Michael Wilmington

As a director, Buscemi is drier than he is as a performer: more quietly funny, less intense and sometimes weirdly compassionate.

Haunts the conscience, troubles the spirit.

As a horror show, it's a cut--or a slash or a bloody whack--above most movies of this type: cleverly written, cleverly cast.

Attack of the Clones celebrates a certain youthful spirit in both moviemaking and movie watching; because it's as much phenomenon as movie, audiences will either ride with or reject it. I was happy to take the ride.

A wildly expensive movie full of computers, nonsense and violence, a film where wit, romance, elegance -- everything -- is sacrificed on the altar of giganticism, cliche and over-the-top action.

A sometimes stirring, sometimes preposterous movie.

The Brady Bunch Movie, which was directed and written by at least five people whom we prefer not to embarrass, looks bad, sounds bad and doesn't make any sense. There's even something nightmarish about it. All these bad jokes and vacant sets become almost horrifying, as if the film were on the verge of proving that life itself is a bad joke on a vacant set. [17 Feb 1995, p.J]

Trespass has its bloody ups and teeth-rattling downs, but it also has a clutch of humorous in-your-face performances and a core theme that explosively carries it along: When the factory breaks down, the rats will kill each other for the gold.

It's a risky movie, and an uneven one. But the impulses behind it are darker and stronger than in most of his previous comedies. Good or bad--and Life Stinks definitely has a weak, undeveloped side--I liked it.

It's a comedy about maniacs: a tasteful murder-comedy, which isn't that laudable a goal.

This is a movie where you can get drunk on the B2], sloshed on the scenery. But perhaps not quite drunk enough. [11 Aug 1995, p.C2]

Allen gives us at least half a classic comedy - more than we usually get at the movies these days - while having some elegant fun with an idea that has intrigued poets and smart alecks through the ages: the interchangeability of comedy and tragedy.

A thrilling ride but also a thoughtful one, it's a movie that does manage to do more good than bad by the end of the day.

It’s a dazzlingly filmed and acted synopsis.

Brighton Beach Memoirs may be one of Simon’s best plays, but the film’s heart seems to be beating in a plastic wrapper. There’s a kind of glace over everything, a sugary show-biz coat that dulls your taste buds. Everything is bigger, brighter and broader than it should be--though remnants of that simpler, more honest story often peek through.

Considering how good "Puccini's" middle often is, it's a shame it falls down fore and aft. But Maggenti, who loves Carole Lombard and William Powell in "My Man Godfrey," is tapping a likable vein here. She should open it up again.

Exactly the sort of personalized, non-assembly line treat some audiences are always trying, in vain, to find.

An erratic but enjoyable sci-fi action movie with an extremely bent sense of humor. [09 Aug 1996, p.F]

The duo carry automatic glamour and nobility and the movie is an elaborate star turn, a chance to see them strutting their stuff one more time.

The content may be dubious, but the execution is hypnotic.

The whole movie plays like an improbable blend of "Repulsion," "High Noon" and the archetypal low-budget rape/revenge shocker "I Spit on Your Grave." Queasy audiences beware, but midnight-movie bookers take note.

No period of Italian history has produced more great movies than the WWII years . But, Malena romanticizes and even sentimentalizes those years.

Wonderful spirit, humanity and humor.

Casual moviegoers may enjoy it, too, if they follow a simple rule: Stop looking for the way out and let yourself get lost.

Most of the jokes in Eddie Murphy Raw are the kind you regale buddies with to show off. Anyone as good as Eddie Murphy should have outgrown that years ago.

Ragged as some of it might have been, that old "Out-of-Towners" had a unified and surprisingly dark comic vision to go with its nifty one-liners. This big, glossy picture is set in movie-movie land, that shiny, peachy place where a celebrity -- like Mayor Rudy -- waits around every corner. [2 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

When it's just roaring along through a kaleidoscope of Los Angeles locations, the camera perched behind, above or below the skateboarding heroes and villains, the movie can be fun. It's shot in an extravagant, try-anything, music-video style. It's rattlingly paced, vibrant and splashy. Then we get to the story. Stop me if you've heard this one: Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl. Sound familiar? Try this for extra spice. Two warring teen-age gangs clash--the free-and-breezy Valley Guy "Ramp Locals" and the swaggering, black leather, bone-in-the-nose "Daggers."

The movie rips and roars.

It's a sordid but expert shocker.

So clearly derived from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that you might begin to wonder when Jack Nicholson will show up. The Dream Team isn't unusual, but it's funnier than, say, Twins or Fletch Lives. It can't really hit any classic highs, perhaps because it regards rebellion as cute and paranoia as a running gag. The jokes, to stick, need grittier, sawtooth edges.

May be corny, but it's also absorbing, sweet and powerfully acted. It's a film about falling in love and looking back on it, and it avoids many of the genre's syrupy dangers.

Slender but surprisingly smart and pleasing.

After a fairly good, tense opening, it keeps rolling up one preposterous scene after another.

Hobbled with pedestrian direction, a dull visual style and a last act awash in obvious bang-bang melodrama.

This is only a movie. But a good one. May Roddy Doyle give us many more.

A gentle film, not very controversial despite its gay content, Chop Sue is valuable as a record of beauty and obsession, much less interesting as a human document.

The phrase "by the numbers" was invented for the way Harper crafts this script. After coming up with a good notion, opening and close, he simply fills up the middle innings with the detritus of several decades of TV sitcoms and high-concept kid movies. [07 Jul 1993, p.F1]

It's one of those fast, slick, half-smart shows that can't decide whether to pay its debts to action or reality -- and winds up cheating both.

Kika is kind of a mess. But it's a charming, stimulating, talented and ingratiating mess, none-the-less.

