William Arnold

All the good intentions in the world and solid performances from three of the biggest and most respected movie stars of our time cannot disguise the fact that Lions for Lambs is resting on a talky, disjointed and not-very-well-thought-out script.

It's an extraordinary feat of animation, possibly the most lovingly conceived, uncompromisingly executed and totally successful animated film since "The Lion King."

A film with the epic scale and fearless common-sense vision of Water is a revelation.

It also has been retooled to be a Farrelly brothers comedy, which means most of Simon's wit has been replaced with gags involving S&M cruelty, explicit bestiality, flatulence, nose mucous, people urinating on each other, and foul-mouthed old men (Stiller's father, Jerry).

All told, the movie also is a tremendous downer. The script goes for a vaguely upbeat conclusion, but it has no spiritual dimension that the viewer feels with any emotion, and it conveys a hopeless, pessimistic future for the interconnected world that it portrays.

Kidman brings her character to life with a fey, moth-to-the-flame enthrallment that's both touching and fascinating.

Whatever you think of her performance, Foster has certainly made all the right choices as a producer, and come up with a movie of taste, integrity and considerable emotional impact. [23 Dec 1994]

That rare animal, a dialogue-driven comedy -- and a good one at that. While one or two of its scenes may seem a tad too talky for today's low-attention spans, the script is mostly razor-sharp acerbic and sophisticated.

It is one of the more pessimistic and repulsive views of the war of the sexes ever put on film. [14 Nov 1992]

Paranoid Park is a movie about its teen hero's inability to express his feelings: to himself, to his parents, to his friends and, unfortunately, to the audience.

It's a botched job...the new "Phoenix" lacks the very things that made the old one special.

The casting is so strong and the overall filmmaking flair of the movie is so captivating that it basically works.

Soars on its purity of form, subdued elegance and tidy professionalism.

Though it's ostensibly a thriller, Trade constantly works against the conventions of its genre in a rather audacious way -- finding, for instance, surprising moments of humanity in even the most monstrous of its villains.

In his determination to lighten the heavy subject matter, Silberling also, to a certain extent, trivializes the movie with too many nervous gags and pratfalls: to the point where his heartfelt drama comes perilously close to tasteless comedy.

Romano just doesn't have the stuff to bring off a role that requires a Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks. He's supposed to be overshadowed by his nemesis, of course, but Hackman chews him up and spits him out so effectively that the movie is glaringly lopsided.

Kidman's performance is the best thing in the movie, but it's not at all appealing.

It's rowdy, often tasteless and very much in the buddy-action vein of the scripts that made him famous, but in a much more comic spirit.

It's an enjoyable period romance. Yet, ultimately, the unique magic of Austen so beautifully caught in 1996's "Emma" is missing.

Jackman, who stepped in after a cranky Russell Crowe walked away in a salary dispute, strikes just the right chord as a scruffy romantic hero.

Gradually, it becomes clear that Campion is taking an experimental, almost documentary approach to movie biography - avoiding clear villains, grandly dramatic moments, and the kind of phony movie dialogue so characteristic of the traditional Hollywood biopic. It's a bold and risky method, and sometimes it induces boredom. But somehow it works, giving us a extraordinary sense of one woman's life and the forces that made her, and a subtle, powerful feminist statement. [21 Jun 1991]

Fascinates by its very premise: the fact that, on the basis of a Web site logo, these two bozos could so easily pass themselves off as important officials.

Clever, often hilarious, inside-Hollywood farce that makes the most of... a delightfully absurd premise.

The film's grueling training sequences have a perverse fascination, and, though he's nothing special here, Kutcher is probably the most appealing he has been in a big-screen role.

Ultimately, it's a surprisingly empty experience.

As amateurish and fumbling as it is in every department, the sum total of the movie is pretty darn scary.

Positioned to be the environmental documentary of the year.

Most of the magic of this unusual movie comes from the freshness, imagination and sweet spirit of its animation, which is blissfully its own thing and does not show the influence of any of the reigning forces in the art form.

Doesn't have any of the creepy suspense that graced the first "Friday" movies, and very little of the Daliesque dream imagery of the early "Nightmares." It's just a slam-bang succession of gross-out mutilations, played for giggles.

So full of limp slapstick silliness and stock characters that it's hard to stay awake through it.

An unapologetic B-movie.

A slow-moving, unashamedly weepy, middle-age love story of the kind big-studio Hollywood doesn't often make anymore.

Efforts to expand the envelope of grotesquery make the film repulsive and suspenseless, and it sorely misses original director Tobe Hooper's grisly, wily sense of humor.

The movie is a resounding dud: immaculately composed and shot (very much in the Kaufman tradition), but riddled with crime-movie cliches, wincingly obvious in its plot twists and rather badly acted.

