Stephen Holden

If the movie had more courage, it would lay waste these people as hilariously as Robert Altman's film "A Wedding." But as its bad vibes accumulate, Cheerful Weather exhibits all the energy of a disgruntled wedding guest muttering complaints under his breath.

Forever stumbling over itself and breaking its own spell.

May be an expertly manipulated exercise in psychological horror, but that's all it is. Don't look for the kind of metaphoric weight you'd find in a movie by David Lynch or David Fincher.

Ms. Barkin is almost unrecognizable as this bedraggled bundle of rage and disappointment. Exploding from deep within, her devastating performance hijacks the film.

When My Neighbor Totoro, which was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, is dispensing enchantment, it can be very charming. Too much of the film, however, is taken up with stiff, mechanical chitchat.

Spike Lee's messy, meandering, bluntly polemical Red Hook Summer has one crucial ingredient: a raw vitality.

A clever if muddled collection of riffs on the "Blair Witch" juggernaut, dressed up with intellectual pretensions by Joe Berlinger, who directed this film with a chortling zest.

Set Fire to the Stars barely skims the surface of characters you wish had been given more dimension, but as a snapshot of postwar academia and its pretensions, it exerts a creepy fascination.

Until it transforms into an improbable thriller, Turn the River is a finely observed portrait of a desperate working-class woman who refuses to play by ordinary rules.

The screenplay relies on so many mechanical contrivances to make the story gripping that you can hear the rusty machinery clanking.

Until it goes haywire with the cabbage scene, Stray Dogs sustains a hypnotic intensity anchored in exquisite cinematography that portrays the modern industrial cityscape as a chilly wasteland.

Too light-headed to qualify as satire, too poker-faced to register as comedy, Fay Grim belongs in its own stylistic niche: the Hal Hartley film.

The movie they have concocted has the feel of a visual sampler or an elaborate color swatch submitted for a design that remains largely unexecuted.

K-9 doesn't have a shred of credibility. And Mr. Belushi, despite some rough edges, lacks a strong enough macho growl to make Dooley seem like a police dog in human clothing. But with its surefire dog tricks and breezy pacing, K-9 is at least mildly diverting.

So long as the camera is studying Franny maniacally bestowing his largess or throwing temper tantrums, The Benefactor is mesmerizing. But Mr. Gere’s flamboyant performance is the sole raison d’être for this melodrama.

Mr. Harris's depiction of a saintly, soft-spoken, bow-tie-wearing middle-school teacher lends the movie a moral weight it probably couldn't have summoned had another actor played the role.

If the central performances in Careful approached the earnest intensity of some of its early-1930's inspirations, the movie would probably be twice as funny.

As much as you admire the stagecraft and the technical skills on display, when all is said and done, that's all it is: a fancy, not-quite-two-hour stunt.

An affable throwback to those guilt-free days when hippie drug dealers radiated the glamorous aura of avant-garde heroes risking prison to spread the doctrine of liberation through cannabis.

For all its violence and road rage, Snitch doesn’t disintegrate into noisy popcorn nonsense.

It's a striking measure of the nervousness of the country right now that a movie so full of holes should be as gripping as it is, at least for its first two-thirds, after which it collapses into a swamp of sentimental mush.

In critical ways, the movie is a mess. The basketball scenes are so sloppy and haphazard that the would-be slapstick registers as confusion. But away from the court, the actors bring their caricatures to folksy comic life.

5 Flights Up would be nothing without its stars, whose humanity warms up a movie that otherwise portrays New Yorkers as coldblooded, slightly crazy, hypercompetitive sharks.

Once you've accepted the notion that On the Line gives product placement in movies a blatant new prominence, the film turns out to be a soothing cinematic snack of milk and cookies.

Most of the supernatural sightings are flickers at the corners of the screen, so that at certain moments watching the movie feels like taking an eye exam. You see it, then you don't. But the film is not especially scary, and even its boo! moments lack a visceral shock.

Kisses may strike you as either ingeniously magical or insufferably cute, depending on your taste. But more than the story, which circles back on itself, the natural performances of its young stars, Shane Curry and especially Kelly O'Neill, nonprofessional actors, lend the movie a core of integrity.

As this cautious, politically evenhanded movie grinds along like clockwork, the fuse that should spark an emotional explosion fizzles after some sporadic hisses and sputters.

A small, mildly entertaining documentary.

The appeal of The Wendell Baker Story depends on how charming you find the Wilson brothers, with their chipmunk grins and hip smart-aleck attitude. For my taste, a little goes a long way.

Although the screenplay by Roy Blount Jr. comes up with some potentially sidesplitting situations, the director, Howard Franklin, who shepherded Mr. Murray through the equally limp Quick Change six years ago, methodically subverts them.

