Jack Mathews

Allen was out of his element in creating characters who feel like East Coast cousins of the Clampetts, and his dialogue has never been more banal or forced.

Despite the audience pandering -- not just in its violence, but in its wall-to-wall sexual vulgarity -- there are terrific elements in Baby Boy.

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.

It's in French with French actors, but its film noir sensibilities have a filtered Hollywood vibe about them. In other words, it's pretty much a mess.

Features some of the year's most beautiful scenery and two of its most wooden characters.

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

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

A guy flick, but I can't imagine many male viewers actually identifying with Elliot or his friends. The depression would be unbearable.

The World has a pokey pace, but it presents a uniquely powerful look at the new big kid in the global economy.

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.

Sillier than it is clever, and Toback's self-indulgence is tiresome. He's a genuine auteur, all right, but his life and the funky tastes that inspire him are just not as interesting as he thinks they are.

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

The source for Jieho Lee's The Air I Breathe is an ancient Chinese proverb about the four cornerstones of emotion - love, pleasure, happiness and sorrow. But Lee and co-writer Bob DeRosa went 0-4 with their convoluted screenplay, making me thankful they didn't try to adapt the Seven Deadly Sins.

Notre Musique is a cry against war and man's inherent needs for tribalism and violence, a position that wouldn't start a good argument in a college cafeteria.

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.

A vanity project by a moderately talented artist that has moments of real brilliance in it.

D.O.A.P. would be more effective, and more entertaining, if it took a cue from "Dr. Strangelove" and used Sterling Hayden's paranoid, quick-triggered Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper as the model for Cheney to get more outlandish behavior from him.

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 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.

Feels like a college knockoff of Billy Wilder's "The Apartment."

The result is a long night of confrontations that feel heavily rehearsed and unlikely. There are some good moments, but I didn't believe any of this.

Surely, this bloodthirsty comic farce about a sadistic backwoods family being hunted by a sadistic backwoods sheriff is the "Citizen Kane" of hix-ploitation horror.

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

The movie never really comes alive, and Crialese's coyness with Lucy's character is more frustrating than mysterious.

Earnest but ambling drama.

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.

Among the creepiest adult monologues you'll hear in a regular theater this year comes from Karen Young in Heading South, a well-acted but misguided tale of displaced sexual longing on the beaches of Baby Doc Duvalier's 1970s Haiti.

The intimate love story is overwhelmed by the carnage. It may be an accurate picture of life in Medellin, but it's not convincing.

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

It irks the ink out of me to see Lane exalted as a hero for doing what any responsible editor would do, then being paid to consult on his own canonization.

The Czech Republic and Russia, the respective homes of Emil and Oleg, should sue.

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

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."

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.

The joke is that the salesmen believe they're actually trying to discover talent and - like the people they're encouraging - are victims.

Have Marc's friends tricked him with a conspiracy of silence, or was that mustache a growth only in his mind? The filmmaker has said there is no intended meaning to any of this, so search for it for your own amusement.

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.

Clintonistas may want to look away when Carville and his colleagues lay out their political philosophy for Lozada, or, as he's affectionately known, "Gani." It's pragmatic in a way that defies the needs of the impoverished majority of Bolivians.

The play within the movie is much more entertaining.

The setting and circumstances of the war overwhelm the personal story and diminish the dilemma of the title character's love life.

Beware of movies whose creators boast of the little effort involved. Little reward is what you're likely to get.

Beautifully shot, and graced with another winning performance from the lovely Beart, Strayed nevertheless fails because the relationship between Odile and Yvan never makes us feel the sexual passion it implies.

Night at the Museum takes a can't-miss comedy premise and misses by a country mile.

Saga too arty for own good.

Miller takes Chekhov's themes and checks them off, but he never gets under his egocentric characters' thin skins.

To say Spike Lee is repeating himself is itself repetitious -- he is getting B-O-R-I-N-G!

Some people will want to call it pornography. In one respect, it's the opposite.

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.

Often tedious, sometimes fascinating anthology.

A claustrophobic psychodrama.