The talk is witty, the twists are ingenious, the look and the mood are drop-dead.

Highway Courtesans carries a feeling of truth, of bravely facing problems that are pressing and real. It's a good, informative piece on the oldest profession--and on how the world differs from what we usually see in the movies.

Good in many ways, full of talent and intelligence, and marks the debut of a promising young American writer-director, Dan Harris.

Lisa isn’t ineffective. It’s shaped in the usual sadistic way that leaves some audiences howling with blood-lust by the climax. But it’s basically a nasty movie that tries to end up nicey-nice: a house-cat of a sex-thriller that wants to claw the hell out of you and then curl up to warm milk and velvety hugs.

Graced with Nair's loving direction, Witherspoon's radiance and that great cast, it is a treat, if somewhat less so than the novel.

Kline, though, does give one of the great movie performances of the year so far.

Johnny Suede has an astonishingly consistent tone and a remarkably talented and cohesive cast. [21 Aug 1992]

As bizarre, provocative and almost deliberately off-putting an indie picture as anything that's popped up in theaters recently.

Most of the rest of this Hamlet effective or lovely as parts of it may be, just keeps sawing at the air in a drafty hall and pouring all its light on Mel Gibson and his angelic stubble. [18 Jan 1991]

In The Hudsucker Proxy, the filmmaking Coen brothers make dark, startling, wittily extravagant sport of the American Dream. The movie is opulent and wry, a bitingly intelligent fable about business and romance. [25 Mar 1994, p.A]

It's a good film but an over-obvious one. I wish I'd liked it more.

It's a good small film for intelligent audiences who like to watch the movie camera explore other regions and other communities -- something all our movies should do more often.

A physically gorgeous production with a strong, clear conflict at its center. It's grueling but also exhilarating. Perhaps its ambitiousness is the film's biggest problem. Trying for dramatic sensitivity, historical scope, touching romance and shocking violence and suspense, it gets stretched too thin.

It’s swift and mean--a little empty perhaps, but not enough to distract you from its pleasures: the stark, brilliantly metallic gleam cinematographer Misha Suslov puts on his images, the psycho-electric jabs of the Lalo Schifrin score, the clean thrust of the plot, the furiously lucid action and the canny, almost stylized, minimalist performances of the actors (Jones, Hamilton, Vaughn, Richard Jaeckel, Keenan Wynn, Ving, Smith and the others). The movie may be shallow, but it’s also trim. It has that easy virtue of the old-line Hollywood B film: little visible excess fat.

Imagine Steven Spielberg gone existentialist, Carne and Prevert making rock videos, a punk "Diva" and Jean Cocteau crossed with the Clash, and you may get an idea of the peculiar charms awaiting you in the cavernous, fluorescent interiors of Subway. [Nov 16, 1985, p.16]

The boys are breezy; their companions glib and glittery. This big studio mix of bang-bang and badinage isn’t really a bad movie. But a lot of it suggests a fancy misfire: a super-powered evening at the town’s most expensive eatery, where everybody starts out psyched up to have Big Fun, and things start to slide. What happens? The food disappears. The music is too loud. The conversations are brittle, the jokes are pushed too hard, everyone laughs too much. And, at the end, in case your attention starts wandering, people start pulling out guns and killing each other.

Muppets from Space has silly gags and cute cosmic fish swimming around in its space. It just doesn't have the right awe and wonder -- except, perhaps, for the children who should be its prime audience. Adults, beware -- at least this time.

It's a good transcription, though sadly bowdlerized. [02 Jul 2000, p.29]

Both the movie and Denzel Washington are knockouts.

Airheads loses its guts and spark halfway through.

Thanks to the actors and the way the movie lets them loose, it's often funny or moving at all the right moments.

At least Reno is around -- and he's the only spice in this stale, slick stew

This pretty but witless movie is well-produced, slickly directed -- full of jokes about hot dudes and hot babes pitched right at the "American Pie" crowd.

King and Romero are a natural match, and though this isn't the best of the King-derived horror movies--The Shining and The Dead Zone probably are--it's close.

The diversity of the Beauty Shop ensemble is a large part of what makes it so much fun to watch;

Scott is able to make it fresh and lyrical, as well as give us rousingly exciting scenes of nature in eruption. [02 Feb 1996]

The film tries to mix the two 1930s movie comedy strains: screwball romance and populist fable. But there's something nerveless and thin about it. Hawn and Russell are good, but their scenes together have a calculated spontaneity--overcute, obvious. Director Garry Marshall keeps the lines slamming off each other briskly but with a shallow, hectoring energy. And he doesn't have much visual flair.

Starts like a house afire and then suffers an imagination burnout.

Big Trouble in Little China is a try at mock-Oriental movie magic that goes leaden about a third of the way through -- and finally detonates into great, whomping firebombs of overcalculated, underinspired absurdity. [02 July 1986, p.10]

It's hard to believe how bad this movie is.

I don't think it's a great movie -- though Theron's is a near-great performance -- but it's not one you can easily forget.

Bond, like rock 'n' roll -- or Tomorrow -- may never die. Even so, watching the movie explode and crash its way toward its climax, I could only keep thinking: Come back, Richard Maibaum.

The Nativity Story surprised me. I didn't expect such an obvious art film approach. Yet the Bible, in the King James version, is great English literature.

A stylish, nasty, very well-done Belgian horror movie.

Slick but forgettable. [01 Oct 1993, p.C]

A seductive revisiting of an old classic - one that helps us see these lovers and their world with renewed passion.

Seemingly a simple comedy, it actually -- like all Allen's "simple" comedies -- has a lot to say. Will the audience listen or just dismiss it as minor, out-of-date Woody? If they do, it's their loss.

An irritation, more fizzle than sizzle.

