Jami Bernard

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.

For sheer escapist fun, the proudly ridiculous Bandits fills the bill.

After a moment's adjustment, it works amazingly well, because the emotions that drive teenagers like Jim to seek their places in the firmament transcend eras, fashion, even animation styles.

Petersen's speculative reenactment makes for gripping summer entertainment -- if you don't mind a little corn floating in your brine.

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

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

It's a romantic weepie.

Farrell has the toughest role, playing a man who doesn't understand the powerful crosscurrents of his own emotions, the love, guilt and loyalty that become opposing forces and begin to destroy the relationships he covets.

An actress' dream.

Phenomenal acting, plus intelligent direction and themes, put The Ballad of Jack and Rose above other indie films about loss of innocence. At the same time, there is something garish about watching a father and daughter struggle with the snake of incest in their ill-advised Garden of Eden.

With Chomsky as its star, this documentary cannot go far wrong, even though filmmaker John Junkerman intersperses Chomsky footage with some really bad Japanese pop music.

Funny, yet appalling.

What a treasure - a funny, tart, romantic comedy about tweens suffering the pangs of first love. It makes the cityscape an essential part of the romance, like a junior, vintage Woody Allen.

A good-natured, gag-filled sequel.

Students of acting will appreciate the relish with which the characters bite off juicy chunks of dialogue.

Watching these pros in a dance of things unsaid is breathtaking, but it's a lugubrious, claustrophobic tale.

Turns out to be less than the sum of its wonderfully silly and bizarre parts.

Like all blond jokes, Legally Blonde is basically meanspirited, and that's when it's funniest.

This long-awaited movie has been unwisely chopped into two pieces -- the second is due in February -- when it really needed to be one long, delirious ride.

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.

There was no burning need for a remake, but this one is respectful of its predecessor. It incorporates the technology and acquisitiveness of the intervening quarter century since Romero's vision. It even features a metrosexual, something unheard of in 1978.

You can't look away, not only because the carnage is so masterfully photographed, but because the director sucks you into his bleak, poetic, even sensible vision of cosmic brutality. Not for the faint-hearted!

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 perfect sci-fi movie for a post-9/11 world, in that it tells us we're afraid of threats hiding in plain sight.

"Grimm's Fairy Tales" were pretty grim, but Criminal Lovers crosses the line and sexualizes your worst fears.

Gentle, funny and full of the lessons one expects from the scions of the late Jim Henson.

There's magic afoot, even if the movie is more serviceable than magical.

As a love story, Wimbledon is a washout. As a meditation on sports psychology, it might help improve your game.

Unless you live and breathe exhaust fumes, there isn't much to sustain a viewer through a lame story and dialogue so pathetic.

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.

Jazz is a good metaphor for Robert Altman's movies they're often improvisational, free-form and full of unexpected dissonance. Unfortunately, his movies also fall prey to the hazards of jazz they can be boring, screechy and endless. Thus, Kansas City. [16 Aug 1996, p.49]

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.

It may take a half-hour to get one's bearings, but there's a payoff in the subsequent charm of this nearly wordless, surreal comedy set in a decrepit bathhouse in Bulgaria.

A rare blend of comedy and tenderness whose point is not the horrors of war but the lengths a parent will go to protect his child's innocence.

A psychosexual thriller that treads a thin line between art and exploitation. The mere fact that it manages this queasy high-wire act is what sets debut director David Slade's slick mind game apart from the drooling pack.

The vitality of the hip-hop scene serves as both backdrop and metaphor in a romantic comedy as sweet as its title.

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.

Gives moviegoers a funny, observant, evanescent approach to the mysteries of human desire.

The Cold War isn't exactly a hot ticket right now, but K-19 punches up the timeless aspects of the story -- adventure, danger, teamwork, noble self-sacrifice and two forceful actors butting heads, even if you don't buy them as Russian for a moment.

It's an intelligent, chilling movie, but one that can't quite shake those stage origins.

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

Carrey gives an otherworldly, possessed performance as Kaufman.

A rare window into the apparatus and limitations of glam-rock.

