Jack Mathews

Pure dumb fun -- horror slapstick that rudely parodies both the arterial violence of slasher films and the topless hedonism of the spring-break ritual.

Critics are inclined to describe the action in films like "XXX" and Lee Tamahori's sequel, XXX: State of the Union, as "cartoon violence." I'll resist doing that out of respect for cartoons.

When it comes to sports movies, there's nothing like the real thing, and there's never been anything quite as real as the documentary Murderball.

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.

A riveting story.

Seth, who played Nehru in the Oscar-winning "Gandhi," gives a subtly layered performance as a complex, tormented and very decent man in crisis.

Once you're past THOSE scenes, and come to know the context and characters involved, you'll find something both deeply humanist and emotionally complex.

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

He's not someone you may wish you'd known, but he's a fascinating street character.

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.

North Country may be a simplistic account of a hard-won battle, but it will have audiences cheering.

The action sequences that follow are routine to the point of monotony, involving chases through crowded streets and store fronts, a commandeered bus, a woman in peril, and so on. But Donner wisely devotes long spells in between to the evolving relationship between Jack and Eddie.

Dreadfully unfunny.

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.

A one-joke idea...wears itself out almost instantly.

Lost in La Mancha basically catches "Don Quixote" in free fall…It's our loss nonetheless. Gilliam is one of the great film fantasists of our age, and one expects he would have done Cervantes proud.

It's nonsense. Even when its big secret is revealed in the final moments, it adds up to nothing more than a dizzy, dark, hysterical waste of time.

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

Despite some emotional dips and a see-it-to-believe-it load of schmaltz at the end, The Bucket List is mostly a joy ride with good company, and the actors obviously were having a high time on their traveling boondoggle.

A "Ben-Hur"-size epic with beefcake, beauty, outsize heroes, flashy duels and epic battles. There are breathtaking vistas, taut political intrigues, dangerous romantic liaisons and one of the greatest wardrobes ever assembled for a costume drama.

The Stockholm syndrome, that strange psychological malady by which hostages bond emotionally with their captors, is the central theme in this intimate melodrama.

Newly minted celebrity couple Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston don't have many opportunities to demonstrate their romantic chemistry in Peyton Reed's funny, heart-wrenching The Break-Up, but they still give what may be the best performances of their careers.

Given the lousy singing of Kirsten Dunst in "Spider-Man" and Drew Barrymore in "Lucky You," it's nice to report that Fisk - Sissy Spacek's daughter - shows real talent performing two songs here.

This is likely the fastest-moving intentionally funny action movie ever made. It's as if the 21 Bond movies and four "Die Hards" had been distilled to remove their body fat (that is, character development, buildup, rest stops, etc.) and left us with only the killing and the punch lines.

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.

A breathtaking visual history of big wave surfing. This is vicarious daredevilry at its best.

Blakeney's script contains more hackneyed dialogue and misfired jokes per minute than would seem possible, and the result embarrasses every actor in it.

Powerful theater.

This documentary doesn't probe too deeply, and it presupposes that there is a general interest in Jeremy commensurate with his Q rating among the porn-renting public.

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.

Penn hasn't attempted much comedy since "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," but he's masterful here.

Clever as it is, Blood Simple is derivative and self-consciously stylized.

Stevens, an actor taking charge from the other side of the camera, and writer and co-star Breen are going for a romantic black farce, a darkly noble idea, but one that requires far more empathetic characters and funnier situations than they've created.

Chinese director Zhang Yimou has made some of the most beautiful movies of the last 20 years, and with his latest, Curse of the Golden Flower, he has also made one of the most deliciously nutty.

Darker than the shadow of death.

A confused, empty, only occasionally funny mess of a movie.

Excess Baggage, a scruffy romantic comedy about a despairing rich girl who hatches a kidnapping scheme to test her father's love, is an aimless waste, a star vehicle without a compass. It wants very much to be both funny and poignant, but is more often just noisy and pointless. [29Aug1997 Pg 14]

Fascinating, amusing and ultimately disturbing.

In these movies, it's always easy to figure out who's going to survive and make the killers cough up their own blood, but you still hope that the victims will go in the order of their performances -- worst actor first, etc. No such luck.

It's an interesting profile in self-destruction until the script becomes unhinged itself and has Laura doing things that are not so much outrageous as hilariously stupid.

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.

Coppola won't win any Oscars, but the movie is a contender for cinematography, costumes and production design, and it's a lock for Prettiest Pastries.

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.

Pure situation comedy, and it's still fresh enough to provoke laughs.

The biggest little movie of the year - and one of the best ever about the news media.

Sophie Scholl is the subject of a feature film that has earned an Oscar nomination for a Germany she would have loved to live in.

