Stephen Holden

A wispy pubescent comedy.

Ludicrous, impenetrable and headache-inducing.

Its rich, wide-angle view of Italian politics and society stays with you. The details may vary from nation to nation in the industrialized West, but the big picture is pretty much the same everywhere.

Like most movies that examine specific ailments, this gawky, occasionally touching film has the feel of a dramatized case history whose purpose is to educate as much as it is to tell a story.

Putrid comic stew.

This comic jigsaw puzzle is crammed with deliriously funny little bits.

Even more than Jerry Lewis, Robin Williams or Pee-wee Herman, Mr. Carrey, now 41 (pretty old for an overgrown kid), sustains a maniacal energy that explodes off the screen in blinding electrical zaps. Those jolts don't always feel pleasant.

Although neither Ms. Berry nor Mr. Del Toro can be faulted in their scenery-chewing moments, these star turns make you uncomfortably aware that they are Oscar-conscious auditions for the Big Prize. Their naked ambition subtly contaminates a movie that, despite its fine acting, has the emotional impact of a general anesthetic.

Today few would dispute Trumbo's assessment of that very dark period: "The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one who survived it on either side came through untouched by evil."

A crude but irresistibly effervescent movie cut from the same sequined cloth as "Fame," Camp couldn't be better timed to ride the coattails of "Chicago" to cult popularity.

It begins with a montage of devastating black-and-white news clips interwoven with flashes of the flight of a terrified young widow and her two children. After that, the movie softens somewhat, but it never succumbs to sentimentality.

If “(Untitled)” shrewdly hedges its bets about the value of it all, it is ultimately on the side of experimental music and art and their champions, no matter how eccentric. For that alone this brave little movie deserves an audience.

Written and directed by the husband-wife team of Kieran and Michele Mulroney, Paper Man is so unsure of itself that its symbolic edifice feels like a desperately erected defense system.

The Next Karate Kid doesn't even try to achieve surface credibility. Under the patient ministrations of Miyagi, Julie metamorphoses from an angry tomboy into a loving, disciplined beauty in a matter of weeks. [10 Sep 1994, p.14]

Takes such pains to avoid narrative and verbal cliches and anything that could remotely be construed as sentimental or romantic that it feels curiously flat.

It is Mr. Sabzian's poignancy that makes "Close-Up" much more than a clever reflection on film-versus-life as an endless hall of mirrors.

A juggling act between high soap opera and low comedy, Maybe Baby manages to keep its pins in the air until very near the end.

Watching it is like a slow injection of a numbing anesthetic. It may send a chill to your heart, but along with it goes a warning signal to your brain not to believe a word of this hooey.

A small, mildly entertaining documentary.

Veber's giddy social comedy The Closet finds more delicious, chortling fun in the spectacle of obsequious hypocrisy than any movie I've seen in ages.

Somersault, which the Australian Film Institute garlanded with 13 awards, including best film, director, actor and actress (for Ms. Cornish's astonishing performance), is a movie about the looks on people's faces and the disparity between the surface and the roiling chaos beneath.

It has the loose-jointed feel of a bunch of sketches packed together into a narrative that doesn't gather much momentum. Its conspiratorial eager beavers are so undeveloped that they could hardly even be called types. You don't care for a second what happens to them.

For all its political button pushing, Machete is too preposterous to qualify as satire. The only viewers it is likely to upset are the same kind of people who once claimed that the purple Tinky Winky in "Teletubbies" promoted a gay agenda.

As the film veers uncertainly between meticulous historical recapitulation and shameless hokum, it brings enough characters to populate a mini-series. When the historical details become too clogged, the movie shamelessly overcompensates by wallowing in cheap sentimentality.

This disjointed, desperately whimsical film is simply not funny: not for a minute.

With a director, screenwriter and star who have deep roots in the theater, Off the Map is more than anything an actor's film.

The screenplay evokes this psychosexual power struggle with perfect accuracy and finely tuned performances.

A passionate ground-level examination of home childbirth.

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.

Couldn't have succeeded had it been cast with movie stars. Its authenticity derives not only from the streets on which it was filmed but also from its able Colombian cast.

Trees Lounge is not much more than a jumble of beautifully acted sketches that introduce the characters in Tommy's world.

Slackly directed and thinly written, "Airborne," which opened yesterday, exists mainly for its scenes of the big race, in which two teams rocket down a series of winding hills, jumping over cars, scooting under trucks and bouncing down stairs. The camera work in this extended sequence has a nice gliding energy, but the participants are so thickly encased in helmets, goggles and padding that it is impossible to see how the two sides are doing as they elbow each other around the course's hairpin turns.