Frederick is the key to the movie and she's definitely an impressive new talent, someone who can really hold the screen and who delivers something striking or memorable in every scene.

It's Whoopi Goldberg, however, who gives you something extraordinary. At the center of all this formula tongue-in-cheek thriller pablum, she keeps sending out weird curves and bent splinters of off-center energy. She's a remarkably empathic actress, and you only hope she'll get a few vehicles that push her to the limit.

A "Chekhovian" movie that's closer to the master's mood than many, it's also a jazzy, rainy day film that makes serious and amusing points about life and people in the midst of its downpour.

Strikes me as something of an elaborate mistake, a wasted opportunity and a script Hartley should have discarded. But I liked it anyway.

A gaudy yet grim science-fiction horror movie of such surpassing silliness, humorless intensity and stylistic overkill that watching it may actually put you in a state of paranoia.

When the crashing chords and defiant lyrics of "Be the Rain" close things out, there's a burst of idealism and energy that redeems everything. If you see Greendale, treat the movie charitably and dig the music.

May be the only movie in recent memory unworthy of its own genuinely hilarious Web site, www.finemanfilms.com.

As sports movies go, Gridiron Gang isn't bad, just not top-line material.

A humane and fantastic work, and it touches us precisely because Konchalovsky shows the reality of both the soldiers and the madhouse inmates. His movie is just what he intended: a nightmare that speaks the truth.

Possession needs a sharp eye, a wicked tongue, less reverence and much more of its author's voice.

There is a thrill in seeing them wooing and pursuing each other through the streets of New York, a city that here again, for a while, becomes a movie isle of joy.

As a sheer ghostly thriller, it's mostly a spell-binder, but I was disappointed at the ending.

It's ludicrous, but it's fun. Besson is a filmmaker so in love with his own daffy excesses that he's able to pull us, laughing, right into his world of loony pop. [9 May 1997]

Strong, hard, dirty, funny, moving atmospheric and laced with scabrously musical street dialogue.

A bomb? Not quite. Anyone who gets a kick of train thrillers should get knocked off the tracks by this one. [17 July 1995, p.N2]

The best things about The Last Boy Scout are the editing, Bill Medley's singing, a few moments of Noble Willingham villainy and Willis--whose weary, exasperated style exactly suits this kind of material. But the worst things about Scout are its slickness and self-confidence. A story about lonely heroism in a sick age should be a little hipper to what's really heroic and what's really sick.

The Sea isn't just brooding Scandinavian domestic tragedy, a lesser Bergman-Ibsen pastiche. It's also hilarious and rowdy, and it plays with our sympathies and expectations in such surprising ways, with such brilliant actors, it's easy to see why it won the equivalent of eight Icelandic Oscars.

The "Fallen" moviemaking team obviously want to make a thinking person's horror movie. Intermittently, they succeed. But this movie suffers the fate of many recent nightmare thrillers. [16 Jan 1998, p.A]

Hitchcock adapts another Daphne Du Maurier novel -- a tale of pirates and distressed damsels on the Cornish coast -- with less memorable results than either "Rebecca" or "The Birds." But Charles Laughton is a nicely nasty two-faced villain and Maureen O'Hara a staunch heroine. [18 Jun 2000, p.22]

There's scarcely a scene in which the actors, action and sound track aren't cranked up to maximum intensity.

Critters is a dumb, but sometimes likable little movie: maybe an odd comment, since it contains savage killings, mutilations and general bloodshed and evisceration. [25 Apr 1986, p.8]

Should please its core audience, which includes anyone who might actually want to win a date with Tad Hamilton. Others may opt to wait for another date with Kate Bosworth -- or Nathan Lane.

It's a real disappointment: too hasty, too scattered and superficial, and, in the end, disappointingly sappy and sentimental.

A funny movie, but like "Josh" himself, it's too self-absorbed, and maybe too nice, for its own good.

This is a pro's movie, solid, taut and trim, done mostly with exemplary skill. That's its trouble, perhaps. This Getaway knows the score too well, entertains us too effectively, beguiles us too knowingly. [11 Feb 1994, p.A]

In compositions lustrously lit and creamily colorful as an elegant piece of soft-core porno, the moviemakers guide us through Veronica’s life, from virginity to bawdy fame to sainthood. Reality never intrudes — even though the script obviously wants to set us straight about gender, femininity and political power in 16th Century Venice.

This movie offers four of the best -- and best-looking -- Hollywood stars cavorting together in material so slight and inconsequential it often seems ready to float away like a toy balloon. [16 Oct 1997, p.1]

It's the best new battle film since "Black Hawk Down," a movie it surpasses in sheer feeling and bravura style, if not in nightmarish panic and suspense.

Elegant, scary fun.

It put a smile on my face that never left for 117 minutes.

Top Gun is a male bonding adventure movie that's both exciting and disturbing, mind-boggling and vacuous...Measuring this movie against its model -- Hawks' air films -- you can see the difference between a great director making his movies breathe, and a superproduction that depends on action and hardware. Top Gun is an empty-headed technological marvel. The actors -- especially Anthony Edwards, Val Kilmer and Meg Ryan -- are good, but they only connect as archetypes. The emotion heats up only when the planes are flying. [16 May 1986, p.C1]

Things Change is a coldly controlled, immaculately mounted show, with a softly beating heart. Everything--the dialogue, the performances, Ruiz Anchia's jewel-like lighting, Michael Merritt's wittily elegant production designs and Alaric Jans' haunting, spare score--contributes to the final effect.

The all-time great Stoller-Lieber title number, performed by The King in jailbird regalia, is just one highlight of this '50s rock-the-house classic. [04 Sep 1998, p.H]

Other than Shaw's turn, which gets dampened in the determinedly frolicsome finale, there's little to like in Three Men and a Little Lady. Selleck is charming. Danson, aided by latex and a Carmen Miranda outfit, has two funny scenes. Travis has a lovely smile, which she overuses.