A straightforward, no-nonsense, agreeably old-fashioned historical action movie.

There's still enough of Doyle's hilariously foul dialogue and outrageous, culture-shocked Irish characters for the film to be a good bit of fun.

A thoroughly enjoyably and wistfully charming ensemble drama carried off with an irresistible Gallic flair.

Anthony Hopkins is a great actor and he gives a resourceful, inventive, compelling performance that holds our attention over three hours. It never convinces us that he is Nixon: he doesn't look much like him, and he misses entirely that incredible shiftiness in his public manner. But it somehow works. [20 Dec 1995, p.C1]

The movie is entertaining, reasonably true to the facts of its subject's life and full of music.

Reminds us of just how exciting and satisfying the fantasy cinema can be when it's approached with imagination and flair.

A movie that plays better if you know nothing about it going in.

The best of several films about the Roosevelts, this adaptation of Dore Schary's Tony-winning Broadway play - which deals mostly with FDR's battle with polio and the difficult years that formed his presidential character - earned Greer Garson a best-actress nomination as Eleanor. [16 Nov 1995]

The star-crossed love story that takes up most of the movie-within-the-movie is strangely compelling, and Douglas gives a believable, often powerful performance as a man in the process of discovering the karmic ripple effect of a closed-off life.

Very slick, very compelling and not nearly as predictable as it sounds.

So uninvolving as basic storytelling that it quickly becomes boring.

Ultimately, the script lacks the ambiguity, irony and heartfelt emotion that would make the conversion of a dozen hardened criminals very credible, and -- despite its obvious good intentions -- the movie seems pat, simplistic and slightly phony.

Marks a surprising maturity, restraint and confidence to Carrey's acting. Even more than "The Truman Show," he plays it perfectly straight here, and his natural charisma carries the movie with just the right dose of Jimmy Stewart charm.

The performances are immaculate, especially Dafoe and the always-magnificent Mirren, who rarely gets a vehicle this worthy of her talent.

Surprisingly, first-time director and co-writer Andrew Scheinman relentlessly fails to find anything magical or especially funny here. Little Big League seems to have no sense of the absurdity of its situation and uses the premise mostly as an excuse for one more by-the-numbers competition movie. [29 Jun 1994]

It's a consistently funny script, tastefully packaged by super-producer Brian Grazer and directed with just the right touch by Dean Parisot.

A funny, rousing crowd-pleaser.

In the end, we feel just what Branagh wants us to feel - a sense that, behind all its frustrations, there is a joy in this unavoidable battle-between-the-sexes that makes life worth living. So his film has it both ways: It is true to Shakespeare and his poetry, and it makes an almost perfect '90s date comedy. [21 May 1993]

Zellweger is a gifted comedienne and her wonky persona sparks here and there, but the humor is so broad that the film is a poor stage for her subtle comedic skills, and she's not photographed well: her face has to be lit just so or it tends to looks strangely distorted. McGregor is terrible casting.

A tough, taut, mostly well-executed morality parable and thriller that explores some of the bitter ironies of this strange religious vendetta in which America unwittingly finds itself.

A dynamite comedy-drama that, unless it stiffs big-time at the box office, should be up for multi-Oscar nominations come February.

Dempsey also needs some fashion advice. As always, he sports his trademark five o'clock shadow in every scene (which in itself is excessive). But with Dempsey at age 42, it's beginning to make his face look more sinister than sexy, less Dr. McDreamy, more Richard Nixon.

It's resolutely grim and rather predictable but very compelling, and it offers a commanding star vehicle for Denzel Washington.

Non-cultists should enjoy this engaging and well-acted retread -- a film that develops its own charm as it goes along.

The movie offers several moments in which Williams comes alive, but they're few and far between.

There's still nothing quite as thrilling on the screen as the spectacle of an icon movie star in a perfectly tailored role.

As energetic and irreverent as it is -- the movie never finds the inspired blend of edgy black comedy and gleeful journalistic adventure that it's after.

It's an expensive star vehicle that also happens to be a teary, unabashedly sappy, romantic comedy with every element as purely calculated to appeal to a heterosexual woman's romantic fantasies as an episode of "All My Children."

First and foremost, it soars because its grand design and numerous story problems were worked out half a century ago by a guy named Tolkien, and Jackson was smart enough to realize this.

The best thing about The Joy Luck Club is that it is not too cerebral, calculated or self-consciously arty. It is also an intensely emotional movie that celebrates the mystical undercurrent of life, that accepts the healing miracle of love, and - in the tradition of the great Hollywood "women's pictures" of the '30s and '40s - simply does not leave a dry eye in the house. [24 Sept 1993]

Never as visually or viscerally thrilling as some might expect, but it still manages to be a fascinating study of a national phenomenon that has had very little impact in our part of the country.

