Jack Mathews

Billed as an action thriller, it plays out as an urban-fairy tale version of "Bonnie and Clyde," with an ending suitable for a Harlequin romance.

A giddy black comedy about a homicidal housekeeper in rural England, is a hilarious reminder of that 1944 Frank Capra classic about two old maids whose cellar is cluttered with the bodies of would-be suitors.

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.

This epic tale of survival, love and adjustment covers a 59-year period - from 1910, when a band of urban émigrés arrives to start a settlement, to 1969, when only one of them remains.

This year’s foreign language Oscar scandal – there is always at least one – is the snub of director Cristian Mungiu’s disturbing, masterful realist drama following two college roommates as they carry out plans for one’s black market abortion in Communist Romania.

Turner's guileless amateurism stands in refreshing contrast to the rest of the performances -- stilted, self-conscious and sleep-inducing -- that fill this tedious 3-1/2-hour marathon, the Civil War in real time.

The very thought of humanizing Hitler makes me queasy. If he had a good side, I don't want to know about it.

No actress of her generation inhabits characters as thoroughly and convincingly as she (Streep) does, and this performance carries the movie

We're left with virtually no insight into the appeal of a movement that lasted 30 years.

In the year of the animated movie, this one soars above them all.

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

I don't mean to demean it; it's smart, inventive and well-crafted. But as a feature film, it's a novelty item at best.

For a much better film about a similar story, rent "The World's Fastest Indian," with Anthony Hopkins on a motorcycle.

A great big sloppy kiss of entertainment for audiences weary of explosions, CGI effects and sequels, sequels, sequels.

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

Italian actress, writer and director Asia Argento's performance in the godawful Scarlet Diva is one of those bawl, spit, scream and vomit exhibitions that provoke admiring applause in acting classes and great gales of laughter in theaters.

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.

It takes a while to get used to the film's campy characters and its broad, "Ace Ventura" stylings. But Ferrell is the anti-Jim Carrey -- his deadpan comic mannerisms are infectiously funny, and his cluelessly narcissistic Burgundy is a joy to follow.

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]

Left-wing flame-thrower Robert Greenwald (Uncovered: The War on Iraq) gets after the global giant anyway, and he may have you thinking twice before entering another Wal-Mart parking lot.

Larry offers enough scatological humor to fertilize the wheat fields in the star's home state of Nebraska.

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

Clever, compelling, funny and unpredictable, and it has a lollapa-looza of an ending.

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.

Oddest-of-the-year romantic comedy.

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.

A record number of movie cliches are strung together for the otherwise forgettable boot-camp drama Annapolis.

This, the 10th and worst-written entry in the series, would have been better if it had followed Dreyfuss instead of Clouseau, or if Kline had been cast as Clouseau instead of Martin.

While it won't rival the Harry Potter movies as a cultural milestone, the luminous, irresistible Stardust is no less industrious at scavenging myths and legends and making something altogether new from the familiar pickings.

Possibly the worst idea for a movie this century.

It's often maddening, because of its structure, and some of its visuals are pretentious nonsense. But, as a story of undying love, it's certainly unique.

The film makes you squirm as well as empathize, but it does need narration.

September Dawn, written by an evangelical Christian, may be the worst historical drama ever made.

The standout in the cast is James Todd Smith, whose acting talent may soon persuade him to shed his adolescent stage name of LL Cool J and concentrate on mainstream film roles.

Good, clean fun, and the view is fabulous.

It's no Runaway success, but Gere and Roberts still glow.

Though Borat has been likened to "Jackass," there's a huge difference. The "Jackass" movies are about extreme stunts. Borat is about interaction and gullibility, and its success is unique to both Cohen and to this one-time-only movie.

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.

More than a bad movie, it's an anti-movie.

In Crazy Love, friends of Burt and Linda express as much confusion over their relationship as we feel, and the Pugaches themselves make an unconvincing case for theirs being a love that conquered all. On the contrary, love doesn't seem to have had anything to do with them. She married him out of desperation, and he pursued her out of a sense of entitlement.

This is a "What were they thinking?"-size disaster, with the wrong actors in the wrong roles in a project that had no reason to be remade in the USA.

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

Far from the smart historical epic some might have expected, is just another feisty summer shoot-'em-up.

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.

Ishii instills this unpleasantness with some Hitchcockian black humor.

The story itself is a smooth little gem.

A ponderously slow experience.

The playfulness evident in the hundreds of bondage photos that made a pious young Tennessee model semi-famous in the 1950s and an 82-year-old legend today is also the driving force of Mary Harron's superb The Notorious Bettie Page.

a despairing movie that you can't look away from, though you'll wish you could.

Ale's community is like a band of pirates - collegial, bickering, larcenous and supportive - and his life within it is both heartening and heartbreaking.

