There were a lot of ways for this film to go stupid; it succumbs to none of them.

The "Citizen Kane" of Oedipal zombie-cannibal-right to death-comedy-love stories... So gleefully over-the-top that it's decidedly hard not to gag while you're laughing yourself incontinent... Sick. Perverse. Brilliant.

Metaphorically speaking, Strictly Ballroom celebrates individuality over homogeneity; for all its melodramatic flourishes and grotesque exaggerations, it never mocks the hero's dream of self-expression.

There's no getting around this dumb script that's just too silly for words.

A good, psychological thriller that, I suspect, packs more of a wallop if you have not seen the original.

While past parodies like Airplane! and the marginally worthwhile Hot Shots filled out down time with slapstick visuals and spastic throwaway gags, Loaded Weapon is content to lumber along at its own boring pace: you end up checking your watch between jokes, and there's nothing funny about that.

The performance are uniformly wonderful, making Sommersby solidly entertaining though never engrossing.

Despite a great 15-second, computer-generated effects scene, Corn II manages to be 90-odd minutes of unrelenting cheese. Like runny Brie with blood all over it, it just makes you want to gag.

Best of all, is this knock-out, though overused, optical effect of a bullet hurtling and whizzing through space toward its target. Sniper is sure to appeal to armchair assassins and fantasy war-gamers. Beyond that audience, Peruvian director Llosa's American debut will appeal to anyone interested in well-made and well-acted pictures that compensate with skill for what they may lack in inspiration.

The acting's not bad, the skiing is great and the scenery is spectacular. Still, six bucks is a steep price to pay for a travelogue, especially to a place where extreme prejudice has become as threatening as any vertical drop.

Damage brings to mind Last Tango in Paris, although Malle's elegant, precise direction is drastically different from Bertolucci's work, a film that celebrates the loss of inhibition and control. Although relentlessly somber, Damage offers a perverse humor in the idea of father-and-son rivalry over the same woman: it's like the Oedipus complex in reverse.

Aiming to be this year's Basic Instinct, Body of Evidence never raises a discernible pulse.

Is it a comedy? A documentary? An underground gore-fest? Man Bites Dog, the first feature film from Belgian director Rémy Belvaux, is all of these and much more, a ghastly, shocking and explosive debut with all the genuinely ruthless ability to disturb as an oily blue-barreled revolver jammed in your mouth. And it's funny, too.

Alive is no Oscar-challenger, certainly, but it does treat a very dicey incident with the even-keeled direction the story deserves.

Previously responsible for The Hitcher, a disturbingly cold-blooded exercise but still a powerful cinematic vehicle, Harmon still doesn't show enough humanity to be considered anything more than a stylish director. But he is a damned stylish one, who keeps the film interesting and the action sequences effective. If you don't expect much (and the developer vs. land owner plot is ridiculous) you may be surprised at what's here.

Bad sets, bad acting, bad direction, shadows of boom-mikes, inexplicable plot holes, generic effects, fake-looking gore, death by pogo stick (!?), off-kilter Irish brogues... I just can't say enough about this, can I? My head hurts just trying to remember this complete and utter waste of perfectly good Kodak film stock.

Director Miller, thankfully, keeps his pacing quick and his touch deft -- Lorenzo's Oil rarely becomes bogged down in interdisciplinary conundrums or the unwarranted heartstring-yanking that so often occurs in Hollywood MedFilms.

Ultimately, it's a very boring ride.

There's no denying that Pacino's performance is superb. The rest of the movie plays like a bunch of inconsequentially strung together sequences.

You've got to admire a movie that's willing to journey down paths that have no clear antecedents in the creation of a modern whimsical fable, but you don't have to admire the fractured results.

If anything, A Few Good Men errs by throwing almost too many elements, themes and moral debates into the mix thus, by default, they sometimes seem shallowly developed and overly simple. Then again, that perhaps allows them to connect with more universal experiences.

Unfortunately, the film rests heavily on the shoulders of Murphy, who seems to wander aimlessly from scene to scene, searching for a laugh. The joke's on him, though: There are none.

