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.

Don't even rent the DVD, it'll only encourage them.

A spirited remake of the French drag farce, has everything in place, from eyeliner to one-liner.

Intriguing, oddly banal and ultimately deflating.

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

(Stamp and Fonda's) polar-opposition in acting styles and temperament, their cultural differences and their pop-cultural synergy come together with almost delicious cacophony.

Amazingly stilted before accelerating into its exciting finish.

About half a notch above disaster.

The movie's still a solid "B," a workmanlike drama.

This is the kind of sophisticated and pleasurable movie you dream of seeing from France.

A warmly spirited travel diary of a movie.

Mostly, the movie is riveting, well-done fare -- the stuff of Hollywood epic adventure.

The movie, however, is Pesci's. In that courtroom, he gets on a roll and stays rolling until the end. There's no one better with that New York-New Jersey corridor accent.

I'd rather sit in bumper-to-bumper hell on I-495 for two hours than get caught in Traffic again.

Another sentimental mushfest disguised as a movie.

Diabolically amusing without plunging into the Mel Brooks zone, and it's smart without being pedantic. And it's genuinely scary at times.

In the end, what started off as playful becomes tedious.

Its main purpose -- and no, you are not experiencing ocular breakdown -- is spiritual.

This movie just doesn't match its predecessors.

Feels so slight and pointless.

For audiences simply looking for easy entertainment and some neat-looking robots along the way.

What counts is the comic tension between MacLaine and Cage. It's so well done, it doesn't matter how dumb things get.

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

There's your intrigue. There's your romance. There's your x factor, by which I mean your willingness to give two appealing stars an incredible break throughout most of the major obstacles between them and a successful robbery.

Never transports you to another place and time, as it intends to.

Where Avalon works, as with Diner and Tin Men, is where it's improvisory, comic and most artistically humble.

The movie doesn't have the energy to be truly horrible. It's too muted and enervated. But it's a somewhat tedious thing to sit through.

Each revelation seems more disturbing than the next. But Chinese treatment of Tibetans is only half the heartbreak. The other is the amazing resilience of the Tibetans, who are overwhelmingly Buddhist.

An impressive but nonetheless obvious imitation has sprung up in the shadows of two brilliant movies-I refer to 1955's "Kiss Me Deadly" and 1974's "Chinatown."

It is a fascinating dance between style and substance.

A hilarious, inventive and goofy breath of fresh air.

A firepowered, blood-drenched action picture that doesn't let up.

Unfortunately, the film, written and directed by Sue Kramer, starts with a distinctly uncomfortable moral baseline: How exactly is any audience supposed to identify with a character whose relationship with her brother borders on the incestuous?

What really reaches us is the collective presence of the cast, most of them monks and other acting amateurs. They seem uniformly imbued with inherent grace and effortless spiritual bearing. And their smallest of gestures exude the kind of un-self-conscious gravitas that constitutes all fables.

Eastwood's elegantly directed Mystic River, a deeply textured drama in which the sins (or perceived sins) of the past weigh heavily on the present.

A documentary that knows to sit back and listen as [Dobson] expounds on a variety of subjects.

Leadenly directed and almost soberly scripted, it never captures the campy brightness of the original series -- the herky-jerky animation, the wacky sound effects, the distinctive character voices and that cheesy laugh track.

Terrifically funny romantic comedy, is a slam-dunk for Julia Roberts, the Michael Jordan of cuteness.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves looks like big money. It has the stars, it's based on a classic (and foolproof) story and it's an exhilarating couple of hours. It fills the entertainment megabill utterly.

What keeps the film (adapted from the late John O'Brien's harrowing semi-autobiographical book) from being completely unbearable are the extraordinary performances.

As rich and fun as it was in post-Depression 1937 -- yes, 1937. And the seven dwarfs (Doc, Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Bashful, Grumpy and Dopey) are every bit as charming as they "Hi-ho" to work at the diamond mine.

