Jack Mathews

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.