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 action scenes, including one on that tourist sightseeing staple, the Bateau Mouche, were directed by Cory Yuen with some creative touches, including a hail of chopsticks during a fight in a restaurant kitchen.

Whatever substance there is of Ocean's Twelve fades faster than invisible ink. But it's not the kind of movie you watch for plot details. It's really about spending two hours on that Lake Como speedboat, relaxing with pals.

With one exception (hint: Faye Dunaway), the actors seem remarkably at home in their milieu.

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

The cottage industry of the mockumentary has produced another pleasing trifle, the cute and smart Lisa Picard Is Famous.

Stay through to the end credits, where the two child protagonists (Sabara and Vega) are shown as they were then and as they are now. Rodriguez's best achievement is in spotting the innate talent that would shine through in those two kids.

Although "Jam" is clearly a marketing tool with not much to say beyond "be the best that you can be," it strives to preserve the humor that made Looney Tunes so popular among adults.

Bernie Mac gives surprising wisdom and heart - along with the laughs - to what could have been just another generic baseball comedy.

An unexpected pleasure, a buoyant comedy that will make you feel young again.

Even with the requisite melodrama, it's a rollicking, optimistic movie.

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

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.

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.

Craggy oldsters Mick Jagger and James Coburn steal the show from the young uns in The Man From Elysian Fields, a mostly entertaining twist on the Faust story about a writer who sells himself cheap.

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

The movie exaggerates a common dynamic between men and women.

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

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II. It is sickening.

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.

An eye-pleasing French action-slasher film that is cheerfully unencumbered by the usual conventions of stuffy costume drama.

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

The performances are all on-target. Shelley Long and Gary Cole reprise the lady and her fellow, with Tim Matheson as the interloper, Christine Taylor as the hair-obsessed Marcia and Jennifer Elise Cox as Jan, the mouth-breather.

As strong on action as it is weak on the interpersonal stuff. If Bond can get a new car for each episode, how about some new pickup lines?

Relationship comedy like this is mother's milk to Drew Barrymore, who, as usual, is adorable and perfect.

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.

With its cheerful hailstorm of anachronisms and classic-rock soundtrack, there's nothing medieval about it.

This stripped-down premise made the first "Transporter" fun: It's all about driving skills and choreographed fights, not logic. Even with so few requirements, Transporter 2 runs on empty.

A machine-tooled entertainment that's as fake and flimsy as a plastic Christmas tree. The only reason the movie isn't as bad as it has a right to be is the marvelous Diane Keaton.

A crowd pleaser, even if it is unremarkable.

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.

If it doesn't shed much light on the violinist's personal life, it certainly conveys how personally she relates to her work.

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.

If you're seeking transcendent love this season, skip the morose "End of the Affair" and go with Anna and the King.

The cinematic equivalent of comfort food it soothed when you were younger and, in its familiarity, it soothes again.

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.

After 45 minutes of incomparable boredom, the movie gets slightly better when it stops reaching for cheap yuks and lets the actors do what they do well.

A caustic, funny, low-budget treat, shot on digital video.

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

A temple of enlightenment posing as a movie.

A serious and thoughtful movie that probably does not mean to trivialize the Holocaust and blame the victim. But it is playing with fire nevertheless.

The sexy, psycho Mad Love is like a Spanish "The Story of Adele H.," in which a woman loves once and only once, to the point of self-destruction, in the days before Prozac.

A perfect example of an "art" movie that is so lugubrious and soul-sucking that it's hell to sit through.

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

Wood is compelling, but Charlie Hunnam ("Nicholas Nickleby") is the one to watch.

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

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

The story offers an interesting twist, but the only really spooky part is when a Benny Goodman record insists on playing without human aid. More scares, please.

There's humor and expected back-story pathos.

Most of the movie's rewards are in watching Morton.

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

The movie portrays Guerin -- regarded by many as a hero -- as an irritating figure.

The screen smokes with sexual heat. But what's really erotic is how much fun the actors seem to be having.

