Jack Mathews

In condensing Rusesabagina's story, George has undoubtedly overstated the specific dramatic moments; the movie has more cliff-hangers than the "Indiana Jones" series.

Isn't a movie as much as it is a feature-length screen test.

History as filtered through the faux-liberal prism of Hollywood's dream factory, and an insult, I believe, to the people who actually carried the fight and endured the pain for civil rights.

About the only plausible element in the entire movie is bratty Vanessa's loathing of "Aunt" Mona, whom she sees as a vacuous over-reacher.

One of the ugliest movies I've ever seen. Even though it occurs mostly in the dark, the open flesh wounds are both graphic and implausible.

Its characters are as entertainingly quirky as any he's given us before, and his familiar themes -- strangers in a strange land, lives reformed by chance encounters -- are played out with much higher stakes and with greater purpose.

It takes us about half the film to adjust to its quirkiness, and we leave the theater with both laughter cramps and the feeling that it should have been funnier a lot longer.

The naturalistic dialogue is a masterful bit of writing, credited to Linklater and his "Sunrise" co-writer Kim Krizan, as well as to the two stars.

One of the most skillful, mesmerizing, tense and satisfying time-warp thrillers ever made.

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.

Looks a lot like 1950s American gangster films -- particularly, John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle" -- but it's decidedly French in its sexual candor and moral laissez-faire.

Never graduates above the boneheaded.

The movie is dismally organized, his (Keys) interviews are shallow and uninformative, and the project has a whole lacks a strong point of view.

Mostly a lazy string of setups and sight gags, of tongue-in-cheek confrontations between the two stars that barely amount to sketches.

A bad Altman impression of the L.A. rock scene.

People unfamiliar with either man may think Altman is mocking Keillor and his 32-year-old radio program here. But, it is pure affection, and the movie is as much up-tempo, irresistible fun to watch as the show is to hear.

The incredibly moving post-9/11 drama Reign Over Me proves that behind the funny guy facades of former standup comedians Mike Binder and Adam Sandler are a pair of very serious talents.

The film is at its most compelling when the witnesses are telling their stories, and at its least in covering Pinochet's circuitous legal route to Britain's House of Lords.

The confusing time line of Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr's bizarre tale of sibling romance, murder and obsession is just one of its problems. The others are the romance, the murder and the obsession.

There's a reason filmmaking is considered a craft, and Hoge, a former teacher in a juvenile prison, cannot pull off what would be a tricky proposition for a skilled veteran.

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

Gere, who's credited with keeping the project alive for years, has never thrown himself quite so fully into a role, and Pellington tells the story without a hint of skepticism. I suppose he had no choice. If you're going to treat poppycock as history, you had better believe it.

Dalton, using a Scottish brogue coarse enough to take his tongue with it, is hootably bad, and Kathy Bates, playing Ma James, is pure ham.

With the exception of one masterfully choreographed - and improbably bloodless - martial-arts gang fight, the new version of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days is one of the lamest remakes of a classic film I've ever seen.

The story is fanciful, with grotesquely improbable twists involving the fictional Garrigan (James McAvoy) and one of the dictator's three wives (Kerry Washington). But as Amin, Forest Whitaker's command of the screen is so thorough, so frightening, so ripe with malice that you won't move in your seat for fear of catching his eye.

May be the best movie of the year.

Structurally, Love Actually is less like "Four Weddings" than it is "Scary Movie 3." ­Curtis throws every gag he can think of at the screen and the ones that don't stick, he throws again and again.

No better than whatever you might pick up while wearing a blindfold at Blockbuster, even if you happen to reach into a trash can.

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.

Del Toro ("Cronos") is a stylish horrormeister, and he has created an evocative, foreboding atmosphere. But only a fan of this kind of mayhem could find a way into the story.

It's a romantic comedy, though neither funny nor romantic. It's a ghost story, though not scary. It's a satire about publishing, but without teeth.

The upbeat brothers are full of sweetness and love, but the script is made of taffy, and if you can chew and laugh at the same time, you're welcome to it.

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.

Exploits and trivializes public anxiety for entertainment and commercial gain. They've been doing it for years. But this little piggie didn't get to the market in time.

Ken Liotti's script barely earns a C+.

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

A charmer, a comedy with drama -- or vice versa.

As the latest in a never-ending chain of thrillers about young people lost and dying in a hostile land, John Stockwell's Turistas at least offers the visual benefits of exotic settings and a cast of barely clad hardbodies.

A fascinating contrast in lifestyles.

Hand-held cameras give their surface showbiz relationship a sense of immediacy that, like love itself, has more than a hint of danger.

As a conventional drama, Rent would be a pretty corny soap opera. As filmed theater, it's only slightly more con­vincing. The saving graces - and there are many - are Larson's original songs and the comfortable fit of its ensemble cast.

Ron Shelton's boxing pic is long on road work but strictly a flyweight.

Much of the film is sub-sophomoric, but Campbell and Davis give hilarious deadpan performances.

A mostly accomplished first film, with precise comic timing and some hilarious moments.

An early and daunting contender for worst movie of the year, writer-director Irving Schwartz's amateurish melodrama stars a hollow-eyed Piper Perabo as a self-loathing young woman who has every reason to hate herself.

Princess is far more contemplative than "Run Lola Run," far less energized, and the little tricks of fate that made his last film so unique seem like sophomoric affectations here.

A dazzlingly original visual adventure.

I wouldn't recommend the movie to anyone, but if the families of the victims take something positive from it, as their cooperation with Greengrass suggests they do, that's justification enough.

It is driven by the finely expressed -- if nearly mute -- performance of Lemercier. We learn a lot about this woman and her emotional state from Lemercier's subtle body language. As for Lindon's Jean, well, it's enough that he's there and doesn't require batteries.

