Jami Bernard

Bai Ling plays a resourceful prostitute from a Malaysian refugee camp who grows harder and more alienated by the day. Nick Nolte, Tim Roth and Temuera Morrison offer strong supporting performances.

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.

A natural successor to "The Blair Witch Project" in terms of its small suggestions of horror past and future.

The movie does have one very perplexing major flaw. It throws in some minor-character narration toward the end, as if test audiences had lost their ability to concentrate, and this was the filmmaker's only solution for getting us back on track.

Violent, cool and street-smart, Shaft supplies everything you want in a summer movie.

The sepia-tinted palette of Ask the Dust drips, reeks and creaks of the seamy side of a city that takes more often than it gives.

The script provides an excellent payoff, although action fans may not agree, because that payoff is the equivalent of a Cheshire cat's grin.

An unexpected delight.

The direction is still slick, but Matchstick Men gets most of its thrills from the unknowable in human interaction. This could be the biggest "scam" Scott himself has pulled off.

A pleasure, chock full of creatively choreographed fight scenes.

Could easily serve as an instructional video for repressive regimes who have not yet learned you can get more with honey than with vinegar.

"On Deadly Ground," "Out for Justice," "Marked for Death" these are the last times Seagal gave us nothing. With Fire Down Below, he outdoes himself. [6 Sept 1997, p.32]

Brilliant. [24 December 1997, p. 24]

With his haggard good looks and bearish presence, Nolte is the main event in this colorful three-ring circus of a heist picture.

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.

Written, acted and directed so intelligently that it stands out from the pack, and is guaranteed to give you the warm glow of holiday movies past -- the kind that celebrated faith in human potential and the value of hard work.

The power of the arts to transcend cultural differences is presumably what moves the German to spare Szpilman, and, perhaps, is the key to Polanski's salvation as well.

The script is so ridiculous that nothing rings true.

Amazing... There are only a finite number of filmmakers with the devotion, patience and ability to tease out these stories.

Sven Wollter and Viveka Seldahl give superb performances as the couple, a once-vigorous conductor and his orchestra's concertmistress. But soon ... well, you know the drill.

It's a virtual clip reel of grandly comic moments that remind us what a good actress can do when parts are scarce.

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.

Has that same air of silly innocence, a rarity in today's movies.

A gangsta rapper without fire in the belly isn't terribly interesting, cinematically or musically.

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

Accomplishes two great things on what was undoubtedly a minuscule budget. It breathes life into a small story that has larger ramifications. It also shows that America, as represented by Jackson Heights, is still the promised land for people about whom movies are rarely made.

The actors are unknowns, but Ryan does a lot with her little downturned mouth. There are as many shades of anxiety as there are shades of blue in the sea, and Ryan manages to find them all.

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.

The wordless six-minute animé shorts - at the end of which our double-jointed heroine would always die - don't lend themselves to a 95-minute action movie where viewers might rightfully expect something to make sense.

This genteel confection skews toward older audiences - those who go for "Calendar Girls," "Ladies in Lavender" and "Mrs. Brown."

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.

This is a sophisticated and unsettling documentary marred only by a voice-over taken from the writings of Jamaica Kincaid.

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

The movie is an actors' paradise, and absolutely no one disappoints.

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

Jackie Chan finally has met his match, an opponent so deadly that none of his considerable talent or charm can fight it -- a bad movie

Pacino is masterful as the sharp-witted, seen-it-all detective.

If the Founding Fathers had known National Treasure would be the result of their efforts to forge a new nation, they might have reached for the Wite-Out.

A crowd pleaser, even if it is unremarkable.

That it all seems improvised on the spot (it was not) is testament to the power of a film that trusts its characters, its actors and its ultimate goal.

Delicious, intelligent thriller.

Billy Bob Thornton wrote, directed and stars in this compassionate, occasionally funny, character-driven movie about a mentally unstable man who takes the best interests of children very seriously.