Several of the special-effects sequences -- a Tokyo hailstorm, a system of tornadoes ripping through L.A. (and tearing up the Hollywood sign), a tidal wave breaking on the East Side and washing through the canyons of Manhattan -- are just dandy.

Like most films in this overworked genre, it's as formulaic in its own way as a John Wayne western, and the characters and situations all have a gnawing predictability about them.

It is not just that this action-comedy is a totally stupid, by-the-numbers collection of every action movie cliche ever coined. It is that the thing is so upsettingly mean-spirited and incorrigibly ugly, a movie that absolutely revels in sadism and constantly asks us to laugh at the most sordid and explicit acts of violence. [17 Mar 1990]

It's mostly quite enjoyable. Director Joe Johnson's many action sequences are lively and engaging, the location photography (mostly Morocco) is breathtaking, and both the horse and Sharif (in his biggest Hollywood role in years) are adorable.

Surprisingly, the weak link is Dunst, who's previously been the delight of all her movies.

It finally just rings false as a human drama.

Altman always manages to pop up with another masterpiece -- and darned if he hasn't done it again.

For fans of Rosie O'Donnell, Another Stakeout is also noteworthy as the first real starring vehicle for the fast-rising, dead-pan comic. But she seems awkward as a lead and never very funny. You get the sense that her considerable talent might be better suited to television, stand-up comedy and supporting roles. [23 July 1993]

In Costner's best moments, he makes us absolutely believe this character and feel his pain.

Another gutsy, big-budget movie that dares to say something new and optimistic about our messed-up times. And it almost, but not quite, brings it off.

As always with Stone, the film has some gritty performances and a certain likable audacity.

As the very traditional hero, Li keeps us riveted through the fisticuffs, and he also carries off the film's heavier dramatic moments well enough -- though, as always, his lack of a strong personality prevents the movie from ever genuinely catching fire.

The two central performances are competent but uninspired -- and annoyingly mannered. Pearce's Warhol is a one-note, irresponsible villain and Miller's Sedgwick is a shallow, pretentious party girl who chain-smokes her way through every scene.

Director John McTiernan is normally a competent director but he's simply not at his best here. He shows little flair for comedy, his performances are one-dimensional, and his action sequences are predictable and sometimes amazingly sloppy. [18 Jun 1993, p.5]

It's too quick, too pat.

Fairly incompetent as a musical and rather silly as a drama.

Covers this exact same territory, but does it with such refreshing, clearheaded honesty and skill it seems like a revelation.

Keanan, a competent young actress, has several strong and quite believable scenes of conflict with Ladd that make the movie work as a compelling relationship drama in its exposition half. But these scenes are soon forgotten as the script moves into non-stop suspense and terror. [20 Apr 1990]

When a director has two actors as iconic and skillful as Robert Duvall and Michael Caine for his leads, all he has to do is point the camera in their direction and it's hard to go wrong.

In many ways this is an extraordinary movie: there's probably never been such a portrait of a major star in the grip of old age.

Casts a dreamy romantic spell that lingers pleasantly in the mind for a long time after experiencing it.

DiCaprio could hardly be better. He brings this outrageous character and his demons to life with skill, sympathy and a symphony of small, telling touches.

It's an entertaining and mostly intelligent movie that is grungy enough to appeal to today's rock fans and nostalgic enough to appeal to the aging baby-boomer fans of the Fab Four. [22 Apr 1994]

Rarely has paper-casting worked as dismally as it does for Jason Lee and Tom Green.

There's a satisfying craftsmanship to every sequence, the direction is stylish without being show-offy, the plot mechanics are convincing, the pace is breakneck and compelling, and the film does something unique and interesting with its Hitchcockian concept.

(Bacon's) most believable, heart-wrenching and charismatic lead performance in many years.

The movie around Stallone is fairly dreadful, so overly stylized and poorly written that it's always a struggle to stay oriented.

All these good elements have resulted in a movie that is not so much awful as mediocre, disconnected and ultimately incomprehensible.

New director John Moore just doesn't have original director Richard Donner's filmmaking flair, so the same scenes done the same way on phony-looking Prague locations without the benefit of Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning score just seem terminally slow and flat.

Even though almost everything about it feels forced and its casting chemistry hardly sizzles, its heart is in the right place, it has its quota of funny and touching moments, and it's ultimately fairly enjoyable.

It fulfills a lot of the criteria for a successful oater: spectacular scenery, an evocative frontier atmosphere, an ensemble of enjoyably tight-lipped performances, and plenty of stylish violence.

The movie is a delicious, consistently hilarious screwball farce that gives Clooney his best comedy role to date and should finally, forever, lift the Coens into the wide-release movie mainstream.

Director Jonathan Frakes keeps the tone just this side of tongue-in-cheek.

It doesn't have the imagination or daring to make a full turn to self-parody.

