Jack Mathews

With each succeeding picture, Linklater seemed to grow as a filmmaker, just as his characters became more defined and developed. But with his fourth picture, subUrbia, he takes two giant steps backward.

There weren't enough good laughs for me to recommend it to anyone other than the most devoted Beanheads.

Casting Williams in this thriller, adapted from Armistead Maupin's novel, was a bigger mistake than the actor's performance.

The Coen brothers might have pulled this off, but it's out of Allen's faltering reach.

Billed as the first film to go from conception to the big screen within the Sundance program, Dopamine is an amiably slight independent film that probably should have gone directly to the Sundance Channel.

The writers, and director Miller, an MTV veteran making his feature debut, are never able to mesh the film's contradictory tones. [11 Dec 1998, p.F14]

Might have worked as a sex comedy, certainly as porn. But as a suspense thriller, it's creepy for all the wrong reasons.

A claustrophobic psychodrama.

It's a good thing Jaume Serra's House of Wax wasn't shot in 3-D like the original 1953 horror classic - Paris Hilton is in it and she doesn't have a third dimension.

Where's the levity, you ask? There is none, or rather, there is none that Manuel can perceive.

Tamahori attempts to cover the ludicrousness of the story with a wickedly fast pace and sensational action set pieces. And in a film more than an hour and half long, events do whiz by.

If you feel anything other than admiration for its craftsmanship, let me know; The Good German is as emotionally cold and unconvincing as any movie I've seen this year.

the director works way too hard to cover his tracks, and the resolution is a disappointment - if you get it at all.

There's great music and lovely settings, but the filmmakers have done little more with their subject than reiterate the Britannica's description of her.

Banderas has some very effective moments, but in his emotional scenes, Cristofer has him screaming his lines into Jolie's face with such a spritzing fury, she might have filed a union grievance.

A black comedy that some viewers may take as an assault. The disconnect between the realism of its violence and the near-slapstick tone of some of its comedy is too much to be framed within one movie.

Often tedious, sometimes fascinating anthology.

The Last Time feels like a script that was written backwards, as if the twist ending occurred to Caleo first and he then filled out a story to get to it. Fair enough, except getting there in this case is just no fun.

Goldblum, who has made psychological confusion his actor's stock-in-trade, gives Nolan's behavior just enough credibility to keep his quest alive for us, and Heche gives a delightfully unaffected performance as Lucy.

Evening is a case study in how a subtly evocative book can elude the most well-intentioned filmmakers and some of our finest actors.

Has many of the qualities that made the actor such a great target for self-parody in Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich" - it's sober, deliberate, self-consciously mysterious and no fun at all.

Essentially conversations, confrontations, and an extremely pat -- and very verbal -- reconciliation.

Sitting through the film is punishing work. The jittery closeups create a response that is more physical (I'm thinking nausea) than emotional, and there are no respites.

In trying to disguise his themes within the structure of a noir thriller, Parker was simply more successful at fooling himself than us.

When the producers of Eros, a triptych of short stories about eroticism and desire, described what they wanted from Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai, American Steven Soderbergh and Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni, they must have written the memo in Chinese. Only Wong attempted something sensual.

The movie turns into something strange and annoying, an attempted blend of a suburban thriller with an Old West shoot-'em-up.

Dunst makes Davies the most confident and interesting person aboard the Oneida and makes this voyage almost, but not quite, worth taking.

Cats Don’t Dance treads this territory with a whimsy that will be over the heads of young kids and too unimaginative for adults.

There is one good, legitimate scare in Robert Zemeckis' quasi-ghost thriller What Lies Beneath, and that's just not enough for a movie that lasts more than two hours.

It's never a good thing to notice that the actors in a movie are having a better time than you are. It's so unfair. They're paid to work, you're paying for fun.

Directed with his usual flair for the obvious by Dennis Dugan ("The Benchwarmers), "Chuck and Larry" has the nowness factor of a Polish joke. Does anybody laugh at this stuff anymore?

The movie has a terrible premise compounded by a lame script and the miscasting of its surfeit of talented stars. You have to wonder why Dobkin, whose last film was the hilariously raunchy "Wedding Crashers," would be attracted to this tame material.

A pretty run-of-the-mill B suspense movie.

Finally, you get down to the music, which is easy to take for the first hour, before it starts doubling and tripling back on itself, in an unnerving and seemingly unending spiral of repetition.

Gerry isn't much of anything, and doesn't claim to be. It's a movie stripped of its movieness.

