Jack Mathews

Good, clean fun, and the view is fabulous.

But look up the word "slight" in the dictionary and you could find a still from this film.

Clearly, Caan's major influence is Quentin Tarantino, though he manages only a weak imitation. But give him credit for casting Kelly Lynch and Jeff Goldblum and letting them go.

It's hard not to like a movie so determined to make you feel the love of a family, to make you feel that every dream can become a reality and that every mortgage - no matter how close to foreclosure - can be rescued by the sudden death of a family member and his inheritance.

Thornton, directing his first film since the minimalist "Sling Blade" (1996), has a much better grip on the material when he's focused on the scruffy desert landscape and the adventures of the two Texans.

A sweetly hilarious romantic comedy about a soccer fan whose favorite pro team's unexpected success threatens to push him over the edge.

Ozpetek moves things along at a snail's pace and lays the sentiment down thickly. But it's a potent tale, wonderfully acted by Mezzogiorno and Massimo Girotti as the old man.

Ultimately, Eyes Wide Shut doesn't rank among Kubrick's best work.

If you're game for something different, it's worth a few giggles.

Cruise isn't horribly miscast, a la Tony Curtis in "The Son of Ali Baba" or John Wayne as Genghis Khan in "The Conqueror," but he doesn't miss by far.

The question is, can a Slovakian lawsuit against the filmmaker be far behind?

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

A strong, gritty, powerful piece of film making, and one of the three or four best movies made about the Vietnam era.

There are some clunky, juvenile jokes and an excess of shots to that special place on men that make us double over and weep. But there are some very funny, very hip jokes as well.

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.

I wanted more. I expected more. The filmmakers said it was going to be smart - really smart - like all of Lee's movies. Instead, it's big, dumb and fun.

Jovovich, Besson's 24-year-old ex-wife, hasn't a clue how to project shadings, interior emotions, character or personality. Everything's in a full screech.

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

In the end, Weaver provides a moving and sensitive portrait of one person out of an estimated 400,000 in America with this mental disorder we are just beginning to understand.

Everything about this political thriller is ridiculous.

It took one novelist, one screenwriter and two directors - Scott McGehee and David Siegel - to cobble together this earnest nonsense, and if it weren't for 12-year-old novice Flora Cross, who plays its central character, all would be lost.

Buscemi's latest, Lonesome Jim, written by James C. Strouse, asks you to spend 91 minutes with a 30-year-old slacker and would-be writer who has the DNA of a sloth. "Slowsome Jim" is more like it.

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.

The question is not whether the movie exactly duplicates the experience of the book, but whether the movie stands on its own. Angela's Ashes clearly does.

If you're in the mood for a horror movie, this ought to do you.

The overall effect of Lucas' digital mania has been detrimental to the saga. Where the first trilogy was mythological fantasy, the second is pure cartoon. The sad truth is, the more three-dimensional they look, the more two-dimensional they are.

It's no small trick to blend fantasy, slapstick and genuine emotion, but Ellis pulls it off with whimsy to spare.

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.

Every potentially worthwhile or amusing moment in writer-director Brad Silberling's 10 Items or Less could be told in 10 minutes or less, with credits included.

But Allen can still write a good joke and there are some here. Not enough to say he has returned to form, but enough to remind you of what that form was.

Gets too caught up in its escalating violence and strained-to-bursting moral subtexts. It's the blood of souls drenching the screen, and it's a hideous sight to behold.

Awkward, unconvincing bisexual roundelay.

I'd never seen anything like it, and can say that I hope to never see anything like it again.

An amazing physical specimen, beautifully photographed and edited. If you think of it as your own opium dream, you may dismiss the lousy story as a mere side effect.

There's nothing new here, but Frank provides a genial reminder that politics doesn't always have to take the low road.

Slight Canadian coming-of-age drama.

What might have read as a dense allegory comparing the rituals of the super-rich with the tribal customs of the violent Ishkanani tribe in the Amazon becomes a tedious, over-ripe soap opera on screen.

Soft porn for people who like to watch - and want to be punished for it.

Ishii instills this unpleasantness with some Hitchcockian black humor.

If Mussolini had a Monica Bellucci to inspire his troops, we might still be trying to take Palermo.