The Last Days on Mars ultimately can’t transcend its pulpy roots.

There's no escaping that "Dominion" is finally an act of commercial scavenging. You may retrieve the eggshells, coffee grounds and banana peels from your trash and assemble them into a cute, novelty gift basket. But if you bend down and take a whiff, your nose is still met with the scent of garbage.

The film's most upsetting scenes are its interviews with residents whose livelihood has been decimated and whose health has been compromised.

Mr. Trump comes across as an insensitive, lying bully who will do whatever it takes to realize his dream of creating what he promises will be the world's greatest golf resort.

Eureka never comes to life. -- In pursuing its aesthetic agenda so single-mindedly, the movie leaves the characters behind in the muck.

The connections made in Photographic Memory are more tentative than those found in Mr. McElwee's earlier films, which also seek answers in roundabout ways while maintaining an acute eye for light, color, space and atmosphere.

Even at 143 minutes, For Greater Glory cannot satisfyingly fill out the stories of a half-dozen secondary characters, and there are frustrating gaps in the biographies of Gorostieta and José. The jamming together of so much history and melodrama makes for a handsome movie that is only rarely gripping.

There is so much to admire in The Weight of Water, Kathryn Bigelow's churning screen adaptation of a novel by Anita Shreve, that when the movie finally collapses on itself late in the game, it leaves you in the frustrating position of having to pick up its scattered pieces and assemble them as best you can.

Mighty Fine chugs along heartily until it abruptly stops on the edge of cliff, leaving you feeling shortchanged. It is a couple of crucial scenes away from feeling complete.

Leaves a movie that wants to be a searching moral examination of human motivation under stress frustratingly opaque at the center.

Almost in spite of itself, The House of Mirth is powerful, at times even moving.

If it weren't so overpopulated and desperate to shock, Nowhere might have succeeded as a maliciously cheery satire of Hollywood brats overdosing on the very concept of Hollywood. But the movie is so hectically paced that it doesn't have time to develop its characters or to flesh out the tales it sets in motion. Even comic books are better at telling stories.

An ingenious contraption that holds your attention for as long as it whirs and clicks like a mechanized Rubik’s Cube. After it’s over, however, you may find yourself scratching your head and wondering if there was any purpose to this sleek little gizmo.

As informative and packed with cultural lore as it is, The Komediant is dramatically diffuse.

Had it had the concision and symmetry of a classic French farce, Après Vous could have been an irresistible laugh machine.

While most films in which the angry past confronts the guilty present degenerate into mawkish reconciliations, Emile errs on the side of restraint.

What ultimately sinks this stylish but heartless film is a flat lead performance by the eternally snippy Meg Ryan.

Throughout the movie, you have the feeling of being dragged along on an impromptu journey by a filmmaker who is traveling without the benefit of a GPS device.

The Hunt doesn’t know where to stop. It is undermined with a short, unsatisfying epilogue whose shocking final moment isn’t enough to justify its inclusion.

Mr. Pitt is a reasonably photogenic specimen. But this actor, whose typical screen character is a broken, androgynous man-child, is disastrously miscast.

Despite its hip, off-center style and pointed de-glamorization of its singles, the movie adds up to little more than feel-good fluff.

Instead of feeling universal, the movie feels claustrophobic.

A surprisingly unpolished piece of work that plays as though it were written for the stage and only slightly modified for the screen.

Throughout the film there is an abundance of sumptuously photographed flesh on view. But House of Pleasures is not an erotic stimulant so much as a slow-moving, increasingly tragic and claustrophobic operatic pageant set almost entirely in the brothel.

This spare, minimalist film is not realistic. It has the simplicity of a silent movie, and the blocking of the actors, especially in the scenes with Koistinen and Mirja, emphasizes the distances between them.

[An] incisive, queasy-making documentary.

If it feels uncomfortably real, it's because its vision of decadence (if you'll pardon the word) is almost unwatchably creepy. Crazy Eyes awakens the same queasiness. Yes, it feels true. But why bother?

The film’s method of circling around its subject, then closing in at the end, feels coy and withholding, as if Mr. Greene reserved the few juiciest moments for last.

Like its recent forerunners, "Rachel Getting Married" and "Margot at the Wedding," Another Happy Day is both anguished and histrionic and in its strongest moments very, very good. But it is also overpopulated, strident and constitutionally unable to step back and scrutinize itself.

Certainly an honorable film. But honorable is not always watchable.

The film fails to convey the claustrophobic terror experienced by a man who called his book "Letters From Hell."

If Mr. Neil had the tonal mastery of Wes Anderson, Goats could have been so much more than an episodic sequence of whimsical little psychodramas.

Settles for being an atmospheric scenes-in-the-life biography of someone's most unforgettable character. It could have been so much more.