Quickly curdles into a nasty variation of the one-last-score genre.

A Goofy Movie is engaging in its mild-mannered way, but the story is too rambling and emotionally diffuse for the title character to come fully alive.

The film is so flat that it leaves you wondering if Mr. Kaniuk's book is ultimately untranslatable to the screen.

Although the movie takes on many of the characteristics of a conventional thriller, it refuses to go for cheap, vicious shocks, and the adults are seen through the curtain of Michele's trust.

Even done so lightly, the film still carries a sting.

A skillfully organized account of Mr. Rogowski's life and of the sport's boom period. But despite the earnest testimony of two former girlfriends, the movie maintains a chilly distance from its subject.

Gets lost in a fog of indecision and compromise.

A mediocre gross-out movie that barely pushes the envelope.

So soft-hearted it wouldn't hurt a fly.

The concert scenes find the stage awash in such intense joy, camaraderie and nationalist pride that you become convinced that making music is a key to longevity and spiritual well-being.

This agreeable, lightweight movie, written and directed by Georgia Lee, turns the malaises of a suburban family into bittersweet farce that teeters between cheeky humor and surface pathos.

The dialogue may be crisply idiomatic, but there's finally nothing realistic about the speed with which the characters hurtle through their mood swings and power plays.

Like "Cruel Intentions," Swimfan is entertaining enough to be considered a guilty pleasure. But to transcend the teenage movie genre both movies would have needed a baby Glenn Close, and both came up short.

Just below the movie’s attitude of pep-rally cheer is a mood that approaches despair. Mr. Gelbspan has probably amassed as much hard evidence of climate change as anyone alive.

A larger problem is the film's attempt to piece together a hard-boiled crime drama with a soft-boiled soap opera, ultimately giving precedence to the suds and adding a sickly lemon scent.

Blessed by Fire, a bitter remembrance of the Falklands War in 1982, captures battlefield chaos and confusion with a visceral force you won't forget.

A bleak, static mood piece about adolescent emptiness. There's little dialogue, and what there is offers the scantest information about Gerardo, who, as played by Mr. Ortuño, conveys an impenetrable blank-faced melancholy.

Although the actual story of Zentropa is the stuff of an ordinary thriller, that plot is the only conventional aspect of a film that is an almost impudently flashy and knowing exercise in post-modern cinematic expressionism.

Small, smart, off-kilter comedy.

Escape From L.A., which the director wrote with Mr. Russell and Debra Hill, is much too giddy to make sense as a politically astute pop fable. As amusing as some of its notions may be, none are developed into sustained running jokes. [09 Aug 1996, p.C5]

More than sad, it's slightly sickening to consider the technology, talent and know-how squandered on Hostage, a pile of blood-soaked toxic waste dumped onto the screen in an attempt to salvage Bruce Willis's fading career as an action hero.

So good it leaves you starved for more.

What gives the film a chilly authenticity is the creepy performance of Arno Frisch in the title role. Cool and unsmiling, with a dark inscrutable gaze, his Benny is the apotheosis of what the author George W. S. Trow has called the cold child, or an unfeeling young person whose detachment and short attention span have been molded by television.

The exquisitely coordinated performances elicit an empathy as powerful as anything I can remember feeling in a recent film.

An ensemble piece developed from an improvisational workshop, the movie exudes a haunted melancholy that recalls such early Alan Rudolph films as "Choose Me" and "Welcome to L.A," and it includes several flashy performances.

Does a fine job of building up a sense of dread as its adulterous relationship gathers steam. So it's all the more disappointing when the movie ultimately collapses with a ridiculous comic ending that leaves you feeling almost as betrayed as its cuckolded husband.

A deeply personal film, and at times a touching one, it is a collection of fragments and memories artfully pieced into a quirky, captivating book of dreams.

The chemistry between the two is as old as Abbott and Costello. Harold is the sensible worried one, and Kumar zany and reckless. The movie's funniest moments, set at Princeton University, caricature and then demolish the image of Asian-Americans as nerdy, sexless bookworms incapable of fun.

Despite its surreal touches and an improbable story that piles on the metaphors, the movie, which has a rich, honey-dripping score by Andrea Guerra, maintains a tone of refined heart-tugging realism.

Lilies, an extravagantly mannered revenge fantasy by the Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, raises the level of protest at religious prohibitions against homosexuality into a piercing operatic cry.

At its best, Cast Away, like "Titanic," awes us with its sheer oceanic sweep and its cosmic apprehension of human insignificance.