Kempner demonstrates how the star's success and dignified bearing inspired a generation of Jews to fight through the ethnic barriers in all fields.

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

Gerry isn't much of anything, and doesn't claim to be. It's a movie stripped of its movieness.

Kids are going to adore looking at this movie, living in it, flying through and above its brilliant landscape. It's an animated joyride over a relief map of Manhattan. I just wish the script was as good as the paint.

Two hours of the worst sort of sentimental sap.

Who knew that Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno could be unlikable? And yet, there they are, grating on each other's nerves (and ours) as strandees at Charles De Gaulle airport.

I'm not sure the filmmakers - one, Harry Thomason, is a long-time Friend of Bill - have connected enough dots to prove a "vast" conspiracy. But that many people devoted much of their lives and resources to destroying Clinton is indisputable.

Funny and masterfully inventive.

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.

The performances are all solid, but Sheen, last seen as Tony Blair in "The Queen," is so good in his incredibly demanding role that he makes the natural discomfort people feel at seeing someone so debilitated disappear completely.

Trudy is really the only character with the "Barrytown" zest, and Montgomery throws herself into the role with unselfconscious abandon. She makes the screen crackle with energy.

A very clever update of the 16-year-old heroine, managing to make her seem both as square as the Bobbsey Twins and as contemporary as MySpace.

A sports movie for people who may not care about sports but can't resist a heart-tugging underdog story.

You have no idea how determined director Rich Cowan is to suck the last drop of sap out of this tree.

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

Lucky Number Slevin would be too clever for its own good if it weren't so ... darn clever. This violent flick is not in the same league as "The Sting," which has my vote for the cleverest winding road toward a happy ending in screenwriting history, but it contains nearly as deft a con job as that 1973 film.

If this were a more serious film, its cynicism about the U.S. government would put it in a league with "The Manchurian Candidate." But it is simply an Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick with bantamweight Wahlberg doing the heavy lifting for the preoccupied Governator.

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

So far beyond Bollywood, I think it's set in the suburbs of L.A.

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.

The movie crams in so many of the events and characters of Thack­eray's 900-page novel that the story often seems to be moving on fast-forward, pausing here and there to introduce a character, then skipping ahead — from London to the country to Brussels and on, eventually, to India.

There are terrific performances from Kline and Judd, some breathtaking staging and production design, and, of course, some of the best music and lyrics of the 20th century.

Desperate for a slice of Spanish soap opera? You might try this misguided romantic melodrama.

This is extremely dark and politically loaded material.

We Are Marshall is less a movie than a commemoration.

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

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.

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

Muppets From Space has its share of whimsical lines aimed over children's heads at their parents, but speaking for one parent whose kids are grown, it's not enough. [14 July 1999, p.36]

A curious entry in the current wave of raunchy youth comedies. It's refreshingly free of scatological humor, but even while aiming higher, it can't raise its focus above the belt.

Michael Corrente's Brooklyn Rules takes him to the mean streets of Gotti country, circa 1985, and it's another gem.

The 20 or so minutes we spend with the Albatross in the squall is high adventure, to be sure. Everything else is ballast.

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.

One of those bright ideas for a TV sketch that convinces someone it's too good to waste on the small screen. It's not.

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.

The script and the performances are all fine, but it's very slow going.

As dull and inert as the ink used to print the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that informed Mike Rich's script.

Doesn't so much crackle as pop. It has enough double entendres to fill a D-cup, but it has a premise that would have burned a hole in the screen in 1962, when its story is set.

A harmlessly cheery confection.

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.

Dumb fun is the best way to describe The Independent, and I mean that as a compliment.

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.

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.

The idea of Bean fitting into this situation, even disastrously, requires more than suspension of disbelief. It requires a full blackout of reasoning. But for the converted, and for people with a low threshold for visual comedy, Bean amounts to a hill of laughs.

As with all ensemble horror movies, your first challenge is to guess which of the Carter kin will survive to destroy the creatures killing them, and in what order the family members (and their pets) will fall.

Something less than a gem. It has a brilliant lead performance from Yuliya Vysotskaya as Janna.

Don't like archetypes? Wait till you meet the cliches.