[Gere] seemed to be improvising his way from beginning to end, like he was disgusted with the actual script.

In the end, Made is a movie with better potential than actual results.

It's a pleasant experience. But that's what it is: a sequel that replays every aspect of the original movie.

Everyone in the cast is terrific, including Dermot Mulroney as Wolf, the beret-sporting cameraman who thinks he's a genius but can't seem to stop screwing up shots, and Wanda (Danielle Von Zerneck), a tough-talking assistant director who gets weak in the knees whenever Chad gets close. Best of all is Buscemi, a wonderfully offbeat, edgy performer who has appeared in such independent films as Mystery Train and Reservoir Dogs. He carries the emotional weight of the movie as his dream project faces impending doom, his red-rimmed, frog-like eyes threatening to burst with exasperation.

The inside story is weak, dull and head-poundingly boring, and the outside story is only slightly better, thanks to the lukewarm likability of its two stars.

Devolves into such utter ludicrousness, the best response (other than avoiding the thing in the first place) is to laugh.

An entertainment to be seen and appreciated in momentum. As such, it is constantly gripping

The only active ingredient is the dynamic between Smith and Jones. There's just enough of that to get us through.

A surprisingly gripping experience.

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

The movie equivalent of a great read. It's a masterfully conducted concert of characters...already head and shoulders above most of the competition.

It's not often you find a movie as exciting and awful as Rumble in the Bronx. But the sole aim of this so-bad-it's-funny action picture is to introduce Jackie Chan to American audiences. In that narrow sense, it's completely successful.

May leave you more cold and stunned than enlightened.

You're exhilarated from beginning to end.

It doesn't seem like overstating things to say that Eros becomes steadily worse as it goes along.

An extraordinary film ... that's impossible to dismiss or leave unmoved.

Someone definitely inhaled too much before making this one.

We may not get to their innermost feelings, which would have taken this documentary to a deeper, maybe darker level, but the movie's purpose is celebratory. As such, it's a satisfying experience.

The movie, which is based on the Lowell Cunningham comic book series, throws out some wonderful implications, but they’re frustratingly few and far between.

A canny (and profoundly sexy) movie.

The movie's entertaining for some wickedly funny situations and witticisms.

Often wickedly funny, but about halfway through, the premise becomes -- shall we say? -- intestinally overextended.

O'Neal's performance, on the other hand, could incite angels to throw tomatoes from heaven. As the meek-and-noble reporter (who never seems to find time to file stories), he seems to be a confused Barry Lyndon, inexplicably whisked into this century and given a Georgetown lease, a ridiculous movie role and a byline. You get the feeling that, like this movie, his news stories need editing.

Cheerful, energetic and on the money.

A bare-bones outline ignores the performances, the stirring music, the close-in camerawork and the direction of Steve Anderson. The emotional punch and atmosphere of the movie soar through any hokiness. Plummer's search for the son he never saw grow up becomes a powerful odyssey.

A highly watchable slice-of-low-life entertainment. If this isn't her best role, it's Dunaway's gutsiest.

It's more a collection of episodes that build to a complex, richly layered picture of these girls' lives. And the more time we spend with them, the more endearing they become.

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.

It's full of good heart, and you can't help but like its unequivocal sentimentality.

Compelling, if throwaway, drama.

Essentially, Chuck & Larry is an oafish chance for audiences to laugh at gay-bashing jokes and then feel morally redeemed for doing so -- courtesy of an obligatory wrap-up scene that reminds us that homosexuals are humans, too.

If you're a fan of Witherspoon, this movie was produced, shot, edited and distributed entirely for you.

Like Casablanca, Diva, Clockwork Orange and countless other quality-cult films, Prick Up Your Ears has an indefinable idiosyncrasy that makes you want to come back for more.

It's also genuinely moving to see disenfranchised individuals discovering self-determination from the hard ground up.

Parents is an impressive debut, and certainly the most provocative new release around town. You may leave this movie realizing how dark your childhood actually was. You may also leave a vegetarian.

