Russell Smith

Regrettably, The Postman is just one more reminder of what a nonfactor sincerity often is in terms of artistic merit.

If you can tune into its somber, hypnotic wavelength, you may be surprised at the raw emotional impact it delivers in key scenes, and at its ability to provoke your imagination long afterward.

Sorvino and Kudrow, for whatever inscrutable reasons, seem to be having a blast with their ridiculous characters, and both shine in the loopy set-pieces and dream sequences that pepper the story.

Feel-good comedy with none of the pejorative hints of innocuous blandness that term so often implies.

The only reservation I have in recommending this film is the ultimate question of what value there is in this kind of naked, unmediated portrayal of such wretched situations. What Oldman has done is to open a window onto scenes we know are taking place everywhere, all the time. Why -- and if -- we choose to look is a personal call for every viewer.

In essence, the artistic failure of She's So Lovely is traceable to a single, supremely ironic fact: For a story by a writer with so much professed faith in the power of truth to bubble up out of apparent chaos, there's hardly anything here that feels recognizably true.

The humor in this movie is basically anthropological notes on doper culture and behavior: junk-food frenzies, smoking rituals and hardware, non sequitur conversation, and short-term memory loss. In other words, stuff that passed into the realm of cliché back in the time of the Johnson administration.

The splendid performance by Sobieski, who ends her long run as industry-mag buzz princess and arrives as a full-fledged star.

It's an utterly contemporary film that forces - and rewards - hard reflection on the nature of truth, goodness, and identity.

What is love? Haddaway asks in the omnipresent soundtrack song. Not this time-wasting bilge, that's for sure.

Efforts to pin down its odd seductive power are as futile as, say, describing the specific sense of disorientation you feel at the instant when a darting cloud suddenly obscures the sun, throwing all your perceptions into a new light before you realize what's happened. Disquieting, but subtly consciousness-expanding. Just see the movie.

These thugs, needless to say, are pulverized as effortlessly as so many Easter chicks. This is a problem I've always had with Seagal's martial arts sequences; there's seldom a nanosecond of suspense, and the fight choreography has all the sophistication of Seventies drive-in fare such as Billy Jack and Walking Tall.

Director Jim Sheridan, who has collaborated with writer Terry George on In the Name of the Father and Some Mother's Son clearly understands the weariness that inevitably consumes not only long, seemingly irresolvable conflicts but stories about them.

Ms. Elliott's film is, in part, an effort to reverse his slow slide into obscurity. On this level it's an unqualified success.

Pack the kids off to the multiplex with an easy conscience and forgiving critical sensibility.

With her audience's full attention assured, first-time director Kasi Lemmons then proceeds to unravel a spellbinding, powerfully seductive tale that blends Southern Gothic magical realism and disturbing family drama with the flair of a born storytelling genius.

With its understated moral power, generous spirit, and bracing flashes of dark humor, Titanic Town offers a fresh, subtly illuminating take on an ancient sorrow.

Funny, scabrous, disturbing, tragic, and improbably life-affirming, The General travels its own idiosyncratic path with more real style and substance than the past half-decade of Hollywood gangster movies combined.

For all his superfan's intimacy with b-ball culture, he focuses less on the sport's fascinating mystique than on generic recapitulation of how celebrity culture seduces and devours young minority athletes.

The filmmakers go to obvious pains to add a bit of nutritive value to their sweet, frothy confection.

To put it as kindly as possible, Fuqua is a well-intended tyro who wrongly assumes that his obvious love for action movies qualifies him to make them himself.

Near-unwatchable romantic melodrama.

Shabby, nondescript hack job.

On a more basic level, I simply found it so hard to penetrate the two main characters' cauterized psyches that, in the end, I hardly gave a damn what happened to them.

As with so many recent films, this innocuous little romantic comedy suffers far more from the effects of art-by-committee than the ruinous domination of any one person.

Don't trust the impression created by Sphere's intriguing trailers that it has much to do with the awe and terror of direct contact with an advanced alien intelligence.

This film is both too formulaic and too much a one-man vehicle to rate as a true masterpiece. But God strike me dead if I'm lying, this is one gut-busting funny movie.

Microcosmos is more about reverie than revelation. Still, don't be surprised if you come away from it with that feeling, like the aftermath of a deep, strange dream, that your consciousness has been enlarged in a subtle but very real way.

Little effort is made to churn up romantic chemistry between Foster and McConaughey. For better or worse, director Robert Zemeckis sticks to Sagan's original vision for these characters, in which they're basically totems embodying both sides of a philosophical dialectic.

The fact that the blatantly thumbtacked-on happy ending plays as unvarnished fairy tale adds a definite bittersweet tang of irony.

Shoddy, brainless, pre-sold kids' entertainment.

This movie is by no means a classic in absolute artistic terms, but as a reaffirmation of all but forgotten verities it's an unqualified success.