The best thing about High Heels are the performances - [Victoria Abril]'s tense, voracious daughter, Parades' star-turn mother, the sinister Bose, the arrogant Atkine - and the lucidity of Almodovar's narrative style, which by now seems as natural as breathing. [20 Dec 1991]

The movie -- even though it's based on real events -- seems unsatisfying and unconvincing.

Irwin Winkler's The Net, which should have worked a lot better than it does, is a glossy, intricately plotted, mostly implausible suspense movie about a woman on the run.

Mighty Joe Young is a mighty big movie about a mighty big gorilla. And a lot of it is mighty bad -- unless you're a devotee of high tech and low camp, elephantine effects and mouse-sized stories, politically correct nostalgia and/or Charlize Theron and Bill Paxton in jungle outfits.

What Kasdan's "Earp" needed was more humor and better villains. "Wild Bill" has the humor and villains, the flash and energy, the fire and style. And when, at the end, Hill seems to throw it all away, it almost hurts. But you can say one thing about "Wild Bill": Unlike most movies, it has a lot to throw away. [01 Dec 1995, p.C]

A paper-thin wish-fulfillment comedy about escaping small-town repressions and blasting conformity.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles never rises above its marketing-hook origins. It's a product, a commodity, a toy tie-in, a trailer for the comics, an advertisement for the cereal. It's a naked sell.

Like its title heroine, it's sparkly, pretty and flirty--but often all wet.

Probably the last movie to carry a credit for the late Christopher Reeve--as well as the last credit for Reeve's late wife, Dana.

What's wrong is the decision to let all the actors improvise their lines...At the end, Irreversible looks less like captured or even distorted life than an acting class.

It has a jokey irreverence that keeps it from teetering over the edge to absurdity.

A classy supernatural lady-in-distress thriller.

A contemporary teen summer romance with a modern sexual twist--though in many ways, it's just the same old malarkey.

The movie is like a big, smug, sunny ball of fluff, batting around in a crystalline cage. It's bright and well-meaning, but there's little to grab onto or feel. Not even the presence of those expert actor/farceurs, Steve Martin and Diane Keaton, give it any real presence or bite. [20 Dec 1991, p.16]

It's possible to admire or respect a movie without enjoying it too much, and that's partly the reaction I had to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. It's an incredibly ambitious film of sometimes thrilling visual achievement, but it didn't connect fully to my mind and nerves.

A classy triple shot of film erotica from three brilliant writer-directors.

Beautifully produced: a moving film with a fascinating story and exemplary acting.

A highly entertaining and visually breathtaking movie, capable at times of rocking and delighting you.

The movie is an odd mix of tones and styles, and the thriller plot is casually introduced, shoved aside and reintroduced. But, like all Duvall's work, Assassination Tango breathes with humanity.

This is a better movie than the vacuous "Insurrection," thanks largely to a sympathetic screenwriter, longtime "Trek" fanatic John Logan ("Gladiator"), and a crew (headed by Patrick Stewart's Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and Brent Spiner's android Data) determined to go out in glory.

There's something light and insubstantial about this movie. It almost floats away as you watch it.

The kind of fascinatingly bad film only a really gifted and fearless moviemaker could make: a 92-minute long raggedy-raunchy vision of sex, transit and alienation in which Gallo focuses on himself so obsessively, it's as if he'd become his own stalker.

The Favor is a sex comedy without sex-and pretty much without comedy. [29 Apr 1994]

This movie might be better-maybe even a classic-if it were less urbane, if the New York tiger that Nicolas Cage and Richard Price unleashed could bare all his fangs, and not just fill the theater with his magnetic growl. Then Kiss of Death might really be a killer. [21 Apr 1995, p.C]

A pumped-up, flag-waving, outrageously hokey and ridiculous -- but sometimes incredibly exciting -- war movie.

In French Kiss--a picture that isn't unusually funny or original but that has expert actors, smooth direction and ravishing French locales--we can get pleasure from the sheer, relaxed polish of it all, the effortless swing. It's a good time passer. [5 May 1995, p.C]

Takes a fascinating true story and turns it into a conventional cop thriller, hoking up the provocative three-generation saga of the LaMarca family.

The Shadow shows what can happen when you overdress pulp. You wind up with something gorgeous and suffocated, bejeweled trash floundering in its own oversplendid stuffings. [01 Jul 1994, p.H]

A beautiful, intensely moving film.

A beautifully tooled action thriller about love and terrorism.

To say Young Guns is one of the best big Westerns of the '80s doesn't mean much: Westerns have been almost moribund since 1976. But it does hint at this movie's surprising vitality, bloody ebullience and violent impetuosity-qualities it shares with crazy little Billy. [12 Aug 1988, p.11]

American movies about childhood often have a spurious feel. They can be grandiosely phony or sentimental--or both, as in Home Alone. Unfortunately, Now and Then, despite massively good intentions, fits right into the program. [20 Oct 1995, p.J]

The new movie, like its predecessor, is a crime thriller with a moral viewpoint, an eye and ear for street color and a taste for macho movie fantasy.

This century's Planet of the Apes is a rouser, a screaming-banshee fun house.

Though the story is potentially fascinating and the visuals sometimes spellbinding, the movie itself is stranded in the purgatory of the second-rate.

It's one more example of minuscule ideas inflated to preposterous proportions: An Attack of the 50-Foot Marketing Hook. [17 Jul 1992, p.F10]

Overall, The Brothers is glossy fun, but it should have given us more ideas and energy.

