Edward Guthmann

It's a witty, intelligent scramble, and it's beautifully mounted.

Conveys the character of this tiny, insular community through richness of detail.

A compelling, sympathetic portrait.

What sounded like an embarrassing blunder -- the romantic pairing of Richard Gere and Jodie Foster -- turns out to be surprisingly entertaining and persuasive.

I'm not quite sure what David Cronenberg is trying to say in Crash, but whatever it is, he deserves a lot of credit for having the nerve to put it on screen and face the consequences.

It's rare that we have a screen character as well-rounded, as recognizably human or as brilliantly played as Sonny Dewey.

Death Becomes Her may be crude and tasteless, but it's also irresistibly funny and very well played by Streep, Hawn and Willis -- each of whom suffered career disappointments of late, and each of whom shines in a role that casts them against type. [31 July 1992, p.D1]

A wonderful, cockeyed sex comedy.

If they weren't so funny and real, and if Linklater hadn't done such a good job in writing their dialogue and casting them, their lack of ambition might seem depressing, and the movie might come off as some smug hymn to negativity. [9 Aug. 1991, p.F3]

It's beautiful to look at, but it's stiffly acted by some of the performers and tends to get ponderous.

An absorbing look at emotional tyranny, with a great screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Today, Blade Runner works better than ever: Scott's version not only has more dramatic integrity, but its visual aesthetic and futuristic vision are more in sync with today's movie-goers. [11 Sept 1992]

Rising Sun doesn't work all that well as a thriller: it's far more successful in its old cop/young cop character study, and in its examination of cross-cultural tensions. [30 July 1993, p.C1]

Surprisingly, Potter takes what seemed like a recipe for embarrassment and excess and delivers a film that's sweet and understated and devoid of diva posturing.

[Raimi]'s drawn lovely, complex performances from Paxton and Thornton and proven that he can work effectively -- and movingly -- in a minor emotional key.

Joyously unhinged and outrageously inventive.

A goofy genre-buster that takes its amateur criminals as seriously as ``Pulp Fiction'' or ``Run Lola Run'' did theirs.

One of the most impressive actor-to-filmmaker transitions in recent years.

Graham Greene ("Dances With Wolves") in one of the year's best performances, he's a fully dimensional character: pathetic and shrewd, tragic and bitterly funny.

A marvelous film.

Heartfelt and passionate and brave in what it attempts to explore.

Great pleasures.

Apart from Lawrence's goofing, Blue Streak isn't much of a movie.

The result is startling and repellent -- a challenge to filmgoers accustomed to fake gunfire, fake wounds and cosmeticized death.

For music fans, there's great pleasure in hearing new audio tracks to "Sitting Here in Limbo," "Friend of the Devil" and more songs -- each one complete and unedited.

There's tremendous maturity and skill in Felicia's Journey but also a sense of impending horror that's bound to repel some audience members -- even though the violence is all implied.

For all its flaws and vagueness, Safe is smart, challenging and provocative -- a film that gives you plenty to chew on, long after Carol's sad tale has wound down.

Hollywood warhorse Norman Taurog directed Elvis eight times and had a knack for dragging decent performances from the boy. [03 Aug 1997, p.34]

Concubine demonstrates that Chinese films are growing by leaps and bounds in their technical sophistication, but also reveals how much they borrow from the energy and style of American cinema. [29 Oct 1993, p.C1]

It's that dilemma -- a commitment to Orthodox life, the refusal to deny one's sexuality and the fear of expulsion once that sexuality is revealed -- that director Sandi Simcha DuBowski illustrates so powerfully.

They're great, every one of them, but the real joy of Little Voice is Horrocks: her impeccable evocation of a timid soul and that eerie voice that sounds so surprising coming out of her.

It's smart and good-hearted and boasts an amazingly good score, but the film is limited by the very private nature of the man it portrays.

Not only celebrates Deren's cinematic legacy but also reveals a gifted talent whose explosive temperament was at odds with the lyrical, dreamlike imagery she put on screen.

Meticulously crafted, and warmly acted by a cast that includes Winona Ryder as Jo and Susan Sarandon as her mother, the devoted Marmee, Little Women is one of the rare Hollywood studio films that invites your attention, slowly and elegantly, rather than propelling your interest with effects and easy manipulation.