Mr. Bales's spectacular technical performance of a toxic bad boy on the fast track to hell somehow lacks an inner core.

Under the direction of Andy Tennant, the Olsen sisters lay on the icky-poo cuteness with several trowels, often delivering their lines as though they were reciting the alphabet.

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.

The story is deepened with a distinctively European political subtext as the increasingly grandiose Mesrine engages in a running dialogue with various characters about the differences between gangsters and revolutionaries.

Although it exhibits a heartfelt connection with the city's half-invisible population of illegal immigrants, its myriad inconsistencies and strained plotting are increasingly frustrating.

The kindest thing to be said for this frantic, cluttered mess of cheesy computer-generated action-adventure clichés is that at least you can see how the estimated $175 million budget was spent.

A slapdash, poorly acted, paint-by-numbers teen horror comedy, the sequel is too frenetically edited to build any suspense, and its special effects are strictly bargain basement.

A sly retrospective exercise in corporate self-congratulation masquerading as an insider’s tell-all.

So oblivious to genre that it occupies its own special stylistic niche, if you can imagine such a thing as a romantic revenge farce.

May be the opposite of trash, but it is something just as disposable: dead literary meat. Dragged down by a stuffy screenplay clotted with generic period oratory, overdressed to the point that the actors seem physically impeded by their ornate costumes, and hopelessly muddled in its storytelling, the movie is edited with a haphazardness that leaves many dots unconnected.

Shrewdly taps into the lurking primal terrors of anyone who ever had to sleep with a night light.

Pointless little kidnapping thriller.

Don't Tell, which was unaccountably nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, is no better than a second-tier candidate for the Lifetime Channel.

For all its eccentricities and technical quirks, Dracula is a compelling expressionistic work.

Freaked, which was directed by Mr. Winter and Tom Stern from a screenplay they wrote with Tim Burns, has the candy-colored glow of a goofy psychedelic comic book and the irreverent sensibility of Mad Magazine.

In the Shadow of the Moon is such a morale booster. The power of its archival images hasn’t diminished with familiarity.

The performance of Mr. Barnev, who has the poker face and agility of a silent clown, defines the style of a film whose timing and physical comedy look back to 1920s slapstick.

As these tumultuous events play out in the film... they generate the suspense of a smaller-scale "Seven Days in May."

A small Canadian horror film that makes the most of its minuscule budget.

Well acted, but it doesn't enrich its metaphor beyond giving an old story a sour contemporary resonance.

The home-movie crudeness of Dead or Alive: Final indicates it was made on the cheap with minimal preparation.

For an actor like Mr. Hopkins, disappearing into another character, especially a historical figure, must be a far more unsettling deconstruction of reality than for the casual moviegoer observing the transformation. That is a notion Slipstream might have explored more fruitfully, had it focused its wandering attention span, kept its camera steadier and figured out what it wanted to say.

Watching the movie is like reaching into a Christmas stocking and pulling out handfuls of cheap plastic toys that are broken.

This portrait of 20-something gay men and their straight friends is a joyless exploration of middle-class deadbeats (with the exception of Ephram) lost in a torpid funk of low self-regard. Because they’'e not rich, there is no sleazy zing of "Less Than Zero"-worthy glamor.

Cheesy, amateurish film.

Sonatine, made in 1994, predates the Japanese director's art-house hit Fireworks by three years and is arguably stronger than its successor.

Its uplifting message about teamwork and caring wouldn't hurt a fly. You might even say, the movie is good for you.

Sustains such a palpable mood of foreboding until the end.

Ms. Collette’s Maggie is the film's prime mover. This wonderful Australian actress, who hasn't a shred of vanity, virtually disappears into the complicated characters she plays, and Maggie is one of the strongest.

As it observes these people, most of them well over 60, it conjures a melancholy definition of exile as a haunted state of mind.

Softening that apocalyptic undercurrent is a counter-strain of quiet nobility.

Fascinating but somewhat repellent.

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

Clever, funny, wildly innovative film.

She's All That is essentially a formulaic comedy, but it has enough glimmerings of originality and wit to make you wish it were much bolder and funnier than it turns out to be.

The closest sensory approximation of an acid trip ever achieved by a mainstream movie and the latest example of Mr. Gilliam's visual bravura.

For all the trials its characters endure, you might almost describe Ramchand Pakistani as a happy movie: too happy to be entirely believed.

Tautly acted, fairly sexy and atmospheric. Its vision of Stella and Lenni as defiant, doomed outsiders desperately racing toward an elusive paradise on a treacherous highway may be bleak, but it's also intensely and proudly romantic.

