gotta Have It." Unfortunately it's still lodged behind his cranium. And the movie's out.

Flirting With Disaster, like that Energizer Bunny, keeps on going. But in this case, the perpetual motion is a deliciously hysterical rush.

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

It's a diatribe from beginning to end.

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."

Director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi take a deeper, edifying interest in the moral ambiguities that arise between Maurice and Jessie. And thanks to our warm investment in both characters, we're more than willing to sign up for this existential ride. We allow this relationship -- and the movie -- to take us places we'd never usually go.

A touching documentary.

Thanks to strong performances from all, particularly Mount and Nicholson, we're with this story all the way.

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.

FernGully is neither weighty nor whiny. It sings its message unobtrusively through -- and for -- the trees. And most importantly, it never forgets to be delightful, for children and their moviegoing guardians.

Remains highly watchable throughout, for its atmosphere and the actors.

The real deity of the movie is director Woo, who takes complete command of the latest technology -- hyperspeed editing, breathtaking cinematography, 10-out-of-10 stunt work -- to create brilliant action sequences.

This is all about getting your life back on course before you can fall in love. Which isn't such a bad idea for a movie, as long as there's something more. Unfortunately, there isn't.

An ingenious hybrid of submarine movie and ghost story. And there's a wee bit of "Macbeth" in there too.

Ultimately, Brothers is a flashy, stylistic show of emptiness, intended to protest emptiness. But that's clear almost from the outset.

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

It's too bad Chan's imagination and delicacy were wasted in this movie.

Overdresses and ultimately abandons what drew us to its 1998 predecessor in the first place: an intimate embrace with history.

Avoid this movie unless a) your child has refused to eat until you take him or her, or b) your house is being fumigated to kill an infestation of mosquitoes with the West Nile virus.

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.

McNamara fits perfectly into Morris's canon: He tells a story that knocks you right off your feet.

Luckily, life (just like the SAT) has its multiple-choice options. You don't actually have to watch this.

Reilly and Luna make a chemically appealing screen team. Reilly, one of the best working actors in the indie side of things, is wonderfully world-weary, manipulative and roguishly charming.

Kidman grabs center stage and never relinquishes the position. Playing mercilessly against her pinup girl image, she's an unforgettable, comic archetype—a more slapsticky corollary to William Hurt's bumbling, handsome newscaster in "Broadcast News."

Sometimes big-time studio entertainment is done so well, you simply have to salute its corporate effectiveness.

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.

Director and co-writer James Marsh clearly thinks he has made a grim and telling satire about fundamentalist hypocrisy. But he and co-writer Milo Addica display such contempt for their characters and religious conviction in general, they reduce everything to one-note banality.

Despite a glut of luridness, the story line feels essentially flat, as Keitel stumbles through New York in an immoral, unchanging haze. It is only the strength of Keitel's performance that gives his personality human dimension.

Lee's finest, most unabashed labor of love.

Doesn't need the passage of time to become a classic. It's one already.

There's one thing worse than a movie with two Jean-Claudes: A movie with two Jean-Claudes and bad fighting.

It goes down (and comes back up) like a hairball.

Although this script starts off with great zest, it's ultimately a disappointment.

Has a refreshingly original attitude.

It hasn't aged so much as triumphantly metastasized. [20th Anniversary Release]

The experience isn't for everyone. But it amounts to intellectual penicillin for our sequel-driven, franchise-heavy entertainment culture.

If Slater were a bigger star, this self-serving vehicle would have been a hoot, a surefire DVD attraction for any Camp Night in the living room, not to mention a shoo-in for one of the 10 worst movies of 2005.

There'd be nothing wrong with this if the film 'fessed up to its kitschy soul. Instead, it pretends to be the high-minded drama it's not.

The movie spares no effort to reach out to the crudest, youngest audiences it can.

The muddy, convoluted story revolves around the star's cool-guy poses and one-liners.

You don't have to love WWF scrapping to appreciate this movie.

On one hand, the movie is guilty of schematic arrangement...But at the same time, Israeli producer-director-writer Eran Riklis and Palestinian co-writer Suha Arraf use the device to reveal touching human complexity.

This is the Mickey Mouse factory at its finest, with inventive animation, stirring music and a pride of inspired, almost-human animals.

Even at its least successful, Caro Diario is always watchable.