It is both inside-baseball and self-parody, exposing a world that is just as ruthless and shallow as we've been shown it is in films like "The Player" and "Permanent Midnight."

Tough, unsentimental British film.

Barely qualifies as a documentary. It's the personal journey of a man hoping to claim a million-dollar literary prize by proving that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare.

The film's overriding messages are of personal responsibility and redemption. If that is Villeneuve's objective, it's done as an insidious polemic. If not, it's guilty of an even greater sin: It's boring.

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.

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

The lone gem of the anthology takes place in the loft of a trendy L.A. restaurant where a snooty Steve Coogan learns from starstruck Alfred Molina that the actors are cousins...This is the longest of the shorts, and has a payoff ending that nearly makes the whole thing worthwhile.

George Bush supporters may think this dissection of the President's narrow and decisive 2004 election victory in Ohio is better than sex. But Democrats and Bush voters who have come to rue the day are more likely to compare it to losing the World Series on a seventh-game walkoff home run.

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.

There are some effective group scenes with Darius and Nina and their friends, but Witcher's dialogue and direction more often show the craft than the naturalism he's after. [14 Mar 1997, p.F1]

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

It was against all odds that Michael Mann ("The Insider") would make a boring movie focusing on the most eventful decade in the life of the most dynamic athlete in history. But that's what he has achieved with Ali.

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

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

The hand-held camera work gives the film an effective documentary pulse, but it adds up to only half a movie.

An improvement over "Jackpot," but not much. The best thing about it is Nolte, playing the grizzled priest as an angel in his own right. Everyone else- - save the young boy playing the orphan -- seems to be in on a joke we just don't get.

The laugh ratio in this run-on of skits is pretty low, at least to the unaltered mind of one who's seen enough of these films and eaten enough White Castle burgers to last a lifetime.

Wenham and Porter are appealing actors, and Teplitzky's depiction of their coupling has an unflinching realism.

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.

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

Dispiriting, unsubtle and unpleasant.

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.

A strange creature, a narcissistic mock documentary.

On stage, the attractive 34-year-old Silverman is very funny. She's too blue for Comedy Central, and too slow-paced for an HBO hour, but she'd come off better in either of those formats than she does in this mishmash.

The result is a gorgeous, third-person version of an extended family-vacation movie that the Piersons, their friends and their former Fijian neighbors can enjoy for years to come.

Undertow becomes unbearably imitative and predictable. It's a kids-in-peril B horror movie in the guise of an art film.

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

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.

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.

Danes' smart, fun, radiant and very attractive Mirabelle actually undermines the premise of the book

Theirs is an affair not worth remembering.

CSA is a sophomoric film essay that would have barely rated a passing grade from a tougher teacher.

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

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.

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

Ultimately about the indomitability of faith, and the Christian symbolism is laid on thick. But the story, adapted from a famous behind-the-Iron-Curtain novel, sheds light on a subject few people have known about.

From the beginning, Edmond is too self-absorbed for us to care much about his fate, but like the proverbial train wreck, you can't tear your eyes - or your ears - away from the spectacle.

What they say, mostly over black-and-white stills from his early career and meandering footage of desolate Mali, could be said in 10 minutes. The good news is that much of the remaining documentary is devoted to Kar Kar's elegant voice and exquisite guitar playing.

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.

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.

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 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.

Given the grim events, the buoyantly goofy An Amazing Couple has the effect of laughing gas pumped through the vents in a funeral hall.

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.

The script (written by Susan Minot from a story by Bertolucci) suffers from the same tired blood as his characters, and his direction is often ponderously self-conscious.

A bungled mess that spends an hour creating two characters whose lives are about as believable as a successful ambush set by Wile E. Coyote for the Roadrunner.

If I were in the sign business, I'd produce a bumper sticker that reads "Even smart people make dumb movies" -- and give the first one to David Mamet.

The subtitle of this interview/documentary about the late, great French photojournalist should be "For Collectors Only." There is no theme, no point, no history, no illuminating insights - it's just Bresson talking about his individual photos and early sketches.