A lumpy three-and-a-half-hour glob of Civil War history.

The film’s rich performances, in which every shade of every character’s emotions registers, can go only so far to camouflage the glaring lapses in a drama that often confuses hints and allusions with coherent storytelling.

A taut, skillful exercise in cinematic clockwork.

It doesn't get worse than Grown Ups, Adam Sandler's sloppy entry into this year's man-child-comedy sweepstakes. Lazy, mean-spirited, incoherent, infantile and, above all, witless.

As intense an immersion in military ambience as a Hollywood movie could hope to provide in just over 90 minutes.

Stoned accomplishes the unlikely feat of making the golden years before medical science and the law caught up with rock culture look dull.

They play cotton candy effigies of themselves named Kelly and Justin, and the best that can be said is that they don't embarrass themselves.

A macho fantasy of physical control, grace and invincibility in which women are all but absent.

Witty, exquisitely fine-tuned screen adaptation of Nick Hornby's 1995 novel

Sadly, Mr. Smith has made a movie so false and blatantly icky that it's the film equivalent of making goo-goo noises and chucking a baby under the chin for 103 minutes. At the end, all you're left with is drool and a mountain of baby powder.

The best way to enjoy The Intruder is to surrender to its poetry without demanding cut-and-dried explanations.

Rookie of the Year, which was directed by Daniel Stern from a script by Sam Harper, has an appealing central performance by Mr. Nicholas, who manages to be cocky without seeming obnoxious. As a summer diversion, the film has about as much substance as cotton candy.

What we are left with is a mildly entertaining "man on the street" gloss, seasoned with fragments from blaxploitation movies and music by Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye and others.

The characters' faces reveal more about them than any words that come out of their mouths.

As smart as it is, Pi is awfully hard to watch. Filmed with hand-held cameras in splotchy black-and-white and crudely edited, it has the style and attitude of a no-budget midnight movie.

The kind of movie that seduces you into becoming putty in its manipulative card-sharking hands and making you enjoy being taken in by its shameless contrivance.

Then She Found Me, a serious comedy, is more impressive for what it refuses to do than for its modest accomplishment.

Visually, and in its soundtrack of overlapping voices, the film sustains a mood of heightened consciousness.

The film's distance from factual reality oddly enhances its bleak underlying vision. It portrays a demoralized American work force fearfully going through the motions of life while waiting without much hope for things to get better.

Whether or not Bush's Brain makes its case against Mr. Rove, the movie leaves you with the sickening feeling that it's no longer possible in American politics to stay out of the gutter unless, of course, you want to lose. Dirty politics work.

9 Songs, for all its failed ambitions and its tinge of sexism, is lovely to watch.

Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn.

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.

Easy A isn't nearly as good a movie as "Clueless," Ms. Heckerling's contemporary pastiche of the Jane Austen novel "Emma." But the one-liner-loaded screenplay has the same insouciant charm.

A liability of Casino Jack is the relative absence of its subject.

Creates a cinematic mosaic of American lives unprecedented in its range, balance, subtlety and even-handedness.

Little more than a sanitized blend of nonsense and adventure and just a teeny bit of romance, interspersed with the occasional pop song.

A fairly tough-minded film until the end, when several commentators who have been critical suddenly turn misty-eyed and suggest that underneath it all, Holmes was really a sweetie.

Rolling Family is not a movie of ideas but an emotional and tactile experience of economy-class travel. In surveying a large swath of the Argentine landscape, it could be a companion piece to "The Motorcycle Diaries."

A much more high-pitched movie than its forerunner. [10 July 1993, p.15]

It is left for Mr. Heidbreder to offer the fanciest rationalization for their addiction. Asked whether the movies are a substitute for life, he rejects the suggestion that their behavior is pathological and declares that film itself "is a form of living."

City of Men has a more humane, you might say bleeding-heart, perspective on this anarchic culture than “City of God.”

Bland, obsequious adaptation of John Grogan’s best-selling memoir.

A visually enthralling 40-minute tour of the southwestern Pacific depths.

A truly majestic visual tone poem.

A bubbling crockpot of farcical mush to warm the tummies of anyone who really and truly misses "The Brady Bunch," and I mean really and truly.

Although The Song of Sparrows has some of the trappings of a naturalistic drama, it is really a series of strict moral lessons pieced together into an austere Islamic sermon.

Even if it ends on a hopeful note, this is a feel-bad movie that leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Except for Williams, the sitcom-meets-sci-fi acting throughout the movie is strictly of television caliber.

