Jami Bernard

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]

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

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]

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.

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

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

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.