Despite all the violence that ensues, The Proposition is a psychological Western more in the mold of Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" than the John Ford films its stark cinematography resembles. It's about a good man, Stanley, who does bad things, and a bad man, Charlie, fighting his conscience.

The casting of Ferrell and Heder turns out to be inspired. The direction, by a pair of NYU grads who've only made TV commercials and two short films, is pitch-perfect. And - miraculously - the skating sequences are passably realistic.

Dublin-born Byrne and native New Yorker Linney...are both exceptional at depicting characters about to burst from inner turmoil, and Linney, in particular, is heartbreaking.

There isn't a moment of genuine suspense or tension in the film, and the paltry laughs are supplied not by Murphy but by Hardison, whose character, a lowlife Brooklyn habitue forcefully turned into the vampire's bug-eating sidekick, spends the entire movie moaning about his decomposing body and embarrassing the boss with his earthy patter. [27 Oct 1995, p.1]

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.

The choice made by Kevin Spacey in taking on the role of Quoyle in the film adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News nearly sinks it. But not quite.

A gripping, sometimes dramatic, sometimes annoying collection of jerky images and subjective impressions.

A movie-movie of the first rank.

Bacon's performance in "Saw" creator James Wan's laughably extreme revenge thriller Death Sentence is six degrees of ham.

As tawdry as this may seem, Bertolucci is not trying to one-up himself. He was 27 when the student riots occurred and very much a participant in a revolution that was both complex in its implications and naive in much of the behavior. He has caught that perfectly

The salvaging operations, and the scavenging of B-52 parts for retail recycling and junk art that seem to consume most of the film take it to tedium, and beyond.

A sumptuous feast for the eyes and an occasionally exhilarating stimulant to the heart. But beware my hearty: It will tie your rum-soaked brain in knots.

The Savages is a TV movie made for the big screen - and it needs the larger venue to accommodate the huge performances of its stars, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney.

By the time the credits roll and a disclaimer informs us that there may, in fact, be a lost gospel of Jesus and that it is being suppressed by the Church, all we can think to say is, "Ah, shaudup!"

Based on the true story of the first emperor of unified China, could be downsized and told as an American Western.

In the end, I don't know that Delirious has all that much to say about the fame game, but you'll laugh nonetheless.

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.

The movie is bookended by a powerful indictment of apartheid and a study of white guilt.

Showcased in 3,000 Miles are two of the longest, noisiest, bloodiest and most ludicrous shootouts ever staged.

It's too long, unnecessarily complicated and often silly, but Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is still the purest popcorn entertainment of the summer.

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.

Imagine that, instead of trying to solve his wife's murder, the amnesiac character in Christopher Nolan's "Memento" had gone on "50 First Dates." That comes close to describing French director Jean-Pierre Limosin's playfully sexy tale of memory lapse.

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.

Becomes a very conventional suspense film, replete with virtually every cliche of the genre, some used more than once.

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.

"Quantum Bull-Bleep" would be a more apt title for the conclusions that the movie draws, but one concept was a revelation to me. One of the scientists said it's a fact that a single object can be in two places at the same time. I guess that explains O.J.'s alibi.

Clearly meant as an endorsement of the Democratic presidential nominee's character.

This vapid '80 punk party reeks of 200 Cigarettes.

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

It's as harrowing as moviegoing gets.

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.

Hurt and Dancy are terrific in these roles, but the power of the movie is in the tension created by Caton-Jones on the same sites where this historical event unfolded.

Digital video is both the blessing and the curse of writer-director A. Dean Bell's well-conceived but underachieved What Alice Found.

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 strength of McKay's film is not in identifying a cultural period, but in giving voice to so many great theater people. Their passion is infectious, their stories are priceless and their humor is boundless.

The Cave looks pretty cool - if you're into stalagmites, stalactites and that sort of thing -and the action is nonstop once they're in the hole. Unfortunately, there are no reference points in the dark to let us know where everyone is in relation to each other and to the monsters, and, therefore, there's little suspense.

Hilariously funny, full of fang-popping scares, and guaranteed to increase travel by train.

I hated it, but I grant that it does tap into a vein of technological horror - the fear of the VCR! - that will have young videophiles chatting it up for weeks

If you can watch it without weeping over your own predicament, you'll see some serious talent bursting out.

The sole asset of "Bobby Long" is Johansson. Blossoming before our very eyes, she gives Pursy the combination of hope and determination that makes her journey worthwhile.

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

We never really learn what Lee thinks of this man, other than that he is worth every second of a 130-minute documentary.

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.

A remarkable and moving account of a part of the French experience that needs more remembering and less forgetting.

This is a riveting story about a man who for years moonlighted as an anonymous hangman while holding a day job as a wholesale grocery delivery man.