Jami Bernard

A daring feminist movie that, while straightforward to a fault, is a rare opportunity to sample a female point of view from Iran, where such a thing is usually a veiled subject.

It's not the best "Little Mermaid" movie - it's totally predictable and its trio of tweeners squeal at a pitch that could break glass. But it's also a bubbly confection about best friends, crushes on preening lifeguards, grrrl power and shades-of-blue fashion tips.

Linklater's ravishing new movie represents a bold leap into the possibilities of technology.

Director Samira Makhmalbaf made this raw and effective parable with the recognizable help of her father, legendary director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

The movie creaks and groans, weighed down by clichés.

Screenwriters look to many sources for inspiration. In the case of Saving Silverman, they looked behind them, and liked what they saw.

The philosophy is even less plausible. But the action -- oh, the action! There's nothing else out there like it.

In this cross between film noir and melodrama, there's lust, need, camp and betrayal.

The acting and stories are uneven, but Erick Avari, as a man who wakes up to his humanitarian obligations, provides the movie's affecting center, and Peter Falk gives a harrowing performance as a hopeless drunk trying to manipulate his grown son.

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.

Rough around the edges, but effectively presents the quandary of women during the repressive religious regime.

It's not just a movie about an underdog who fights the odds, it's about following one's heart -- despite the obstacles.

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

A strange, somewhat icky romantic comedy. [25 November 1998, p. 45]

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.

All this frenzy, all these "quotes" from other movies, and yet Vol. 2 is strangely static - a dulling experience that can safely be admired from afar without it ever engaging the senses.

An informative, amusing and unnerving overview of the history and consequences of corporations.

What keeps these mother-daughter tumbleweeds from drifting right out of consciousness is the unique rapport between the actresses.

A hit-and-miss romantic comedy.

A daring, teeth-grinding experience that doesn't let the viewer rest easy.

Almodovar is adept at weaving together strands you'd never guess would match.

The visuals might be undistinguished, but the voices are excellent.

Phantoms is fear-less.

An insanely delicious animated feature.

Amusing and slightly alarming documentary.

Uplifting and moving in a traditional Hollywood way, while also seeming as raw and unfiltered as cinema vérité.

Vardalos is a breath of fresh air. After all the little nipped and tucked bunnies we've been seeing onscreen for so long, we forget what real women look like.

Shows that there's a limit to how much mileage one can get from offbeat, creepy and symbiotic.

Jacques Demy showed up with the lightest touch with his 1960 Lola, a movie that has been called a musical without music.

The group in Portraits Chinois is a little too diverse and unwieldy to keep emotional track of.

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.

The performance of the movie is Liev Schreiber as Shaw, a man howlingly uncomfortable in his own skin.

The plot is intricate and tight. The preamble is a bit challenging to sort out. But the movie's engine is the relationships and the characters' inner lives, all of it boiling with emotional intensity.

A sobering documentary done in a whimsical style.

Clever, buoyant and surprisingly human.

The feel-good movie of the summer. And the song this pimp works up, about how hard it is to manage a stable of ho's, is catchy and moving.

It's the same old, same old - except with some really snappy one-liners.

There are some nicely gory touches for genre connoisseurs...But JC2 lacks the all-important character development we got in the first installment.

Here, Noyce lets his camera, the geography and the youngsters tell this exceptionally powerful story.

Apt to scare kids. [18 December 1998, p.72]

This updated version has the good sense to star Brendan Fraser, who is shaping up as one of our finest romantic-comedy stars.

The floating, flailing, flying puppies in the inspired opening credits of 102 Dalmatians set the tone for an adorable sequel to the live-action version of the famously spotted cartoon.

A neat, twisty little domestic drama about smart people, foolish choices.

Gigli is a disaster.

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."

Filmmaker Josell Ramos has his heart in the right place, but his camera is usually in the wrong place, complete with bad lighting and all-around lousy tech credits.

Impressionistic and open to interpretation, which is a kind way of saying that there's no way to figure out the ending.

Amusing and good-natured, but necessarily thin.

A good-natured, gag-filled sequel.

Once Were Warriors has more to say than the traditional TV-movie about spousal abuse. But some viewers will have to pay a price: This is a movie that requires strength and fortitude to sit through.

No matter which floor you're on, the huge cast is extraordinary, and Altman gives the actors free rein to bring their characters to life despite such close quarters.

A sublimely uplifting movie.

Flails about desperately for a genre to call home.