Irma Vep blurs the line between reality and fantasy, toys with notions of identity and offers a playfully jaundiced look at the petty jealousies and acts of sabotage that infect film crews in the heat of production.

Bound to be talked about, debated and eviscerated far more than it's understood.

Stettner approaches this material with a playwright's incisiveness and structural sense. His dialogue is cutting, often surprising.

Succeeds despite that mismatch of artist and material.

Delicious but complex.

An eye-opening documentary.

Segues confidently from broad humor to tense drama.

Is Poison Ivy a total waste of time? Not really: there's a nice surprise in Barrymore's femme fatale performance, and more than a few pleasures from the gifted Sara Gilbert. Long may they act. [30 May 1992, p.C3]

Beneath all that baloney and bombast, there's a lovely, inspiring story in Lorenzo's Oil. [15 Jan 1993, p.C1]

Directed by Andrew Bergman, a sometime playwright (''Social Security'') and film maker of modest talent (''The Freshman''), ''Honeymoon in Vegas'' is lightweight, palatable stuff -- the kind of instantly forgettable romantic comedy that Hollywood made in the '60s with Jack Lemmon or Tony Curtis. [28 Aug 1992, p.C1]

Dopey but rather sweet. [30 July 1993, p.C1]

Film is often too subtle and languorous for its own purposes: At times, it's close to soporific.

Larger Than Life isn't as bad as it sounds, mostly because Murray is so likable and fundamentally incapable of not being funny.

Grease isn't a four-star musical. It's fluffy and unimportant, and it gets tedious toward the end with the car-racing sequence that Kleiser staged in the paved-in-concrete Los Angeles River. The friskiness of the performers, the choreography by Patricia Birch and most of all Travolta's phenomenal charm give it its value.

Harron validates and largely clarifies the work.

Wildly ambitious, unwieldy epic.

Haneke directs Benny's Video in a cool, dispassionate style that matches the austerity of his subject, but keeps us at a distinct remove. And even though he introduces a faintly optimistic note in the film's last moments -- a hint at possible redemption -- his film is mostly a grim, downbeat experience. [01 Apr 1994, p.C3]

A superficial diversion.

Murphy is wonderful -- I wouldn't begrudge him an Oscar nomination -- but The Nutty Professor is a mess.

Sweet and harmless -- a beach movie in more ways than one -- but it doesn't run awfully deep.

A glossy miscalculation.

The wolf-homosexual analogy is well drawn, but Wolves ultimately feels slight, a tad unfinished -- as if it were conceived as a sketch and hadn't been fleshed out to feature length.

Ultimately, Regarding Henry has its heart in the right place, but is far too reluctant to share it with us. [10 July 1991, p.E1]

Talky, emphatically unsteamy psychological drama.

If John Waters had directed Mermaids, the new Cher comedy, it might have more of the spunk and the trash that it needs. In the hands of middlebrow director Richard Benjamin, it starts off promisingly but finally sinks into schmaltz and melodrama. [14 Dec 1990, p.E1]

The movie isn't particularly well-paced, and I found it dull. But I've got to give credit to Todd Masters, who designed the special-effects makeup, to Gilbert Adler, who directed the Crypt Keeper sequences, and to Zane, who plays the Collector with style and wit. If I were 12, I might've loved it.

It's like watching a bad update of an Antonioni film.

The story doesn't quite pay off, characters are underwritten and the surprise ending is contrived and unconvincing.

Granted, you don't expect much from a movie like this: azure seas and honey-dripped sunsets, perhaps, a little titillation and a few wicked laughs. But Robert Steadman's photography lacks the imagination of Almendros' work on The Blue Lagoon, and the rare erotic moments are no match for the dumbness of Leslie Stevens' script. [03 Aug 1991, p.C3]

Slick, overly deliberate and brimming with hammy performances...directed by Rob Reiner with glistening, uninspired competence. [11 Dec 1992]

Ultimately there's something too measured, too controlled in his film.

Directed by first-time film maker C.M. Talkington, Love & a .45 is a low-rent variation on Natural Born Killers -- ragged, raunchy, a bit bratty but not altogether worthless.

Sentiment, the kind bordering on schmaltz and easy tears, is found in Shower, a well-meaning generational drama.