Pfarrer's screenplay feels older than the Martian hills.

A smoothly executed jab in your solar plexus, a lean, smart film noir that pokes at you with quintessentially English disdain and sarcasm.

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

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

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.

As a straight-ahead thriller, the movie is enjoyable and stirring much of the time.

A delightful, wholesome experience for the family.

The movie's gentle and friendly, but nowhere close to exciting. It would be hard to believe that anyone involved with this production --considers Snow Dogs anything more than phoned-in business as usual.

In this extended good time of a fairy tale, there's something for everyone.

Never the magic charmer it sets out to be.

We have been treated to something we normally would never get in a prison comedy like this: a little delicacy with the humor.

The visual comedy is brilliant.

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

Hilarious…The joy of Beetlejuice is its completely bizarre -- but perfectly realized -- view of the world, a la Gary Larson's "The Far Side," or "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." [1 Apr 1988]

It's funny! It's not Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" or anything, but it's pretty darned good!

If it lacks a certain fuzzy warmth, Kinsey makes up for the shortfall with spirited and (for a commercial movie) amazingly candid vigor. It's an alert, lively movie with a crackling performance by Liam Neeson.

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.

The episodes are too convoluted to get into.

It's an exhilarating sparring match between Duvall's workmanlike fine-tuning and Penn's raw energy. [15 Apr 1988]

Roach knows to play to the movie's twin strengths: Stiller and De Niro. Throw these guys together, turn up the intensity.

It may be longwinded here and there, but Mississippi Masala jumps with life. There's an ebullient, lusty mood to it. The characters have a crazy, eccentric rhythm of their own. It's fun to watch them be.

Rushmore is an almost indefinable genre of its own. A comedy with a menacing edge? An ironic romance? Hard to call.

In this comedy, Cecile misinterprets husband Alain's furtive attempt to have himself medically tested as suspicious extramarital behavior.

A 160 minute work of sustained brilliance and delicacy.

A loud, standard-issue sci-fi action film that has a confusing mission.

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

Mirren's finely calibrated performance reveals a complex woman coping with a bewildering world, and Blair's growing sympathy for his beleaguered monarch gradually becomes ours. This nuanced compassion may not impress the real Queen Elizabeth II, but, for us commoners, it makes for a richer experience.

Nobody's Fool is so eloquently straightforward, it practically sings to the soul. A story about very real people caught in the everyday woes and worries of a small Upstate New York town, it shows the kind of character traits, tics and from-the-heart chatter you wish there was more of in the movies.

Few will accuse Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues of being a masterpiece. But it's still full of the things that make Spike Lee films, well, Spike Lee films. Full of the fun, full of the spirit.

If The Madness of King George, which Bennett adapted for the screen, dilutes some of the play's articulate intensity, it still conveys the drama's essential spirit. King George-the-movie also has the supreme advantage of Nigel Hawthorne, who originated the role of George on stage. His subtly calibrated performance, as he undergoes emotional rages, bouts of dementia and sudden attacks of lucidity, provide the film's most amusing and touching moments.

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.

Essentially an extended cutesy session.

Lazily written and hopelessly miscast.

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 movie (written and directed by Noonan), which took the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, is not as profound as the festival laurels imply. But when all is said and said, the fate of this relationship -- left hanging as the movie ends -- becomes a matter of compelling significance.

For all his patient, accumulative storytelling, Sayles yields little that doesn't feel trite or overly schematic.

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.

Cutting to the chase: In terms of summer movie thrills, director John McTiernan's return to the "Die Hard" genre (he made the first one) is a triumph.

Sensual, funny and, in the end, very touching.

Informative and entertaining.

Jeffrey Blitz's smart, deceptively lighthearted movie gives audiences an endearing nerd-messiah to revisit that angst for all of us and -- maybe, just maybe -- he'll end up in love and ahead.

A rambling disappointment.

You can boost mediocrity a little, but you cannot raise it from the dead.

An entertaining affair whose wild-card creativity never ceases to surprise.

Like the opium dreams that its eponymous hero becomes addicted to, this fragmented, trigger-happy account of Wild Bill Hickok's final years feels like a bad trip through every cheap western knockoff you ever had to sit through.

There's such a sense of overall intensity, you know you have been though something powerful.

The Krays is a foreboding, riveting metaphor about human monsters and the monstrosities of criminal life. It's one of the most original films of the year.