Eloquent and informative.

If the new Ocean's Eleven is mostly Clooney's show, he's more than up to the task of carrying it. Indeed, this could be his career-defining role: The twinkle in his eye has never seemed more disreputable, his devil-may-care charm has never seemed so appealing, and he dominates the movie with the graceful ease of a Golden Age Hollywood star.

It's really Harris' movie, and he brings to it just the right blend of engaging affability, gruff strength of character and transcendent nobility of spirit to make it a genuinely enriching experience.

It's a well-crafted, intelligent, no-nonsense western epic that zips us through the famous siege and the birth of Texas with style, verve and impressive historical accuracy.

Cedric Kahn has caught the irrational compulsion, nail-biting tension and unpredictability of plot that is Simenon at his best.

The story is patently implausible and unnecessarily confusing, and it works to a moral dilemma for its hero -- and a trick ending for the audience -- that resolves the action with so little satisfaction that you wish they hadn't bothered.

A kind of homage to that more simple and elegant time.

An engaging and intelligent comedy that manages to pay tribute to the conventions of its genre and still be very much its own thing. [02 Oct 1992]

As clumsy as the movie is in many ways, it strings together maybe a dozen situations in which we are absolutely, excruciatingly, on the edge of our seats -- which is to say that the new Poseidon essentially does its job.

Definitely works as an action piece, it's often surprising and never boring, and several sequences had me positioned well on the edge of my seat.

The film is not very convincing as sociology, but it is mildly amusing as comedy, has an unpolished charm to its visuals and performances, and showcases so many rock songs on its soundtrack that it qualifies as a musical. [19 Apr 1991]

The kangaroo is devoid of charm, as are the actors, who have the chemistry of fingernails on a blackboard.

In typical Fellini fashion, there is much frantic activity - no less than three films-within-the-film, several surrealist sequences that come out of nowhere, and many scenes that deliberately make reference to, and comment upon, the director's life and past films. [17 Jun 1993]

The bright spot is Seann William Scott ("Dude, Where's My Car?") as Bo Duke. His good-naturedly maniacal manner and early Dennis Quaid killer smile are endearing, to the point where he occasionally threatens to elevate the movie into something special.

In the lead, Anderson ("The X-Files") is competent but never quite makes the character come soaring to life.

Poetic Justice is much more self-indulgent and self-consciously arty and shows [Singleton's] directorial inexperience in almost every scene. [23 Jul 1993]

Director Fran Rubel Kuzui ("Tokyo Pop") cannot begin to find the style that would give some unity and originality to this mess. The result is a grindingly dull horror comedy and an unnecessary satire of Valley Girls - a full decade after that phenomenon has come and gone. [31 Jul 1992, p.12]

Wilde (Fry, in a wonderful performance) comes off less as a sexual martyr than a man who foolishly lets his obsession for an unworthy young lover (Jude Law) lead him into big trouble that he might well have avoided. The only totally sympathetic character in the movie is Wilde's wife (Jennifer Ehle). [05 Jun 1998]

A monstrous disappointment.

Re-creates the era convincingly, and, as usual, Penn is mesmerizing: a consummate movie actor at the peak of his game.

Just a silly mess of a movie in which no one is trying very hard to do anything but goof off. [6 March 1998]

An action buddy comedy is such an offbeat and inspired notion that it's impossible not to think of it without smiling.

A rare flub for the usually spot-on director and cast.

Universal Pictures has a lot of gall to pick up a movie as thoroughly awful as Empire and -- with a straight face and a $20 million or so ad campaign -- thrust it on the holiday movie market as if it were a significant piece of filmmaking.

There are hints of madness in all the characters, and it gets creepier and more surreal as it goes along until it finally comes to a showstopping climax that took me completely by surprise and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight.

A solid piece of storytelling that doesn't pander, skips the usual POW stereotypes and allows the film to work reasonably well as an epic of war, a survival story, a prison thriller, a murder mystery and a courtroom drama.

Cinema does not get much better than this.

Best of all, the second Potter movie reunites its adult cast: Harris, Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, John Cleese, Alan Rickman, Julie Walters and others -- a veritable Who's Who of British actors that single-handedly elevates the proceedings out of the kid's movie genre into something special.

It's a sorry specimen if ever there was one, and could even stand as an argument for how the movies have deteriorated in recent years.

Ends badly, with a clumsy, nihilistic coda that leaves one uncertain how to feel about the story, confused as to what point has been made and not at all convinced that the new South Africa will be that much different from the old one.

This documentary fails to grasp AIDS as a theme.

Fascinating and mostly sympathetic.

An undistinguished treasure-hunting epic that rips off the 1977 movie, "The Deep," in virtually every frame. It's pretty to look at, but so low-voltage and instantly forgettable that it's hardly worth anyone's time.