The themes are about the power and consequences of sex, but the stories are too glib and episodic to leave any impression.

Like a lost recording by the Beatles, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo arrives with its feet planted firmly in the past, a reminder of a time when Stallone, Chuck Norris and other wooden soldiers of the big screen filled multiplexes with the floor-shaking thunder of trivialized war.

The movie includes a postscript about her (McKinney's) loss, blaming it on more dirty tricks. That may be true, but it doesn't put the steam back in the film.

Beautifully shot but overly spare documentary.

The cat-and-mouse game between the patient and doctor and the coy is-he-or-isn't-he? game being played on us by the filmmakers becomes tiring.

Awkward, unconvincing bisexual roundelay.

Failures on the scale of writer-director Steven Zaillian's All the King's Men are as rare as falling sequoias, and they make a noise even if no one's in the woods to hear them. This sequoia is very noisy indeed.

The second half, picking up 10 years after Eddie was institutionalized, is pure screwball comedy. It's as if Cassavetes had written the first half for himself to direct, and the second for Carl Reiner. [29 Aug 1997, p.F10]

The film's biggest problem is its psychologically false ending. Having created a complex relationship, Anselmo seems to throw up his hands at the end and admit he doesn't have a clue about how to resolve it.

Among the year's biggest disappointments.

That final night of competition is exciting stuff, capped by a heroic victory ride, but this is otherwise a plodding feature about decent young people in a rough-and-tumble sport that makes you wonder how many IQ points they have being bucked around inside their heads.

While I understand Vergès' oft-repeated claim that he wants to use these sensational cases to point out that the French were no better than the Nazis in their treatment of colonial subjects, it's impossible to overlook his glib dismissal of his clients' crimes and the smug righteousness that rests in the smirk constantly on his face.

The characters she (Ephron) invents are not very interesting, and aside from the always reliable Travolta, the performances are uniformly aligned.

Besides repeating his premise that only fools fall in love and deserve whatever circle of hell they enter for it, he seems to really believe that morality has no place in art. Certainly, he's keeping it out of his.

Mostly, though, Hayek's problem is one of physical miscasting. She's so tiny next to the tall, rotund Molina that she looks like child in their scenes together. And despite a fake caterpillar brow, she's just not believable as a woman bemoaning her disfigurements.

A tale of love, desperation and conspiratorial madness, comes off on the big screen as a wacky psychological snow job.

Soft porn for people who like to watch - and want to be punished for it.

No one makes something out of nothing like the French, and in this wispy tale about a jilted middle-age man and the very young housekeeper who briefly lights up his life, writer-director Claude Berri's got plenty of nothing.

Farrell, adding to the case for his impending stardom, locks into his role with the laser precision of the sniper's rifle scope.

Looks stunning, but it's an ill-conceived mess that plays like two movies awkwardly spliced together. In one movie, parents are asked to stand by while the kids are entertained with cute animal tricks and slapstick pratfalls. In the other, the kids will be hushed while the parents are treated to inside jokes.

A combination ghost and shaggy dog story that is so well-made and acted you can nearly overlook its murky, unsatisfying ending.

Watching Garry Marshall's Raising Helen is like eating a box of Forrest Gump's chocolates. You may not know exactly what you're going to get, but you can count on a high sugar content.

Trying to resist Reese is like trying to resist Reese's Pieces: They're always the same but you can't help yourself.

There are a couple of surprises in the I-can't-believe-they're-doing-this vein, but mostly, "Pie 3" is an aimless charade of doggy poo, latex breasts and really, really bad language.

For Kidman, it is a one-note performance dictated by the script. Leigh had more dimension to work with and gives the film's most honest performance. Meanwhile, Black, whose job is mostly to deliver comic relief, is completely lost - that is to say, not funny - in the material.

Posey is as over-the-top as a drunk in a game of charades, while DeVito wears the sunny, slavering grin of an old coot hoping to get lucky at Jack Nicholson's pool party. If it still sounds like fun, good luck. Don't blame me if you leave frustrated.

Other than the terribly miscast Posey, the cast is solid, with Dukakis wrenching the heart as a mother tested to the max by her son's request. But the movie didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.

The material here, written by Ehren Kruger, is beneath banal, and the three leads are so miscast that it's like watching a dress charade.

It's not honest, and it's certainly no solution.

An underdevelopment of a bad idea that is entertaining, so far as it is, because of McDormand's totally unselfconscious performance. This wonderful actress is never less than interesting, and even as a caricature of a stereotype, she's fun to watch.