It's stylish, it's sort of smart, it's full of misplaced talent. But it's not funny enough, and maybe, in a way, not dark enough either.

The most visually spectacular, action-packed and surreal of the adventures of Capt. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp).

Almost as uncompromising, and sometimes as funny, as "Dollhouse" or "Happiness."

A lively little Australian rock movie hamstrung and sunk by one of the least successful story ideas I've seen recently.

Twins starts with an overblown fairy-tale quality that seems as if it should work. But, by the finish, the movie collapses on the shoulders of the stars. It works because they both showed up and delivered the goods and kept their end of the deal. [9 Dec 1988, p.1]

To give the movie its due, it's been directed, at least on the visual level, with unusual elegance: filled with graceful, gliding tracking shots, and icily precise Hitchcockian setups of the bleak decor and scary effects.

To say this movie's premise is bonkers is putting it mildly.

Isn't good satire or good slapstick. It does have those lyrical, catchy Menken tunes, and the film perks up whenever Raitt or lang sing one of them. But much of this movie is deadly.

Funny Farm --a weak-fish-out-of-water comedy about a New York City couple who see their rural paradise turned into a rustic hell--is a movie with a doubly deceptive title. This movie isn't about a farm, and it isn't very funny, either.

No one who sees the last half-hour of this movie will ever forget it--though quite a few may want to.

A limply derivative, disappointingly trivial and hokey fish-out-of-water crime comedy.

A wildly improbable story that neither Newman nor co-stars Fiorentino and Mulroney, for all their panache and chemistry, can make much sense of it.

At its best, this new film does mix grandeur with skepticism, excitement with reflection. In the end, like Harry, it redeems itself.

A big, hearty fantasy-adventure with spectacular fire-breathing effects and a fizzling story. [31 May 1996, p.C]

A ravishing crock. Like its title character, a computer-generated movie star programmed to resemble a cross between Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Kim Basinger, it's beautiful but empty, gorgeous but spurious.

A relaxed-looking expert piece that immerses us in another world. At the end, Hanson has a bonus. He and his producers hired Bob Dylan for the Oscar-winning "Things Have Changed" in "Wonder Boys," and Hanson brings Dylan back here, for a folky, bluesy number called "Huck's Tune."

Howard has a wonderful touch with actors, and almost all of them here have their moments. [26 March 1999, Friday, p.A]

The film is an epic treatment of a childhood curio. It's also the kind of elaborate movie stunt you can't imagine someone really pulling off. [26 May 1995, p.C]

Most novels can't be encapsulated well enough in a conventional two-hour movie format, and Dreamcatcher may be one of them -- a miniseries gone wrong.

Great Balls of Fire would be an entertaining evening even if it preserved nothing more than Lewis' songs -- rerecorded by Lewis with all the soul and groin-stirring fury that he has preserved during three decades. It also has an often-dazzling comic impersonation of Lewis by Dennis Quaid, a goofy ballet of awesomely confident struts and brags. [30 June 1989, p.1]

It's good, hard-edged stuff, violent and a bit exploitative but also nicely done, morally alert and street-smart.

The acting is primo and the cinematography, on high-definition video by the gifted M. David Mullen, is striking.

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, the co-stars of Out to Sea, keep fooling, beguiling and surprising us. Nothing can sink or ruffle them. Even with substandard scripts or dubious projects, they remain one of the greatest comedy actor teams the American movies have had: two longtime stars with formidable talents who complement each other perfectly. [02 July 1997, p.2]

Writer-director Kouf often comes up with seemingly sure-fire ideas and then fails to develop them. "Gang Related" takes some chances. But, while trying to shift the moral center and avoid cliches, it keeps floundering and stumbling back into them. Like the accumulating corpses on Divinci and Rodriguez's beat, it seems a victim of greed, confusion, mistaken identity and a mixed-up system that turns good guys bad. [8 Oct 1997, p.1]

It's by far the best cast Burns has assembled -- so much so that, unlike his other films, he doesn't come near dominating it.

This is a meaty, well-crafted thriller that absorbs and disturbs you from first frame to last.

This hip, highly partisan biography of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey is a surprisingly entertaining movie about the perils of studying sexual behavior in a sexually uptight culture--our own.

In the end, it all can't help feeling a little slight, more a pleasant wade into a writer's neurotic playground than a satisfyingly deep dip.

Watching actors this good handle material this dopey is like waiting for Itzhak Perlman to pick up his violin and start playing variations on My Baby Does the Hanky Panky. It's funny. But it's also sad. The movie suggests we get the government we deserve, but do we really deserve this movie?

With its lilting Lerner-Loewe score and great Kelly dance numbers, this is almost a Hollywood musical masterpiece. But it's sabotaged by the airless "outdoor" studio sets mandated by MGM. [13 Mar 1998, p.L]

There's a sass and bite to Winger's acting, a grinning intelligence, unabashed sexiness and total immersion that make her one of the movies' few hipster female stars.

What pulls us along through the inky shoals of The Way of the Gun? Sheer style, plus the movie's refusal to play nice.

Packs so much hell-for-leather action, gorgeous Moroccan scenery and eye-popping Industrial Light and Magic visual effects into its two hours that, after a while, I began to get tired of it.

Love can be a battleground, and, despite its homey-sounding title and gentle, almost nonchalant air, Jeff Lipsky's Flannel Pajamas gives us a series of messages from the front.

As for Ramis, he's no Stanley Donen. He can make us laugh, but he can't make a movie dance.

The second film never has the hardness or urgency of the first. Its best moments, perhaps happily, tend to come from the actors rather than the story or Richard Edlund's effects: especially newcomers Geraldine Fitzgerald and Julian Beck. [23 May 1986]

This version not only doesn’t surpass or match Brook’s, it makes the material look bad.