A reasonable facsimile of a perversely funny book whose odd characters are given life by a terrific cast.

As urban gangster drama, Once in the Life is way below mundane, and Fishburne's direction exceeds the rookie jitters.

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.

A predictable outcome is not bad if it's fun getting to it. But this story is so lamely conceived and presented that it's a grind.

For those who go along with it, it's a crafty piece of work nonetheless, ending with a pair of marvelous twists. [16 Jan 1998, p.F1]

It's impossible not to be moved by its nearly nonstop visual assault.

While the football sequences are carefully constructed, the sensation we get from the blizzard of images and teeth-jarring sound effects is of having our head used as the football.

A personal documentary on a family member. The question is, who -- outside of friends and family -- would want to watch it? The answer...is ... beyond me.

Treu and screenwriter Jessica Barondes may not have their ears to the ground that's trod by real kids, but as they did with their previous film, "Wish Upon a Star," they're allowed to dream.

If you have seen the play, especially if you've seen it with the original cast, treasure the memory and protect it. The movie will attack it like a virus.

The sweetness of Nacho's nature, along with Black's unselfconscious physical enthusiasm, turn all this into a live-action cartoon, with the ring violence having no greater consequence than a Wile E. Coyote fall from a high place.

The movie is over in a breezy 112 minutes, but it may be another half-hour before your sides quit aching.

Ends up a portrait through a rose-colored lens, turning a social parasite into a Greek hero.

It's an intricate, at times incoherent, but often funny and consistently fascinating trio of stories with the same actors in different but related roles.

Oddly, it’s the bawdy silliness of “Dangerous Beauty,” and its jaw-dropping presumptions of Veronica’s liberated lifestyle, that makes the film occasionally entertaining. But it’s a movie without a consistent tone or creative vision.

Represents the year's biggest gamble - and it delivers the year's biggest and most ambitious fantasy.

The strength of Windtalkers is in its occasional, all-too-short respites from battle, when Enders is struggling with his demons and Yahzee is trying to understand his aloofness.

The movie falls apart toward the end as it enters "Eyes Wide Shut" territory, but until then, it's fun to see bookworms cast in the James Bond mode.

Mighty Joe Young may be the season's most appealing family bet. Certainly, it has an appealing cast.

With “Geronimo,” an honorable effort to right some wrongs done the Apache warrior in past movies, [Hill] seemed stifled by his commitment to history. And in “Wild Bill,” which he wants us to see as a psychological profile of a legend’s final days, he can’t for the life of him let go of the legend.

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.

It's a slight, old-fashioned B movie, the last thing you would expect from an actress coming off a breakout year, but it has a charm and freshness we don't see much these days.

A light-footed comedy that suggests that for even the most desperate, love is just around the corner.

Whoever wanders into the theater should leave a winner.

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.

Pretty much a road to nowhere.

Krabbe attempts to stuff too many themes and subplots into the story.

There is one good, legitimate scare in Robert Zemeckis' quasi-ghost thriller What Lies Beneath, and that's just not enough for a movie that lasts more than two hours.

Schrader's main interest is not in the mystery, per se, but in the political intrigue of incestuous Washington, where conflicts of interest are the norm and morality is indeed relative. The points are well-taken, but Harrelson's performance often gets in their way.

Wild West Show would have really been something if Vaughn had taken a few of his fellow Frat Packers with him - say, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Ben Stiller and Steve Carell - instead of the struggling unknowns.

I may be wrong, but I think Guy Pearce is wearing Nicole Kidman's false nose in The Hard Word. Whatever it is that's on his face, it looks like a dead cod and won't win him an Oscar.

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

The movie works best as a car's-eye travelogue of Jordan. And the three women might be good company on another, less stressful trip. Say to the Caribbean.

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.

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.

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

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

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]

In the end, Phantom needed more human and less digital scale. The magic of "Star Wars" lay in Lucas' ability to play the human comedy in a fantastic future. With Phantom, he has brought the series to the brink of total artificiality, the future as a video game.

The Spanish writers-directors often overreach for humor, and really overreach for a happy ending. But there's a strong heart beating beneath the foolishness and one wonderful performance from Leonor Watling.