This is a stirring movie, if relentless intensity, handheld camera work, cover-your-eyes violence and ear-splitting yelling matches are what you're craving.

May be morally tangled, pessimistic, lurid and foreboding, but it's also humanistic.

For the most part, it's a provocative one-on-one between racial opposites Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson. Their relationship -- or perhaps, their ongoing collision -- is the best part of the movie.

The movie covers too much ground with too little detail. It manages to be convoluted, complicated, incomprehensible and maddeningly thin all at the same time.

This movie -- which is equally appealing to children (those of adventurous, non-freak-outable spirit), Japanese animation (anime) fans, and any surviving acquaintances of Timothy Leary -- is so full of invention, you might want to take a breather now and then.

The movie is more entertaining than it is logical; its narrative leaps are sometimes ahead of our ability to believe them. But as the compellingly enigmatic Pierre, Pinon keeps us rapt.

A crowd-pleasing combination of buoyant spirit and occasionally dark humor.

Evokes its spirituality with deft strokes and wonderful humor.

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

The sequel's plot is laughably thin.

This adaptation of James Hadley Chase's "Just Another Sucker" isn't so bad you'd want to roast it over the coals, but it ain't much good either.

What's best about Faithless is its honesty, its lack of desire to ingratiate itself with the audience.

Thornton, writer-director of the superb "Slingblade," has a gift for depicting down-and-dirty scenes among men. And when our three principal characters go riding from Texas to Mexico, this is the best part of the movie.

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.

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

Exquisitely textured film.

The dialogue and acting are flatter than a punctured ball.

So unassuming and pure of heart, you can't help but warmly extend your arms and yell "Safe!"

Why did director Barry Sonnenfeld take on this project? Just to sully a fine comedic resume that includes "The Addams Family" and "Get Shorty"? And one last one: Which one of these levers do you push to send the RV careering off the mountain for good?

His new film, Manhattan Murder Mystery, isn't a knee-slapper. A comic mystery in the tradition of the "Thin Man" movies, it has effortlessly funny appeal. Almost intentionally imperfect, it's a tossed-off sketch of a thing, intended to lightly engage and no more.

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.

A front-end collision of a romance.

A frustrating update. Take away the comedy and you're left with a pallid version -- a sort of Reader's Digest condensation -- of the original.

Subtly riotous.

It does wonders to a critic to know that [Britney] could be a continuing font of teen and post-teen kitsch for years to come.

For the right audience, this movie is the butt-kicking, dirt-talking, blood-spurting equivalent of beautiful music.

Mad City is for those who haven't seen enough movies about hostage situations. It's also for those who haven't seen enough ponderous movies about media exploitation, or Dustin Hoffman's ongoing reliance on muttery method acting.

In Adrian Lyne's latest monstrosity, love takes on money -- and loses. Not necessarily in the story, of course. This is a Hollywood movie. I'm talking between the lines.

Robert De Niro is one extended pleasure in Midnight Run -- a real actor putting his considerable talent to work in a well-scripted comedy. And he's more than complemented by Charles Grodin, a brilliant comic performer who has been wasted up to now in small roles or lousy movies. [22 July 1988]

A spirited attempt at modern film noir, and huge parts of it are enjoyable.

Grabbing every backstage musical cliche by the lapels, it sends each one pirouetting, then sprawling hysterically across the floor. It's hard not to love this kind of tribute.

Dogme 95 at its best: open-ended and exciting, with a grand sense of experimentation.

In a movie as unrewarding as this, there's really only one burning question: When does the spanking begin?

The movie's a floating longboat that ought to be ignited and pushed out to sea, Viking style.

It is quietly observant, with a detached eye for the telling moment, and the visual compositions are often exquisite.

A respectable effort that doesn't care to do more than course smoothly and effortlessly through familiar waters.

Cronenberg's deeper purpose is to pull audiences into an affecting, powerful story about right and wrong.

The Secret Garden unearths a few inventions of its own, it bears its own, quiet charms.

Yes, it's weird. But it's wild card weird, with that thrill of never knowing what's coming next or when these Parisians are going to get musical on us.

This suspense drama, which stars Sally Field, Kiefer Sutherland and Joe Mantegna, tries desperately to press your vigilante buttons. But its manipulative agenda is so transparent, you don't know whether to take exception or laugh it off.