A business-as-usual blockbuster blueprint that rarely surprises you.

A sports bio movie that I really enjoyed about a sport and sports hero I barely knew existed: the World Hour Record competition for bicyclists and its gutsy, tormented and most unusual champion, Graeme Obree.

Species carries the whole idea of the erotic thriller--that '80s yuppie genre that mixed sex and slaughter--past cliche into howling absurdity.

A movie of such cheerful craziness and nonstop ferocity that you can't take it seriously for a second.

Martin Lawrence and Ashton Kutcher may seem like an odd-sounding comedy team, but in some weird way, they click as voice-actors and cartoon buddies in Open Season.

The movie is dedicated, in a nice touch, to early Farrelly fan Gene Siskel. And Gene was right: The Farrellys are often very funny filmmakers. .

The movie has bounce and bite, but it skitters around too much. Its needle is hip-hopping around between too many grooves.

That conscious absurdity is at the core of The Quick and the Dead. It's a rousingly grotesque, often wildly entertaining western horror-comedy, with co-producer and star Sharon Stone as a sexy lady gunslinger taking on all comers in the gunfight tournament from hell. [10 Feb 1995, p.C]

Just because a movie was inspired by real life and has good intentions doesn't mean it can't wind up as phony as a three-dollar bill.

There's barely a scene in this movie that taps his (Murphy) special brilliance.

It's an extraordinary performance in an often brave and intelligent film that, unfortunately, tends to collapse around him in the end -- just as the world of Kline's character, tweedy but likable William Hundert, deconstructs around him.

The images are lustrous, the cutting is brisk and the acting of the two leads is right on the money.

This rich, gorgeous music and the wistful pastoral scenes create a rhapsodic mood that the rest of the film doesn't really sustain.

It’s not a bad film. Brightly designed, slickly paced, it has its cargo of youth elements: laughs, sexual tease, action and music. But, halfway through, you can almost feel everyone relaxing, waiting for the next bit of spiritless slapstick or car-chase to carry them through to the end.

Chevy Chase has not been on a roll lately, and to say that in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation he's funnier than in his last six movies combined may sound like high praise, until you remember those six movies. "Caddyshack II" alone almost throws them into the "minus" laugh range. But here, he does what he does best: flat-out slapstick and subversive tear-downs of his own smooth image. This sweet, goofball, manic middle-class daddy brings out his sharpest reflexes and he gets good support from D'Angelo, the bulging-eyed slob-in-excelsis Quaid, and from Questel and Hickey as his dottiest relations.

Think about the worst movie ideas you've had in your life, the ones so embarrassing they make you wince. Now imagine this: a modernized version of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" titled Scotland, Pa.

A singularly cheerless trip, explicit but sterile, racy but dull.

So stunningly shot and visualized--and scored so hauntingly well by Anja Garbarek, the daughter of saxophonist/composer Jan Garbarek--that it works even if you don't pay attention to the story. Maybe it works better that way.

There's a razzly-dazzly beauty in Barbara Ling's designs and Kanievska and cameraman Ed Lachman shoot them wittily. But it's swallowed up in the story's empty outrage.

Jennifer 8 is smarter than most of the swanky scare machines, but it’s also too hemmed-in by convention and programmed scares. The game is too rigid: the player’s skills are being wasted. The movie, perhaps, should have been built entirely around those Garcia-Malkovich scenes--because it’s in the exchange of glances between those two, the scraped wariness of Garcia, the quiet, almost lazy sadism of Malkovich, that it really chills the blood.

It's a spree of a movie, one of the most impishly entertaining of Altman's career. Smart, sparkling, almost sinfully amusing.

A modern digitized lollapalooza concocted out of old-fashioned slam-bang space opera elements.

This is a movie that, for all its often high intelligence and skill, seems emotionally underdone, bogged down in tony literary and cinematic cliches.

Works better and cuts deeper than the mostly fictionalized "Hoosiers."

We're No Angels proves that a great ensemble is no guarantee of a great movie -- but it also proves that the misses of the brilliant can still give you something extraordinary. [15 Dec 1989, p.F12]

In the end, Switch isn’t a top-grade Edwards movie--though it shares with his best, a sparkling directorial panache and charm, a charge of risque humanism, a wizardly delight in body language.

The Theory of Flight is built from the kind of material that either soars or crashes with audiences. And here, it doesn't quite hold together. But if the film, as a whole, never takes flight, the actors do. Watching them bicker and sail up is so delightful, you only wish their vehicle could keep them aloft longer.

Fairly entertaining and often exciting, expertly done in a way, but not especially engaging or new, and not as emotionally involving as its title suggests.

One hopes that this is Hollywood's last go-round with Swept Away. Watching this fiasco, I kept having nightmares about a possible cartoon version, co-starring Cruella de Vil and Shrek.

One of those movies that promises much but doesn't deliver. Despite a lot of misplaced talent, this movie is as silly and forced as its title.

Somewhat illogical but full of terrifyingly sustained sado-masochistic emotion. [05 Dec 1997, p.L]

The Baby-sitters Club movie, written by Dalene Young and directed by Melanie Mayron, winds up seeming just as packaged and programmed as many of its summer competitors. The books, however obvious, don't talk down to their youthful readers. But the movie does. [18 Aug 1995, p.F]

It's interesting - in its own let-it-all-hang-out, shaky-camera way.

There are misfires in Sucka, but there's also some funny stuff. Wayans shows a refreshing taste for self-mockery. [17 Feb 1989, p.8]

If you were forced to judge it simply on its action-movie visual and technical elements, you'd have to count it a roaring success... . But if you lay aside that action and watch the people instead, it's a morass of dimwitted family crises and hack action-movie cliches.

Elaborate misfire, which misuses an unusually good cast.