There comes a time when the future looks old, and that's where "Star Trek" finds itself on the time-space continuum.

It's corny, plodding, implausible and - on occasion - seriously creepy. At the same time, it contains a couple of this movie year's most sublime sequences, and features one of Nicole Kidman's bravest and best performances.

An instant contender for cult status on the midnight-movie circuit, where lines like "Do we look like quantum wormhole specialists?" will be given the respect they deserve.

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

There aren't many better examples of how commercial intuition sabotages story integrity in today's Hollywood.

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.

The changes are meant to make it easier for audiences to accept Vincent's loyalty to Angelo and Joey, but they blunt the genetic mystery that made McAlary's story so compelling in the first place.

As a story, Burton's Planet of the Apes is more of a comic-book creation than either of his "Batman" movies.

For all its spiritual angst, Constantine is about as silly as fantasies get.

If you find a movie with a more annoying central performance than the one given by Brenda Blethyn in Cherie Nowlan's Introducing the Dwights, keep it to yourself.

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.

Save your breath, and your money.

Too long by about 20 minutes, and takes itself too seriously near the end. But if you're looking for a movie for a boys' night out, it's a winner.

Ultimately, Murder by Numbers has been reduced to a tease, giving us a hint -- mostly through the fine performances of Gosling, who creates a charismatic sociopath, and Pitt, who's character seems genuinely troubled -- of the kind of relevant social drama it might have been.

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.

Solondz's refusal to frame his dark, misanthropic impulses with an overriding point-of-view seems a cheap copout for a film whose title proposes that it's about the storytelling process.

It's got a hot premise, some cool sets, attractive stars and action that lets up only when it thinks you're about to surrender.

The upside and downside of surveillance cameras are explored in ways both funny and sad in writer-director Adam Rifkin's imaginative, ultimately disturbing ode to high-tech voyeurism.

As cool a summer lark as you'll find.

An intended throwback to the halcyon days of colorful studio cartoons, more in the Chuck Jones style than Disney, and the animation of its characters and Western motif is fine. But the writing of co-directors Will Finn and John Sanford and their characterizations are embarrassingly bad.

The new cast is no match for the star-clustered original, but Lucas, who looks much like a young Paul Newman (you may think you're watching "The Towering Inferno"), has a strong, matinee-idol presence, and Russell is a reliable old hand at this sort of thing.

The film makers are so anxious to please their audience that they turn the last act into a preposterous cat-and-mouse game that nullifies the integrity of the story.

Ultimately, The Four Feathers is strong where its predecessors were weak (in the authenticity of combat) and weak where they were strong (in the larger-than-life quality of the characters). It's not a good exchange.

More amiably mindless summer distraction than just about anything Hollywood has to offer this season.

A solidly crafted, entertaining melodrama.

Charles Shyer's update is a pointlessly tame romp.

The Coen brothers might have pulled this off, but it's out of Allen's faltering reach.

Piddington does a beautiful balancing act, creating a movie that works both on the level of suspense and as a detailed factual chronicle.

South Korean director Kim Ki-duk does a bizarre riff on the twisted macho ethos of abusing women until they learn to love you.

Tops Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" in anger and frustration.

Hilariously inventive Hollywood satire.

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.

Perhaps this is just a bad performance by Bana; he's not shown me anything yet. But there's a more basic problem. If money is just a way of keeping score, and Huck doesn't care whether he's flush or busted, why should we?

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.

Dreamcatcher has no business being this bad.

Some terrific characters and some of the year's punchiest comic dialogue.

Has so many ideas working in it that they all but suffocate its thin plot.

Humorist and liberal radio talk-show host Al Franken is a funny guy, and most of the people he attacks - Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Dick Cheney - are not. But the joke was on him when George Bush won re-election in 2004.

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.

Like Schwarzenegger himself, it looks tired, and a little bored.

With more than a passing nod to the Hollywood mob movie, Pavel Lounguine ("Luna Park") crafts this superb post-Soviet "Godfather" movie loosely based on the exploits of bad boy billionaire Boris Berezovsky.

You watch with amazement their physical movements, how closely their lips match their overly precise, prerecorded dialogue, yet they're not human enough to get us past the stunt factor and lost in the drama.