A snooze, despite all the sex and other gunplay.

Covers every cliche in the Hollywood sports movie playbook, but it also makes the routine much more enjoyable than you'd expect.

David Hogan keeps the action moving and loaded with fights, gun battles and other action-trashy thrills. Lee is terrific.

Where there was effortless cool in the first movie, there is nothing but manufactured posing here.

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

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

A heartbreaker, plain and simple.

The story behind Hercules, Walt Disney’s insipid, lifeless, animated feature, is hardly the stuff of children’s entertainment.

Extraordinary documentary.

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.

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

Just a few guilty laughs, a predictable resolution and repeated close-ups of that dog jerking its head to one side, doing the cute thing.

Has to be one of the must-see films for any student of Hollywood fame and infamy.

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.

Made up of tiny, non-nutritious patties, this movie is a buffet of Hollywood nothingness.

What songs, what people and what a triumph that their music won in the end.

For all the filmmakers' efforts, this project is something of an artistic albatross. It's a conundrum that doesn't get answered until a sort of help-the-audience Cliffs Notes final scene, in which we learn Everything. But by then, more than a few of us may be wondering, was it all really worth the trouble?

The movie finds charming humor in a world full of sectarian strife between Protestant and Catholic.

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.

At its worst, which ends up being most of the time, the movie traps us in art-house pretentiousness, as we're obliged to follow the yearnings and abstract corruptions of the urban zestless.

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

Mostly a string of talking-head interviews, but those talking heads -- more than 16 men and women -- are compelling.

The movie isn't exactly providing entertaining escape. In fact, the only escape on your mind is going to be the exit door.

Flanders, which takes us from the rustic heartland of northern France to the killing fields of an unnamed foreign locale, has such a primitive poetry, we are moved even by its most gruesome moments.

Demy, his cinematographer Jean Rabier and production designer Bernard Evein created an operatic masterpiece of romanticism, which makes a modest but effective antidote to the harsh era of cynicism that has pervaded world cinema ever since.

Don't hold your breath waiting for The Punisher to be original, not for one second of its torturous two hours.

What makes this movie deeply fascinating is the fight Haskell wages. As the semi-willing subject of this movie, he's determined to gain the upper hand or, at least, come out somewhat sympathetic.

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

This is 90-proof, single-malt stuff. You sip it neat and you don't handle heavy machinery afterward. This movie will stay with you long after you've seen it, thanks to Thewlis's performance, Leigh's direction, Andrew Dickson's haunting bass-and-harp soundtrack, cinematographer Dick Pope's indelible images -- and the unalloyed, naked conviction of it all.

It's funny for young kids, extremely non-critical moviegoers and possibly people with a catatonic medical condition. But it's painfully idiotic for anyone else.

After the disastrous "Mixed Nuts," her last holiday season folly, Ephron appears to have hunkered down for a career of pandering mediocrity.

Malkovich's lead performance digs in its heels, deadening the movie's speedy exhilaration. The result is a highly diverting but ultimately unsatisfying production that doesn't perform -- so much as paraphrase -- the script.

The words - taken directly from the book - are beautifully cast, but they encapsulate the emotions too conveniently.

An ambitious, experimental mess of a movie in search of something more profound.

This film explores what low-budget films do best: the quirkiness of character, and slightly off-kilter comedy.

It is horrible. Time curls up and dies while this Hilary Duff vehicle wheels its weary, conventional way along.

But this whore-and-the-innocent friendship, set in Shanghai during the 1930s, is too trite to pull us in. And the gangster scenario around it (Bi Feiyu wrote the script) is similarly unconvincing.

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.

The movie automatically pegs itself for the straight-to-video sci-fi rental shelf.

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

A relaxed delight, a series of delicately tongue-in-cheek musings about the clash between American and French cultures.

For about 10 minutes, it works.

A great picture, 113 minutes of stirring stuff, set to the ironic lilt of Jean "Toots" Thielemans's harmonica and Harry Nilsson's theme tune, "Everybody's Talkin'."

The 1994 "Speed," which starred Bullock and Keanu Reeves, was hardly "King Lear" on a bus, but it was an entertaining ride. But this movie is nothing but pain to sit through.

Soderbergh and screenwriter Coleman Hough aren't interested in creating a coy whodunit so much as evoking the deeper, less romantic mysteries of people -- and it's riveting.