Fear, thanks mostly to Foley's stylish direction and a couple of strong performances, is a much better movie than "Whispers," but those familiar with the formula will get no major surprises. [12 Apr 1996]

I've laughed harder during a single "Road Runner" cartoon than I did throughout Back in Action.

In writer Josh Friedman and director Brian de Palma's attempts to condense the book's convulsively odd final chapters, they've created an even loonier melodrama.

A string of sketches. Some are better than others -- or, at least, less bad -- but they exist as extended, stand-alone jokes within an enveloping framework.

It's that rare movie that had me wishing I was at the opera.

What sticks is a colorful, mesmerizing, at times breathtaking mess - it's like watching a bonfire on acid - and what slides to the floor is, well, you probably don't want to know.

You have to look at the earlier film to understand where the Coen brothers went wrong - terribly, noisily, annoyingly wrong. They've made a broad comedy out of a black comedy and completely lost its charm in the process.

You don't have to be a Muslim, or a humorless person of any persuasion, to find Brooks' performance excruciating.

Dispiriting, unsubtle and unpleasant.

It takes chutzpah to title this movie Déjà Vu; every scene in it rings a bell. Certainly, I had just seen the same affable-righteous performance from Washington in Spike Lee's "Inside Man."

One long camp joke, with vamped scenes strung together.

Herzog, who deadpans his way through the high jinks, is the best thing about the movie, but even he gets wearisome before Nessie has sunk the boat.

You can guess how it all ends, but getting there is a repetitious parade of put-downs and smackdowns that suggest you can't go home again - not when your mom's sleeping with a monster from your past.

James Siegel's best-selling thriller Derailed is a perfect commuter book that has become the most imperfect of movies.

The script gets so silly, the Monty Python troupe would reject it.

Only David Paymer -- and the actor formerly known as the singer Meat Loaf, playing Newman's suspicious neighbor, ring true.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped has nonetheless brought attention to a nearly lost classic. For more than two decades, "Fingers" was not available on video or DVD and was rarely screened. But it's available now, and if you've never seen it, put it on your must-rent list immediately.

The film is at its worst, however, when Daredevil takes over. That's partly because Affleck, a handsome fellow with possibly the most inert film presence of any actor since Sonny Tufts, looks ridiculous in Daredevil's red leather pantsuit and horned mask.

It's no wonder Sidney Lumet's Find Me Guilty had trouble finding a distributor. Its target audience is behind bars.

Luc Besson, a sort of French version of Steven Spielberg without the intuition, has tried a lot of genres in his young career and has had his greatest success with slick action films like "The Fifth Element" and "La Femme Nikita." Animated movies for kids he should stay away from.

There is a vengeance motif that is worked out in a way that is both emotionally satisfying and completely unbelievable.

In the expanding genre of quirky comedies, first-time writer-director Michael Clancy's messy, fitfully funny Eulogy is among the quirkiest.

As thin and wispy as a dream you can't quite remember in the morning, writer-director Jake Paltrow's The Good Night wastes the ample comedy talent of Martin Freeman, turns his famous sister Gwyneth into a shrew, and makes you wish Danny DeVito had directed the movie instead of acting in it.

Despite four very strong performances, Closer is hard emotional work to sit through. It's impossible to empathize with either the viciously insecure Larry or the unscrupulous, childlike Dan.

If there was an iota of plausibility to any of this, we could forgive the film's greater leaps of imagination - all those break-ins of absurdly unprotected bastions of Western civilization. But this is not audience-participation suspense. All you can do is sit and watch, and wish there was more wonder.

Amen is propelled by a most dubious assumption -- Gerstein's belief that if the German people knew of the Holocaust, they'd stop it.

In A Lot Like Love, there is no doubt - nor suspense, nor depth.

The movie works best as a car's-eye travelogue of Jordan. And the three women might be good company on another, less stressful trip. Say to the Caribbean.

There's an inherent distance between movies and their audiences that -- combined with the distance between 9/11 and today's opening of the film -- The Guys can't bridge.

Like Schwarzenegger himself, it looks tired, and a little bored.

We Are Marshall is less a movie than a commemoration.

Deery's points are well-taken, but they would have been a lot better made if he hadn't taken so many easy shots at the church by demonizing its local authorities.

The movie is as unpleasant as its hero, and the film audience gets no more for its money than the customers at the Laughing Stock. Still, watching Whaley take Jimmy down his tortured path has some morbid appeal -- like a train wreck in progress.