Jami Bernard

Like many dreams, you won't remember it when you wake up. The style obliterates any emotional attachment.

There are many delightful movie techniques out there available for making animals appear to speak, so it's too bad The Shaggy Dog doesn't use any of them.

The best part of Zatoichi is its fine sense of rhythm, culminating in a galvanizing clog-dance finish.

The nasty, violent material has two small beacons of hope - Nielsen as a fair-weather stripper in the manner of old film-noir dames, and Quaid as a scurvy ­mobster who hates being cheated. With his puffy, reddened face, Quaid looks like a bad Santa.

It was filmed in and around the World Trade Center, and the subsequent cuts, reshoots and sleights of hand designed to obscure that fact prove devastating.

Nothing you haven't already seen elsewhere, except for Vin Diesel looking even then like a box-office champ.

It's a misguided, miscast remake of the 1974 Robert Aldrich classic.

This has all the ingredients for a top-notch thriller except one - a thrill.

Nearly scrapes the bottom of the cracker barrel in search of suspense, now that the humans accept the polite mouse as one of their own.

Hurt is slumming in an unchallenging role.

Some of the scenarios are funny. But they're uniformly overplayed.

What's subversive about the movie is that it comes off as squeaky-clean, when in fact it's irresponsible. Worse, it's not that interesting.

With more buckling than swash, The Count of Monte Cristo is a good-looking, poorly acted washout.

Reefer mildness.

A period romp that tries too hard.

Director Charles Herman-Wurmfeld ("Kissing Jessica Stein") misses several opportunities to go all out and be, as Elle would say, "superfun."

Mark Wahlberg could lose some of the good will he generated from his performance in "Boogie Nights" by playing an idiotically gentle killer for hire in The Big Hit. [24 April 1998, p. 53]

Searching for a documentary feel, the camera here is so shaky that you cling to the arms of your chair lest you pitch into the next row.

As a boxing movie, Against the Ropes is perfunctory, with a well-muscled Omar Epps diligently enduring predictable montages showing his rise to fame as Jackie's first protégé. As a biopic, it's likewise uninspired stuff.

Go for the extraordinary special effects, by all means, but not if you want to feel good about yourself or humanity. And heed the PG-13 rating, because this movie takes no prisoners.

The wheezy Mighty Wind can't blow out the candle of this group's first musical mockumentary, 1984's "This Is Spinal Tap."

A prettily photographed yet morbidly gloomy movie.

I'd like to believe I could watch ­Cedric the Entertainer all day long. The tedious comedy Johnson Family Vacation puts a strain on that theory.

Without Crowe and Paul Giamatti, this movie would have little in its corner.

The slapstick is broad to the point of overkill.

The already minimalist filmmaker has gone positively threadbare with Ten, a movie that feels as if there was no director on the set. For the most part, there wasn't.

The makers of Seducing Doctor Lewis have a cute idea, but they milk it for all they can, sometimes to the point of embarrassment.

The movie delivers the promised ballroom action, but not the charm. And if you think the title is endless, wait till you see Goodman's death scene.

When improv is done well, it sheds a unique light on the human condition. When it is done adequately, as it is in Full Frontal, it simply makes you long for a good script and pricey production values.

The script is so ridiculous that nothing rings true.

Originally intended as a comedy, the snippets of lightheartedness that remain seem awkwardly out of step with the unsurprising drama that replaced it.

With its scenes of full-frontal nudity and its references to the Tiananmen Square protests, Lan Yu may be a breakthrough film for China, but it's well-trod territory for American viewers.

A modern-day fable about love and commitment — it's different.

As documentaries go, Watermarks is nothing special. But the women who inhabit it are sensational.

While Pfeiffer is a stickier subject, Clooney is so game he could have chemistry with a sandbox. [20 Dec 1996, p.61]

Taking one's pound of flesh and having it, too, leads to a queasy comedy in which Pacino burns a hole in the screen while the frivolity around him sputters.

