Roger Ebert

The movie is awfully sweet. The young actresses playing eighth-graders look their age, for once, and have an unstudied charm.

This is the kind of movie that some kids would probably enjoy - it's filled with technology, special effects and action. But it just doesn't make any sense. And It lacks the wit to have fun with its time travel paradoxes, as last year's wonderful Time After Time did. It just plows ahead. Or behind. Or somewhere.

Uys's style sheds a sweet and gentle light on this new comedy, which is a sequel to the surprising international success - and, I think, a better film.

The fact is, the reverse chronology makes Irreversible a film that structurally argues against rape and violence, while ordinary chronology would lead us down a seductive narrative path toward a shocking, exploitative payoff.

A perfectly acceptable brainless action thriller.

Griffin is quick, smart and funny.

Bright and zesty.

A funny movie that only gets funnier the more familiar you are with the James Bond movies, all the Bond clones and countless other 1960s films.

One of those movies where the audience knows the message before the film begins and the characters are still learning it when the film ends.

Lacking a smarter screenplay, it milks the genuine skills of its actors and director for more than it deserves, and then runs off the rails in an ending more laughable than scary.

Proves to be unsatisfactory because it establishes a well-defined group of characters and shows them disrupted by the careless behavior of a tiresome young woman and two adults who allow themselves to be motivated in one way or another by her infectious libido.

Casino Jack is so forthright, it is stunning.

Hitchcock liked typecasting, he said, because if an actor was right for a role, that made less work for the director in getting the audience to accept the character. Here the casting is so wrong that nothing quite works.

It's like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir. I liked it.

A quietly enthralling film because it contains the murder and the investigation within Carter's smooth calm.

I guess you have to be in the mood for a goofball picture like this. I guess I was.

Broderick is splendid as the gambler. He knows, as many addicts do, that the addictive personality is very inward, however much acting out might take place.

The flywheels of the plot machine keep it churning around, but it chugs off onto the back lot and doesn't hit anybody in management. Only Penn and Willis are really funny, poking fun not at themselves but at stars they no doubt hate to work with.

The movie has been directed and acted so well, in fact, that almost all my questions have to do with the script: Why was the hero made so uncompromisingly hateful?

This movie could obviously go on fooling us forever, but we are good sports only up to a point, and then our attention drifts. Shame, since there's so much good stuff in it, like how effortlessly Rachel Griffiths keeps two tough guys completely at her mercy.

Plays like a tired exercise, a spy spoof with no burning desire to be that, or anything else.

In Death Wish we get just about the definitive Bronson; rarely has a leading role contained fewer words or more violence.

It's one of those off-balance movies that seems searching for the right tone.

Quigley Down Under is a handsome film, well-acted, and it's a shame the filmmakers didn't spend a little more energy on making it smarter and more original.

Living these lives, for these people, must have been sad and tedious, and so, inevitably, is their story, and it must be said, the film about it.

I have a feeling the loss of their child and the state of their marriage were what most interested the backers of this film. They must have wanted to make a film about Darwin the man, not Darwin the scientist.

It's one of the movies with a lot of smiles and laughter in it, and a good feeling all the way through. Just everyday life, warmly observed.

Look Who's Talking is full of good feeling, and director Amy Heckerling finds a light touch for her lightweight material.

When a film telling three stories and spanning thousands of years has a running time of 96 minutes, scenes must have been cut out. There will someday be a Director’s Cut of this movie, and that’s the cut I want to see.

Any Which Way You Can is not a very good movie, but it's hard not to feel a grudging affection for it. Where else, in the space of 115 minutes, can you find a country & western road picture with two fights, a bald motorcycle gang, the Mafia, a love story, a pickup truck, a tow truck, Fats Domino, a foul-mouthed octogenarian, an oversexed orangutan and a contest for the bare knuckle championship of the world?

Variable ratings: The Hand (4 stars), Equilibrium (3 stars), The Dangerous Thread of Things (1 star).

Falls so far outside our ordinary story expectations it may frustrate some viewers.

Whether you will like Jay and Silent Bob depends on who you are. Most movies are made for everybody. Kevin Smith's movies are either made specifically for you, or specifically not made for you.

The film has its rewards and one performance of great passion. That would be by Ellen Burstyn, as Miss Addie, who plays it all in her sick bed in a Tennessee country mansion with a debutante party going on downstairs.

A truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy. Elaine May, the director, has mounted a multimillion-dollar expedition in search of a plot so thin that it hardly could support a five-minute TV sketch.

Has it come to this? Do we need the additional emotional jolts of blindness, paralysis and amputation in order to accept a story about young love and kids succeeding by luck and pluck? People who are handicapped must find that these movies range from the depressing to the contemptible.

Strangely enough, the long-awaited meeting between Connery and Miss Bardot is a flop. They look yearningly at each other a lot, and once he puts his arms around her and they fall out of camera range, but otherwise no sparks are struck.

An astonishing achievement in imaginative filmmaking.

Fox is very good in the central role (he has a long drunken monologue that is the best thing he has ever done in a movie). To his credit, he never seems to be having fun as he journeys through club land. Few do, for long. If you know someone like Jamie, take him to this movie, and don't let him go to the john.