The triumph here is the natural, fluid way the characters interact, many of them displaying real-life, quirky senses of humor you don't often find in screenplays.

Lean's wonderful 1946 movie are taken down a peg with a tawdry update of Great Expectations set in modern-day Florida and New York. [30 January 1998, p. 44]

It's too big an ensemble to provide enough back story for each player. But Sayles doesn't give his characters easily digestible labels, like "kook" or "pathetic loser."

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.

Take the Lead hits all the marks you'd expect of a movie like this, but it's done vibrantly and with warm-blooded characters.

A standout feature of the movie is its representation of female friendship.

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

The story is predictable, even bland, but the stellar cast, detailed set design and abundance of good humor elevate it from the typical feel-good movie. It makes for intelligent counterprogramming against some of the season's harder-edged fare.

Is it possible to have too much Anthony Hopkins? Believe it or not, the answer is yes. Hopkins' quiet power and perfectly formed vowels overwhelm the rickety, falsely sentimental Hearts in Atlantis.

If you're looking for cinema, skip this. But as a religion-based self-help workshop for victims of ­childhood abuse, it'sa deadly accurate button-pusher.

The movie was snatched, all right, and Ritchie is the culprit.

It's a big snooze because we can't take the main characters seriously.

All three leads grow on you.

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

The tone moves from gently jocular (Irons appears in drag) to mystically morose (a female shaman tries to ululate up a cure), and that creates a jarring effect from which the movie does not recover.

The movie may be set in prewar Japan, but it's pure 1940s Hollywood. There's costume, pageantry, melodrama, the feeling of a sweeping epic without the bother of too much accuracy, equal doses of heartbreak and uplift.

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

There are two movies vying to occupy the same space here: a teen comedy about artistic pretension and academic double standards, and a darker, nastier movie about a serial killer. They share Zwigoff's trademark misanthropy, but it doesn't delight as it did in the perversely sweet "Bad Santa." Now it just feels mean.

A brilliantly pitch-perfect sendup of a particular type of cheesy movie.

Rudd delivers the best bad Franglais since Inspector Clouseau.

This romantic comedy is about a love that is destined to be, and it celebrates that warm huddle of caring and craziness called family.

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

A magnificent looking and occasionally very silly Chinese Western.

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.

In a preamble that sets up Hawke's character, the jittery hand-held camera and grainy palette establish the look and feel of a '70s movie, thus paying homage to the Carpenter version, which, frankly, had more suspense.

Thanks to director Wayne Wang ("The Joy Luck Club"), there are also artistic touches that keep this movie from sticking to the roof of the mouth the way peanut butter does to Opal's pet.

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.

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

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 self-conscious movie by Katja von Garnier is shot like a music video, stocked with quick cuts, lip-synching and fantasy performances.

It's about as routine a movie as they come, but it features plenty of endorphin-releasing hip-hop choreography as Derek teaches Sara to get jiggy with it.

Caught with a shaky hand-held camera, this aimless diary glides indifferently along Weber's stellar collection of photos.

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

Oughtta be much bettor.

What if you made a pornographic movie with a real story line and better acting but didn't show any sex? You'd get The Fluffer, a movie that sounds and feels like the real thing but isn't.

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.

A well-acted and surprisingly thoughtful treatment of the same old, same old.

In this story of suburban teenage angst, the parents are weird and often cliché to the point of incomprehension, as if seen through the prism of ... a 25-year-old.

Sophisticated in that European way and predictable in that Hollywood way.

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]

The sniper's life is a lonely one, full of shallow breathing and delayed gratification. Solitary as it is, Jude Law manages to get a little action in the bunkers of wartime Stalingrad in the ambitious but sometimes inadvertently silly Enemy at the Gates.

Satire works when it's sharp and funny. When it's not, you get New Suit, an unremarkable sour-grapes comedy about the obsequious players and inconsequential products of Hollywood.

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

This is a serious and well-acted drama, not a jokey ripoff, whose relevance (however distant) to Columbine is a plus.

If Sacred Planet helps kids appreciate the beauty and wonder of nature and animal life, it will be worth it. But surely civilization can come up with a more generously entertaining delivery system.

