Jack Mathews

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

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

Turturro's Luzhin is a cinematic soulmate of Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man and Geoffrey Rush's David Helfgott.

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

Something bad happened on the way from the book to the movie. [15Dec1995 Pg. F.01]

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.

This is Guest's fourth ensemble parody of showbiz subjects, and though his sketch-comedy style and acting troupe are now familiar, this is his most accomplished movie.

What is lacking in suspense is more than made up for in passion and in sports cinematography virtuosity.

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.

Perhaps the most evocative movie of the new year, Campbell Scott's Off the Map, moves at the pace of a Southwestern sunset and ends before you're quite ready to let it go.

Maybe you have to have experienced one of these anti-weather urban cocoons to appreciate the concept of the film, and the prickly people who populate it.

Whether we've reached the critical mass of "misplaced power" is the gist of the current national debate, and Why We Fight is a useful tool in that argument.

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

Like previous films by the literary-minded auteur John Sayles, Honeydripper takes forever to develop its characters, its period and its location. But once it's done all that, the payoffs are rich.

Perversely funny.

Does something no other Jesse James movie has done: It tells the truth.

Much of this is pretty funny, in its perverse, disorienting style, and there's an irrepressible sunniness to the relationship between Lola and Hlynur's mother.

A slicker, faster-paced, high-tech upgrade that lifts the sprightly spirit and the main action set piece from the original while developing its own twists and a new ending that, though a bit too pat and eager to please, is a vast improvement.

These are people who are just waking up to life again. It may appear to be the ultimate non-action ­movie, but in the context of these lives, it is the highest kind of ­drama.

Slither is neither repetitive nor reverent. It is a dark and hilarious spoof of those movies, one in which both the characters and the audience seem to be in on the jokes.

The banter between these unlikely partners seems inspired by Quentin Tarantino's ingeniously insipid dialogue, delivered with indelible deadpan sincerity by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in "Pulp Fiction." Neither the dialogue nor the characters are as interesting here.

Meandering, overlong digital soap opera.

That Williams occasionally comes close to the author's layered spirit is a tribute to his passion. But the film fails on a number of levels. First, it is what it is: the prologue to a story that covers four(!) decades.

If you have a serious interest in wine and the ­patience for this kind of rangy, undisciplined filmmaking, you'll learn something. But you'll have more fun at a winetasting.

Of all the Middle East-theme movies this season, Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War is the least political and most entertaining. That doesn't mean it's great, just that it's unimportant.

Delpy wrote the dialogue that gives the film its forward thrust, and "2 Days" is a wonderful first feature.

Whether you lived through the period and will have fond memories jostled, or are scouting for future DVD pleasures, the surest way to see a good movie in a theater this week is to see one about them.

A claustrophobic psychodrama.