The movie is mostly about our nasty heroes being attacked by terrifying antagonists in incomprehensible muddles of lightning-fast special effects. It lacks the quiet suspense of the first “Predator,” and please don't even mention the “Alien vs. Predator” pictures, which lacked the subtlety of “Mothra vs. Godzilla.”

A sweet, innocent family movie about stray dogs that seem as well-trained as Olympic champions. Friday, the Jack Russell terrier who's the leader of the pack, does more acting than most of the humans, and doesn't even get billing.

Here Common isn't called upon to do much heavy lifting in the acting department, but he plays well with Queen Latifah. Sure, the movie is a formula. A formula that works reminds us of why it became a formula.

By the film's end, I found myself simultaneously hoping that ESU would win its big game, and that the school would pull the plug on its football program. I guess that's how I was supposed to feel.

So likable, we go with it on its chosen level.

The movie is not quite successful. It is too secretive about its heart.

Too much action brings the movie to a dead standstill. Why don't directors understand that? Why don't they know that wall-to-wall action makes a movie less interesting -- less like drama, more like a repetitive video game?

Youngblood is not a bad movie, and indeed has moments of real conviction. But it is doomed by its plot, which is yet another example of what I like to call the Climb from Despair to Victory (CLIDVIC, rhymes with Kid Pic).

Curiously enough, the movie isn't really about what happens. It's about how it feels. This is a story more interested in tone and mood than in big plot points.

The film's failure is to get from A to B. We buy both good Sam and bad Sam, but we don't see him making the transition.

The first time I saw the coming attractions trailer for Sister Act, I roared with laughter and delight. Unfortunately, it's better directed than the movie. The trailer has high energy and whammo punchlines. The movie is sort of low-key and contemplative and a little too thoughtful.

Star Trek is over for me. I've been looking at these stories for half a halftime, and, let's face it, they're out of gas.

An effective thriller precisely because it is true to the way sophisticated people might behave in this situation. Its characters are not movie creatures, gullible, emotional and quickly moved to tears. They're realists, rich, a little jaded.

What the film gains at Bakshi’s hand is a very clever bag of animator’s tricks, most of which serve to make Tolkien’s characters palpable after all those years on paper.

I felt too much of the movie consisted of groups of characters I didn't care about, running down passageways and fighting off enemies and trying to get back to the present before the window of time slams shut.

Here is a tense and sorrowful film where common sense struggles with blood lust.

Charles Bronson, who has recently started to enjoy a long-delayed superstar status, is very good and slit-eyed as the mechanic, and the movie's premise is a nice one with a lot of neat twists toward the end.

The fancy stuff and foolery impedes the story and its emotions; the underlying story was strong enough that maybe a traditional narrative would have been best, after all.

Make no mistake: The Cannes version was a bad film, but now Gallo's editing has set free the good film inside. The Brown Bunny is still not a complete success -- it is odd and off-putting when it doesn't want to be -- but as a study of loneliness and need, it evokes a tender sadness.

A good movie, fearless and true, observant and merciless. Naomi Watts was brave to make it and gifted to make it so well.

The screenplay, by Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon, has a good feel for female best-friend relationships, and the dialogue has life and edge to it.

When I see these six together, I can't help thinking of the champions at the Westminster Dog Show. You have breeds that seem completely different from one another (Labradors, poodles, boxers, Dalmatians), and yet they're all champions.

Does John Carter get the job done for the weekend action audience? Yes, I suppose it does. The massive city on legs that stomps across the landscape is well-done. The Tharks are ingenious, although I'm not sure why they need tusks. Lynn Collins makes a terrific heroine.

This is the kind of movie where every note is put in lovingly. It's a 1950s crime movie, but with a modern, ironic edge: The cops are just a shade over the top, just slightly in on the joke.

Taken shows Mills as a one-man rescue squad, a master of every skill, a laser-eyed, sharpshooting, pursuit-driving, pocket-picking, impersonating, knife-fighting, torturing, karate-fighting killing machine who can cleverly turn over a petrol tank with one pass in his car and strategically ignite it with another.

The movie never says so, but it's a practical parable about the debate between pro-choice and pro-life. If you're pro-life, you would require Anna to donate her kidney, although there is a chance she could die, and her sister doesn't have a good prognosis. If you're pro-choice, you would support Anna's lawsuit.

In Step Brothers, the language is simply showing off by talking dirty. It serves no comic function, and just sort of sits there in the air, making me cringe.

They had a great idea here. It's too bad they didn't follow it through on a human level, instead of making it feel made up and artificial and twice-removed, from the everyday experience it pretends to be about.

There is plot and more plot in Kiss of Death. By the time it's over you may wish you had taken notes, to keep track of who is doing what, and with which, and to whom.

Because of the ingenious screenplay by John Orloff, precise direction by Roland Emmerich and the casting of memorable British actors, you can walk into the theater as a blank slate, follow and enjoy the story, and leave convinced - if of nothing else - that Shakespeare was a figure of compelling interest.

Here's a movie with a plot spun out of thin air. That doesn't matter, though, because the movie is acted and directed with such style that we have fun slogging through the silliness. And part of the fun comes from watching Tom Selleck, the hero of Magnum, P.I., in a movie that does him justice.

Romeo is Bleeding is an exercise in overwrought style and overwritten melodrama, and proof that a great cast cannot save a film from self-destruction.

The plot risks bursting under the strain of its coincidences, as Sara and Jon fly to opposite coasts at the same time and engage in a series of Idiot Plot moves so extreme and wrongheaded that even other characters in the same scene should start shouting helpful suggestions.