Like a Hollywood buddy-cop movie gone through a multi-culti blender. It holds up a funhouse mirror to that familiar scenario in which a maverick cop breaks the rules.

Gives cinema vérité texture to a fictional story of trailer-trash dysfunction (minus the trailer).

The story and humor are so tame the movie barely merits No More Tears.

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

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

It has the feel of those romantic movies of the '40s that no one thinks are made anymore.

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.

After a few movies in which Paltrow was in danger of becoming a caricature of herself, she's back in rare form.

An update with a jolt of sheer exuberance.

Any which way you describe this uncompromising movie, it will never sound palatable. Still, it features one of the most spectacular physical transformations by an actress hungry for a meaty role. I haven't used the term "tour de force" in all of 2003, but now it is time.

Lacks the charismatic presence of Vin Diesel, who has priced himself right out of the franchise. Without Diesel, there's not much gas, at least not from the nonvehicular elements.

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

Has hell frozen over? Not only is Jack Nicholson starring in a buddy movie alongside Adam Sandler, but of the two, Sandler's low-key approach is preferable.

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

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.

A charmer with an attractive cast and an excellent soundtrack.

Cannibalizes "Saturday Night Fever" for everything from structure to plot, but does it adorably.

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

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.

This movie's attempt to reinvent Mizer as a First Amendment hero isn't as effective as its triumphant display of beefcake, which is, after all, the movie's raison d'etre.

Even Isabelle Huppert Lite is more profound than the best work of most other actresses.

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's killer, dude! [17 October 1997, p. 52]

The lightweight bauble is perfect entertainment for now.

This is a quieter, more psychologically dense movie, where the payoff is sometimes no payoff at all - for instance, Tim Roth plays a cut-rate divorce lawyer whose own weirdness (he seems to live out of his car) is never explained.

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.

Prepubescent girls might get a few safe giggles while others around them are yawning.

Dysfunction seeps from every pore of this family, and the anger and ugliness of the characters overwhelm not just the story but the movie's stunning National Geographic location.

The idea that every animated feature from Disney is an instant classic officially springs a leak with the noisily disappointing Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

Alnoy's unnerving mood piece is spare and atmospheric, even funny. The movie is accomplished, but gets hung up on arty composition.

It's an excellent fusion of subject and style.

This is no simplistic vigilante movie. Like Park Chan-wook's "Vengeance" trilogy, it explores the nature of the beast of revenge, leaving the audience in a sweat of dread.

This is not for the Merchant-Ivory crowd, but action fans will feel their pulses quicken.

Lane...is as stunning and changeable as that Tuscan countryside. Without her, this movie would be irksome, pandering as it does to stereotypes, including that of the American woman who goes abroad for easy sex with limpid-eyed hunks.

Attempts a coolness quotient it can't pull off.

We've seen this story before, and the thrill is gone.

A perfect blend of summer action, a big movie with a deeply personal story.

The result is a bit of a mess: sometimes delightful, sometimes tedious, always creative.

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

Modest and polite. That's not a ringing endorsement of Michael Showalter's good-natured comedy, but there are enough laughs in it if you're willing to settle.

Due to budget constraints, the movie is necessarily rough around the edges. But directors Josh Apter and Peter Olsen have a sure grasp of how to maintain a mood that chills long after the movie is over.

The French may be guilty of some bad behavior, but that's no reason to punish them with the shapeless, deceptively crass Le Divorce, a Merchant-Ivory production in which all things Gallic are reduced to quirks of snobbery, misogyny and haute selfishness.

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.

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

Hurt is slumming in an unchallenging role.

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.

The resulting movie is a mixed bag, not quite a documentary and yet as "true" to Weber's fascinations as a dog named True can be to his master.

It's the first mainstream gay movie that feels totally comfortable in its shoes.

Kinetic, meaningless and fun.

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

Shot on digital video, made on the run whenever Watts was available between gigs, the movie is a pointless, tedious eyesore.

A surprisingly genial and affecting comedy about the trials and tribulations of teenage rebellion during the Reagan '80s.