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.

This is an execrable movie depicting the improbable events in the life of a young boy being intermittently raised by his crackhead, highway-hookin' mom (actress-director Asia Argento, with a face that makes Courtney Love's mug shot look glamorous), her plumb-nuts evangelical parents and a cartoonishly incompetent West Virginia social system.

The best performance comes from Venora.

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

This is a family movie in the best sense; it plays to children without talking down and to their parents without pandering. Mostly, it's just good fun.

Other than a tortured apology from Bill Clinton for having misunderstood the gravity of the situation, there isn't a peep of remorse heard from the normally sanctimonious West. And Dellaire's final bit of self-abuse is to blame himself for his failure to shame the world to action.

The first of three planned remakes of Dutch films by the late Theo van Gogh, Steve Buscemi's Interview takes the most unnatural act in human intercourse - the celebrity interview - and makes an explosively funny two-character psychodrama out of it.

On one level, Microcosmos is the strangest act of voyeurism ever recorded, with bugs caught au naturel, eating, working, metamorphosing. We're even treated to a steamy scene of unexpurgated snail sex. When this couple gets together, it redefines intimacy and stick-to-itiveness. On another level, the film is a spectacle and celebration of life, in all its phases. [11 Oct 1996, p.F15]

This is as bitter and despairing an exploration of the human spirit as any of Bergman's films, and it is just as vibrantly written and directed.

Any opportunity to see Pete Seeger perform, even at age 85, is worth taking - and Seeger is front, center and full-throated in Jim Brown's concert film.

As a sign of how stubborn some irrational religious traditions can be, Hindu protesters forced Mehta to close down her Indian location and finish the film in neighboring Sri Lanka.

Eisenheim's storybook romance with aristocrat Sophie (Jessica Biel), the childhood sweetheart now expected to become Leopold's princess, is the most compelling thing about a film that should dazzle the eye as much as stir the heart. It does not dazzle.

It's hard to get a fix on what Hallstrom had in mind. The first half of the movie plays like a frenetic caper comedy...The second half turns psychologically dark.

The Macao settings are beautifully rendered, and the dark humor is often very funny. But it is noisy.

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.

There is no turning back; the biggest project in China since the Great Wall and the Grand Canal has claimed its human cost and now must prove its own worth. -

Of this much I'm sure: It's an awful movie.

This is good clean fun, with or without the soap, and one of the most spirited entries of the season.

Takes the worst and most annoying elements of the first film and treats them like grand assets.

Greenebaum's tedious, film-school level exercise in self-indulgence and exploitation.

As a film, The Score may not add up to much, but take it apart and it's something to see.

Insipid, self-indulgent bit of art-house macabre.

The most emotionally satisfying because, in addition to having both more intimate drama and more spectacular battles, it resolves all of the issues raised before.

Connelly's better-than-routine potboiler has a high-concept premise built for the movies, and it's the first of the former L.A. Times reporter's 11 crime novels to make the journey from bookshelf to big screen.

It provides the first genuine laughs I've had at the movies in this young year.

Thekind of misfire that makes you understand why every waiter, parking valet and sushi delivery boy in Beverly Hills has a screenplay under his waistband.

Dreamcatcher has no business being this bad.

The humor in de Heer's script is mostly anatomical, and the performances of the nonpro cast are stiffer than bark. But you've never seen anything like it.

By the end of Francois Gerard's plodding, uninvolving melodrama, his boredom will have nothing on yours.

The fourth documentary screed this summer to have grown out of the left's frustration with the nation's turn to the right. Keep 'em coming, I say.

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.

A tormented dramatization of the exact same events, and it's as bad as the earlier film ("Dogtown and Z-Boys") was good.

A powerful movie that should win all the year's ensemble acting awards. Pitt has never done better dramatic work, Blanchett is as convincing as always, and - in introducing themselves to American audiences - veteran Mexican actress Barraza and Japan's Kikuchi are revelations.

In Aniston's previous film roles, the "Friends" star has made little impression, but under the direction of the gifted young Arteta, she's certainly grown to fill the big screen here, and looks ready to leap from TV to film.

The characters are boring, the violence generic, the suspense nonexistent.

On paper, the "rising stars" of Meiert Avis' low-flying romantic comedy Undiscovered are Steven Strait and Pell James, but the real star is Tyson the Skateboarding Dog.

Crowe was going for something magical in all this, but the film is so affected and mannered, so preciously in love with itself, that it's painful to watch. Scenes go on and on, and when you think the movie's over, it goes on and on some more.

America's favorite superhero reappears in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns, and all we can say is, "Man, oh Man of Steel, it's good to have you back."

If you want an hour or so of terror, put your faith in Them.

Both a madcap comedy and a cautionary tale about the dangers of drug abuse. But it's not funny or smart enough to work as either one, let alone to strike a balance.

The film serves him well, replaying a few surviving recordings that make clear what a beautifully melodious voice he had and what a talent went wasted.

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.

A raucous gospel comedy that's as broad as co-star Beyonce Knowles' vowels and chockablock with foot-stomping, up-with-the-choir music that will have even atheists praising the Lord.

For sheer bravura film making, for creating a cartoon world with real air, flesh, blood and the exhilarating cycle of fear and escape, Dinosaur is tops.

Truly depressing commentary.

That there was no squirming among the kids at my screening may be the best recommendation of all.

Designed as a giant put-on, "Kiss Kiss" is so inside Hollywood, so anxious to bite the hand that fed Black, that it plays like an elaborate prank. Some of it is a lot of fun; most of it is a lot of nonsense.