A slice of life in the most profound sense.

Warner Bros. quietly releases Hiller's latest film, Carpool, without advance critics screenings, without more than a whisper of promotion, without warning or apology to the lost souls who might wander in to see it.

Some of this is elemental psychology; blood is thicker than water, etc. But the movie also reveals how the privileged class ignored, condoned or denied the reality of the Holocaust.

The Exorcist is still shocking, but mostly because of its graphic, anti-religious language. [2000 re-release]

Typical of road comedies, it's a pastiche of sketches.

A charming trifle, beautifully filmed in a Currier & Ives setting, with buttery-smooth performances from Binoche and Depp, and enough good tidings in its nougat center to get you through the holidays.

Asylum is as dark as Dracula's mood on a moonless night, and people suffering from depression should think twice before opening the coffin. This thing would put off Mary Poppins.

As movie fiction, I guess it is entertaining enough.

Ray and his writers found plenty of material to fill Cooper's capable hands. They've turned what must have been a tedious investigation into a sharp cat-and-mouse game between Hanssen and Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe).

The individual scenes are just random, uninspired riffs by Carvey or awkwardly flat cameos by the likes of Jesse Ventura and Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson.

Until he was shot to death in 2000, Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique was a lone voice for truth and freedom in his politically riven country.

Both frustrating and instructive.

Sensational...as authentic as news footage, and far more intimate.

The time-warp romantic fantasy The Lake House is a puzzle that is maddeningly obtuse, emotionally overstretched, and virtually absent a sense of interior logic.

A captivating piece of visual wizardry. The house, which eventually frees itself from its moorings and chases after our trio of tweener heroes, is a genuine original.

Like Stone in "Basic Instinct," van Houten has an audacity to match Verhoeven's. Hers is a role that Bette Davis would have killed Ingrid Bergman for, and she is so good in it that it seems only a matter of time before she'll star in a real Hollywood movie - as opposed to this pretender.

So much is so good about The Recruit that you'll wish the ending were better. It's like opening the last lid in a Chinese box and having a clown figure pop out on a spring.

With echoes of "Dave," in which Kevin Kline takes over for the comatose U.S. President he resembles, Kristoffer begins to feel the power given to him and to make his own decisions, leading to some hilarious situations and an unpredictable ending.

Their ultimate success is a classic victory for the little guy.

The result, at best, is a sweet failure.

Stamp, whose ability to make Wilson simultaneously coarse and charismatic is irresistibly entertaining.

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.

Eric Steel's documentary has more than a whiff of exploitation about it.

Written to skewer the upper class of its time, the script is now just a broad joke-fest, clever lines batted back and forth like badminton shuttlecocks.

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.

Fonda's performance is a perfect storm of histrionics, and she leaves nothing and no one standing.

Frankly, after watching writer-director Timur Bekmambetov's grim fantasy - the first leg of a trilogy adapted from the sci-fi novels of Sergei Lukyanenko - I'm still a little confused.

The actresses create wonderfully rich characters, and Luis Callejo, as Caye's unknowing boyfriend Manuel, and Antonio Durán, as the sadistic civil servant, fill out the very strong cast.

Often tedious, sometimes fascinating anthology.

A metaphysical shaggy-dog story, whose unpredictable punchline is its only redeeming feature.

The worst performance in a film that diminishes even the talented Stockard Channing is given by Allen. He's never written a more unpleasant, vapid or irredeemable character for himself, and he makes it worse by overplaying.

What Andersen does best is capture the sense of growing up and living among the landmarks of Hollywood's authentic back lot.

What keeps the film from becoming obnoxiously redundant is the conviviality of the comedians. These are funny people even when they're not telling the joke.

Wells' vision of the distant future is cartoonishly simplistic without the subtext of British class consciousness that informed the novel.

In a sad twist of technological birth and infanticide, General Motors - with assists from the oil industry, the Bush administration, cowardly California energy officials and apathetic consumers - doomed the future car to the literal scrap heap of history.

The successful bits, along with an amiable cast of losers and their prom-night prey, make American Pie a winner.

If it weren't based on a true story, you might suspect Sydney McCartney's A Love Divided was created by a panel of militant Irish Protestants.

Most of the film is way too goofy for all but the most thumbstruck Hitchhiker.

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.

The Specialist allows Eichmann to convict himself, not of complicity in the Holocaust -- to that he pleads guilty, by reason of nationalism -- but as a man unfazed by his own inhumanity.

I watched A Good Woman with a fixed smile frequently interrupted by giggles, but I didn't believe a second of it.

There isn't a flicker of chemistry between these old pros in Andre Techine's peculiar melodrama.

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

At times, the giddy tone makes it feel like a musical set on the eve of Pearl Harbor, but the acting is uniformly good and it's an absolutely gorgeous film to watch.