Despite its rare look at the tensions between religious and secular soldiers in a settlement on the occupied West Bank, it's a pretty static, by-the-book drama that would be insufferable without the sullen heat of Tinkerbell and Avni.

The game itself is meaningless, and the movie, much the same way, likes it like that.

This is a movie full of tin-eared humor and situations too contrived to give romance a toehold.

Kingsley seems determined to rescue this old chestnut of a character from Jewish stereotypes, but to what end? Oliver's boyhood has become worse than Dickensian - it's bland.

Leaves the viewer exhausted, jet-lagged from the effort of investing equally in competing story lines.

This spirited documentary shows us the hazards of filming volleyball at nudist camps and the marketing possibilities of women mating with gorillas.

An unerring sign of the awfulness of Malibu's Most Wanted is a series of the least funny outtakes ever appended to a movie's closing credits.

But while this terrific cast gets to strut and preen, it's difficult to make an emotional connection with most of them.

Big, bloated and only intermittently amusing.

A deliberately stupid movie whose crazy charm wins you over in the end.

A safely sanitized comedy with an important message about loyalty and individuality, plays to Lohan's strengths and gives the target audience a chance to live it up vicariously.

Lightweight, inoffensive fare, as bland as a sleepwalker under a hypnotist's spell.

Nicolas Cage does such a persuasive job of portraying Chicago TV weatherman Dave Spritz as a train wreck of a guy that you wonder whether this might actually be a training film for a psychoanalytic convention on hopeless cases.

The central relationship here is curious but not engaging, except for the pleasure of watching Deschanel, making All the Real Girls just a filmmaker's exercise in impressionistic style and mood.

As filmed by Steven Soderbergh with appropriate visuals for a movie about perceptions, Gray's quest for ocular health leads from an Indian sweat lodge to a Filipino psychic surgeon. [19 March 1997, p.39]

But there's no affection in this mean-spirited sendup of "the business" and nothing to mitigate its sour taste.

While their often-unclothed bodies are visible, their faces are replaced with digital "buttons" saying things like "Your ad here."

Even while trying to access my inner giggly, dreamy adolescent, I found the movie as irritating as a chigger under the skin. The cast is pretty and inoffensive, with America Ferrera, using charisma and fierce emotions to stand out from the pack.

With its mystical mumbo jumbo and even a helpful beam of celestial light in one scene, A Rumor of Angels is a kind of cinematic comfort food for an undemanding audience.

The meltingly beautiful Newton gives a solid performance, but she and Wahlberg do not glide like Astaire and Rogers, to put it delicately.

La Promesse believes that decency is an innate human quality that can surface from any rubble. [16 May 1997, p.47]

The jolts are mild and too easily anticipated.

With destitute and disillusioned Mexican laborers much in the news lately, Star Maps is timely, and Spain is effective and affecting in the lead role. The movie's efforts at realism, however, are undermined by a cast of scenery chewers starved for attention. [23 July 1997, p.45]

The real star of the movie is the background work.

The realistic scenes of oyster farming and the beauty of the Hawkesbury River lend this movie a degree of fascination that its taciturn, beer-swilling characters can't provide.

Bale fails to make Chris a character compelling enough to stand out from that heavy dose of '70s clothes and hair.

Well-acted but otherwise lackluster drama.

A tiresomely madcap story with extremely faint political (and politically incorrect) overtones.

The cinematic equivalent of the mad-scientist experiment gone awry. It seems to be grooving on its own strangeness, at the expense of its connection with a paying audience.

It is not a great ad-vain-cha, and it's a lousy movie. But it underscores Irwin's kitschy popularity as a sideshow entertainer on the Animal Planet channel, where he cheerfully wrestles or rescues all manner of Aussie wildlife while telling the camera what great danger he is in.