One Fine Day is no great shakes, but it avoids being tiresome thanks to the attractiveness of the stars and to a few twists that screenwriters Terrell Seltzer and Ellen Simon offer to differentiate this from other bickering-adversaries-fall-in-love comedies. Both stars also have adorable kids who figure prominently in the plot.

It's an honest portrayal, but it leaves the audience stranded, without the emotional hook of a character we can care about.

Surprisingly tepid and soapy.

This is pleasant, safe entertainment that ought to appeal to kids younger than 10, especially to girls, with its female-empowerment fantasy.

Jingle wants to warm our hearts and establish Schwarzenegger as a family man -- but devotes so much time to goony violence and broad physical comedy that the last-reel schmaltz feels hollow and tacked-on.

In Hollywood, where integrity is rapidly consumed and careers defined by market value, there's trash and there's trash with a pedigree.

Little Buddha is ambitious, sincere and squeaky clean -- a dose of spiritual eyewash that skims the surface of the Buddhist religion and leaves us wishing for more. [25 May 1994, p.E3]

Melodramatic take on love and war.

It's beautifully shot by first-time feature director Antoine Fuqua, whose eye for sensual surfaces, deft camera moves and elegant framing was refined with commercials and music videos

Exuding glamour, health and prosperity, real-life spouses Beatty and Bening are so radiant that they run the risk of seeming superhuman and thereby losing our sympathy as screen characters.

Pure of intention and passably diverting, His Secret Life is light, innocuous and unremarkable.

The Brady Bunch Movie is fairly innocuous, and ought to satisfy the twenty- and thirtysomethings who grew up on the sitcom. Just one problem: It may be unsporting to point this out, but the whole notion of holding up the Bradys as the ultimate cultural icon of the '70s is basically a lie.

A provocative, upsetting film.

Even the surprise ending arrives with a thud and makes us wonder why Shyamalan didn't try something new instead of recycling his "Sixth Sense" recipe.

A domestic melodrama with weak dialogue and biopic cliches.

I just wish that "Apollo 13" worked better as a movie, and that Howard's threshold for corn, mush and twinkly sentiment weren't so darn wide.

As haunted-house thrillers go, Cold Creek Manor is more ludicrous than the average but at the same time more handsomely produced.

It's not a bad film, but Towne and his star, the charismatic Billy Crudup, never fire the imagination in the way their inspirational, respectful biopic is obviously intended to.

It's hard to give two hoots about any of these characters.

Sexual curiosity is a very dangerous thing in Rain, a dazzling mood piece from New Zealand filmmaker Christine Jeffs.

It sets up two or three dozen satirical targets, hits the mark occasionally, but has trouble maintaining an even satirical tone or satisfying pace. Dawber, too, is unappealing in the female lead -- definitely outclassed by Ritter. I'd wager Stay Tuned will die an early death at the box office and find its real life, appropriately enough, in home video. [15 Aug 1992, p.C3]

Has a weirdly divided structure that alternates Irwin's nature segments with clumsy dramatic footage set in the CIA.

Impeccably mounted, nicely scored and beautifully written.

Mother is a relationship comedy, like Woody Allen's films, and it screams for the smart, elastic pacing that Allen creates. The situations are funny -- 40- year-old John moves into his old bedroom, goes shopping with Mother, is shocked that she has a boyfriend and occasionally curses and smokes -- but his poor timing flattens most of those scenes.

It's a light-hearted comedy about faith, transcendence and American-brand exploitation, and addresses those issues in such goofy, indirect, unhurried fashion that you could easily miss what Schrader has to say.

The movie, directed and written by Gregory Nava ("My Family/Mi Familia"), is only so-so but Lopez, who appeared recently in "Jack'' and "Blood and Wine," is so vibrant that you almost forgive the movie's paint-by-numbers script and moldy formula.

Too bad the plotting is jumbled, and the characters too numerous and undifferentiated.

Neutralizes these characters, makes them cute and one-dimensional like fluffy dolls.

Basketball Diaries is an earnest, botched effort to do justice to Carroll's book. Amazingly, though, even with Kalvert's lack of style and vision, the greatness of DiCaprio's performance is undiminished.

The film has a good heart, but its central premise -- that ignorance is an enchanted realm -- is too sentimental.

It makes you wonder when Araki is going to find something else to think about.

The story of an elaborate con game and the wholesale betrayal of an innocent man, it's also an unusually cold film that ends with a feeling of hollow soullessness.