The face-to-face interviews laced throughout the movie are fascinating and often laugh-out-loud funny. Ask people to talk dirty and you don't know what they'll say.

My Fellow Americans is a gang-written comedy that doesn't have a political bone in its body, or much evidence of a funny one, either.

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.

If the point of this umpteenth posttraumatic stress drama is that war is hell, even years after it's over and you're sitting in a movie theater, Big Bad Love makes it.

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

Even if The Mummy is imitation Spielberg, it offers more bang for the buck than we're used to getting.

If you can overcome the graphic nature of its casual violence, it is a lot of fun. The banter among the brothers is well-written and has a genuine fraternal feel to it. And the chases and shootouts have a fresh malevolence to them.

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.

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

For each joke that is fresh, there are at least three that fall thuddingly flat. Rock suffers a problem common to comedians moving from sketches to features; he hasn't quite been able to get his performance level above caricature. To his credit, he's made more of this than you'd expect from the lame premise.

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.

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

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.

This drama from Fox Faith Movies has a mercifully light hand in selling its Christian-values themes, but its plodding story about a spoiled young scion who must complete 12 tasks assigned him by his late grandfather is still a slog.

Rather than heightening our sense of empathy, we become numbed by the repetition.

It's no great thing, but in their (Weinstein brothers') heyday as Oscar campaigners, they could have made Redford a contender.

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.

Carrey's performance is a tour de force of physical mime.

A ticket to this movie is a season's pass on that train - and you must complete every ride.

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

The ethical issues driving Michael Hoffman's The Emperor's Club almost outweigh the improbable arc of its story, and Kevin Kline's endearing performance as a prep school classics teacher is almost worth the price of admission.

The jokes come in endless flurries, and if they're working - even at a ratio of 1 in 4 - you're laughing more than you're not. The Zucker-Proft team simply has a higher batting average than the Wayans.

Director Margarethe von Trotta nearly buries the drama of the protest itself within the awkwardly sentimental framework of a contemporary New Yorker's quest to learn the truth of her widowed German mother's grief and history. But while the film concentrates on Lena, eloquently portrayed by Katja Riemann, the movie earns your empathy.

To see Allen, now 70, trying to reclaim the persona he's been handing off is like watching Willie Mays fall down trying to hit a slow curve during his last season. Woody may go on to direct many great films, but it's time for him to retire Alvy Singer.

In A Lot Like Love, there is no doubt - nor suspense, nor depth.

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

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

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.

Drifts from goofy situation comedy to pop culture parody to a last-act load of sentiment that would sink a trash barge.

Though Brother Bear is as beautiful as any of Disney's hand-drawn features, the gang-written script is deadly flat.

The movie feels like a rush job and at times its tactics are as suspect as those attributed to its subject. But when it comes to political strategy trumping policy in the Bush White House, it makes its case.

An unusually shallow and facile work for Brooks, but the writing and the performances - other than Leoni's - keep us at least halfway involved.

Without the surprise, realism, audacity and upstart cheekiness -- pun intended -- that made "The Full Monty's" blue-collar strippers so irresistible.

Shot with an annoyingly jerky hand-held camera, Virgin is a test to stick with, and despite the best efforts of Moss, it wore me out.

A shrill, amateurish two-character play that demeans women and leaves men with the quaint notion that the best way to a woman's heart is through enslavement.

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.

The cat-and-mouse game between the patient and doctor and the coy is-he-or-isn't-he? game being played on us by the filmmakers becomes tiring.

As the story of a romantic office lump, Janice Beard resembles last year's "Bridget Jones's Diary." But it is a far, far lesser thing.

The studio's fresh corps of CG animators may get up to speed before the current four-picture cycle is completed, but if they don't get better material to work with, the sky will be falling along Dopey Drive.

Though Civic Duty seems to be a study in paranoid psychosis, it has just enough ambiguity to make you wonder if it isn't something else. You'll still be wondering when it's all over.

Only Stanley Tucci seems aware of the drop-dead stupidity of the plot, and acts up a storm of high camp as the narcissistic scientist.

Jovovich needed a steadying hand to keep her from flying out of her socks, and Pritikin, on his maiden solo as a director, couldn't or didn't have the heart to provide it.