There's so much good here, in the dialogue, the performances and the observation, that the movie succeeds at many moments even while pursuing its doomed grand design.

This is not the story of a fugitive trying to sneak through enemy terrain and be rescued, but of a movie character magically transported from one photo opportunity to another.

It doesn't even inspire a put-down. It just lies there in my mind -- a big, heavy lump. But in the midst of it, like a visitor from another movie, Lee Marvin desperately labors to inject some flash and sparkle. And he succeeds in bringing whole scenes to life. A good actor can do this, but it's a waste when he must.

I'm all for movies that create unease, but I prefer them to appear to know why they're doing that. Super is a film ending in narrative anarchy, exercising a destructive impulse to no greater purpose than to mess with us.

Kline's Frenchman is somehow not worldly enough, and Ryan's heroine never convinces us she ever loved her fiance in the first place. A movie about this kind of material either should be about people who feel true passion or should commit itself as a comedy. Compromise is pointless.

This is Spielberg's weakest film since "1941."

[Lillard's] performance dominates the film, and he does a subtle, tricky job of being both an obnoxious punk and a kid in search of his direction in life. He's very good.

The most astonishing thing in the movie, however, is how boring it is.

Compared with the sensational stunts and special effects in the Bond series, The Saint seems positively leisurely. The fight scenes go on too long and are not interesting, the villains aren't single-minded enough, and the Saint seems more like a disguise fetishist than a formidable international operative.

The movie, written and directed by Dylan Kidd, depends on its dialogue, and like a film by David Mamet or Neil LaBute has characters who use speech like an instrument. The screenplay would be entertaining just to read, as so very few are.

Life with Mikey is a good-hearted retread of many other movies about friendship between a hapless adult and a wise child.

Not an extraordinary movie. In its workmanship it aspires not to be remarkable but to be well made, dependable, moving us because of the hurt in the hero's eyes.

A movie that doesn't buy into all the tenets of our national sports religion; the subtext is that winning isn't everything.

Duke and his screenwriter, Chris Brancato, don't make Hoodlum into a violent action film, though it has its bloody shoot-outs, but into more of a character study.

Somehow I kept waiting for the movie to get back on track - to get back to the zany comedy I thought I'd been promised. My problems with Cadillac Man were probably inspired more by false expectations than by anything on the screen.

For me, Happy Feet Two is pretty thin soup. The animation is bright and attractive, the music gives the characters something to do, but the movie has too much dialogue in the areas of philosophy and analysis.

If you respond to film noir, if you like dark streets and women with scarlet lips and big fast cars with running boards, the look of this movie will work some kind of magic. The story itself may not be so mesmerizing, but who really cares? Style and tone are everything with a movie like this, which wants to bring to life a dark secret place in the lurid pulp imagination.

They (fans) know what they enjoy. They don't want no damn movies with damn surprises. I am always pleased when moviegoers have a good time; perhaps they will return to a theater and someday see a good movie by accident, and it will start them thinking.

The movie is rated R, but it's the most watery R I've seen. It's more of a PG-13 playing dress-up.

It is about the actual lives of refugees, who lack the luxury of opinions because they are preoccupied with staying alive in a world that has no place for them.

The movie exudes a sense of authenticity, of a subject researched well. The major difference, however, between "Network" and "Power" is that "Network" had a plot and "Power" does not.

The Black Windmill commits the one crime no thriller can be pardoned for. It's not thrilling. It's also terribly passive and static, and Siegel directs Caine almost to a standstill.

Perry tries to be faithful to the play and also to his own boldly and simply told stories, and the two styles don't fit together.

What's funny in cartoons is not always funny in live action, and some of the dunkings in unsavory substances left me less than amused.

I could see how, with a rewrite and a better focus, this could have been a film of "Braveheart'' quality instead of basically just a costume swashbuckler.

This is a sweet, whimsical, low-key movie, a movie that makes you feel good without pressing you too hard.

What distinguished Stand by Me was the psychological soundness of the story: We could believe it and care about it. Now and Then is made of artificial bits and pieces.

There's a lot of funny stuff, but the most unexpected comes from Arnold, who has been uneven, to say the least, in his movies.

Shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue, and it mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat.

The movie is probably ideal for those proverbial young girls who adore cats, and young boys, too. I can't recommend it for adults attending on their own, unless they really, really love cats.

Is this a good movie? Not exactly; too much of it is on automatic pilot, as it must be, to satisfy the fans of the original Shaft. Is it better than I expected? Yes.

Too cluttered and busy, but as a glimpse into the affluent culture of a country with economic extremes, it's intriguing. Occasionally it's funny and moving, too.

Burton's made a film that's respectful to the original, and respectable in itself, but that's not enough. Ten years from now, it will be the 1968 version that people are still renting.

There is no entry portal in The Rules of Attraction, and I spent most of the movie feeling depressed by the shallow, selfish, greedy characters. I wanted to be at another party.

Strange, that movies about Satan always require Catholics. You never see your Presbyterians or Episcopalians hurling down demons.

Here is a movie that finds the right look and tone for its material.

Cluzot, with his uncanny resemblance to Dustin Hoffman, is an engaging actor who effortlessly summons up inner neurosis. The others are all skilled at light wit and banter; in a way, the film is simply a record of the French being French.