With its agile, clever script and winning characters, Toy Story 2 is that rare thing -- an excellent children's movie with no upper age limit.

Unleashed serves two masters, each one disappointingly: It's a brutal series of over-amped fights, and it's a touching story of human nature at war with itself.

One of the reasons the move is so funny is that it is only a few degrees away from real life.

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 tries to be more existential than gumshoe but falls way short.

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

It's a compassionate story about what makes people tick and what really matters.

Omar Sharif certainly doesn't disappoint in Monsieur Ibrahim. The casting alone promises something extraordinary.

Delightful and moving - although fanciful.

The movie is paint-by-numbers with several numbers skipped.

Earthlings beware: The dialogue and characters have less weight than bodies freed from gravity's grip.

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

What Possession reminds us more than anything is that love is more exotic at the safe remove of history. The irony is that LaBute is more at home chronicling the present, yet that's where this movie falls apart.

It took the German restorers four years to ready this print using dupe negatives and old prints found in archives around the world. Their work speaks for itself. Each frame of this classic is drop-dead stunning, the more so now that the movie no longer hiccups its way across the screen.

Boorman doesn't shy from showing Cahill as a complicated man who, in one famous incident, nearly crucified one of his own men for a minor infraction. But the portrait is a loving one, full of empathy for an oddly principled man who, in another line of work, could have made a difference and lived to enjoy it. [18 Dec 1998, p.72]

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 bouquet of snappy one-liners and disarming nuttiness.

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.

It is a sweet, wonderfully acted cameo of a movie about the lengths to which a lioness will go to protect her cub.

Profoundly depressing.

It's too bad there's so little of LL Cool J as the secret object of Georgia's fantasies. He'd make a funny, nimble, sexy romantic lead with just a bit more screen time.

The result is a back-lot studio tour that's not exactly good-natured, but terrific fun and it gives the ensemble cast plenty of clowning opportunities.

It's a humiliating comedown for Ford, and he looks creaky and grumpy, obviously aware that he is miscast and dreading every scene.

Dano is a real find in this daunting role about a teenager's identity crisis. The subject of the movie is dicey but ultimately deeply rewarding.

It is not the worst movie ever made, as some critics claim, but it does a passing imitation.

The love and attention Oshii poured into animating Batou's pet basset hound proves that the human instinct dominates even in a movie dependent on technology.

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.

Inordinately clever, sprightly romantic comedy.

It's hard to care what really happened on Wonderland Ave. when the audience hates the neighborhood.

Cedric is certainly the bright spot in this movie - personable, silly and lovable, with just enough of Gleason's girth, timing and humanity to make you wish he'd driven Ralph Kramden's bus onto the lot of a different movie.

Unfocused and shrill.

Peregrym's performance as fiery, troubled teen Haley Graham is a triumph of charisma over technique.

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]

Funny, yet appalling.

The requisite set piece, which will remind you of the treetop sequence in "Crouching Tiger," involves a fight atop a forest of burning poles, exactly the kind of thing you want in a movie like this.

A lush, panoramic, dizzyingly portrait of the many-tentacled entrepreneur Howard Hughes. Unfortunately, though it may finally gain an Oscar for director Martin Scorsese, it is not his best work. The movie is disappointingly flat.

Best of all is newcomer Justine Clarke playing a dour illustrator. Clarke's fascinating features register emotions at war, but always governed by a sense of self-deprecating humor.

Harris convincingly creates one "Pollock" after another over the course of the movie.

The movie then becomes John's story, making an unbelievable leap of psychodrama to do so.

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."

Mostly pitched at a new crop of children who will detect the movie's mildly sarcastic, audience-winking tone with no problem.

There ought to be a law about transporting humor internationally.

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.

An actress' dream.

Hell is sitting through a movie in which you have no respect for the protagonist and the "surprise" ending is as clearly lit as the exit sign.

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