Mendelsohn's fusion of science fiction and Chekhovian melancholy finds a fresh perspective on a familiar theme.

For its courage to address a ticklish subject with warmhearted humor, Breakfast With Scot, adapted from a novel by Michael Downing, deserves a light round of applause.

More skin is shown in Spread than in most Hollywood movies. But despite twitches of insight into its characters and their world, Spread refuses go more than skin deep.

If Return to Never Land -- doesn't have a story to match the original's in breadth and imagination, it does a smooth job of recycling its characters and themes.

A wispy pubescent comedy.

Narco Cultura feels like two short films sandwiched together to make a feature. One is a shallow pop-music documentary focusing on Mr. Quintero. The other is an equally superficial portrait of the embattled Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso.

A mildly diverting period heist movie.

Dramatically Joe the King feels unglued, as if crucial sequences had been left on the cutting-room floor.

Like most documentary polemics, it simplifies the issues it confronts and selects facts that bolster its black-and-white, heroes-and-villains view of raw economic power.

“Saturday Night Live” deserves much better than the documentary equivalent of what a book editor would surely dismiss as a rushed, careless clip job.

Where the director Paul Verhoeven infused the original Robocop with an attitude of mock solemnity, Robocop 3 has the energy and style of a cartoon free-for-all. [05 Nov 1993, p.C29]

What lifts The Trench above the run of the mill is the intensity of its disgust.

Fallen Angels certainly abounds in visual pizazz, clever in jokes and trendy pop references, but such things can carry a movie only so far.

The harder Mr. Radnor strains to make you love his alter ego, the more resistant you become.

As one comic after another recalls triumphs, misadventures and painful lessons learned, the stories become redundant.

The meek, mopey comedy In the Land of Women is the film equivalent of a sensitive emo band with one foot in alternative rock and the other in the squishy pop mainstream: a softer, fuzzier "Garden State."

Piles too many small disasters on top of the initial tragedy, including a drunken car accident, a drug bust and a cancer scare. It also swerves unsteadily into farce.

The movie is an amusing ball of fluff that refuses to judge its characters’ amoral high jinks. Winking at the vanity of wealthy voluptuaries and hustlers playing games of tainted love, it heaves a sigh and says welcome to the human comedy.

Aside from appreciating the movie's sturdy performances, my reaction to this satire of the middle-class, all-German family swung from revulsion to mystification.

The one solid element in Wild Horses is Mr. Duvall’s squinting, stone-faced portrayal of a gruff, crusty patriarch beginning to crumble.

It's all so seamy, sordid, lurid and shocking! And dull, despite a noirish gloss of wide-angle cinematography and a jaundiced, smoggy color scheme.

The kind of movie that is a must to avoid on a bad day. Even on a good one, it could send you into a funk.

What does it all mean? Less than meets the eye. Amer is a voluptuous wallow in recycled psychosexual kitsch.

If its tone is considerably tougher than that of movies adapted from Nicholas Sparks novels, it is still a grown-up soap opera. And as the overly determined plot progresses, it feels increasingly Sparks-like, although there are no dewy young lovebirds to swoon over.

Much more effective at evoking a paranoid mood than at telling a coherent story, and the jerky action sequences are among the film's weaker visual elements.

If Sweet Sweetback is unforgettable, it is also deeply flawed. The acting is mediocre at best. And in depicting women as grotesque, flailing sex machines serviced by the indifferent stud hero, it matches today's gangsta rap in arrogant misogyny.

This unwieldy amalgam of science fiction and horror, directed by Paul Anderson, douses almost every scene with glitzy special effects in a futile attempt to cover up a paucity of thought.

It is wonderful at conveying a sense of suffocating ennui. Too wonderful, since the story is so sketchily told and the dialogue is so fragmentary that it doesn't quite cohere. The characters remain hazy ciphers in the torpid atmosphere of a place you'll never want to visit.

If Divan is often fascinating, it is sometimes frustrating.

It is a strange piece of work.

The movie is so busy constructing its labyrinthine plot that it often forgets to plumb the souls of its characters.

Throughout Grbavica the desire to forget and the need to remember are at loggerheads. At Sara’s school the psychological wounds of the war are being handed down to her generation through the separation of heroes and nonheroes. Fathers pass their weapons down to their sons. Even as you leave a war behind, you bring it with you.

Though less reassuring and not as dramatically coherent as "Hotel Rwanda," it still packs a hard punch.

Keeps its claws carefully retracted. That's probably for the best, since the documentary still leaves a bitter aftertaste.

For all its sensitivity to the subject, The Farewell Party makes a number of tonal missteps of which the most glaring is the insertion of a musical number that upsets the movie’s otherwise sensible balance between the comedic and the morbid.