The animation isn't vivid, the characters aren't very interesting, and the songs are routine.

The movie is focused on two kinds of chemistry: of the kitchen, and of the heart. The kitchen works better.

Too bad that robots, unlike humans, cannot be discovered in one movie and go on to star in another. I'd like to see No. 5 in a film more suitable to its talents.

Too bad the movie relies on special effects to carry the show, and doesn't bring much else to the party.

Great energy and creativity went into the construction, production and direction of this movie, but it doesn't have a story that does justice to the production.

Will you like this film? Yes, probably, if you like monster and horror movies. The movie occupies familiar ground, but it has a freshness and winsome humor to fit it, and Craven moves confidently through the three related genres he's stealing from (monster movies, mad scientist movies, and transformation movies in which people turn into strange beings). There's beauty in this movie, if you know where to look for it.

A package like this looks OK on paper, but goes nowhere. It turns all of the characters into chess pieces, whose relationships depend on the plot, not on human chemistry. Since the plot is absurdly illogical, you’re not left with much.

It involves some of the best use of 3-D I've seen in an animated feature. It also introduces a masterstroke that essentially allows the series to take place anywhere: There is this land beneath the surface of the earth, you see...

The movie is a first-time directorial effort by Justin Theroux, a splendid actor, son of the writer Phyllis, nephew of the novelist Paul. He might have done better to have taken on something by them.

The movie's a mixed bag, but worth seeing for the good stuff, which is a lesson in how productive it can be to allow characters to say what they might actually say.

More fable than slice of life, and all these people and props give Robert De Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman their opening to create two screwy characters from opposite ends of the great personality divide

Passes off pathological behavior as romantic bliss. It's about two sick and twisted people playing mind games and calling it love.

That the movie is fun is undeniable. That it is bad is inarguable.

All of this has a fascination, and yet Red Trousers is a jumbled and unsatisfying documentary.

The movie labors under an enormous handicap: A much better, more intelligent and more exciting film has already been made about this same subject.

Love and Bullets is a hopelessly confused hodgepodge of chases, killings, enigmatic meetings and separations, and insufferably overacted scenes by Steiger alternating with alarmingly underacted scenes by Bronson.

Forget the plot. The movie is really about Steve and Terri taking us on a guided tour of the crocs, snakes, deadly insects and other stars of the outback fauna. Steve's act is simplicity itself.

There's too much contrivance and not enough plausibility, and so finally we're just enjoying the performances and wishing they'd been in a more persuasive movie.

American Flyers is shaky at the core, because it tries to tap-dance around its own central issues.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is probably about as good as we could have expected. It lacks the dazzling brilliance and originality of 2001 (which was an extraordinary one-of-a-kind film). But on its own terms it's a very well-made piece of work, with an interesting premise.

There are a lot of things in Billy Jack that are seriously conceived and very well-handled. Some of the scenes at the school, for example, with real kids experimenting with psychodrama, are interesting. Some of the action scenes are first-rate. But the movie has as many causes in it as a year's run of the New Republic.

There is a lot of individualism in this movie, both in the filmmaking and in the characters.

A project of this sort depends crucially on the chemistry between its actors, and Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke develop an erotic tension in this movie that is convincing, complicated and sensual.

In D.J. Caruso's Two for the Money, you can see Al Pacino doing something he's done a lot lately: Having a terrific time being an actor.

Management works as a sweet rom-com with some fairly big laughs.

The performers breathe real life into the characters, starting with Elizabeth Pena and Alfred Molina.

Bullock does a good job here of working against her natural likability, creating a character you'd like to like, and could like, if she weren't so sad, strange and turned in upon herself.

I think it works like a nasty little machine to keep us involved and disturbed; my attention never strayed, and one of the elements I liked was the way Paltrow's character isn't sentimentalized.

A very angry film.

The Stoning of Soraya M.”has such a powerful stoning sequence that I recommend it if only for its brutal ideological message. That the pitiful death of Soraya is followed by a false Hollywood upbeat ending involving tape recordings and silliness about a car that won't start is simply shameful. Nowrasteh, born in Colorado, attended the USC Film School. Is that what they teach there?

Unfortunately, the parts of the movie that are truly good are buried beneath the deadening layers of thriller cliches and an unconvincing love story.

Would a Republican enjoy this movie as much as a Democrat? Possibly. Party affiliations mean nothing to the characters, nor does the plot approach them. Then why are Huggins and Brady both Republicans? I'll save you the trouble. It's because Hollywood is run by a lot of rich liberals, right?

I saw it a third time. By then I had moved beyond the immediate shock of the material and was able to focus on what a well-made film it was; how concisely Solondz gets the effects he's after.

The movie is not in any sense a musical featuring this band (which, as nearly as I could tell, does not have a name). The soundtrack has a lot of music, freely selected from pop hits old and new, but the running gag is that the band never gets to play, and so we never get to hear it.

Twins is not a great comedy - it's not up there with Reitman's "Ghostbusters" and DeVito is not as funny as he was in "Ruthless People" and "Wise Guys" - but it is an engaging entertainment with some big laughs and a sort of warm goofiness.

I know Letters to Juliet is a soppy melodrama, and I don’t mind in the least. I know the ending is preordained from the setup. I know the characters are broad and comforting stereotypes. In this case, I simply don’t care. Sometimes we have personal reasons for responding to a film.