Just Cause might better have been called "Without a Cause." Or "Without a Clue." [17 Feb 1995, p.C2]

It's still a disappointment: a well-mounted and well-acted suspense movie that, thanks to its illogical script, falls off a cliff midway through.

For a film that first seems a throwaway, it has unusual intensity and grip. It’s not another over-reaching, under-financed “Terminator” or “Total Recall” wanna-be.

Gives us a lot to enjoy and something most studio movies don't even try for: an attempt at the richness, density and sheer contrariness of life.

Though it's somewhat better than its predecessor, largely through sheer directorial and photographic panache, it's still pretty disreputable and mindless. [29 Apr 1988, p.4]

It would be tempting to say that inside “Slamdance” is a remarkable movie struggling to free itself from conventional trappings. But the opposite is true. The trappings are what dazzle you; the interior of “Slamdance” is exactly what isn’t remarkable.

Boasts a really spectacular cast to voice those reasonably funny jokes.

For anyone who knew and loved the 1950s TV series The Phil Silvers Show -- in which Silvers played the peerless motormouth Army con artist, Master Sgt. Ernie Bilko -- Sgt. Bilko, starring Steve Martin, will probably be a disappointment. [29 Mar 1996, p.C]

It’s a big, frothy, high-tech, cutesy-poo musical comedy.

It's really a crock: a coming-of-age boys' prison film that has only a fanciful link with Behan's life. The film is a bastard grandchild of Tony Richardson's 1962 "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner."

The movie has a nasty, creepy edge that never lets up, and the characters are deliberately grating and alienating. This is a thriller that, like some classic noirs, glories in its own mean aura, its casual profanity and grotesque violence.

Wacky and heartless, bloody and silly -- and it ends in a flourish of grotesque sentimentality.

The wrong crowd will find these antics infantile and offensive. The right one will have a howling good time.

It's a fairly well-written piece and an even better acted one. And these days, when independent films are increasingly the salvation of the serious American dramatic movie, it's heartening to see something like The Architect, which tries to reawaken a major American dramatic tradition and sometimes succeeds.

Unlike other current D.C. types, Elle would never misplace or misidentify her own weapons of mass destruction. They're all in her wardrobe closet and makeup kit.

Heartbreakers itself is something of a con game: an expensive imitation of older, better films from older, often better times.

This clunky remake can't rise from the ashes, nor would you want it to.

One of the most discouraging things about many big studio movies is the way they waste resources, mainly talent and money. Pushing Tin manages to waste an excellent cast, a glossy production and what initially seems to be a bright, funny script. [23 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

Beside its major virtues, it contains a vice: that one flat lead performance. Who would have thought Kevin Spacey would ever go dull on us?

Though it's sweet and likable to a fault, it's also a movie that never seems heartfelt or deep.

The movie tries hard to duplicate the original's mood and story, but, like Gere or Lopez, is too much of a visual knockout to rope us in.

The two halves of Hiding Out--thriller and teen sex comedy--never meld, working against each other rather than together. Hiding Out never escapes its absurd hook, this mechanical collision of genres. After all, if someone really needs to hide out, isn't the best plan to simply . . . hide out?

Young Guns II generates more sheer visual excitement than any Western since Peckinpah and Leone were in their last '70s prime.

Throbbing with music, seething with anger and romance, The Lost City is a film that breaks your heart, bewilders, alienates and ravishes you by turns.

It has a good director, snazzy visuals and some really funny animals, and that's at least half the battle.

This often entertaining movie mixes grand, epic effects and amazing visualizations of catastrophe with a sappy family-in-crisis plot that would look hackneyed in a '60s Disney TV movie.

Rambo is an inane sequel to a fairly good melodrama; another example of an attempt to repeat an earlier success that goes wildly out of scale.

It's a big, smiley, free-floating blimp of a comedy: a farce about reluctant fatherhood that could use some parental guidance. [12 July 1995, p.N16]

It's arguably one of the emptiest, feeblest, most derivative scripts ever made as a major studio movie. There's no need to do a Mad magazine movie parody of this; it's already on the screen.

Often ridiculous, mostly poorly written and, surprisingly poorly acted too. No matter how many flashy scenes the filmmakers shoot, the bad lines just keep dripping down. [21 Aug 1998]

It's one of those movies where talented filmmakers waste time with stale, phony material.

Man on Fire, which starts off as a good example of super-glitz moviemaking, gradually turns into a movie on fire -- another helter-skelter, big-studio spending spree. Too bad. It could use a lot more of Walken, Fanning and some more honest drama.

But even if Hitchcock’s chase thrillers were the inspiration, with their falsely accused heroes fleeing police through exotic landscapes, the master wouldn’t have approved of this tribute. Logic, character, coherence, psychology--all those vital thriller elements disappear as quickly as the Iowa corn.

An expensive-looking new detective thriller that should have been much better.

Wyatt Earp is a fascinating ride to a West where darkness and heroism mingle, a triumph for Kasdan, Costner, Quaid and the company. It shows how, in this frontier crucible, love and death, honor and slaughter, friendship and a walk toward doom, are all linked together as well. [24 Jun 1994, p.F]

At its best, "Hollywood" has the breezy irreverence and easy, sunny L.A. atmosphere of Shelton's 1992 "White Men Can't Jump," a buddy-buddy basketball-hustle movie.

It’s not the gem it wants to be, but it’s good in comparison to many of the sensation-hungry pictures around it; it’s not just a movie only a mother could love.

Pink Cadillac has a strong visual design and lots of juicy, self-confident acting. But it doesn’t transcend its star vehicle trappings or chemistry. The construction of the story is so soft, you get the impression that if the driver and navigator were replaced, the movie might turn rattletrap and fall apart.

