Lawrence Van Gelder

While instructive on environmental concerns about the impact of logging, Butterfly does not reward those who seek dispassionate psychological insight into the zealous Ms. Hill.

Structurally, Sex, Politics and Cocktails is wildly, almost frantically inventive, with techniques ranging from stop-motion to split-screen to silent film-style intertitles. But no amount of directorial trickery can mask the essential vacuousness of the story and its characters.

An engaging and colorful but somewhat overbalanced documentary.

It is a measure of the shortcomings of this genial, well-meaning but ultimately unenchanting film that scene after scene is stolen by the second bananas.

A tale of negligent homicide, class warfare, vengeance, jealousy and murder, Stephen King's Thinner has the outlines of Shakespearean tragedy and the intellectual content of a jack o'lantern. But as such ventures go, this Halloween handout is more treat than trick, if your tastes run to dripping blood and repellent skin ailments. The production is slick, the Maine scenery is bracing, the characters are well-acted, and in a mumbo-jumbo movie with a few loose ends, the makeup central to the plot and applied by Greg Cannom and Bob Laden to Robert John Burke in the leading role is most admirable.

Given genuine life by the dimpled enchantress Nancy St. Alban, Nora makes palpable the bittersweet love at the honest heart of Some Fish Can Fly.

Though it could do with fewer talking-head interviews and more extended clips from these impassioned live performances, Young Rebels is essential viewing for anyone interested in rap music, free speech issues or the youth culture of contemporary Cuba.

Lots of people will probably like The Kentucky Fried Movie, just as they like Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's hamburgers. But popularity is still no reason for deifying mediocrity.

If an Olympic competition for overplotted movie is ever held, Circus seems a likely contender for the gold.

Though it flies in the face of credibility and becomes downright silly by its end, I Know What You Did Last Summer knows its way around the rules of the popular horror-film genre.

What Yellowbeard establishes is that for even the funniest of performers, a good script may be as essential as pitching is to baseball.

Street-wise older children might find it to their taste; but all the new trappings cannot disguise the fact that "Together Brothers" is an old story, being retold perhaps wisely, but not exceptionally well.

In retelling this timeworn story of conflict between young men in the New World and their stubborn Old World fathers, Mr. Efteriades may not have generated many sparks, but with his affection for Astoria and its people he has given his tale a warm glow.

The offending videotape is never seen, but the entire film is built around its absence. Periodically, the film returns to a written police account of the video, which scrolls up the screen, documenting the animal's suffering blow by blow to the sound of ominous music.

The director's attention to details of character and locale makes for a precise evocation of a New York seldom seen in feature films.

Manages to capture firsthand the danger, fatigue and sheer tedium of an arduous illegal border crossing from Mexico without ever becoming tedious itself.

Turns out to be a pretentiously righteous drama that drowns any claim to serious attention in a sea of superficial characters.

The film, at least 20 minutes too long, has too many competing story lines to succeed as more than an oddball mood piece.

For horror film devotees eager to know how this unseasonable visit from the darker spirits of autumn rates, frankly, it's more marketing trick than moviegoer treat.

Ordinary lives have become an ordinary film.

When it comes to an ending, Drive Me Crazy offers no surprises, but it arrives there in amiable, sensible style.

Mr. Morel's predilection for murky, nearly pitch-black cinematography and spare, elliptical dialogue indicates his debt to filmmakers like François Ozon and Claire Denis, but Three Dancing Slaves lacks the psychological precision of Mr. Ozon's or Ms. Denis's work.

The novelty of a bloody horror film built around a malevolent doll carrying the soul of a serial killer has worn thin.

No more than a sentimental little comedy.

Weighing in at almost exactly one pound and unable to breathe or eat on his own, Nicholas James Baba-Conn seemed doomed to a very short life; his chance for survival was calculated at close to zero.

For juvenile filmgoers and families in search of a more-than-twice-told tale with uplifting messages about the rewards of perseverance, the virtues of animals and acceptance of the handicapped, MVP will do.

American Chai may not tell a new story, but in its understanding, often funny way, it tells a story whose restatement is validated by the changing composition of the nation.

This mediocre sci-fi horror film about an Ohio high school being taken over by thirsty space aliens intent on world domination breaks no new ground. But it has an engaging cast.

People who are immune to atrocious acting in minor roles; to occasionally poor dubbing; to a totally unoriginal story; to the sort of sloppiness that allows at least one reference to the octopus as a squid; and to a climactic sequence that looks like feeding time at the aquarium when it is at all intelligible, will cull the exceedingly minor rewards of "Tentacles" from some realistic underwater photography, a nicely manipulative opening sequence in which the baby vanishes; and the bobbing corpse gimmick that was more shocking than anything else in "Jaws."

Some may be offended by this film's use of Sept. 11 as a plot device, but ultimately The Friend is less concerned with the politics of terror than with its psychology.

Warm of heart, modest in polish, Amy provides satisfactions that must be balanced against its flaws.

In the end, The Baxter is a Baxter of a movie: well meaning and mildly likable, but unlikely to sweep you off your feet.

However fascinating the source material, there's something less than cinematic about 90 minutes of watching people read letters in front of windows.

Knock Off runs breathlessly over land and water in familiar comic book fashion, offering more action than sense and next to nothing in the way of suspense, humor or romance.

Mr. Rodriguez seems unsure what his film is really about, making the moral of the story -- "dream an unselfish dream" -- feel more like a vaguely judgmental homily than a satisfying conclusion.

Repackaged as cyberthriller, the old time-travel adventure returns in this stylish but overplotted and ultimately illogical combination of science fiction, mystery and romance.