Some will find the surprise pleasant, others unpleasant. Whatever it is, it's the least commercial, most somberly heartfelt movie ever made by the cinema's most commercially successful filmmaker.

Not quite a masterpiece perhaps, but a visually stunning mountain drama, and an absorbing look at a dying culture.

Madonna herself is not so much terrible as merely uninvolving. She's quite credible as the harpy of the first act, but she can't pull off the transition and the spark that makes a movie star instantly sympathetic.

Patrice Leconte's new film, My Best Friend, is probably his lightest and sweetest to date. Fans of his serious historical dramas ("Ridicule") or raucous farces ("Les Bronzes") may be disappointed, but others should find it a reasonably enjoyable feel-good comedy.

You've already seen this movie, right? Just a few months ago. It was called "The Score."

Absorbing, scary documentary.

Could there possibly be a worse time for a movie celebrating a draft-evader who embraces Islam? You wouldn't think so.

So devoid of the usual coarse Hollywood calculation that it plays like a breath of fresh air.

It's fun in places, and moves like a bullet, but it's also clumsy and mostly quite routine - and seems a particular letdown considering it was made with a blank check from 20th Century-Fox and the services of John Travolta at the peak of his career. [9 Feb 1996, p.25]

The old formula is showing its age. The movie just doesn't deliver the emotional highs that addicted millions to the Rocky cycle. For the first time, one does not leave the theater floating on air. [16 Nov 1990, p.8]

The movie's one saving grace is Olyphant ("Live Free and Die Hard," HBO's "Deadwood"), whose sociopathic elegance is gradually winning, and whose dry, monotonic, Eastwood-like delivery of one-liners is frequently, if perhaps unintentionally, very funny.

The directors have told the press that one of their goals was "to make horseracing -- a great sport that has gotten progressively less attention over the past 30 years -- cool again." The movie actually does this. It sure inspired me to make plans for Emerald Downs.

It's high melodrama all the way - a play written early in Shakespeare's career, filled with great poetry but lacking the sensitivity and complexity (and historical accuracy) of his more mature histories, and revived so often on stage over the centuries primarily because it's such a rousing, audience-pleasing theater piece. [19 Jan 1996]

As it turns out, the movie is still very much about two well-dressed undercover cops who strike sexy poses, express plenty of attitude and drive expensive cars and fast boats as pop music plays on the soundtrack and palm trees sway gently in the tropical night.

All told, Knocked Up works more in spite of its low humor than because of it.

Not the most thrilling of competition films. There are only two short debate scenes, and each time the team gets to argue (in sound bites of rhetoric) the politically correct side of the issue.

A perfectly titled and thoroughly engaging -- if at times gleefully violent -- black comedy.

An exhilarating musical experience.

In the best tradition of Annaud's work, Two Brothers works as an engrossing outdoor adventure and quasi-documentary.

It's boldly acted, absorbing and satisfying as a history lesson and chock-full of extravagantly brutal battle sequences.

Anges has nothing but affection for its characters and fondness for their quirkiness.

It's a tired rehash of animation cliches that distinguishes itself only by the extent to which it's crammed full of scatology and gleeful violence to animals, and otherwise panders to the worst instincts of its audience.

For all its good performances and family values, it's a painful movie to endure. It consists of watching this poor guy suffer one agonizing setback after another for nearly two hours, and its modest emotional payoff comes only in the final moments.

For genre fans, the horde-of-locust sequence may alone be worth the price of admission.

Another slyly intelligent, extremely funny comedy of character that blazes new thematic trails and provides an irresistible showcase for its stars, Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn. [12 June 1992]

An engagingly whimsical, sporadically charming, frequently very funny Southern Gothic fantasy that somehow doesn't quite come together to be as magical or meaningful as it's intended to be.

Has its own peculiar charm.

Not only does it recapture -- and enhance -- the subtle emotional core that has made the film so beloved for the past three-quarters of a century, it delivers the most eye-boggling, hair-raising movie thrill ride since 1993's "Jurassic Park."

The style is dated, and its neorealism seems forced and ineffective, but it's still delectable, and mostly for the things Pontecorvo hated about it: its delirious '50s color, and its stars, particularly Montand at the peak of virility.

It's nicely crafted, respectably acted and often quite compelling in a low-key way, but it doesn't have the kind of flair, impact or resonance we've come to expect from the director.

Director Neil Burger manages to make his technical deficiencies and clumsy interviews work for the credibility of his story rather than against it, and he builds an eerie, naturalistic suspense that's believable enough to raise an authentic goose bump or two.

A fairly underwhelming experience for man or child -- not so much bad as just more of the same, with little of the original's novelty or freshness.

Sadly, it's still a plodding affair that's low on plausible character motivation and compelling action scenes, and it's still not much of a showcase for its star, Charlton Heston.

