Lisa Alspector

This friendly, briefly exciting story (1998), inspired by John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, achieves a nice balance between caricature and nuanced characterization and even manages not to be cloying.

By the time the fighting between clones and their originals turned to fraternal bonding, I was quite moved, even blissed out.

At once a light comedy and a reasonably serious meditation on the perils of fame.

Divided into sections bracketed by the arrival of each new DJ and is enlivened by the edgy yet trendy environment.

[Farrellys'] great achievement is forcing those of us addicted to eye candy to see we have a problem.

The movie manages to push buttons without seeming formulaic.

Scenes that should have been uproarious are weaker than many of the movie's smaller moments.

Many of the plot points seem belabored because they're introduced in the voice-over, then ploddingly dramatized, then analyzed by the family over meals.

This is a sensitive and at times gently humorous love-and-war story; the flight scenes are exciting and exquisitely crafted, the characters lovingly drawn.

The treatment of this touchy material is impressive, neither gratuitous nor mincing, but this satirical comedy doesn't really go anywhere.

The music's great, but frequent tight shots of actors ostensibly blowing their horns look phony enough to be distracting.

Though hypocritical in the way it sensationalizes sexuality, this serious and funny 1998 movie about a 15-year-old coming to terms with her body and her family in 1976 is, refreshingly, never coy or ironic.

This gorgeous expressionist drama makes the comparisons so effectively at the outset that by the end they seem belabored.

For the sake of more irony--the movie is lousy with it--the precocious characters have an infantile response to the discovery that their parents are missing: all want their mommies after a night of junk-food excess.

Entrancingly lurid live-action fantasy.

Stylistic excess, comedy, and romance often help make extremes of cruelty and horror function as cathartic metaphor, and all three figure, not always successfully, in this sequel.

The social criticism is as unforced as the humor (and the references to "The Conversation") in this 1998 conspiracy thriller, whose spirited action is balanced by an almost contemplative attitude toward surveillance phobias and the movie cliches they've spawned.

A judicious mix of the lightly gory, the generously cartoonish, and the unexpectedly atmospheric makes for action that's scary yet unintimidating.

Mildly exciting sports-in-prison movie.

The plots of animated features are often excuses for visual showboating, but here the lilting story line, based on west African folktales, complements the alternately sumptuous and austere images.

Depp conveys his character's ambivalence and ambiguity with utter conviction, and though the annoying score tries to throw Pacino's monologues over the top, his persuasive, low-key performance puts the violins in their place.

Disarming-misfit story, which combines elements of a road movie, romance, small-town idyll, and police procedural.

Their blossoming love is thwarted at every opportunity by wicked stepmother Anjelica Huston, whose practical motive -- she wants her own daughter to become queen -- is part of an unusually nuanced characterization.

Political incorrectness, gross-out humor, references for their own sake, and some real wit are distributed over the 85 minutes with an unusually consistent sense of timing and proportion, and the tone is just right.

Favreau, who also plays the long-suffering Bobby, mixes elements of drama into this appropriately annoying comedy.

The humor is often predictable--minor characters are stereotyped only to be demeaned for easy laughs--but the movie impressively fulfills its larger purpose of making you look at your culture's conventions as such.

This 1968 Beatles musical gets somewhat plot heavy near the end, but it's a marvel of innocence and free association, blending several animation techniques in a loose narrative full of gentle bad puns and flowing visual segues.

Whether the story's bald ironies are historical cliches or just dramatic ones, they convey only platitudes about gender, sexuality, and power.