You'll be rooting for these people to get slaughtered out of sheer boredom.

There are more climaxes in here than in a Swedish blue movie. This is not to say you won't be thrilled, charged up and put through the ringer at times, but your intelligence will need to be shoved under your seat like warm, flat soda.

A little too shopworn and pokey to be more than a respectable European diversion.

Start lining up now, bring a bullwhip -- and maybe some d-Con. Indiana will do the rest.

Sure, the heroes and villains are arranged in a convenient moral gallery. But the performances, Weir's adroit direction and John Seale's superb cinematography take care of that banality.

As viscerally compelling as smash-mouth filmmaking gets.

Although the movie has its moments, it's a tearjerker that jerks too hard.

Never was the case for psychotropic medication more acute than in Jovovich's performance.

Fails to capture the spiritual hallelujah of the novel.

So full of pep you can't help surrendering to its creative energy.

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.

We are left with vivid images of Dominique, whose desire to change his country, despite formidable intimidation, is an inspiration to any supporter of democracy.

The longer I take to review this movie, the more the absurdities loom. So let me finish before I think about the story's stupidly plotted structure or recall how tiring it was to watch apes perpetually pushing humans to the ground or sending them pirouetting into the air.

Hollywood Homicide is about murder, all right: the wholesale slaughter of anything funny, original or even vaguely logical.

Ferrell provides just enough humor to get us through the familiar fare and enjoy the ride.

The suspense is laughably absent.

There may not be a bigger-hearted performance this year than Jamie Foxx's in Ray.

That mind-bending, mystical business was better handled in such films as 1990's "Jacob's Ladder."

The problem with this movie is the problem with most Renny Harlin movies: There's an excessive amount of excess -- a mind-numbing plurality of firearm battles, vehicular explosions and brutally frank sexual talk.

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

A well-mounted, macabre seriocomedy with passing punchlines. And for about half the movie, it's compelling stuff.

Every moment of the way, there is a delectable sense of subtle menace and, at the center of it all, Huppert's haunting expression, part sphinx, part grace and maybe part scary.

A blundering cringefest, thanks to unintentionally laughable dialogue, hackneyed writing and uninspired direction.

August, who also made "Pelle the Conqueror" and "House of the Spirits," steers this story to its stirring conclusion with firm lack of sentimentality.

All the movie's treacheries, deceptions and story twists are marred by our lack of innocence. We see the big picture way before the characters do, and that pushes us right out of the movie and back into our seats -- the last place we want to be.

The movie's sweeter than funny, but still has a fair share of guffaws.

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

Manages to be innocent, physically passionate, earnestly romantic and self-deprecatingly funny, all at once.

Climb into this rig and you'll be sweating bullets.

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.

Essentially a dumb guy's day in Heaven. The movie's retrofitted with stunts, fights, explosions, drugs, babes and cars -- not necessarily in that order.

At best, the movie is a problematic chamber piece; at worst, a misdirected, slightly misanthropic pretension.

A fascinating premise. And yet, the movie, directed by Bruce Beresford, never quite blooms.

A feel-good infusion for your precious little darling (or pack of darlings) who could use an uplifting fantasy.

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.

It's a B+, not an A. This would be enough for most filmmakers. But Anderson must contend with a higher standard. It's his fault for being original.

A hugely absorbing social drama that is, by turns, excruciating, sad and sardonic.

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.

Despite a subject of immense potential -- the movie's surprisingly uninvolving.

More sluggish than a funeral barge, cheaper than a sale at K mart, it's a nerd, it's a shame, it's Superman IV.

Unfortunately, the story, adapted by Anne Rice from her best-selling novel, sucks at the neck a little too long. A 23-minute snipping from this 123-minute movie would have done wonders.

May be ambitious in its genre-defying abandon, sideswiping science fiction, satire, film noir and melodrama along the way, but it's also exasperatingly convoluted, self-amused and politically sophomoric.