It's an interesting and eye-opening journey.

It works as a fascinating and often very funny character study/satire of a famous author, though it loses interest the harder it tries to be profound and falls apart completely toward the end.

The film's near-fatal flaw is its dialogue, which had to be invented wholesale from the Old English text. It alternates between sounding stagy and anachronistically hip -- with more overuse of the F-word than any two Samuel L. Jackson movies. It's a big mistake.

Unfortunately, director John McNaughton cannot give the script the stylistic unity, black humor or plausibility it needs to rise above an incurably adolescent macho sex fantasy. [5 Mar 1993, p.6]

The movie is occasionally funny, always very colorful and enjoyably overblown in the traditional Almodóvar style; and the performances -- especially Javier Cámara as the gentle, sweet-spirited Benigno -- are exquisitely tender and moving.

It doesn't, as they say, really work -- but it's enjoyable enough in spots to leave one feeling passably entertained.

Passably entertaining.

The biggest failing of the film is that it's the lamest possible excuse for a whodunit. [17 Apr 1998]

It also boosts the punch of the movie that so many of its action scenes evoke the Iraqi War news footage of the past month, and the "X-Men" premise -- people persecuted because their difference makes them seem threatening -- carries even more relevancy and weight than it did three years ago.

Make no mistake: This not high art. But it does its job without insulting our intelligence or unpleasantly jangling our nerves.

Far from a great movie, it nonetheless does its job as a family adventure and saga of a woman's personal growth.

A movie in which almost nothing works.

A spellbinding action-drama, skillfully built upon a scary corporate conspiracy, chock-full of enjoyable downbeat performances.

For all its f/x pageantry, it is rather tired, as if it's the third sequel of a franchise, not the initial episode.

By most of the standards by which we judge movies, Jungle Fever is pretty bad. Scenes seem structured solely to provide an excuse for characters to deliver speeches, everything seems heavy-handed, obvious and didactic - and false. [7 June 1991]

A happy surprise: a timely antidote to the comic-book mindlessness of "Spider-Man" and repetitive space fantasy of "Star Wars," and an encouraging bid from the top of the A-list to once again reach very high and spit in the face of the gutless formula filmmaking that rules Hollywood.

Well-paced, well-structured nail-biter with precious little of the usual Hollywood nonsense, several virtuoso sequences, and a camera flourish that only occasionally gets silly.

A gripping, unusual and suitably harrowing -- if, in the final analysis, not particularly satisfying -- concentration camp drama.

Surprise! The remake is not a heresy. It's a decent enough stab at being what the old movie was to its time, following the same basic plot, full of respectful references to its model, updated with a gallery of fairly imaginative special effects.

There's nothing harder for an actor to play than a thoroughly good character, and Staunton does it with a dowdy, sublime originality.

The movie is a misfire.

It's the first film I know of in which we get to see all five of the top-billed actors vomit

Does a solid job of dealing with the problem but with enough originality that it's not an exact duplication of the Gore film.

A riveting piece of movie storytelling, mounted with a genuinely epic flair, shot and edited in a no-nonsense, classic style.

A winning combination. By some bizarre quirk of star chemistry, their persona complement each other, the action scenes have comic flair and the movie is mindless fun.

It's a gut-wrenching emotional experience that you'll watch with tears in your eyes. [26 Mar 1999]

It's the strangest comic-book superhero movie you're likely to see this year. For anyone looking for something totally different in this most overworked of Hollywood genres, this is it.

Has a slight bite.

An absorbing and fulfilling experience -- even though it ends with a question mark.

The film is a strange, nostalgic, suitably outrageous ode to a very real revolution in consciousness.

The film's first-time director, the TV-commercial-trained Marcel Langenegger, is out to emulate Hitchcock with dashes of "Vertigo," "Strangers on a Train" and more. But his homage is uninspired and disconnected, and his film is a bore.

Never quite builds the compulsive emotional power it needs to be an unforgettable personal drama.

A clumsy and incompetent thriller for nine-tenths of its length, but it has an ending so clever and that goes so wildly against expectations it almost exonerates the film.

Above all, the film suffers from a lack of originality. The premise of Goodbye Charlie was at least something new in 1964, but Switch comes at the end of a long cycle of body-switching comedies that ran out of steam more than two years ago. [10 May 1991]

The movie never falls into gushy moments of inspiration and Schnabel never tries to manipulate any particular response from the audience. We're left to make of it what we will.

It's a magical film -- an exquisitely made and exceedingly wise family drama that communicates a touching sense of the universality of the human condition, and leaves us with the rich emotional satisfaction we just don't seem to get often at the movies anymore.

Even though he's strikingly played by Rockwell, Barris comes off as such a distasteful character and the silliness is so unrelenting that the movie wears you out. Long before it's over, you feel yourself reaching for that gong clapper.