The Island runs 136 minutes, but that's not long for a double feature. The first half of Michael Bay's new film is a spare, creepy science fiction parable, and then it shifts into a high-tech action picture. Both halves work.

The movie is funny and entertaining in all the usual ways, yes, but I was grateful that it tried for more: that it was actually about something, that it had an original premise, that it used satire and irony and had sly undercurrents.

The movie is a pleasant, inoffensive comedy. It's indifferently acted, especially by James Hampton in the lead, and it's too talky. It has some success with making its youngest camel cute - although not as cute as Benji by several miles.

John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness gets off to an intriguing start. But then the movie loses its way.

Strangely enough, Ralph Nelson's Charly succeeds as a movie for reasons having little to do with the plot. As the story of a personality in crisis, it works. We care about Charly. But the whole scientific hocus-pocus, which causes his crisis, is irrelevant and weakens the movie by distracting us.

Here is an unsuccessful movie with some surprisingly successful scenes. It has moments when it is electrifying and passages where it slows to a walk.

The kind of movie that leaves you with fundamental objections. But that's after it's over. While it's playing, it's surprisingly good.

It's only 76 minutes long, but although kids will like it, their parents will be sneaking looks at their watches.

There is nothing wrong with the performances. All of the actors are professionals, although none have as much fun as Shelley Winters, who is the actor everyone remembers from the 1972 movie.

I wonder who the movie was made for. Smaller kids, I'm afraid, will find it both slow and depressing, especially the parts about why God allows bad things to happen.

Funny Farm is kind of a loony, off-center comedy version of Hill's "The World According to Garp," another movie about strange people in bizarre situations.

Airport 1975 is good, exciting, corny escapism and the kind of movie you would not want to watch as an in-flight film.

MacLaine and Cage are really very good here.

Funny and moving, and more entertaining than some of the movies you are considering this weekend.

The two leads are not inspired. Jake Gyllenhaal could make the cover of a muscle mag, but he plays Dastan as if harboring Spider-Man's doubts and insecurities. I recall Gemma Arterton as resembling a gorgeous still photo in a cosmetics ad.

The one saving grace in Halloween III is Stacey Nelkin, who plays the heroine. She has one of those rich voices that makes you wish she had more to say and in a better role. But watch her, too, in the reaction shots: When she's not talking, she's listening.

Sugar Hill is a dark, bloody family tragedy, told in terms so sad and poetic that it transcends its genre and becomes eloquent drama. [25 Feb 1994, p.33]

Elles has a surprisingly deep performance in a disappointingly shallow movie. The performance, acute and brave, is by Juliette Binoche.

Cowboys & Aliens has without any doubt the most cockamamie plot I've witnessed in many a moon.

After the bite and freshness of "Analyze This," Mickey Blue Eyes plays like an afterthought.

A preposterous plot, but it's not about a plot, it's about acting.

It looks good, it moves quickly and it is often a jolly good time. As mindless swashbuckling in a well-designed production, it can't be faulted. The less you know about the British Empire and human nature, the more you will like it, but then that can be said of so many movies.

A breathtaking exercise in the macabre, a gruesome thriller with quirky cops and a killer of Lecterian complexity, and even when the movie is perfect nonsense, it's so voluptuous that you're grateful to be watching it anyway.

On its own terms, it's funny at times and finally sad and sweet.

The idea of the story within a story is one of the nice touches in The NeverEnding Story. Another one is the idea of a child's faith being able to change the course of fate. Maybe not since the kids in the audience were asked to save Tinker Bell in Peter Pan has the outcome of a story been left so clearly up to a child's willingness to believe.

While no reasonable person over the age of 12 would presumably be able to take it seriously, it nevertheless has a lighthearted joy, a cheerfulness, an insouciance, that recalls the days when movies were content to be fun.

There is nothing to complain about except the film's deadening predictability and the bland, shallow characters.

It's slick, it has impressive production values and the acting is appropriate to the material. So why did I find myself so indifferent to the movie? Maybe because it never generated any sympathy for its characters. This is filmmaking by the numbers, without soul.

The identical premise is used in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," which is like a master class in how Allen goes wrong.

It's not the kind of movie that depends on the certainty of an ending. It's more about how things continue.

As entertainment, the movie functions successfully. But I don't believe the story is true--not true to the facts, and not true to the morality it pretends to be about.

All the events and persons depicted in The Devils are intended to be confused with actual events and persons. How do I know? Ken Russell tells me so.

If the movie had spent more time walking that tightrope between the acceptable and the offensive, between what we have in common and what divides us, it would have been more daring.

This movie doesn't contain "offensive language." The offensive language contains the movie.

It is always a problem in a love story when the rival seems more interesting than the hero, and that's what happens here.

It's fitfully funny but never really takes off. Out of the corners of our eyes we glimpse the missed opportunities for some real satirical digging.

At the end, there is no great revelation, but Huppert has succeeded once again in making us wonder what's going on in there.

Far and Away is a movie that joins astonishing visual splendor with a story so simple-minded it seems intended for adolescents.

I enjoyed a lot of the movie in a relaxed sort of fashion; it's not essential or original in the way "The Truman Show'' was, and it hasn't done any really hard thinking about the ways we interact with TV.