[Harris's] craft is shaky, and the actors she's assembled, with the exception of Johnson and Ebony Jerido as Chantel's best friend, are one step above Amateur Hour. Just Another Girl looks and feels like a first-time effort. [02 Apr 1993, p.C5]

A messy, ambitious comedy.

One can admire it, but it's hard to get caught up in it.

A not-insubstantial comedy.

Doc Hollywood has its moments, including some nice comic turns by Barnard Hughes as a curmudgeonly doctor, Bridget Fonda as the local coquette and David Ogden Stiers as Grady's folksy mayor. And Julie Warner is certainly hot stuff. But Caton-Jones' approach is too facile, and his use of Southern-cracker cliches too offensive, to capture my vote. [02 Aug 1991, p.D1]

Little rings true in The Commitments. The music, which is never lip-synched, is very good -- especially when Strong, only 16 at the time, belts Otis Redding's Try a Little Tenderness. But the characters are shrill and two-dimensional, and the performers, most of whom had little or no prior acting experience, are made to look like pro-wrestling buffoons. [16 Aug 1991, p.F1]

Gratuitous, yes, but Giannaris has the visual finesse to make it work.

Sweet and insubstantial -- just like the French Christmas cake for which it's named.

Rich with statistics and snazzy visuals, but it ignores those larger questions and, as a result, feels a tad naïve.

Pure ham and cheese.

Lacks the kind of rhythm and snap to make it work -- and allows this fitfully entertaining romp to dribble on way too long.

Largely and insider's joke.

It's an interesting technique -- the blurring of reality and "movies" -- but Korine's objective is so narrow and mean, and his viewpoint so colored by smug, adolescent condescension, that Gummo comes off like a mean-spirited prank.

The Portrait of a Lady is a huge disappointment. It's a deliberately arty, overly formal exercise in emotional terrorism.

It may smell awful from a distance, especially if you have low tolerance for lowbrow humor, but up close this yarn about an unlikely golf star is fairly painless.

As dreary as Oscar is for the majority of its 110 minutes, the movie sings whenever Shearer and Ferrero are on screen. [26 Apr 1991, p.E1]

Coming-of-age schmaltz fest.

Pokemon is over.

Campbell and Edwards work wonders with the rocky, wide-open Oregon landscape, but none of their periwinkle-blue skies and sparkling shots of whooping cranes in flight can compensate for a film that aims high, means well, and ultimately fails its audience. [20 May 1994]

The potential for a funny film is here -- one that captures people with their ''clothes'' off, and uses fashion as a metaphor for emotional defenses. Sadly, Altman seems to have taken out all the jokes, and given his actors nothing but sketches to work from. [23 Dec 1994, p.D1]

Floats along on the strength of its writing and supporting cast.

Smothers whatever merits it may have had in a rush of bells, whistles, bombast and smoke.

Stylized dialogue tends to play awkwardly onscreen -- we're conditioned to naturalistic conversation in films -- and Waters, who makes his feature directing debut with The House of Yes, fails to create an emotional tone or attitude to match the characters' goofy repartee.

Ultimately, Chechik can't pull off the fractured-fairy-tale aspect of Benny and Joon. His film never explains mental illness, but romanticizes it, making it seem like a state of enchantment. It's ultimately irresponsible, and not very funny. [16 Apr 1993, p.C1]

Lacks insight and finesse, and feels like a boldfaced Rorschach for Smith's own hang-ups.

Three hours of overstatement and schmaltz.

Handsome and sincere but slightly awkward in its combination of entertainment and evangelical boosterism.

A pleasant but conventional film.

A menage a trois tale that aspires to the breezy screwball comedies of the 1930s -- but more often resembles a hip soap opera.

Consenting Adults is well-made, preposterous junk -- the kind of modestly effective thriller that delivers a modicum of thrills but insults its audience, over and over, to achieve that effect. [16 Oct 1992, p.C1]

So quick that the flat moments are rapidly, inevitably chased by a new gag.

A serious weakness for corn isn't Marshall's only problem. She's got a gift for comedy and she brings out the best in many actors, but she's juggling too many elements here -- baseball, a huge cast, a 1940s milieu -- and never finds a consistently satisfying tone or rhythm. [1 July 1992, p.E1]

It starts out with several seemingly separate stories and characters, allows them to tease, overlap and shade one another, and then weaves them into one rich fabric. It's an allegory about American life -- a tough, cynical meditation on race, crime and the futility of human endeavor.