Avoid the hype, just go enjoy the movie

It's getting hard not to think of De Niro as anything but a dead-pan comedian.

Changeling doesn't care if you love it or hate it, it makes no compromises to fashion and it's charged with that unmistakable assurance of a master filmmaker at his creative peak.

Too much of the humor falls flat. Thomas' numerous chase sequences through the streets, over the rooftops and through the airways of Budapest seem numbingly repetitive, and the script's reliance on castration gags betrays its overall lack of imagination.

Dazzles us with computer-generated animation that has never looked quite so boldly exotic or shimmeringly beautiful.

Throughout, it's clouded -- for me at least -- by a nagging sense that it's straining too hard to build the media clash into more of an historic event than it was.

It fails to persuade us that its subject is significant enough to be worth a movie.

Refreshingly old-fashioned.

By the time the film plummets to its rock bottom, we find ourselves in a flag-waving no-brainer of the first order, and one of the most thoroughly confused morality tales in recent memory.

All told, it's a reasonably effective movie, but it might have been a lot more effective had it the guts to portray a Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden-like character as its villain instead of this rather unbelievable, but more politically correct, gaggle of cardboard neo-Nazis.

As exciting and disturbing as it is in many ways, Children of Men -- based on a novel by P.D. James -- doesn't add up to a credible alternate view of the near-future: Its vision hasn't been well thought out, and, again and again, it struck me as a sloppy piece of storytelling.

The film is annoyingly sketchy on Thompson's early years and education, and it spends so much time on his coverage of the 1972 presidential election and his own race for sheriff of Aspen, Colo., that major aspects of his career get short shrift or go unmentioned.

An uncompromising and ultimately chilling look at individual creativity trampled by corporate greed, and its timing could not be more appropriate.

A strangely mixed blessing filled with glossy production values and vibrant supporting performances but suffers mightily from a lack of credibility and the grinding predictability of its plot.

Best of all, the film showcases Leconte's full range of directorial gifts: his sense of pace and suspense; his ability to make a scene come magically alive with a small touch of wry humor; his ingratiating belief that, as bad as people are in the aggregate, they are capable of an amazing nobility of spirit as individuals. [06 Dec 1996]

An incomprehensible mess -- so boring and numbingly unworkable that it's hard to imagine what he could have been thinking.

But the movie is mostly just bad, and probably the nadir of Pakula's otherwise distinguished career. As played by Kline and Mastrantonio, victim and wife here are just too dumb to be even remotely sympathetic; and the script is so predictable and yet so utterly preposterous every step of the way that it insults the intelligence of even the most undiscerning moviegoer. [16 Oct 1992]

If you're addicted to Billy Bob Thornton's slovenly charm, and thrill to the prospect of watching him talk endlessly about his bodily functions and penchant for anal sex with obese women, this is your movie. If not, it's like 90 minutes in hell.

Comes together with a wry sense of humor, a total lack of gratuitous movie nonsense and a graceful dignity that allows the humanity of his characters to shine through in a very special way.

As a thriller it's dull and incomprehensible; as a romance it's empty and emotionally uninvolving; and as a character study it's strangely repulsive.

The film is a charming little romantic comedy based on a high-concept premise - one of those fraudulent marriages whereby an alien marries an American citizen to get his green card, or permanent residency. [11 Jan 1991, p. 6]

(Bullock's) performance, and the movie's serious side, soon get lost in an overly slick script.

It was also a miscalculation to make the film so sexually explicit. It doesn't particularly serve the story and, for all his gifts, Macy is just not the kind of actor most people want to see in a whirl of sweaty, naked sex.

As far as these things go, the film's violence is not outrageously excessive.

The movie's problem is that it's a cartoon, offering no emotional involvement with its characters and no dramatic imperative.

Technically, the film is consistently impressive. It creates a grimly gothic vision of a crime-ridden and depression-ravaged Gotham City, a dandy pair of chase sequences involving the new generation Batmobile and a range of innovative visual effects.

Low-voltage and forgettable.

A richly textured thriller.

Good performances are mostly wasted. Phoef Sutton's adaptation of the Abrahams' novel is poor, it works to an absurdly unlikely and dramatically dishonest must-hit-a-home-run conclusion, and - though it tries here and there - it has absolutely nothing new to say on the subject of fan obsession. [16 Aug 1996. p.30]

Really two movies working against each other. One is a feel-good movie -- But the more intriguing movie is a tragedy that studies the subtle but long-lasting impact of the teacher's single moral lapse.

It's an unpleasant experience, and a long one, that gets more morose and melodramatic as it goes along.

A fairly hypocritical exercise -- and one that's so flamboyant and overbearing that it comes perilously close to being a classic awful.