Popcorn-buyers, beware: This is no "Shrek," with raucous adult humor sailing over the heads of wee ones. This is "Sesame Street"-level, with white hats, black hats and simple moral messages.

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

A brilliant if slow-paced movie about one man's unwitting journey into adulthood.

It's just as well that John Carpenter makes horror movies, because here's a horrifying thought picture James Woods as an action hero. [30 October 1998, p. 44]

The stop-the-presses news from The House of Mirth is the number of fine performances from people you never knew had it in them.

The strangely mesmerizing dance contest in "Pulp Fiction" was born of Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 New Wave classic Band of Outsiders.

A tart, funny and tremendously sobering movie about the deepest recesses of personal unhappiness.

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.

What Short does not deserve - and neither do we - is a feature-length movie about Jiminy.

Wiseman's film is revealing. But it is also a silent rebuke to a society that tries to hide this pervasive problem behind a smug vision of itself.

The tension of Matt having to work alongside his wife without being able to trust her provides the movie's real electricity, sexual and otherwise.

A pitch-perfect gem.

The bubble-boy niche is thankfully small. John Travolta began his career playing one in a TV movie, but this movie will undoubtedly finish off the genre for good.

Old monster movies were thrilling in a way that mingled terror, sexuality and a real preference for the monsters over their tormentors. Van Helsing is a kiddie adventure on an endless, meaningless loop.

All of Haas' movies have an air of weirdness and dread, and this one is no exception. But it's romantic as well.

Among the movie's oddball treats are Robert Downey Jr. as Grady's flamboyant editor and Rip Torn as a pedantic author and sermonizer known only as Q.

A terrible movie by all reasonable standards -- yet it leaves a sweet taste.

Here’s a British spin on the familiar struggle of the couch potato who plans any minute now to get off his duff.

Grand passion, secrecy, world politics and mortal danger provide a heady mix for this spectacularly beautiful movie. If only the accents were as reliable as the azure of the sea.

The best way to look at this installment, however, is as musical theater of the absurd. The song-and-dance set pieces are brilliant, including a rap-style "It's a Hard Knock Life" in a prison.

Aa bit too familiar an American tail. [19 December 1997, p. 82]

You might want to sit out this season.

Children may get a kick out of Flubber's lowest-common-denominator antics. They may not recognize that Williams' prodigious talent has been reduced to something sub-blobular. [26Nov1997 Pg 38]

Washington can bank on an Oscar nomination for the most forceful work of his career.

The acting is superb, with emotions roiling beneath rigid exteriors.

This Canadian film is extraordinarily low-key, considering the explosive secrets the sisters unearth, but that is part of its strength.

This is not challenging filmmaking by any means, more like a comfortable old slipper. But it's a perennial that's guaranteed to please.

Aside from its relentless exploitation of a child, this minor thriller features an intriguing beginning, a middling middle and an increasingly silly end, with a multitude of red herrings going squoosh underfoot.

Outside of the leads, the acting is uneven, but The Tao of Steve has an unquenchable playful spirit.

A gentle comic stew of monster movies, adding dashes of Bugs Bunny irreverence and British gentility.

The film paints an affectionate portrait of a wry, somewhat addled man whose hard-partying past was in stark contrast with his later life - a fluffy cat nestles in his guitar case while he explains his nickname.

Noir has never been this bright.

Sharp, erotic performances are the mainstay of Olivier Assayas' unnerving Demonlover, a visually stylish movie that equates and fuses high-stakes corporate negotiations with the video-game mentality.

Gore fans will dig the makeup effects and some of the tongue-in-cheek slice-&-dice.

The deliberate simplicity that works so well at the Sullivan Street Theater seems flat, anachronistic and almost spooky on the big screen.

A sharply comic critique of corporate greed might have added to the national dialogue, but this is a series of hit-&-miss sketches.

There is a very sharp, funny critique of ambition and self-made gurus in The Mystic Masseur, but it is obscured by a softening bloat.

Evans fumbles through painfully extended homophobic jokes, weak double entendres and agonizingly contorted double-takes.

The Substitute is just engaging enough that you won't wonder until after the movie why Mr. Smith is apparently the only teacher in the entire school. [19 Apr 1996, p.65]

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.

It's a movie that should have been called on account of boredom.

It's a bit of an oddball story, but surely there was a less plodding way to elaborate on it.

Silly supernatural Viking epic.

A great divorce movie. It's also one of the canniest comedies ever made about a certain kind of literary pretension.

The picture's a dud... Instead of Chow's gravitas rubbing off on the kid, Scott's dude-ness dilutes Chow's authority.