More spirit and grace and less blood and guts may be what Passion needs.

A smart, sprightly little movie with beguiling actors and few inhibitions. Though there's nothing startlingly new here, there's a freshness and vigor to the acting, and the crisscrossing love affairs hold your interest.

The best things about The Thing Called Love are its cast, style and mood. It has a snap, pace and rhythm we don't ordinarily see in today's movies. The dialogue scenes have a headlong pace and crackling self-confidence reminiscent of Howard Hawks, and the three- and four-way love combats recall Ernst Lubitsch.

Newsies becomes a string of set-pieces, some of which work, some of which don't, all barreling full-speed ahead toward its Teddy Roosevelt deus ex machina. [10 Apr 1992]

As silly movies go, this one is at least pretty exciting. But in the end, Typhoon leaves you feeling as exiled from the two Koreas as Sin is.

The idea may sound like fun, but the movie isn't. It's a travesty of a picture that's a disgrace to the memory of the great film from which it's remade. [5 February 1999, Friday, po.A]

With its stylized story-line and almost styleless direction, it sometimes resembles a juggling act with sledgehammers. [13 Jul 1988, p.1]

It's a slick, ambitious movie that doesn't always nail all the many moods and themes it's after.

I liked Flirt better than any of Hartley's films since "Trust." The playfulness he shows here seems better integrated, more meaningful, than the strange narrative whimsies of 1992's "Simple Men" or 1994's "Amateur." [08 Nov 1996]

One of the most intriguing prison dramas ever put on film.

Material like this might have worked if the moviemakers had played it completely crazy and over-the-top, if they'd made it a true satire of the American upper class facing its worst nightmare. But the tone of Toy Soldiers suggests its makers might have tried to turn Animal House into a triumph of the spirit story, too. [26 Apr 1991, p.F10]

It's a distraction: a buzz in your head that won't go away. [31 March 1995, p.HI]

Makes compromises itself, but only because of its small budget and its director's mixed dark-and-rosy vision, at once cynical and sentimental. Yet at least it has a vision -- of both life and cinema.

The imagination, energy, chutzpah and sheer affection shown for Darin by director-writer-star Spacey, who plays the singer, are admirable, kicky. This is a movie, that, like Darin himself, takes a lot of chances and delivers on many of them.

For about half its length, Ravenous is a fairly effective scare picture, with a laugh or two. Then it just goes sour and pretentious. [19 March 1999, Friday, p.D]

Chris Farley is fine at physical gags, David Spade is snappy with wise cracks and Brian Dennehy is a good actor who has the best part in the movie-because he gets to die halfway through it. Tommy Boy, an attempt at populist comedy, has some laughs. But it doesn't really have any ideas, meaning or real feeling. This movie has a heart of plastic. It doesn't beat; it squeaks. [31 Mar 1995, p.C2]

The acting has the bravura stage eloquence of Broadway Shakespeare and the movie is narrated, beautifully, by John Hurt.

If its jolts were as strong as its chuckles, The Woman Chaser might really have turned into the cheap-thrill classic it pretends to be.

Has the worst happy ending I've seen in a while.

It's a real shame that most new boxing movies try to copy the crowd-pleasing, sentiment-choked tactics of "Rocky" rather than the stark drama of "Raging Bull" or the realistic grit of "On the Waterfront" and "The Harder They Fall." Against the Ropes is only the latest sorry example. The sad thing is that, with this real-life story and subject, it could have been a contender.

Overall, King Arthur sinks into a grim, gray torpor - though it's an odd, not unentertaining movie. The approach is different, if not edifying or convincing.

Without Lemmon and Matthau, it's doubtful either "Grumpy" movie would be worth watching -- or even thinking about. But, because these two get much of their humor from reactions, the magnificent friction they create, they can say ridiculous things -- or even make up ridiculous lines (which they seem to be doing here) -- and make the scenes play. [22 Dec 1995, p.P]

Suggests a raunchier, cruder version of a Coen brothers comedy, but it's also a kind of honky-tonk "Rashomon."

Koepp, an often ingenious writer, should have followed King's example and covered his tracks better. If he had, Secret Window might have been as good as "Stir of Echoes," and not simply a mini "Misery" and a not-quite "Shining."

Is this the modern version of "Going My Way," with those squabbling, heart-warming Irish Catholic priests mixing up pop songs and hymns? Well, in a way it almost is, though its mood is far different and it's set in a far different world that moves to a different tempo and has graver and more troubling social crises.

Overbroad, underdone.

It would be a lie to suggest that there aren't some crudely effective moments in Ghost and the Darkness. After all, this is a movie where two man-eating lions pop up every 10 minutes or so, growl and drag off another fresh corpse or two. But crude effectiveness is all the movie has to offer -- and even that is a mark it doesn't always hit.

There are no surprises in this movie -- not even in the Bollywood parodies, when the hero and heroine finally, subversively kiss. There is talent, though.

Not perfect, and neither are life or the movies. But you'd have to be blind yourself not to relish its qualities or laugh at its barbs.

Opulence almost interferes with the movie, weighing it down when it should seem lighter than air, surrounding the inarguably brilliant Carrey with too much frosting and frou-frou.

Sweet-tempered but superficial.

Writer-director Gary David Goldberg's script is full of complex and lively love patter, which Cusack especially rattles off with sometimes breakneck speed.

The movie A Good Man in Africa contains the book's funniest, saltiest scenes, but it's less controlled and assured. [09 Sep 1994, p.C]

If Spaceballs disappoints you, it isn't because it's unfunny or not entertaining. Brooks at medium pressure is still more amusing than most movie makers. [25 Jun 1987, p.1]

Like too many movies these days, takes a clever little idea and all but pounds it into the ground.