Like The Flintstones and The Addams Family, Casper is an attempt to bring cartoons to life while incorporating them with real actors and sets. As a technical achievement, it's impressive, and entertaining.

How could director Lawrence Kasdan and writer William Goldman be responsible for a film that goes so awesomely wrong?

The movie is broad and clumsy, and the dialogue cannot be described as witty, but a kind of grandeur creeps into the screenplay by Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson.

Reeves has many arrows in his quiver, but screwball comedy isn't one of them.

The mother of all disaster movies (and the father, and the extended family) spends half an hour on ominous set-up scenes (scientists warn, strange events occur, prophets rant and of course a family is introduced) and then unleashes two hours of cataclysmic special events hammering the Earth relentlessly.

Great Balls of Fire gives us a Jerry Lee Lewis who has been sanitized, popularized and lobotomized. Even then, the story ends in 1959 - before most of the events for which "The Killer" became notorious.

It is violent, funny, scary, contains boldly outlined characters, and gets us involved. It also has a lot of style.

Could metamorphose into an entertaining sitcom.

The movie is ambitious, has good energy and is well-acted, but tells a familiar story in a familiar way. The parallels to Brian De Palma's "Scarface" are underlined by scenes from that movie which are watched by the characters in this one.

Has just a little too much of the whodunit and the thriller and not enough of the temper of its clash between cultures, but it works, maybe because the simplicity of the underlying plot is masked by the oddness of the characters.

In its mastery of its moments, Jackpot has charm, humor and poignancy. What it lacks is necessity. There's a sense in which we're always waiting for it to kick in.

What we have here is a dirty soap opera. It is dirty because it intends to be, but it is a soap opera only by default.

For most of the film, I sat in quiet amazement: I was witnessing a complex, well-crafted, clearly told story, in a screenplay that moved well and had dialogue that sounded colorful without resembling a Quentin Tarantino clone. [8 Oct 1997, p.47]

Tron: Legacy, a sequel made 28 years after the original but with the same actor, is true to the first film: It also can't be understood, but looks great. Both films, made so many years apart, can fairly lay claim to being state of the art. This time that includes the use of 3-D.

When it's all over, you'll probably have the fondest memories of Robert Downey Jr.'s work. It's been a good year for him, this one coming after "Iron Man." He's back, big time.

The movie is funny without being hilarious, touching but not tearful, and articulate in the way that Burns is articulate, by nibbling earnestly around an idea as if afraid that the core has seeds.

A well-crafted entertainment containing enough ideas to qualify it as science fiction and not just as a futurist thriller.

Like "The Godfather," it shows him (Makovski) as a crook with certain standards, surrounded by rats with none.

The story is nuts-and-bolts space opera, without the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's ''A.I.'' But the look of the film is revolutionary. Final Fantasy is a technical milestone, like the first talkies or 3-D movies.

The strength of Kinsey is finally in the clarity it brings to its title character. It is fascinating to meet a complete original, a person of intelligence and extremes.

This version of The Thing, directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., provides such graphic and detailed views of the creature that we are essentially reduced to looking at special effects, and being aware that we are. Think how little you ever really saw in the first "Alien" movie, and how frightening it was.

This is not a great comedy and will be soon forgotten, but it has nice moments.

This is a dismal, dreary and fairly desperate movie, in which the actors try very hard but are unable to overcome an uninspired screenplay.

What's sort of wonderful is the way this movie takes that old formula and makes it fresh and new, with actors who give it wit and charm.

What they came out with is the most complete collection of cop-movie clichés since John Wayne played a Chicago cop in “McQ”.

American Reunion has a sense of deja vu, but it still delivers a lot of nice laughs.

It is encouraging that well-crafted thrillers are still being made about characters who have dialogue, identities, motives and clean shirts.

A movie that contains one funny scene and 91 minutes of running time to kill.

Look at the cast and credits to form an idea of the directors and actors at work here. By its nature, New York, I Love You can't add up. It remains the sum of its parts. If one isn't working for you, wait a few minutes, here comes another one. New Yorkers, I love you.

Sam and Frankie are certainly interesting enough that a film about them coming to grips with this hidden truth would have been justified. It also would probably have been harder to write than this one, so People Like Us marches on with a coy little smile, toying with Frankie and the audience.

Texas Killing Fields begins along the lines of a police procedural and might have been perfectly absorbing if it had played by the rules: strict logic, attention to detail, reference to technical police work. Unfortunately, the movie often seems to stray from such discipline.

The most audacious, implausible, cheerfully offensive, hyperactive action picture I've seen since, oh, "Sin City," which in comparison was a chamber drama.

It all comes down to whether you can tolerate Leon Barlow. I can't. Big Bad Love can, and is filled with characters who love and accept him, even though he is a full-time, gold-plated pain in the can.

Sometimes it works to show their lips moving (it certainly did in "Babe"), but in Good Boy! the jaw movements are so mechanical it doesn't look like speech, it looks like a film loop.

There's a good story buried somewhere in this melee.

Sarah Michelle Gellar, the nominal star, has been in her share of horror movies, and all by herself could have written and directed a better one than this.

Not one of the great dog movies, but it's a good one, abandoning wall-to-wall cuteness for a drama about a homeless puppy.

Most of the running time is occupied by action sequences, chase sequences, motorcycle sequences, plow-truck sequences, helicopter sequences, fighter-plane sequences, towering android sequences and fistfights. It gives you all the pleasure of a video game without the bother of having to play it.