The Return is a pleasant if superfluous invasion of your local theaters. Everyone in front of the Cocoon Uno camera is back, including Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley, Brian Dennehy, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Steve Guttenberg and nine others. It's nice to see the old codgers still alive, kicking and making whoopee. But don't look for more than extra-terrestrial homecoming.

Admirable in its refusal to be politically correct.

This isn't real life. It isn't even a movie. It's an extended sitcom. And for the first time in your life, you'll actually beg for commercials.

An easy-on-the-sensibilities family film, Eddie Murphy practically assumes the easygoing manner of Mister Rogers, a character he used to wickedly lampoon on "Saturday Night Live."

[An] appealing, if overcooked romantic comedy.

Demonstrates what writer-director Levinson does best: evoke the sights, smells and atmosphere of his youth with intelligence, humor and a keen sense of social perspective.

A humanistic gem of a movie, with unforgettable performances from Linney and Ruffalo.

Sketchy but often entertaining.

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

If you're in the right frame of mind -- a sort of anything-goes, Elmore Leonard spirit -- this thing's going to be your kind of evening.

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]

The most enjoyable John Sayles movie in recent memory.

It's been gunned before -- and so much better.

These dramatic shortfalls make us merely worried that two human beings are in danger, but not two compelling souls. There's your missing ingredient, the human X-factor.

May not be the ultimate word on the Tibetan situation, or even the Dalai Lama, but its heart seems to be in the right place; and it's entertaining enough to give audiences an emotional sense of the story. [16 January 1998, p.N32]

A deft, entertaining story that mixes menace with charm and satire with seriousness.

In the end, however, when all Pacino's demons are bared, they don't add up to the poignant punchline you were set up for. The movie seems to have two or three finales too many -- a disturbing trend in all too many films of late.

It's an intriguing experience.

Sitting through The Hangover is like watching "Memento" featuring the Three Stooges.

So disarming, it's hard to say anything but good things about it. So get in line. The doctor is in.

Where the movie succeeds-and succeeds wonderfully-is when it stays a heartbeat away from politics. For two-thirds of the movie, it's an involving, boxing saga and romance.

Rush is too sinfully good for the drama he's in.

Cruise is at the top of his form, and Gooding makes a brilliant opponent.

Fluffily enjoyable.

Kids will understand this stuff. If you can remember your younger, goofier roots, so will you. Sandlot isn't well made but it's alive with dopey, summertime spirit.

It has its own sunsplashed vitality, thanks to spirited writing by Audrey Wells and winning performances from all three principals.

A third-rate love story.

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

You're invited to fish for the comedy within the movie, within Harry's world, which happens to be falling apart around the hapless schlemiel's ears.

One extended guilty pleasure.

It's something no one should watch.

It's a triumph of vile over content; mindless nihilism posing as hipness.

This is not a fantastic movie. But there's more to it than just an MTV-slickified "Midnight Express" starring two young, photogenic stars.

Consider the title your best advice.

Takes you down paths full of primitive, almost biblical implications, but it also finds comic relief in moments of palpable tension.

The movie’s main appeal—beyond stomach yearnings caused by its cuisine—comes from the actors, who infuse their archetypal roles with comedic appeal.

David Gale deserves the chair for its brutal assault on subtlety.

It manages to keep you going until the end and delivers the appropriate payoffs as a generic-brand thriller.

There are some very funny passing lines, but the movie's too uneven to enjoy.

A witty, raunchy comedy, which proves that a well-written piece of business – oozing with sex, wit and nasty intrigue – works for any generation.

Tarkovsky pulls you into a dark, foreboding nightmare and Nykvist gives that nightmare an explosive awakening.

There were moments when I thought Gone in 60 Seconds might be a passably entertaining movie. I figure those moments, strung end-to-end, would total 30 or 40 seconds.

Hoffman's touchingly fractured performance gives the picture a warm dimension.

Taxes the threshold of acceptable cuteness.