Pryce is very good, but Very Annie Mary is a bit too eager to please.

The movie was written by Scott Yagemann, who taught seven years in the Los Angeles public- school system, and you can feel the rancor and bitterness he still carries.

Light and innocuous.

Harmless enough, and its team of actors so frisky and enthusiastic that it manages to deliver a modicum of laughs despite itself.

Unfortunately, Raising Cain is largely a retread of De Palma's vintage thrillers from the '70s -- an extended self-homage that makes you wonder if his imagination got frozen in 1980.

Unlike other recent films noirs -- ''The Grifters,'' for example, or ''After Dark, My Sweet,'' both of which were based on Thompson stories -- One False Move lacks style and wit, and doesn't explore its characters beyond their cheap, cruddy exteriors. [24 June 1992, p.E1]

Night and the City is basically a mess, but De Niro, calling up his reserves of manic energy, is entertaining in the title role. He's foolproof, really: He even shines in mediocrity. It's a shame his talent didn't rub off on Jessica Lange. Playing Helen, a tough-broad barkeep who joins Harry in his biggest scam yet, the overly mannered Lange gives her worst screen performance to date. [23 Oct 1992, p.C1]

Strange Days wants to say something about faith and redemption -- about the importance of maintaining one's humanity in a darkened world. That's a worthy intent, but Bigelow is so enamored of high-tech thrills, and so mesmerized by the violence she seeks to condemn, that her efforts at 11th-hour moralizing seem limp and halfhearted.

Forget Beautiful Girls. The title ought to be "Jerky, Messed- Up Dudes With Nowhere to Go"

A schlocky thriller that might appeal to less discriminating members of the mall crowd.

It sounds promising, but it doesn't work. You get the feeling that Soderbergh, so early in his directing career, has exceeded his reach -- that the com- plicated logistics of making a film on location in eastern Europe, compounded with the challenge of bringing to life such a fundamentally lonely and passive figure, had stymied him. [17 Jan. 1992, p.D1]

The dialogue, heavy on sarcasm and puncturing insults, never captures the World War II period but sounds ridiculously anachronistic.

It rambles, it's repetitive, but once in a while there's a sparkling moment when someone speaks in a way that conjures the fierce passion of the '60s.

Edge of Seventeen is sweet and affectionate, but it also has "first effort" stamped all over it. Director David Moreton never made a feature before this, and has yet to learn how to compose a shot or block his actors.

Sexy and passably entertaining, with a plot that's too clever by half.

A mean-spirited comedy...that steals the rampaging-psycho-chick formula from ``Fatal Attraction'' and tries to make it funny.

What Daylight lacks is the knowledge of its own limitations. The only really hysterical line is delivered by Sly's son, Sage Stallone, who plays one of three young prisoners also stuck in the tunnel...Surrounded by rubble and rising water, he gazes longingly at the 14-year-old Harris and says, "If we don't die in here, I was wondering if I could give you a call. . . ."

Apart from its cast, however, Gas Food Lodging doesn't have a lot to recommend it. This is true: It's earnest, the milieu it establishes feels authentic, and the three actresses work hard at giving their characters a life...But Anders' inexperience at writing and directing shows. She overloads her film with too many subplots, and consequently loses whatever steam she manages to build up. She introduces too many secondary characters -- two suitors for Nora, one ex-husband, and two boyfriends apiece for each daughter -- but never develops any of them adequately. [9 Sept 1992, p.E3]

A melodramatic yarn that transcends some of its technical and storytelling flaws through the cheery energy and sincerity of its cast.

It's a classy but downbeat spin on the most familiar of TV-movie formulas.

Nossiter's premise is good, and he intrigues us with stylish conceits, but he makes a crucial casting error. Alec ought to be someone we care about.

Cheerfully raunchy and undeserving of its prohibitive NC-17 rating, Orgazmo is a harmless sex farce.

Made in America, for the most part, is surprisingly inept -- badly shot, badly lit and badly edited. It's the actors alone, Danson especially, who save it from total disaster. [28 May 1993, p.C1]

Nelson's work is relentless, grueling and courageous. He makes a large blunder in having American actors (David Arquette, Steve Buscemi) play Hungarian Jews with American accents, while Harvey Keitel plays a Nazi officer with a German accent.