In the failure of Electric Dreams to blend and balance its ingredients properly, plot elements are lost (the brick), credibility is overtaxed (the lovelorn computer), and what remains is high tech without being high art.

Belly is a film that begs for a pat on the head for its virtue while catering to cinematic tastes more interested in crotch shots, topless dancers, wall-sized television screens, ganja galore and, wherever possible, crime without punishment, all to the accompaniment of a high-octane soundtrack.

The medium is more palatable than the saccharine message because Hopkins and Gooding know how to put on a show.

Simultaneously fascinating and vexing in ways that might tax informed devotees of both baseball and film.

The card announcing the film's G rating was roundly booed by the youngsters though at almost every sight of the dog they screamed with mouth-filled delight.

Slight but bright and charming.

A mere slip of a movie, a wan character study of people who add up to little more than a series of studied quirks.

Leave It to Beaver is the sort of movie that could be described as good clean fun if it happened to be good or fun.

Plods along, never catching dramatic fire, sometimes suffering from amateurish acting and often relying on its intrusive and treacly music to impart mood and rhythm.

Sometimes even a talented lineup produces unexceptional results.

Like Giuseppe Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso," Just One Look is a tribute to the formative power of cinema, a coming-of-age film that nimbly interweaves the adolescent hero's struggles with clips from the movies that shape his romanticized notions of life.

Travel from Mars to Earth is an amazing feat, but not much more remarkable than reviving a sitcom that had been dead for a third of a century.

Amounts to recycling rather than reinvention.

Mr. Caan's debut film is not quite a whole thing, but it offers up enough promising fragments to make his sophomore effort worth watching for.

Lovingly shot on location in the Italian neighborhoods of Providence, this comfortably predictable film has its pleasures, most notably a dryly funny Adrienne Barbeau as the brothers' hip, hard-drinking Aunt Lidia.

Establishes its ominous mood and tension swiftly, and if the suspense never rises to a higher level, it is nevertheless maintained throughout.

Lavish in its depiction of surfaces -- clothing, furniture, lighting fixtures -- Flowers of Shanghai proves deficient in its revelation of inner lives.

Easy to like and difficult to admire.

To make a film in 2005 that asks audiences to sympathize with the plight of a band of terrorists is an intellectually audacious gesture.

The movie only really comes alive when the music plays and people sing and dance.

Short on suspense, routine in its action and monotonous in its performances.

Special effects in which the actors appear repeatedly in black outline and occasionally distorted perspective; and an assortment of tricks (rearing up on hind wheels, blushing and blinking his lights) that possesses a somewhat limited power to captivate...Reluctant adults marched off to "Herbie" by tiny press gangs may take what consolation they can from the scenery, featuring France and Monaco.

Theresa Russell is terrific as Angela's slatternly but loving mother, but her character disappears abruptly midway through the movie.

The Devil's Rejects is a trompe l'oeil experiment in deliberately retro filmmaking. It looks sensational, but there is a curious emptiness at its core.

Poverty, capable of stunting lives, can also blight films. A case in point is the earnest and heartfelt but undernourished and plodding Off the Hook.

An earnest study in despair.

Notable chiefly for its eye-catching urban backgrounds and an eclectic score that ranges from jazz and country to classical and choral.

More focused on surface than true revelation.

The pleasures are familiar, but not the least bit inspired.

Most of the principal female characters are either sexually voracious, sexually promiscuous, pregnant out of wedlock or angrily bent on revenge.

Combines old-fashioned boys' adventure with a heavy-handed modern lecture on parenthood. The film possesses a decent heart but suffers from a simple mind.

There's not much sense to the plot. But the film makers' blunderbuss approach to humor, with visual and verbal jokes coming in profusion and scattering high and low, guarantees that just about every funnybone is bound to be hit, some more than once.

Serious, competent and unsurprising debut film.

Sheds heat but insufficient light.

Neither approves of nor condemns the choices made by its headstrong protagonist; rather, it quietly observes her transformation from naïve schoolgirl to wary but proud single mother.

The buoyancy is only intermittent.

It's easy to be seduced by this film's warmhearted, if slightly utopian, vision.

A rare hybrid: an underdog sports picture that's also a transgender fairy tale.

Though it generates its share of unintentional giggles, Desert Wind does manage to take us to a seldom-visited place: the hidden corners of the straight male mind.

A well-cast disaster movie more notable for special effects and stunts than for credible drama.

Too much soap opera colors its love story, and the industrial- strength dancing by booted men that is its centerpiece falls short of exhilaration.

The Time We Killed has the raw intimacy of a filmed diary, but as with reading a stranger's journal, it eventually gets dull.

With Christopher Eccleston as Jude and Kate Winslet of ''Sense and Sensibility'' as his great love, Sue Bridehead, and with convincing evocations of 19th-century England from locations in Edinburgh and the north of England, Jude remains a handsome if gravely flawed film.

Where "Ringu" derived its power from the simplicity of its premise and the purity of its execution, One Missed Call staggers under the weight of its director's taste for baroque excess.

What results is a candy-colored broad comedy with noteworthy performances.

Mr. Tarkovsky appears so absorbed in grappling with his own demons that universality suffers. [17 Aug 1983, p.C14]

A rare and often chilling glimpse into the culture of North Korea.

Instead of sending up their cinematic sources, the creators of Muppets From Space rely too much on this spent screen fuel. Frenetic movement and loud music overwhelm warmth and compassion, and the balance of character, plot, irreverent humor and innate decency that made some of the earlier Muppet movies so welcome is lost.

Rather than seeming classic, Freeway appears to be another film maker showcase, a derivative apprentice work.

This sweet-natured but plodding adaptation of a young-adult novel by Carl Hiaasen could have used a little less broad satire of corporate greed and a few more, well, owls.