It's a consistently entertaining story.

Unfortunately, for all his large soul and exquisite mastery of image, Nava is also one of the worst writers to ever accrue more than two major-movie screenwriting credits.

For all its flaws, Better Than Chocolate is a fair enough entertainment value -- certainly no less meritorious overall than, say, Runaway Bride. But, like many other films that have boasted both a high likability quotient and a positive social message, it seems to be getting a bit more credit than it really deserves. And as far as I'm concerned it's no favor to allow a filmmaker of Anne Wheeler's obvious gifts to operate so far below peak efficiency.

Much like the DNA-scrambled beast to which the title alludes, this film is a chimerical chop-shop product, consisting mostly of spare parts pulled from Alien, Jurassic Park, and even The Ghost and the Darkness.

What I can't accept, however, is talents such as Reno, Garcia, Tomlin, and Molina wasting away in a movie like this. As punishment for their complete lack of artistic integrity, all four of them should be forced to sit in a room for all eternity watching The Pink Panther 2 over and over.

In terms of sheer, unrelenting visual invention, Velvet Goldmine is a wonder.

From the pure entertainment standpoint, ABL's nonstop action helps it avoid the slack moments that marred “Antz”. The dialogue, kiddie-accessible though it is, is plenty intelligent for adult enjoyment.

Ironically, the problem may lie in Baird and screenwriter John Pogue's over-eagerness to give us what they think we want.

There's little to recommend this movie, which is part and parcel with Marshall's schlock-dominated body of work.

Due largely to the tremendous innate warmth and conviction of leads Quaid and Caviezel ("The Thin Red Line"), you may find yourself cutting a surprising amount of slack for this patently ridiculous tale.

With help from talented young director Ferland and a sublime performance from Kevin Bacon, Eszterhas has created a gentle and affecting ode to universal growing-up conflicts within a beautifully rendered evocation of a specific time and place.

All in all, this is perhaps one of those films you applaud more for design than execution while hoping at the same time that its boundary-testing restlessness becomes more widely influential.

The story, serviceable though it is, still shatters like eggshells under even the lightest scrutiny, and the dialogue is often stale beyond belief.

Lack of imagination or subtlety.

It's diverting enough, and intermittently suspenseful, but also strangely empty and decadent in a way that truly merits that overused term.

Definitive modern cinematic eye-candy with all the connotations of empty calories that term implies.

Down in the Delta, like a gratingly platitudinous self-help tape, sugarcoats the complex one-step-back, two-steps-forward nature of personal and social progress. And like the drugs and booze it condemns, it provides a warm rush of euphoria, but no real answers.

When Eastwood is at the top of his form -- as he is for much of this film -- there's no more spellbinding storyteller in American cinema.

In context, it's utterly, dismayingly typical.

Anyone who can watch this film and deny that the Sex Pistols were one of the four or five most exciting and indelibly brilliant rock groups ever is pumping formaldehyde, not blood, through his veins.

The stunning vitality and passion of this film arises not only from the high-voltage personalities involved (especially Ali and King) but from the way they galvanized political and ethnic pride among the people of the poor West African nation.

It does effectively recall those bygone days when impossibly attractive, charming, and endearingly flawed characters dressed to kill, smoked like creosote plants, and behaved atrociously on the way to rapturous romantic consummation.

In essence, the whole Knock Off experience can be summed up neatly in four words: loud, stupid, blurry, frenetic.

Mainly offers fodder for tweens who fantasize about glamorous Los Angeles lifestyles where everyone is skinny, rich, and on Prozac. It's a film where gays and minorities not only fit into stereotypes, but embrace them.

Love's real heartbeat is the sheer likability of its attractive young cast and the earnest naïveté with which they reach (through obsessive movie fandom, endless conversation, and polymorphic romantic pairings) for insights just beyond their grasp.

Most folks are just plain bored -- and I mean cross-eyed, wall-climbing, deep-down-to-the-molecular-level bored -- with this ubiquitous Endearing Wiseguys school of movie comedy.

The unnecessary nastiness, even sadism, of much of the violence also bears mentioning if you're expecting more of the benignly cartoonish silliness of Cube's lone directing effort, "The Players Club."

Possibly due to the story's origin as a Ruth Rendell novel, this is the most coherent, viewer-friendly narrative he's ever filmed.

Now I realize my confessed appreciation for Kids will thoroughly bugger my credibility in describing Gummo with phrases like “appalling,” “gratuitously cruel,” and “exploitative,” but the unmitigated repulsiveness of this film pretty much rules out all subtler options.

Steel's target audience of 12-year-old boys would be better off staying home and busying themselves at traditional, character-enriching activities: sniping at family pets with BB guns, playing Nintendo, and masturbating.

It's just a little too ironic (to quote Okay Pop Singer Alanis Morrisette) that a movie with the word "magic" in its title should be such a perfect example of the difference between competence and inspiration.