We're left with a metallic aftertaste.

Although some of its parts are brilliantly executed and played by a terrific cast, the result is scattered, overamplified and unsatisfying.

A pretty lame premise for a movie.

When Ross gets serious and grasps for allegorical import, Pleasantville bogs down in mixed ambitions.

Ultimately, it's a cold, caustic film that doesn't take a strong point of view but seems to offer up its numerous set pieces.

Much of Astronaut comes off as tedious and self-amused, but the musical vignettes are fun.

Polanski attempts a precarious mixture of drama and comedy here -- seesawing between a serious look at sexual obsession on the one hand and an antic, spoofy tone on the other. It's a bold risk, but it rarely works because we usually don't know if Polanski is being intentionally funny, or merely inept. [25 Mar 1994, p.C3]

A confounding and unsatisfying film.

A sexy, mildly entertaining import.

A time-waster that might be diversionary on a dull cross-Atlantic flight -- but only in the absence of alternatives.

Myers and Carvey bring a lot of goofy, adolescent charm to the party, but not enough to save an idea that's grown stale. [10 Dec 1993, p.C3]

Jefferson in Paris is dull, sluggish and unfocused.

The film's aim -- to dazzle and inspire -- is sapped by Cruise's vein-popping, running-the-marathon performance.

Cold Comfort Farm may be hysterically funny to regular readers of Hardy, Lawrence, Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, but it won't ring many bells for the rest of us.

Exhilarating but blatantly biased.

A silly Hong Kong action flick from actor-turned-director Corey Yuen, fits nicely in the "bimbo fu" genre.

An uneasy mixture of tragedy, satire, monster yarn and David Cronenberg creepiness, No Such Thing can't decide what it wants to be or how it needs to get there.

First-time film director Sullivan draws good performances from Goldwyn, Hutton and Parker, as well as Debra Monk, Elizabeth Franz and Eric Bogosian in minor roles.

Murphy, who started directing movies in his native Australia, does a good job of locomoting Under Siege 2 at a lively, muscular clip.

A strange but oddly memorable film.

Plays like the cinematic equivalent of a paperback bodice- ripper with embossed type.

Her direction is weak, her dialogue is cliched, and her acting lacks energy and focus.

Despite its posh trimmings, and Fiorentino's feline presence, Jade never rises above its limitations and never cloaks the fact that Eszterhas' dialogue and script are basically pulp -- minus the trashy fun that we've come to expect from the genre.

Takes a long time getting started and doesn't hit its stride until Danny starts coaching a team of fellow cons -- think "Bad News Bears," just nastier.

A sweet but curiously unfulfilling story.

The Indian in the Cupboard is such a sweet film, and so lacking in the bloodthirstiness and violence that parents dread in children's films, that its mere existence seems worthy of praise. Too bad, then, that it turned out so dull and lifeless.

Naked Lunch will undoubtedly bring pleasure, much of it perverse, to [David Cronenberg]'s many fans - and, simultaneously, confound and repulse a huge chunk of filmgoers. [10 Jan 1992]

The best scenes are the ones that Fox shares with Tamala Jones, Wendy Raquel Robinson and the full-figured Monique as her sassy girlfriends. There's a ripe, crackling spontaneity when these women get together.

Down Periscope makes a surprisingly successful launch, with plenty of brisk one-liners and a promising set-up. But after that auspicious opening, it sinks.

For all the deadpan laughs it delivers, Careful is too self-conscious, too stoned on its own invention and technique to merit sustained attention. It's a marvelous conceit, but ultimately a thin one. [08 Oct 1993, p.C3]

A dark, unsettling drama from Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone.

The Olsens' precociousness and sitcom-style mugging grate at first, but I found myself warming to their movie in its last half - thanks mostly to Alley, a crackerjack physical comic who's incapable of a flat or colorless note.

Mayron, who directed a remake of the Disney comedy Freaky Friday for TV, took on a lot with The Baby-Sitters Club, and the strain shows. She's got too many characters to establish -- several adults besides the girls -- and her movie feels under-rehearsed, as if she hadn't been given the benefit of preparation and wasn't allowed to get as many takes as she needed of most scenes.