There's no refuge in this uncomfortably realistic movie, and that is its strength.

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

Juices up the visuals with fancy camerawork and split screens, but it can't distract enough from the vulgarity of the material.

A prime reason to see this, if you don't mind some really screechy acting by some of the supporting players and insipid metaphors for love and commitment, is its parade of fine flesh, both male and female.

A hellacious stew of romance and tragedy that gives the words "screwball" and "pathos" a bad name.

High spirits and colorful hissy fits go a long way toward masking the inexperience of this cast of mostly nonprofessionals. It's a charmer.

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.

Good acting and dull dialogue.

Never gives us what it promised: a glorious, totally new sense of horror.

A poetic and somber film that underscores the bum deal women usually get in any restrictive society.

It strains to hard for laughs, with stale jokes about unweildy corpses.

A really lame attempt to expand the marketing reach of the PBS-TV series.

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

A waterlogged bagel, hardly the valentine to New York it imagines itself to be.

Implausible yet enjoyably diverting thriller.

A charming runt of a movie. It's not all it could be, but it's the best the pound had to offer this week.

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.

This fictional "what if" scenario is a bit campy and stagey, like a session of Opera 101. But it has one great thing in its favor: Ardant.

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.

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

Kelly McGillis quite literally as you've never seen her -- as a manipulative, icy sex goddess in whose bedroom there are no limits.

Michael Jackson is an alien? Tell me something I don't know.

Hart's War has its priorities clear, but delivers them with insulting simplicity.

Not worth the rocket fuel.

Horror fans will still find it worthwhile. The ending is also a nice twist on the slasher genre.

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

As Shakespeare adaptations go, Scotland, PA. is just a McNugget, but the actors help sustain the satiric tone right up until McBeth's lady finally gets that stain out the old-fashioned way, with a cleaver.

It's not the best of von Trier, but the movie is shot in an unforgettable, haunting style that evokes both Bergman and the silent era.

No other mainstream movie has so openly tackled the subject of female sexual experience.

It has a distinctive look but a few too many recycled ideas; better luck on the next crash-landing.

The real star of the movie is the background work.

Forget the awful trailer that makes the movie look like chalk screeching on a blackboard. The Banger Sisters is sheer fun, and a great showcase for Hawn.

This heavenly sequel, again directed by "McG" (aka Joseph McGinty Nichol), is infused with an irresistibly joyous spirit that simply cannot be faked.

Brutal but somewhat endearing.

A fine example of how a character-based story can be so compelling you don't miss the frills.

All the magic at the disposal of today's filmmakers cannot bring to life this unappealing animated children's movie.

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

A preposterous action movie in which a Navy SEAL makes the world safe for democracy one continent at a time.

Its shapelessness and the cultural differences in acting style will keep this version filed under "cult oddity."

The co-stars genuinely like each other, and their pleasure is infectious.

The jokes are wild, raunchy, surreal and dead-on.

The movie walks a tightrope between playing this misunderstood malady for laughs and sentiment.

A climbing thriller whose plot may be on thin ice but whose action sequences are stunning.

Under different direction, Orange County might have drawn a savvy cult audience that would appreciate the black-comedy possibilities of Shaun's idolatry of a certain writing professor (Kline), the homoerotic overtones inherent in best-buddydom and pyromania as a sexual turn-on.

There's a thin line between smart-stupid and just plain stupid, and Super Troopers walks it with ease.

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

The laughs are there, but the movie's main asset is Paltrow, mournful and always braced for the worst.

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

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."

While this is not exactly a hopeful movie, it's a polished exercise in the kind of social commentary that can wake people up.

Ya-Ya Sisterhood is so divine. It offers a world where friendship is forever, the half-empty glass is refilled and the men are perfect.

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

A by-the-numbers tearjerker notable mostly for the most adorable little sluggers this side of the "Bad News Bears."

The movie resembles a video game in which each victory whisks you to the next level, with slightly different antagonists and a faster pace.