This is one that, like a 1am rerun of a late-season Cavs-Grizzlies matchup, deserves to play out in darkness and obscurity.

Yet a nigh-miraculous blend of high spirits, poignancy, gentle satire, and unpretentious insight into the nature of human aspiration make this one of the most impressive films you're likely to see this year.

The underlying problem is the mainstream film format's length constraints, which seem to have forced a rude bowdlerization of the story.

Next time, Pooh, why not do the work it takes and give your drowsy-eyed meal tickets some of the (as it were) good shit?

A gleefully overplotted crime yarn that channels in sanitized form the perverse subtropical-noir sensibilities of Carl Hiassen.

A “thrill ride” movie with all the predictability, brevity, and industrial efficiency that cliché implies.

A slight, oddly lifeless movie with dubious appeal for even the most incorrigible Simon devotees.

Hall, one of our least appreciated great actors, is mesmerizing as Sydney.

Yet for all its unmistakable visual trademarks (hypersaturated colors; mad-scientist tinkering with film stocks and editing technique; sudden presentation of enigmatic, troubling images), this is also the most radical departure Stone has ever made in terms of basic sensibilities.

In this magnificent, profoundly tragic film, Nolte and Coburn each turn in career-best performances as a father and son who embody the ancient, seemingly ineradicable male pathology of violence, retribution, and the slow death of the soul.

Thanks largely to the raw bravery and intensity of the two leads' performances, Happy Together takes a quantum leap forward in terms of visceral power.

As enjoyable as it is, it's hard to escape a sense of Analyze This being the work of competent talents who knew exactly where the good-enough line was and didn't feel particularly inspired to push far beyond it.

There's plenty of solid, intelligent content here to stir the mind and heart, assuming you're able to overlook the distinctly patronizing presentation.

For my money the most gloriously, enchantingly trivial play in the Shakespearean canon, A Midsummer Night's Dream may also be the most screwup-proof of the bard's works.

If you're fed up with the stultifying, formula-driven character of today's mainstream films, give Fallen Angels a try. At the very least you'll be engaged, and if you're lucky you may just recapture some of your original wonder at the seductive power of movies.

A sketchy, half-baked, stylistically inconsistent movie that scarcely even pretends to care whether it makes sense or not.

Rare two-for-one Chan special.

The driving forces behind Dick's courageous, defiantly candid film are curiosity about all things human and a desire to explain the seemingly inexplicable.

This film's intelligence and uncompromising originality commend it to even moviegoers with zero tolerance for top hats, parasols, and crap English accents.

Within the context of films that include the word booty in their titles, it serves up an unusually fresh, inventive and good-natured brew of pure lascivious fun.

Assuming that rich human insight, great production values, and topnotch acting still count for something, Mrs. Brown should have no trouble finding an appreciative audience.

Most of the actors seem to have been issued one facial expression at the beginning of the film, along with pain-of-death instructions not to change it under any circumstance.

Nothing but tarted-up melodrama.

No originality, no memorable characters, no comic timing, and no good jokes equal no fun for the audience.

A center ring extravaganza of smackdown movie entertainment

Unostentatious originality, psychological insight, and stark beauty make it well worth any film lover's time.

Given a choice between the puerile but essentially innocent whimsy of Dr. Dolittle and the dimwitted nastiness of, say, "Dirty Work," parents should be grateful for the Eddie Murphys and Jim Carreys of the world for at least providing a kinder, gentler option.

It's almost as enjoyable watching these august septuagenarians jumping from trains, cruising with Harley-riding dykes, and exchanging pubescent screw-you/blow me repartee as it must have been for them to do it. And fun, sometimes, is its own best rationale.

In the end, though, the undeniable power and emotional richness of this film swing the balance toward the good.

And next time around... show the courage of your lowbrow convictions and get back to the gonzo, unapologetically senseless mayhem that made this saga so much fun in the beginning.

I loved this movie. Or perhaps I should say the 15-year-old boy in me -- the dreamy, disaffected misfit with his head in the stars and a stack of Bantam sci-fi paperbacks as his sole defense against small-town boredom -- loved it.

Thanks to this relentlessly likable film's playful sexuality and utter lack of pretension it's surprisingly easy to let all of one's objections float away on a fragrant cloud of kitchen sweat, pheromones, and sweet lime zest.

Though Cuaron slips a time or two during his stylistic highwire act, his refreshingly original movie, aided by Hawke's career-best acting in the lead role, is a joy to watch.

Clockwatchers may not be a Grapes of Wrath for the Nineties, but its intelligence, slow-boil outrage over grunt workers' dehumanization, and subtle assertion of their power to resist make it a terrific piece of pro-labor propaganda.

Neither Hopkins nor Baldwin can be faulted. Both explore and illuminate their half-realized characters as best they can, but creating any real power or suspense is just too big a bear to kill.