Unabashedly sentimental, it's meant to touch our hearts in profound and important ways, but misses the mark by drawing too deeply from a pool of schmaltz.

It's a bizarre hybrid: one part feminist screed, one part French art film and one part skin flick.

If your tolerance for Branagh's shtick and Woody's narrowness of focus is as low as mine, you can take solace in the director's joke on himself.

Isn't an awful movie. It's got two charismatic, albeit ill-served leads in John Cusack and Kevin Spacey, and it's got a sizzling, tear-it-up performance by The Lady Chablis, who brings such good-natured sass and suggestiveness that you hunger for more whenever she's offscreen.

Small kids ought to love this entry, but die-hard Muppet fans are likely to find it tepid and uneventful -- a minor addition to the Muppet canon.

Pitt isn't a bad actor, but he's way out of his depth and never disappears into the character -- a selfish rogue who gets a jolt of enlightenment at the feet of the Dalai Lama -- the way a superior actor like Daniel Day-Lewis might have.

A listless, predictable effort, occasionally redeemed by witty lines and charismatic performers.

May provide a service by making gay issues innocuous and funny and more acceptable to a broader audience, but Rudnick's play-it-safe script and Frank Oz's antiseptic direction manage instead to trivialize the subject.

Director- writer Oliver Parker saps much of the juice from Wilde, slows the pace and directs his actors in an inappropriately naturalistic style.

Campy, overwrought and gleefully cannibalistic in the way it references and regurgitates horror flicks of yore, Scream 3 fulfills its modest ambitions by delivering a glib slasher spoof for the mall crowd.

An arid, uninvolving film that suffers from Burrows' miscasting as the vain Julie.

Disappointing, pointless and repetitive.

Spielberg uses a more conventional format than he did in the stripped-down black-and-white "Schindler's List,'' and delivers a film that veers between stoic political correctness and mushy pop-Hollywood platitudes.

If Party Girl weren't so contrived, and if Posey didn't exude such cold hauteur, all of that might have worked.

By playing the boob so brilliantly, Atkinson allows us the catharsis of recognizing our own incompetencies and lack of poise.

Lushly entertaining, and its subjects are terrific storytellers with style to burn.

Sinks into melodrama.

An earnest, ponderous epic that tries desperately to say Something Important about disenfranchised blacks and their Afrikaans oppressors, but never does. [27 March 1992, p.D7]

What's lacking is an explanation for the relationship, and some insight into the origins of Rimbaud's art. The other big problem, aside from DiCaprio's twang, is his lack of chemistry with Thewlis. These are two fine actors, working in vastly different styles, who might as well be walking through different movies. At the end of the handsome, frustrating Total Eclipse, you'll be wondering who these two men were.

Despite its technical defects and negligent production values, The Flip Side will probably appeal to a Filipino-American audience.

This is the downside of Roberts' giant success and her dazzling ability to charm: Every time she goes plain, as she did in the little-seen "Mary Reilly" and "Michael Collins," our princess simply fizzles.

Isn't some sober history lesson that bogs down in long speeches and tedious facts. It's about style, it's about fashion, it's about rock 'n' roll busting out in medieval France.

Beneath the handsome production values, the steady motor of Ron Howard's direction and the solid acting of Mel Gibson as a flashy airline tycoon whose son is abducted in Central Park, Ransom is pure poison: the kind of hang-'em-high rouser that feeds off our basest impulses and prods us into cheering the hero on as he commits grisly, retributive acts of violence.

The Distinguished Gentleman isn't much of a movie - it's a mess, in fact. [04 Dec 1992]

Numbskull cinema scrapes new depths.

The schmaltz is relentless in The Legend of 1900, the newest film from "Cinema Paradiso'' director Giuseppe Tornatore. It comes in waves, it leeches onto every surface and it turns decent actors into sticky-sweet fuzzballs.

A glossy piece of trash.

Girl 6 is glossy, technically proficient and a glib waste of time. Lee and his screenwriter goof around with phone-sex rhetoric ("I wanna service your juicy kielbasa''), but that gets tired quickly.

Noe isn't a graceful filmmaker. He wants to traumatize his audience, barnstorm us, make us pay in anxiety and sweat and scorched nerves for the ugly truths he wants us to swallow.

Alan Bates and Charlotte Rampling are the brave stars of this pretty but sterile adaptation of the Anton Chekhov stage classic.