Judd has genuine movie star magnetism -- beauty, intelligence, presence and talent to spare. In the old studio days, she'd be Ingrid Bergman by now.

When 3 Needles premiered at Toronto last year, the stories were overlapping, in the style of "Babel" but without a unifying theme. It's less cumbersome as three separate stories, but they do not add up to much.

There are funny sight gags strewn throughout, but because so many scenes and confrontations are repeated from the original, there’s a staleness and sense of melancholy to the whole affair.

Not a great movie, but it certainly does justice to the great historical event it dramatizes.

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

The film is otherwise a self-indulgent lark.

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.

Not wildly imaginative, and it has a tepid mix of movie references. But the physical environment and characters make it irresistible.

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.

One long camp joke, with vamped scenes strung together.

The first pleasant surprise of 2003, a cross-cultural romantic comedy that doesn't stint on romance or comedy, and- - when you least expect and most need it- - throws in some jaunty musical numbers of its own.

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

The movie ends on exactly the right note, but it hits a lot of bad ones on the way.

Wretch of a B movie.

Campion has made something that's almost unbearably pretentious.

Like a fragile Provence wine left too long in the sun, Ridley Scott's romantic comedy A Good Year spoiled somewhere between the publication of Peter Mayle's novel and this cockamamie adaptation.

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

Failure to Launch sounds like really bad Oscar Wilde, but it's not that good. You are not supposed to dislike anybody here.

Much talking, much sex, much to-do about nothing.

Unless you're seriously into the post-"Matrix" culture, which includes books, games, animation and interactive Web sites, or you believe the Wachowskis have a philosophy worth wading through, the two-part sequel adds nothing indispensable to the first story.

There are too many characters undergoing life changes in the story for each to be properly developed in an 82-minute movie. But for the most part, the actors get the work done.

Heartbreakers is too long by a half-hour, and there are entire sketches (including a horrid nightclub sequence with Weaver trying to sing in Russian) that could be mercifully sacrificed.

So what's the point of doing it a second time if you can't make it more realistic?

There's a lot of flashy acting going, notably by Travolta, who has not been more engaging on-screen in a decade, and by newcomer Barrett, a willowy Aussie who, as a woman living with the specter of death, gives the film's most complete performance.

Uneven but fitfully entertaining.

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.

Whether this reserved, hypercautious widower can deal with the arousal she creates in him - let alone be physically able to act on it - is one of the many layers of tension that drive this unusual and absolutely riveting dance.

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.

Here’s a double-scoop for conspiracy theorists.

A long and uneventful snooze.

But for that one bright, incongruous yuk-fest in the classroom, Luther is deadly material, full of self-righteousness and devoid of balance.

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.

There is just no tension built prior to the murders.

The voice performances are terrific, particularly those of Belushi and Garofalo, as the amorous squirrel and the giraffe he would like to have as his wife.

Really bad movies can be fun, and the dialogue here often attains a level of joyful inanity.

Two hours of ludicrous action, forced humor and self-conscious romance.

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]

Underdeveloped and badly diluted by overlong -- and overly stylized -- forays into the drug use, street hustling and cultural alienation that mostly affects the boys' friends.

There's something deeper at play in the film, something psychologically foul, voyeuristic and personal.

Man on Fire, with a best-ever Denzel Washington, is the first (nonreligious) sure thing to hit the multiplex this year.

It comes off as a fairly straightforward assault on the kind of political corruption that has crossed party lines in movies since the dawn of the medium, and in books before that. The pleasure here is in the dialogue, the characters and the cast.

As delicious as this premise is, Cats & Dogs is about as funny as a hairball left on your pillow.

For die-hard Ferrell fans, this could be the ultimate test. He has been playing variations of "Elf" for five years, and his antics have grown as stale as Jackie's socks.

Writer, director and star Anthony Hopkins releases his inner muse with Slipstream, and guess who shows up - David Lynch!

Convoluted and unsatisfying psychological drama.

On my list of favorite sports, I rank sumo wrestling just ahead of the truck pull, so I'm not a prime candidate for a "Full Monty" wanna-be about female sumo wrestlers.