Filled with haunting visual panoramas. One of the most resonant is a nighttime shot of the Elko skyline dominated by a glittering casino. Evoking a once and future gold rush, it says more about the Old West and the New West than all of Mr. Shepard's elliptical, stagy dialogue can muster. Such powerful images make Don't Come Knocking well worth contemplating.

Admirably high-minded and visually gorgeous but fatally anesthetized by its own grandiosity.

A scare movie about gambling addiction, is as grim and lurid as any in the recent spate of films about the evils of crystal meth.

Although the opening scene suggests a dark urban satire, Blade quickly turns into a cartoonish futuristic action-adventure yarn in which Blade is the only thing keeping humanity from being exterminated by vampires in a hematological holocaust.

Astonishing and frustrating, the fusion of live action and computer animation created by the Jim Henson Company in MirrorMask is an example of too much lavished on too little.

Veering wildly between farce and suds, the movie never makes up its mind whether it's a spoof, a soap opera or a feminist pep talk.

Deteriorates from a potentially enlightening exploration of urban development and class conflict into a preposterous melodrama.

Likable but muddled screen biography.

Once the movie gets down to business, the muscle and pyrotechnics take over. The action -- especially the motorcycle chases through the marble government halls -- pack a fairly good visceral charge.

Party Girl aspires to be a mid-90's answer to the Susan Seidelman movies "Smithereens" and "Desperately Seeking Susan." Although it has some of the same frothy energy, it has no real story to tell.

Michelle Pfeiffer is Lamia, as deliciously evil a witch as the movies have ever invented.

Mush, delivered with a trembling, quasi-biblical solemnity, is what emanates from Anthony Hopkins most of the time in Hearts in Atlantis, a nostalgic fiasco so shameless it makes movies like "Simon Birch" and "Frequency" seem as austere as the work of Robert Bresson.

It is not a compliment to suggest that a demonically possessed piece of machinery embarked on a bloodthirsty rampage has more personality than most of the flesh-and-blood characters in The Mangler, a horror movie based on a Stephen King story.

Annapolis has enough material for an exciting trailer. But that's all the movie really is: a trailer tricked out with protracted boxing sequences and an undernourished romantic subplot that culminates in a single tepid kiss.

As smart and warmhearted an exploration of an upwardly mobile immigrant culture as American independent cinema has produced.

It’s refreshing to see Dame Maggie in a lighter mode than usual. The role of a genteel psychopath is a piece of lemon tea cake she consumes in one delicate bite.

Ms. Paltrow is not the only star in the film who tries gamely to churn this cinematic glass of diluted skim milk into something resembling butter.

Both in its parts and in the sum of them Tokyo! is playfully and sometimes disorientingly apocalyptic.

This consistently gripping, visually intoxicating film stands as a landmark of contemporary Turkish cinema.

Although the film, with its home movies and family reminiscences, portrays him as a heroic crusader for justice, it is by no means a hagiography of a man who earned widespread contempt late in his career for defending pariahs.

The movie has the metabolism, logic and attention span of a peevish 6-year-old.

As flimsy and manipulative as the shallowest Hollywood fantasy.

Despite a shaky narrative focus and dramatic reticence, its journey is consistently absorbing.

The movie’s unblinking observation of a friendship put to the test is amused, queasy making, kindhearted and unfailingly truthful.

In this sendup of Treasure Island, there are no compelling heroes or villains, and the suspense is minimal. Most of the fun lies in watching the Muppets defuse the swashbuckling tale of its scariness by superimposing their own precociously verbal identities onto their characters.

A shrunken, cowardly movie in deep denial of its true nature, which is far uglier than it is ever willing to admit.

In trying to keep track of everybody while providing enough melodrama to sustain an atmosphere of controlled terror, Paradise Road stumbles all over itself and never really finds its center.

It is essentially a personal reminiscence of daily life that captures with an astonishing precision exactly what it felt to be a 12-year- old boy growing up in a particular time and place.

A movie that knows much better than to try to make sense. It is essentially a strung-together series of gags, most of them thought up by Lloyd, an inveterate practical joker.

At only 95 minutes, the movie feels as though it had been shredded in the editing room. In Hollywood-speak, it has a weak second act.

Although you wouldn't want an entire movie devoted to such shenanigans, Hotel for Dogs isn't half as zany as it might have been.

The beauty of the landscape and the monk’s sweetness, humility and good humor evoke a plane of existence, at once elevated and austere, that is humbling to contemplate. That said, Unmistaken Child offers no scholarly perspective on Tibetan Buddhism and leaves fundamental questions unanswered.