Too ludicrous to be taken seriously, but not entertaining enough to rate as camp.

Big, opulent and frequently wretched, Pinocchio is so bad that its American distributor, Miramax, opened it on Christmas Day with scant advertising and no advance press screening.

Never comes alive.

A lot of the acting is amateurish, and most of the plot feels like a rehash of a rehash. The music, written and performed in the spirit of L7, is small consolation.

A white-trash burlesque that springs from the notion that people chasing each other in cars and doing stupid things in motels are inherently funny.

It's a perfect fit for Williams -- a hunk of slapstick, a dose of schmaltz -- and yet he can't save the film, which is overproduced, mechanical and resoundingly unfunny.

The movie is stiff and schmaltzy and clumsily directed.

The few bright moments in Housesitter are supplied by Martin, who works himself into a sweat trying to make this movie work -- he even squeezes laughs out of a wedding reception scene, when he warbles an Irish melody to his dad -- and by Moffat and Harris, who give their Norman Rockwell stick figures a bumbling, simple charm. [12 June 1992, p.D1]

A self-indulgent mess.

Cynical to an extreme, it doesn't illustrate its points but blasts them at us -- in italics, boldface and capital letters.

Instead of defining and spoofing its period, its attitude and its social barometer, Leave It to Beaver just stumbles about in a bland, irony-deprived suburbia that denies the movie any juice or bite and renders the Cleaver family even duller than it was.

Boyle isn't the first British or European filmmaker to make his obligatory zesty American road movie (apparently it's a dream for anyone raised on American cinema), but knowing that doesn't make A Life Less Ordinary any less tiring or its numerous pilferings any less obvious or annoying.

That's a few too many agendas for one film.

It's a sad sight when two big- name stars sink this low, especially when their demoralization and embarrassment are right up on the screen. [24 Aug 1991, p.C3]

In a movie as hackneyed and as dull as Evolution, the small favors of Duchovny's performance stand out.

Hollywood hit-making at its efficient, formulaic worst.

Numbing.

A glob of comedy, drama, action and suspense.

This is trash on a big budget, but trash nonetheless.

Dredges up every cliche about druggy, obnoxious dreamers on the fringes of Hollywood and assumes that said cliches have the power to shock and surprise.

What is meant to be brave comes off as gimmicky and immature.

Crooklyn is loud and raucous and occasionally cruel. The actors shout their dialogue, the kids trade insults and the movie has the strained, desperate-for-fun anxiety of a TV sitcom. [13 May 1994, p.C1]

A wildly implausible thriller.

They try to make Beverly adorable, and the movie comes off strained and dishonest as a result.

Cheesy.

Self-serious, pointless and silly.

This is a sloppy hash of a movie, poorly directed and plotted in a way that looks as if it were improvised on the spot.

Knows its audience and doesn't stint on the flatulence jokes, poop jokes, leg-humping dogs and moments of homo-panic.

It isn't simple bad taste that Formula 51 deals in, but a total vacuum of feeling.

Numbskull entertainment.

A half-baked disappointment...never flies, never comes close to meeting its own expectations.

Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty draw everything in simplistic, overstated terms. The good guys are pure and spunky, the bad guys bellicose and one-dimensional, the conflicts stripped of nuance.

Might be a blast of ridiculous fun -- the way truly bad movies tend to be -- if it weren't so noxious and reprehensible.

It's a bitter pill to swallow, featuring a quartet of unsympathetic characters and an unrelenting air of misanthropy.

Dreadful teen comedy with a "Cinderella" theme.

The Thing Called Love should have been a nice, middle-key romance, with a few gentle digs at Nashville's fevered, wildly competitive country-music scene. Instead, it's a hapless, well-intentioned mess -- running in half a dozen directions at once, looking half-planned and semi-improvised, and featuring a skittish, overly mannered performance by Phoenix. [16 March 1994, p.E1]

In concept alone, Ravenous is anything but appetizing, but in execution it's worse than you'd imagine.

Feels so moldy and out of date.

Nasty to women, cruel to old people and tosses in a cardboard gay couple for gratuitous laughs. It's also got one of those annoying soundtracks that lays rock music right over the dialogue -- as if it wanted to distract us from it.

It's impossible to imagine why Lions Gate, the indie distributor that released "Monster's Ball," would bother with this garbage.