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.