In The Russia House, an extremely pleasant but lightweight espionage drama set in the glasnost age, Connery brings that charisma to bear and, with co-star Michelle Pfeiffer's help, makes the movie work.

The funniest scenes involve Jim and his father, thanks to the brilliant, improvisational skills of Eugene Levy.

Very young children, it should be said, probably won't have any problem with the movie. It's bright and perky on the surface. But for anyone mature enough to pay closer attention, it's going to fall short of expectations.

Doesn't just bring you to the edge of the hopeless zone, it takes you right into its homes where the children play.

Director James Bridges (a last-minute replacement for Joyce Chopra) infuses this Manhattan drug-recovery tale with an appropriate rush of humor, pounding dance-club music and breakneck momentum.

The screenplay (which is credited to a small crowd: director Michael Radford, Anna Pavignano, Furio Scarpelli, Giacomo Scarpelli and Troisi) is refreshingly witty and restrained.

In this admirably unconventional film, director Paul Schrader is interested in just about everything BUT traditional biopic business.

By the end, you realize you've seen an extraordinary movie, easily one of the best of the year.

The effect, in this French period drama, is something like a moving pop-up book, in which characters seem to be two-dimensional cardboard cutouts come to life.

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.

But by the end of the movie -- which seems to last longer than the Crusades -- all the good stuff has dissipated.

Love or Money isn't a movie. It's the director's cut of the promotion trailer. Fox seems to be shrinking -- if not dying -- in his regular, perky-capitalist role. It's time to look into the mirror and realize that Alex Keaton is turning into Dorian Gray.

As with many of his films, Rudolph creates an oyster of a work. You need to jimmy a little around the edges before its delicate wonder becomes apparent - which it does, beautifully.[23 Dec 1994, p.36]

Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom creates a compelling ride of a movie. Every beat of the film is weighted with significance, and our mounting dread becomes almost intolerable.

The movie feels forced, cliched and derivative.

The performances take the movie to a higher level.

Although the acting is committed and sometimes stirring, most of the characters are about as one-note as the biblical archetypes Martin wants to get away from in the first place. "The Name of the Rose" this ain't.

It's just sort of trying.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man isn't a movie. It's an identity crisis. The previews would have you believe it's a zany comedy. But the jokes are too far and few between. And if it's a comedy, why is John Carpenter directing it?

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.

Cutesy in the television sitcom sense.

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.

An assured directorial debut that goes straight for the tear ducts.

More juvenile than a Mel Brooks movie, wittier than "Get Smart," almost as low as "Animal House" and close to the laugh count of "Airplane!", "Gun" is a loving parody of every cop show that ever syndicated its way to your living room. [2 Dec 1988]

Its long-winded denouement, in which Grazia runs away rather than be sent to an institution, doesn't bring the story full circle. It just extends it.

The most assured of the three films.

Crystal’s deadpan expressions and one liners interlock perfectly with Williams’s multiple personalities and verbal asides. They’re like basketball all-stars flipping no-look passes, trading slam-dunks and practically chest-bumping each other. Director Ivan Reitman doesn’t have to do more than keep time.

The fight between good and evil feels fixed in favor of Hollywood redemption.

KEN, KEN, KEN, not another Shakespeare, pleeeeeeez.

What's so powerful about the film is the rich stories it tells and how it leads them like so many human tributaries to one black, bubbling source.

It's the moviegoing equivalent of great eating.

Amusing and inventive.

This movie is a particular disappointment. Although The Seeker is in Walden's tradition of positive storytelling, John Hodge's script is guilty of downright goofy utterances on occasion.

A special weapon unto itself. Spring-loaded with cockney esprit, it peppers its audience with aggressive, sarcastic grapeshot. That's English for "fun," by the way.

If there's such a thing as freedom for everyone, Rory's determined to give the prospect its most grueling road test.

This is as good a visual treat as you and your kids can expect.

Is Meg Ryan going to play the goofy romantic gal forever?

The movie, directed by Simon West isn't bad, although the repeated shots of Campbell lying spread-eagled on the ground, and the amount of detail we're forced to swallow about the horrors she underwent border on the offensive.

There's something about Orchid that's appealing, at least for the so-bad-it's-good aficionados. It inspires a guilty combination of howling amusement and rubbernecky fascination, aided by the overpowering, Brazil-meets-lounge music, the sultry images supplied by cinematographer Gale Tattersall and the life's-a-decadent-dinner-party sets of art director Carlos Conti.