Not to be cruel, but the aspirations of the movie and its principals are so far beyond their reach" not to mention budget"that it arrives in theaters dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Unremittingly bleak and hopelessly outdated parable of American race relations.

The whole movie is something of a country-music clich, and it takes all of your imagination to be as enthusiastic about the characters' singing as they are. But The Thing Called Love is worth a look on the big screen. [16 July 1999]

Might as well have been titled "That Kentucky Fried Chicken Movie." That's how it will be referred to, anyway, though some people may insert an adjective such as "convoluted," "disappointing," or "anti-climactic" before the name of the fast-food franchise.

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.

A brutally claustrophobic battle of wits and will, whose cruel nature ultimately seems to turn on the audience.

While there is a great deal of laughter among the quartet, there's scarcely a giggle in it for the audience.

Despite some clever early fantasy scenes, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's adaptation of best seller The Nanny Diaries won't make Bridget Jones give up her writing.

Unrelentingly bleak, the movie is nonetheless a riveting drama with some outstanding performances.

Horror fans will be appalled by the frivolity of the beheadings, amputations and blunt-force trauma. But when Tilly, complaining about all the good roles going to Julia Roberts, says she could have played Erin Brockovich and done it without the Wonderbra, you know you're into something almost inspired.

Clumsily merges fiction and reality, biography and musical fantasy, and breaks the fourth wall in a way that allows Spacey to lamely address his own miscasting.

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.

Though it is not nearly as funny as last summer's "Wedding Crashers," directing brothers Joe and Anthony Russo's You, Me and Dupree has plenty of chuckles and another sparkling, post-adolescent surfer-dude performance from Owen Wilson.

Zwart never gets the tone right in this very American comedy.

Beautifully shot but overly spare documentary.

When Carrey is doing his thing as the Almighty, histrionically whipping up one miracle after another and relishing the power, "Bruce" has you spring-cleaning your lungs with laughter. But you are made to pay for it with a third-act sap-rising that's as thick as the final reels of "Patch Adams."

Deery's points are well-taken, but they would have been a lot better made if he hadn't taken so many easy shots at the church by demonizing its local authorities.

Though some of the action cinematography is stunning, and practicing snowboarders will love the sense of camaraderie established, it's not riveting entertainment for the rest of us.

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.

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.

May be free of gay stereotypes, but it's absolutely riddled with romantic cliches. It's hard to see the progress in that.

Though the sitcom humor of this is much broader and funnier than in May's film, it is also the part most faithful in spirit to the original.

There is not a frame of "Cheaper" that doesn't feel contrived. It fails the most fundamental test of movie logic.

A fascinating contrast in lifestyles.

Whether Jawed Wassel could have made more of it with further editing we'll never know, but it's a clunky bit of storytelling.

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

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

Adapted - badly and unfaithfully - Close Your Eyes is a convoluted jumble of paranormal psychology, occultism and pagan symbolism, topped off with a quest for immortality.

A popcorn movie with a protein center, satisfying neither taste.

Unlike pop rival Britney Spears, Moore does project star quality on the screen, but she gives Halley an edge of nastiness that makes her harder to empathize with than she should be.

The romantic subtext of their characters' relationship is the film's chief liability, and feels forced and undeveloped.

Obliterating the original structure and intent of "Body Snatchers" is cinema-lit blasphemy.

This is a pitch-black sendup of a classic femme fatale, a teenage version of the husband-killers in "Double Indemnity" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice," without the saving grace of passion.

It's almost a surprise that the sequel is actually better - much better - than the original.

Ford, soon to be eligible for Medicare, gives his entire performance without losing his breath or changing his expression, and Bettany, a British actor whose pasty complexion won him the role of Silas the Albino in the coming "The Da Vinci Code," is an apt tormentor cum foil of his prey.

Watching Kevin Costner and William Hurt share grim laughs during Bruce Evans' Mr. Brooks is one of the pleasures of this totally absurd and equally entertaining psychological thriller.

Ralph Fiennes has faced a lot of acting challenges in his career, but playing a New York Republican who could win an endorsement from Susan Sarandon might be the toughest. Mostly, he handles the task by simply smiling warmly throughout, and gets away with it.