There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased.

Watching this film was a cheerless exercise for me. The characters are manic and idiotic, the dialogue is rat-a-tat chatter, the action is entirely at the service of the 3-D, and the movie depends on bright colors, lots of noise and a few songs in between the whiplash moments.

What he has here is a story that probably cannot be believed in any conceivable level, and yet, to give him his due, he tells it with such conviction that it works anyway.

Hancock is a lot of fun, if perhaps a little top-heavy with stuff being destroyed. Smith makes the character more subtle than he has to be, more filled with self-doubt, more willing to learn.

The visual style is all Zeffirelli, and it is interesting that the opera-within-the-film is not skimped on, as is usually the case in films containing scenes from other productions.

More than anything else, I responded to the performances. Feature films may be fiction, but they are certainly documentaries showing actors in front of a camera. Both Dafoe and Gainsbourg have been risk takers, as anyone working with von Trier must be. The ways they're called upon to act in this film are extraordinary. They respond without hesitation. More important, they convince.

Eyes of Laura Mars tries to say Serious Things about fashion photography, corruption in advertising, and the violence in our society. It does not succeed, but it tries. We would not, however, hold its Serious Things against it, if the movie also succeeded as a thriller. It doesn't, unless your idea of being thrilled is having people leap out of the shadows and then turn out to be friends.

Four Brothers works as an urban thriller, if not precisely as a model of logic.

Caine, who has never been much for the stage, is a superb screen actor, so good his master classes on acting for the camera are on DVD. Here, dry and clipped, biting and savage, he goes for the kill.

The picture is haunted by a story problem: It isn't about anything but itself. There's no sense of life going on in the corners of the frame.

The suspense screws up tighter than a drum-head. The characters remain believable; we have a conflict of personalities, not stereotypes. The action coexists seamlessly with the message.

The movie exhibits the usual indifference to the issues involved. Although it was written and directed by Elie Chouraqui, a Frenchman, it is comfortably xenophobic. Most Americans have never understood the differences among Croats, Serbs and Bosnians, and this film is no help.

How can one man juggle two women, possible expulsion, Mafia baseball bats and the meaning of life, while on acid? This is the kind of question only a Toback film thinks to ask, let alone answer.

Walking out of the screening, I was thinking: Elizabeth Hurley for girlfriend, Courtney Love for Satan.

I admired the scenes with De Niro so much I'm tempted to give Mary Shelley's Frankenstein a favorable verdict. But it's a near miss. The Creature is on target, but the rest of the film is so frantic, so manic, it doesn't pause to be sure its effects are registered.

The Vanishing is a textbook exercise in the trashing of a nearly perfect film, conducted oddly enough under the auspices of the man who directed it.

On balance, I think it's an interesting miss, but a movie you might enjoy if (a) you don't expect a masterpiece, and (b) you like the dialogue in Quentin Tarantino movies.

The plot has holes big enough to drive a Harley-Davidson through. But the film is better than it might have been, and better than it had to be. Take it on its own terms and you might find it interesting.

By removing elements of magic and operatic excess from the story, the brothers Scott focus on what is, underneath, a story as tragic (and less contrived) as the one cited in the ads, "Romeo and Juliet."

The town seems to be as preoccupied as ever with its own personalities and memories, as if it were sitting for its portrait.

This isn't a great movie, but it sure is a nice one.

Hook's visual sense is not acute here; he doesn't show the spontaneous sense of time and place that made his first film, The Kitchen Toto (1988), so convincing. He seems more concerned with telling the story than showing it, and there are too many passages in which the boys are simply trading dialogue.

There's a lot to like in "Dennis the Menace." But Switchblade Sam prevents me from recommending it.

The astonishing success of the original "MiB" was partly because it was fun, partly because it was unexpected. We'd never seen anything like it, while with MiBII, we've seen something exactly like it.

None of this amounts to anything more than goofy fun, but that's what the ads promise, and the movie delivers.

Father of the Bride Part II is not a great movie and not even as good as its 1991 inspiration. But it is warm and fuzzy, and has some good laughs and a lot of sweetness.

I can imagine a film in which a creature like Sil struggles with her dual nature, and tries to find self-knowledge. Like Frankenstein's monster, she would be an object of pity. But that would be way too subtle for Species, which just adds a slick front end to the basic horror vocabulary of things jumping out from behind stuff.

Sometimes you are either open to a movie, or closed. If you're convinced that An Unfinished Life is damaged goods, how can it begin its work on you?

The sex in the movie is so mild that I assumed the R rating was generated primarily by the gay theme, until I learned the R is in fact because of too many f-words.

You want gore, you get gore. Hatchet II plays less like a slasher movie than like the highlight reel from a slasher movie.

The movie tells this story in a traditional, straightforward way. No fancy footwork. No chewing the scenery. Meat and potatoes, you could say, but it's thoughtful and moving.

Tells an engrossing story of a remarkable man, but nevertheless it's underwhelming. Dramatic and romantic tension never coil very tightly, as the film settles into a contented pace.

A labored and sour comedy.

Tells a pointlessly convoluted version of a love story that would really be very simple, if anyone in the movie possessed common sense.