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

Good movie, great fun.

The film becomes a modest delight.

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.

Culkin's best comedy ever. If only this movie wasn't supposed to be a horror picture.

So dull and awful, you actually wonder if this is some kind of Andy Kaufmanesque in-joke, a deliberate attempt to douse the spark that made the original film so enjoyable.

If Frears and screenwriter Donald E. Westlake (who scripted "The Stepfather") are light on substance, they're satisfyingly heavy on nuance. Grifters may not blow you away afterward but it keeps your attention riveted during.

A serious been-there-done-that number.

Rather wonderful to sit through. It's fluff with flavor. And a cell phone.

Honey's a little too darling for reality but, obviously, that's not what this candy-cane vehicle of a movie is all about. It's about the way Alba moves and how good she looks when she's backlighted and smiling.

While Death is fun, there's something cool and removed about it, which makes it feel ultimately like an exercise in special effects. It's more clever than affecting, its narrative tactics more like entertaining detours than a mounting drama. That shortcoming is redeemed by the movie's grim relentlessness.

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

This time, the jokes about dead animals, gunk in the hair, incest and all other taboos are flatter than the road kill Gilly finds himself picking up for a living.

New Bond man Brosnan can't be faulted for much. He's always been generically sexy, a sort of programmed cover boy. In this new venture, he's appropriately handsome, British-accented and suave.

Before this voyage plummets into Stevie Spielberg's locker, the human stuff is more than worth the descent.

A heart-stirrer at times. More often, it's a heartbreaker.

While he dithers around in search of a movie and a theme, Moskowitz meets intriguing people -- almost all of them older men. And because they are hungry readers, they have interesting things to say.

Spiritually aware documentary.

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.

More interesting for the world it evokes rather than the drama that unfolds.

With a premise as cavalier as this, perhaps director and co-writer James Wong could have found a tone more original than post-Wes Craven cynicism. Instead, he panders to viewers, allowing them to take gleeful comfort in the destruction of the stupid and doomed.

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

Something to get excited about.

As it stands, this movie seems to have conflicting desires: to endear itself to the audience and then repel it.

The outcome is deeply unsatisfying. And there's a rather unpalatable message that crime really does pay, and that irresponsible, woman-hopping egomaniac sports figures do finish first. This isn't basketball, it's more like a series of unnecessary timeouts, ending with the creative equivalent of an air ball.

For fans of old-fashioned European filmmaking, this may have its pleasing qualities.

This is for the pre-converted, certainly not the left, or even those who consider themselves detached observers.

Kryzstof Kieslowski's White...is a continuing testament to the Polish director's poetic mastery. Like all of Kieslowski's works, White articulates a whole language of sensations, images, ironies and mystery -- often with a minimum of dialogue. But it is no rarefied, abstract exercise. The movie...aches with human dimension.

Suffers from melodramatic overkill.

The movie is less than nothing special. The movie veers between pretentiousness (oh, the plight of the instant, start-up Artist) and vacuousness.

Lionel Chetwynd has achieved the impossible -- making a Vietnam prison torture movie dull. And although his sympathy for Americans missing in action seems genuine and laudable, the film liberal-bashes so heavyhandedly it's enough to make Nixon cry "Fonda."

An understated, hypnotic stroke of brilliance.

Crossing should be watched not because it's their finest achievement (that's still to come), but because the brothers are keeping things refreshingly different and building a career, their minds still very much fixed on originality.

Unfortunately, Branagh and screenwriters Steph Lady and Frank Darabont (who also adapted The Shawshank Redemption) have created a story as badly patched together as De Niro’s Creature.

A good time for kids

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.

Famed script doctor Tom Mankiewicz, in his directorial debut, creates the required breakneck car chases, stunt tumbles, major crowd scenes and SWAT gunfire around Aykroyd and Hanks. We're essentially watching 48 Hours or Beverly Hills Cop, only with different funny people. Plus the script is a gold mine of one-liners penned by Aykroyd, Mankiewicz and ex-Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel.

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

About as awful and shamelessly pandering as a fanzine movie could dare to be.

Movie is over-the-top but enjoyable entertainment.

A romper that doesn't shy away from sexual frankness or Mediterranean laissez faire.

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.