Jami Bernard

It's sweet but not the least bit plausible that any kid in the mid-'80s would be surprised that along with rock 'n' roll come sex and drugs.

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.

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

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

There's plenty to appreciate here but the story is tedious and some of the overacting runs into cultural translation problems.

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.

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]

A feast for the eyes. But not, alas, for the ears.

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.

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 film itself is a bit on the talking-head side, evoking none of the passion and anguish that are the music's trademarks.

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

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

The overly broad martial-arts comedy Kung Fu Hustle was obviously made with skill and affection for its many cinematic sources, yet I found the tone, timing and emotional involvement off by just enough to irritate rather than enchant.

Maintains a light, dainty tone despite the heavy-handed metaphor, but in crossing the Pacific to the U.S., it is bound to leave most viewers dry.

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

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

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

Even without much in the way of hard facts, Yu makes intuitive leaps, using animated segments to bring to life Darger's work, and therefore the man - or as much of him as it is possible to fathom.

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.

The movie is mostly a series of frenetic clashes, dubious near misses and car chases. It lacks the human interest and snowy splendor of the first movie, directed by Doug Liman.

The slapstick is broad to the point of overkill.

The whole nutty crew finds it rollicking good fun to see themselves lampooned. But there is an unmistakable sorrow behind the humor.

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.

Goes down easily only because Judd and Jackman are eye candy, and because Kinnear and Tomei provide solid comic support.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Freewheeling and mindless.

You can't go wrong with an uplifting, anti-war story like this, but director Christian Carion trowels on the schmaltz, and the movie's emphasis on Christian values actually seems to spell doom for solving today's conflicts with the Middle East.

A ­movie that takes impartiality to new places artistically. The film is infuriating.

It makes sly sense to link female hormonal bursts with the lunar cycle of the werewolf, but the movie's final act is the usual matted-fur chase.

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

This movie hyperventilates with pessimism to the point of perversity.

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

The movie clearly portrays how the glory and salvation of being a team hero is ephemeral.

An unsubtle allegory about a way of life withering on the vine.

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.

Feels like any number of forgettable American teen comedies in which the nerd gets the girl and/or the money.

The crime isn't that the movie's message is amoral, but that it goes totally unexamined, as if the recess bell rang too early.

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

Grueling and bleak, but not unintelligent...although it's hardly groundbreaking just because everyone's face gets pulpy.

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.

The weak story and bland hero are no match for the increasingly exciting visuals, while the score by Steve Jablonsky should be on exhibit in the Hall of Lead.

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.

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.

Strangely unengaging.

With We Don't Live Here Anymore, it's the audience that may want to leave and start a new life.

Old-fashioned comedy-drama.

(Rourke's) nearly unrecognizable presence is characteristic of the odd pockets of talent (and, sometimes, lint) in Steve Buscemi's film.

Cross-dressing and the Irish Troubles don't mix well in Neil Jordan's cloying, fanciful Breakfast on Pluto.

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

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.

It's a diary, collage, meditation, elegy. But, unless you're going for a Ph.D. in code-breaking, it's also a bore.

Well-acted but otherwise lackluster drama.

What is meant to be an innovative, cutting-edge musical melodrama is so jumbled, irrational and amateurish that it makes dinner theater look like the Old Vic.

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.

A slight movie and a major downer, is an acting showcase for Sean Penn. That's good, but not enough.

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.

Charlize Theron's Gilda in Head in the Clouds invites comparison to Rita Hayworth in 1946's "Gilda," which adds a touch of the ludicrous to this already strained material set in wartime France.

An "American Pie" wanna-be that, in trying to be as tasteless as possible, sometimes succeeds.

It may be a dismal comedy thriller, but Antoine Fuqua's Bait has one piece of bait that's definitely appealing: Jamie Foxx.

Hasn't a single original idea in its bird brain. But it clowns around just enough while sitting in the dunce chair that after a while it's mildly amusing.

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.

Only two hours long but it may take your mind another day to get through it. Egoyan has stuffed a lot into this personal and strenuously opaque film, which perhaps explains why its over-plotted, elliptical structure seems so onerous.

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.

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

A prettily photographed yet morbidly gloomy movie.

Certainly there are people who will welcome this kind of "wholesome" family entertainment, but it feels false.

The hand-held camera is much too insinuating for what is essentially a story we have seen many times before. And the cuts and transitions are dizzyingly abrupt.

Truth is, it' not very good.

A bit of a slog for anyone not thoroughly Olsenized.

The plot is contingent on everything going perfectly in ways no one can possibly predict, right down to the most outlandish happenstance of timing and human behavior.

D'Onofrio is a natural for the role of a romantic who just may be a freak. A highly physical actor, he ranges between sweetly awkward and a candidate for the kind of mental hospital shown in "Session 9."

As Ryan, Evans attempts to graduate from "Not Another Teen Movie"-type fare to more adult stuff. He holds his own, but he has no edge.

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 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]

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

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 comes alive in bursts such as a train-top fight hampered by gale-force winds. Cruise's star wattage may hog the show, but it insures that Mission: Impossible won't self-destruct easily.

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.

The movie has some of the washed-out look of David O. Russell's excellent "Three Kings," but none of the edge. That's part of the point - that nothing leads to anything, at least not in this particular war.

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

It's hard to take this movie seriously. It's the cinematic equivalent of dotting your i's with a big heart, a very youngish view of life and death in which everything is too neatly wrapped up with a bow.

Manages to entertain, and yet, like so many flat-footed attempts at waving the flag, it feels disingenuous and dogmatic.

But with her penchant for frilly romance and sentimentality, the focus is often, cloyingly, on Conn as the heroine of the story, the mother who (sob!) wouldn't give up.

A period romp that tries too hard.

Not so much a movie as a self-contained world for like-minded people who wear their outsider status on their sleeves.

An odd little movie with artistic aspirations and a bare touch of comedy that offers sights you never expected (nor hoped) you'd see - like Will Ferrell playing it straight (more or less) and Zooey Deschanel drowning an innocent kitten.

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.

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.

The faux-documentary format does nothing for the material, but Kaye turns in a chaotic and ultimately moving performance.

There are absolutely no psychological insights into sick minds in The Minus Man, a poky, opaque drama with a good cast and not much going on upstairs.

The actors are emotional, but the presentation is theoretical to the point of absurdity.

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