Emanuel Levy

Sachs commits a major error by deciding to center on Lincoln’s character, for John is a far more interesting, complex and disturbing personality.

A deliberately paced literary film that takes too long to build narrative momentum and explore its central dramatic conflicts.

Director Mark Christopher gives the picture a brisk pace and a colorful, party-like mood that makes the experience painless and sporadically even enjoyable.

With half a dozen roles to her credit, Portman is a natural performer who brings rough edges to any role she plays -- the movie is inconceivable without her.

Despite good acting from the entire cast, yarn is a bit dull and predictable, straining too hard to convey its spiritual message.

Despite recurrent narrative and dramatic problems, each of Bigelow's pics provides a visual treat, and this film is no exception.

Not an embarrassment, but it's not distinguished, either.

Inspired by the 1959 hit song, Dale Launer’s Love Potion No. 9 is a light-hearted one-joke romantic comedy that tries too hard to be cute. Glib humor and emphasis on “feel good” values aim squarely at the dating crowd and twentysomething couples. But lack of real wit and comic vitality, absence of star names and sluggish pace make pic less appealing than it might have been.

Schumacher takes a step in the right direction with Flawless, a small-scale, intimate serio-comedy.

A mediocre attempt to recapture the exuberance and candid portraiture of such high school movie classics as "American Graffiti," "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and "Dazed and Confused."

As a high-concept mating of two familiar genres, the police story and the supernatural thriller, "Fallen," Gregory Hoblit's sophomore effort, is a movie that might frustrate aficionados of both genres, despite some strong elements.

Unfortunately, Center Stage is directed and shot (by Geoffrey Simpson) in a way that doesn't let the audience feel the exhilarating pull of the dance world.

Despite the imaginative setup and the original sensibility, pic ultimately suffers from a slight, rather contrived narrative and a lack of secondary characters.

A pedestrian and gruesome, but never really scary, story of how the undead zombies interact with the living.

Occasionally biting but excessively melodramatic.

In actuality, however, what unfolds onscreen is a simplistic and obvious expose about the manipulative power of the news media that by now is so familiar that its cynical perspective is not likely to upset or provoke anyone.

Lacking the manipulative structure of "Speed," which shrewdly interspersed rousing set pieces throughout the story, Speed 2 is vastly uneven, trying in its second hour to recoup energy and compensate the audience for all the exposition of the initial reels.

Her (Foster's) performance is contained in a schmaltzy, ultra-elaborate, overly long production.

The stylistic devices used, which recall early Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky, get increasingly tedious, disrupting not only the sequence of events but also squelching audience sympathy for the protagonists.

Avid users of the videogame and Van Damme’s loyal fans may embrace the film out of curiosity, but this uninvolving movie will fail to achieve the results of the star’s last outings.

But Foster is unable to give the episodic, fragmented film a coherent feel; her prosaic, sometimes irritating picture proceeds scene by scene, with the requisite climaxes and anticlimaxes along the bumpy road.

Unfortunately, Wolman's flat direction accentuates the predictable course of his soft narrative.

A noisy, soulless, self-conscious pastiche that mixes elements of sci-fi, action-adventure and romance, then pours on a layer of comedy replete with Hollywood in-jokes.

Stuart Baird's new thriller is inferior to the Andrew Davis movie in every respect: script, acting, rhythm and even tech credits.

Meant to be an offbeat, darkly comic tale of a triangle of losers desperately clinging to their versions of the American dream, pic comes across as a charmless high-concept indie.

Intermittently funny movie. Almost every scene recreates or alludes to a Hollywood or foreign classic.

The material is slender, the characters not sufficiently engaging or eccentric for a feature-length movie.

The atmosphere is properly bizarre and in moments even scary, but there's no involving story or characters to sustain the feature-length narrative.

Though intermittently engaging and decently acted, the movie suffers from a repetitive format, with too many shifts in time that prove disruptive.

Gilliam's work is long on sensibility, short on sense.

The strongest dimensions of this self-conscious but centerless film are four sexy actresses parading in colorful costumes and Amy Vincent's radiant lensing, which makes the picture seem hipper than it is.

Not a bad picture, just utterly banal.

A shallow, only mildly entertaining satire

Part comedy, part family drama, part romance, part special-effects mystery-adventure, and not entirely satisfying on any of these levels, this hodgepodge suffers from the conflicting sensibilities of its three credited scripters: Robin Swicord, who has done good work before, Akiva Goldsman, who has not, and Adam Brooks.

So fractured and so awkwardly staged that end result is an uninvolving film that’s dramatically inert and artistically shapeless.

Gummo is personal, honest and raw, but it's also erratic, self-indulgent and full of ideas that are not fully explored. [8 Sept. 1997, p.80]

A slender story that's not particularly suspenseful or involving, resulting in a movie that's a feast to the eye but not much for the intellect.

Ferrara has made a film that's always visually arresting, but one that lacks emotional and dramatic sense -- a recurrent weakness in his work.

John Travolta's charismatic screen presence is the only element that propels Michael over its rough narrative spots and scattered direction.

Isn't even unintentionally funny enough to qualify as guilty pleasure a la "Valley of the Dolls."

This small-scale, chamber piece, which boasts good acting from Moore, Skarsgard and Fichtner, has a strong built-in appeal for women but may experience harder times in going beyond the specialized arthouse circuits due to the narrowly-scoped, undernourished script.

There's no particular reason to see this disappointingly trivial picture on the bigscreen.

Visually gratifying but dramatically weak, the film falls short of its aspiration to be a sweeping romantic epic.

A shamelessly sappy family meller that bears the schmaltzy sensibility of Nora Ephron.