Viewers of first-time director Jeong Jae-eun's sober dissection of dismal day-to-day rituals may want to throw themselves into the brackish water long before the movie is over.

Tough going for most audiences and should be considered more of a rough draft full of lofty ideas unevenly executed.

The screenplay is chock-full of political and social observation tarnished by uneven ­acting and editing. The clumsy humor doesn't translate well.

The comparison to Woody Allen is obvious, not only in the New York setting and the characters' comic approach-avoidance to sex, but in Burns' casting of his real girlfriend to play his screen girlfriend. Uh, Eddie big mistake there. [23 Aug 1996, p.41]

Paying homage to Sergio Leone, "Mexico" aims too high and, in the process, becomes more like every generic, overplotted drug-cartel-and-revenge flick out there.

When an intensely emotional scene calls for the voice to break, call in Andy Garcia. He does the best voice-breaking, half-choked sob of anguish in the business, and he does it a lot in Lost City, his well-meaning directorial debut.

Too much chaos, not enough heart. Bad for the digestion.

This movie hyperventilates with pessimism to the point of perversity.

The movie covers only the early years of his (Joao Francisco dos Santos) rise to fame and apparently enduring legend, but the camera never pulls back to provide a social or historical context.

Concludes in a shower of ashes, which is fitting because this movie is a billowing bonfire of ugly human behavior. Rarely have there been so many characters in need of timeouts, cold showers or house arrests.

The movie adds nothing to the political dialogue, and the love story is mood-killingly sad. The lure of the exotic can be deceptive, it says. The moody, murky atmosphere leaves nothing clear except that mixed intentions will always yield mixed results.

Mismatch of tone and material.

Despite a plethora of "naughty bits," it's a yawn.

Beautifully acted and exquisitely photographed, director Claude Miller's superb drama, from Philippe Grimbert's autobiographical novel, is awash with the ripples created by unlived lives.

The mordant humor and far-reaching observations of the book don't come across in Robert Benton's "Masterpiece Theatre"-style direction.

An uneven story undermines this horror franchise, despite high-quality performances by Naomi Watts and David Dorfman.

A bit of a slog for anyone not thoroughly Olsenized.

Good acting and dull dialogue.

Unusual in that it spotlights a common but largely unsung variety of teenage female angst.

The acting runs the gamut, with Daly and Redgrave at the top and a few characters looking as if they wandered onto the wrong movie set.

The book has been altered in mostly reasonable ways to suit the needs of the screen, but what it loses in the translation is invaluable in comprehending what led someone to pick up an ax and wipe out two-thirds of an island's population.

Director and co-writer Gurinder Chadha continues in the vein of her previous movies, "What's Cooking?" and "Bhaji on the Beach," exploring with humor and compassion how cultures adapt in foreign climes.

It is a mash note from first-time filmmaker Pola Rapaport to Aury, but its attempts to dramatize passages of the book are at odds with Aury's advice that "Story of O" was a piece of writing "not meant to be spoken."

Introduces American audiences to Luo Yan, a charismatic Chinese-born actress now living in Los Angeles. She single-handedly nurtured this project to fruition, serving as producer, co-writer and star.

Tomorrow Never Dies delivers the goods with tongue in cheek, if not Bond's tongue in someone else's cheek.

The sensuous visuals, shot in high-definition video, complement the waking-dream quality of a sometimes confusing story.

It's just like Paul McCartney's first solo album after the Beatles broke up; he played all the instruments himself -- because he could.

The film medium allows us to witness a most ravishing cherry orchard. But the grand cast is given to emoting as if they were playing to the peasants in the cheap seats.

Freewheeling and mindless.

A collage without context.

More chemistry between the leads would have helped. But Laws of Attraction still would have had a tough case making a jury believe these two unlikable characters belong together, except as a way to take them out of circulation.

Like a good horror movie, the images, jolts and artistically directed disorientation will keep your stomach clenched...Like a bad one, it doesn't make a lick of sense.