An engrossing study in abnormal psychology, an inspirational drama that tells us a determined man really can do anything his mind can envision and is the first film that plays on what could become a phenomenon of the new millennium: World Trade Center nostalgia.

Its elements all come together with an unforced perfection, every scene feels real and alive in a way that many of his more surrealistic later films do not, and Leonard Maltin, for one, has argued that I Vitelloni is no less than Fellini's masterpiece.

Has the sensibility of a Hollywood "woman's picture" of the '40s -- the weepie saga of a married woman trapped in an untenable situation.

Lively but incredibly dumb.

The movie just seems like one more Hollywood cop-out, and a waste of our original emotional investment.

As weak a star vehicle as Hollywood has cranked out this millennium.

The good news about Alan Rudolph's new film, Mortal Thoughts, is that it is dramatically engrossing, brilliantly acted by its big-star cast and filled with the touches of a virtuoso director at the top of his form. The bad news is that it leads us to one of the worst shaggy-dog endings of any mystery story I can remember. It's so totally unsatisfying, in fact, that it almost spoils all the good scenes that have come before it. [19 Apr 1991]

Has good intentions and the element of surprise -- it's never quite clear where it's going at any given point.

It's Shakespearean in its political machinations and closer to "Saving Private Ryan" and "Starship Troopers" than to "Dracula" or "The Howling."

A not-bad ghost story that marks a comeback of sorts for its star, Michael Keaton, who hasn't top-billed a movie for almost a decade.

An endearing comedy that could well end up being one of the year's big hits.

Neither (Gooding nor Ulrich) has the distincitve spark of an action hero, and their Butch and Sundance repartee falls so consistently flat that you end up feeling a little embarrassed for them.

There is no denying the power of The Handmaid's Tale. It's a scary exaggeration of a world that many people claim they want to build. It should be required viewing for anyone who advocates a fundamentalist point of view of any kind. [09 Mar 1990]

It may be that the Hulk role was not made for sensitive method actors like Norton or Bana. When '70s TV-"Hulk" Lou Ferrigno made his obligatory cameo, a palpable wave of affection swept through the Seattle preview audience.

It's far from strikingly original, but it's well-acted, skillfully plotted and moderately chilling, and it's something slightly different in the haunted-house genre.

Zwick's narrative skills keep us hooked on the story, and the first-rate production values and imaginative use of locations (it was shot in Mozambique) give the film an enthralling scope and epic sweep.

Once you get the joke and grasp the aesthetic they're after, it's fun, and it almost works on the steam of its clever plot mechanics.

Some of the scenes are gorgeous, but "Papaya" is so passionless and empty it has no real impact. [04 Feb 1994]

This great Elizabethean masterpiece comes alive in a rich cinematic version that proves the past 400 years have done nothing to dim its uncanny power to mirror the human condition. [18 jan 1991]

Quite a bit of fun. In fact, in its own good-natured, silly way, it works better than most of the year's other adventure-gutbusters.

The script is tight and well-constructed, director Ernest Dickerson has a feel for film-noir aesthetics, DMX exudes a certain brutish charisma and the movie is as morbidly compelling as a good train wreck.

Its sex is brutal, its depiction of human nature is crude and pessimistic, and its climax -- which involves animal mutilation -- is enough to ruin your whole week.

This remake is considerably different and, for once, the changes have not hurt the film.

It's well-acted by a likable cast and is well-intended, but it misses: It doesn't come off as the powerful socio-environmental statement it wants to be.

Redford also deserves a lot of credit. It's not the kind of showcase that's going to earn him an Oscar, but, without too many compromises, he manages to find the soul of a difficult character and makes his emotional odyssey both believable and satisfying.

Salvadori's homage is a bittersweet, funny, sporadically charming and consistently entertaining love story between two "kept" people.

While it's flawed and often tedious, Kaufman's script is, on the whole, boldly imaginative and enjoyably challenging.

The film below it is such an entertaining and poignantly bittersweet take-down of a good man's midlife crisis that the translation still works like a charm.

An undisputed masterpiece and a one-of-a-kind experience: a wise, poignant, wryly funny, tenderly open-hearted comedy-drama that shrewdly portrays a microcosm of French society on the brink of WWII through an ensemble of love affairs taking place at a country estate over one hectic weekend. [09 Mar 2007, p.6]

Not quite up to the exalted level of the two predecessors ("Toy Story" and "Toy Story 2"), be assured it's still the most eye-popping and thoroughly entertaining animated film to come down the pike so far this year.

The Man Without a Face also manages to be an expression of Gibson's well-known political and sexual conservatism. It goes to some lengths to pay homage to John Wayne (three times) while the anti-war left of the '60s is brutally caricatured as a bunch of effete snobs, and the women in this movie are just in the way. [25 Aug 1993, p.c1]