As junky as the movie is, you've gotta love its immersion in the preposterous and its naive hope that street credibility and attitude, along with a need for speed, are all that's really necessary in this big, bad world.

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

You know this movie is French (apart from the subtitles), because everyone looks great, gets naked and later breaks into a peppy musical number about the joys of lobster and shellfish.

A merry romantic comedy in the screwball tradition.

Unfocused and shrill.

Once in a very long while, a truly memorable romantic teen comedy comes along. The Girl Next Door is one.

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

Egoyan's uncharacteristic bid for the mainstream flames out on many levels, but it's hard not to stare with fascination at the dying embers.

Belongs to an intellectually stimulating subgenre that examines the thin line between documentary maker and subject.

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

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.

Daylight sets a record for implausible scenarios and lack of character development. But let's face it if you're going to be stranded in a fireball, you might as well be stranded there with Sylvester Stallone. Twenty years after "Rocky" punched him into the limelight, Stallone presents a more human-scaled character, and he's charming, even gracious. His acting range may not span Manhattan to Jersey, but he inspires confidence even in material as pre-fab as this. [6 Dec 1996, p.59]

The only thing to do, then, is settle back and appreciate Hudson's no-nonsense performance, an appealingly mature turn that makes you hope she has turned her back on second-rate romantic fluff. (Whether second-rate horror represents actual improvement is another matter.)

Has something going for it that you wouldn't expect from the tired mechanics of the story — and that is the star-making appearance of 15-year-old rapper Shad Moss, who goes by the name Lil' Bow Wow.

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

Alamo buffs will be delighted, and everyone else will be treated to something that feels like Old Hollywood crossed with new sensibilities.

The problem comes when the movie turns into a tedious, faith-based diatribe against medical science.

An on-again, arf-again comedy. [26 June 1998, p. 54]

Union is a brilliant spitfire, though one wishes the script had been run past an English major. But the movie's flaws are smoothed over by a rousing soundtrack, some excellent comic performances and the star-making moves of LL Cool J.

Each man winds up owing the other -- and the enormity of the sacrifices they make on one another's behalf are quite moving and have not been duplicated in the movies since.

The best of the lot are Greta Scacchi, as an actress trying to peddle her first screenplay (with herself attached as director), and Ron Silver.

Not without missteps and the occasional mouthful of sugar, but it grows on you.

The story's unnecessary and unconvincing Russian spies are out of "Rocky & Bullwinkle," but Blair is quite enjoyable as a sassy, capable idealist.

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.

A draggy shaggy-dog story about a poor Jewish girl's painfully slow emotional awakening. The movie is 145 minutes long, so by the time Esther's awake, the audience may not be as lucky.

It's a slight story to begin with, and the movie teeters on camp with its jokey filler material -- the typical King stuff including colorful locals, small puns and asides and a faint whiff of the supernatural.

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.

The movie mostly sustains its excitement of the hunt. But the real star is the panoramic, beautifully composed cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond. Whether he truly loved the African locations or is cursed with "a gift" doesn't matter; the dynamics of the story often flag, but the visuals lend a palpable excitement. [11 Oct 1996, p.49]

The movie is so nervous about offending anyone that it's hardly any fun. Hanks delivers a few solemn speeches meant to deflect criticism. Meanwhile, he and Tautou barely hit it off. At least Mr. and Mrs. Smith got hot while doing their jobs.

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.

A bouquet of snappy one-liners and disarming nuttiness.

A gore movie with no teeth.

Deliriously inventive.

The story is tired, the comedy forced and the mother's larger-than-life quirks are an acquired taste.

The dullest exorcist movie ever made.

Did Lane and John Cusack really have to put themselves through this? Here are two first-rate actors in the embarrassing situation of playing blithering misfits in a lame comedy of errors.

Big, bloated and only intermittently amusing.

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

The plot is formula all the way, but Lawrence has found a way to incorporate the physical techniques of the great silent stars with his standup comic's arsenal, and it's a pleasure to watch him at work.

The screenwriters claim they got the idea for this dreary thing by glimpsing a besieged Chelsea Clinton in the stands at a basketball game.