CB4 is a profoundly confused movie, combining rap music with a satire of the world of rap. Working both sides of the street, it gets caught in traffic. The film stars Chris Rock and Phil Hartman from Saturday Night Live, but it doesn't have SNL's smarts -- and worse, it doesn't have any sense of what's funny. On a structural level, it's incompetently written and directed.

I liked the smaller-scale scenes the best, the ones where Hines and Crystal were doing their stuff.

It fascinates in the moment. It's getting from one moment to the next that is tricky. Surely this is one of the most ambitious films ever made.

Nine is just plain adrift in its own lack of necessity.

The movie's strategic error is to set the deadline too far in the future. There is something annoying about a comedy where a guy is strapped to a bomb and nevertheless has time to spare for off-topic shouting matches with his best buddy. A buddy comedy loses some of its charm in a situation like that.

This movie has a lot of good music in it, some on the soundtrack, some on the screen. Jackson and Bernie Mac have enormous fun doing intricate dance moves together.

My attention was held for the first act or so. Then any attempt at realism was abandoned, and it became clear that the house, and the movie containing it, were devices to manufacture methodical thrills. The explanation, if that's what it was, seemed contrived and unconvincing.

As preposterous as the plot was, there was never a line of Hackman dialogue that didn't sound as if he believed it. The same can't be said, alas, for Sharon Stone, who apparently believed that if she played her character as silent, still, impassive and mysterious, we would find that interesting. More swagger might have helped.

The movie worked for me right up to the final scene, and then it caved in.

Cute, crude and good-hearted movie.

Kevin Kline's performance shows a deep understanding of the character, who is, after all, better than most teachers, and most men. We care for him, not because he is perfect, but because he regrets so sincerely that he is not.

The heart of the movie is in the Spacey performance, and in knowing that less is more, he plays Prot absolutely matter-of-factly.

There is a place for whimsy and magic realism, and that place may not be on a cow farm in New Zealand.

An intriguing plot is established, a new character is brought on with a complex set of problems, and then all the groundwork disintegrates into the usual hash of preposterous action sequences.

Taps works as an uncommonly engrossing story, primarily because the performances are so well done. All of the cadet roles are well acted, not only by seasoned actors like Hutton but even by the very young kids who struggle with guns and realities much too large for them.

A typical Horatio Alger story, with rats playing more prominent supporting roles than they customarily did in Horatio Alger.

Ice Station Zebra is a movie so flat and conventional that its three moments of interest are an embarrassment.

Most of the time I wasn't laughing. But when I was laughing, I was genuinely laughing - there are some absolutely inspired moments. This is the kind of movie that serves as a reminder that comedy is agonizingly difficult when it works, and even more trouble when it doesn't.

Let's say Roller Boogie is no better and no worse than the beach blanket/bikini/bingo/bongo movies, and from there you're going to have to take it by yourself.

It must have been even more exhausting to make this film than it is to watch it. But it's made with a kind of manic joy that makes me suspect its writer-director, Roger Roberts Avary, might develop into a considerable filmmaker, once he thinks of something to say.

The average issue of Mad magazine contains significantly smarter movie satire, because Mad goes for the vulnerable elements and Scary Movie 3 just wants to quote and kid.

A good-looking movie with hard-working performances and a bubble-brained script, which nevertheless stumbles over a truth from time to time. Class Act could be a trial run for something really relevant.

This is a bitter, sour movie about two people who are only marginally interesting.

The movie is curious in how close it comes to delivering on its material: Sequence after sequence seems to contain all the necessary material, to be well on the way toward a payoff, and then it somehow doesn't work.

Not realizing that Inkheart is based on a famous fantasy novel, I had the foolish hope the movie might be about books. No luck. Wait till you hear what it's about.

A Saturday afternoon stop for the kiddies -- harmless, skillful and aimed at grade schoolers.

I have the curious suspicion that it will be enjoyed most by someone who knows absolutely nothing about Shakespeare, and can see it simply as the story of some very strange people who seem to be reading from the same secret script.

I did not really enjoy this movie, and yet I recommend it. Why? Because I think it's on to something interesting. Here is a movie about a woman who never stops thinking. That may not be as good for you as it is for her.

Clever, done with skill, yet lacking in the cerebral imagination of the best science fiction.

I think the fault is in the screenplay, which tells a story that can be predicted almost from the opening frames. The people who wrote this movie did not bother, or dare, to give us truly individual Japanese characters; there is only one who is developed with any care.

The movie's last 30 minutes are like a kick in the gut.

Jennifer 8 promises a plot of excruciating complexity, but the storyline turns relentlessly dumb. By the end the characters might as well be wearing name tags: "Hi! I'm the serial killer!" This is the kind of movie where everybody makes avoidable errors in order for the plot to wend its torturous way to an unsatisfactory conclusion.

To call A Lot like Love dead in the water is an insult to water.

The result is a little like a comedy crossed with a home movie. It is also, like many home movies, somewhat rambling, and overly dependent on knowing the names of all the players.

Pure slam-bam space opera.

Pretty thin, but you grin while you're watching it.

Blanchett, Crudup and Gambon stand above and somehow apart from the absurdities of the screenplay.

It might work on video for viewers who glance up at the screen from time to time. The more attention you pay to it, the less it's there.

Harmless, brainless, good-natured fun.

Has the outer form of a brave statement about the races in America, but the soul of a sports movie in which everything is settled by the obligatory last play in the last seconds of the championship game.