One of the best movies I've seen this year and, consequently, the less said about it here the better. The beauty of this movie is in the way it twists and turns, thwarting expectations, confounding stereotypes and venturing into places you least anticipate.

Perhaps one of the most unbearable viewing experiences of the year, complete with a formulaic script, lousy acting, and muddled direction.

Williams' shape-shifting, gag-spouting, celebrity-impersonating Genie is truly a hurricane in a bottle. His manic energy and hip humor are so exhilarating that the rest of the movie risks grinding to a halt whenever he's not onscreen.

What it lacks in charm, it compensates for with audacity and single-mindedness of vision.

The John Hughes script must have taken him all of thirty minutes to write – simply a matter of a few name and location changes. It wasn't a good script the first time, either.

A mortal movie about an immortal subject and the very fact that it succeeds as well as it does is a testament to Lee's skills as a filmmaker.

Interestingly, Coppola has eschewed state-of-the-art special effects in favor of a panoply of archaic film-school tricks -- reversing the film, multiple exposures, playing with the shutter speed -- that give his Dracula a stylized, almost hyper-real clarity and a wonderfully singular weirdness.

Robinson keeps Jennifer 8 moving right along, alternately dropping clues right in our laps and tossing in a red herring or two, but it's the dark town running like a black thread throughout the whole film that keeps your nerves jangling.

The Lover is one of those great films that shouldn't be missed.

While not always successful or even unusual, Night and the City is a tart Manhattan cocktail worth savoring until the cup runs dry.

Make no mistake, I'm not saying Dr. Giggles is a cinematic watershed or anything like that, but it does manage to mix humor and horror in a way that very few films ever manage successfully.

Director Rose seems not to know what to show next, and whether this is in an effort to keep his audience guessing or not, it only ends up making what could have been an exceptionally disturbing film exceptionally annoying.

Kline and Spacey are excellent here, playing off of each other like a couple of professional combatants; it's by far the most interesting thriller in the last six months.

A pure cinematic distillation of Maclean's words, it is by turns austere and vibrant, disconsolate and joyful.

Ultimately, Under Siege isn't much because, basically, with Seagal as the star there's no real human center. But Davis, playing to Seagal's strengths, has woven a carefully crafted confection around the star, who has enough moves to hold it all together.

It is violent, certainly, but it's also a genuinely excellent film, horrifying and touching and beautiful in a bloody sort of way. A bit like real life, really.

The Mighty Ducks may satisfy the Pee Wee hockey players in your household but the rest of you may be turned off by the simplified penance and redemption formula.

When combined with Sinise's solid work in front of the camera (as George) and behind it, this Of Mice and Men makes for an unassuming but well-made movie which, unlike so many adaptations of literary works, does not go awry.

Hero dips into the world of Capra's Meet John Doe, and comes up with an even more repellant visage of the Media/Citizenry connection than that film.

Though its reach sometimes exceeds its grasp, Tarantino has created a movie with all the gritty punch of a .44 in the belly.

Interesting to watch like well-performed gymnastics but it never really connects.

The Last of the Mohicans rarely flinches in depicting the eye-for-an-eye savagery of war. Although not explicit in the way you might expect, it nevertheless requires you to screw your courage to the sticking place. Perhaps that's a tribute to its ability to take you along its journey without much effort – real enough to elicit a visceral reaction, romantic enough to remind you it's only a movie.

Landis has a lot to work with here and he misses few opportunities for sly commentary, but he blows it on a much grander scale. Innocent Blood is way too long. It loses steam and coherence about midway through, leaving us rooting for it but doomed to disappointment. Combining comedy, horror, romance and chase scenes, Innocent Blood finally begins to collapse in on itself but not before we've had more than a few good laughs and a frightened yelp or two.

Mandel and producer Sherry Lansing have obviously put their whole into the creation of what ought to have been a riveting and powerful film. Instead, School Ties ends up about as memorable as a plate of gefilte fish.

A terrific cast, good pacing and some smart, funny dialogue bring an occasional fresh breeze to what is essentially a stale formula comedy.

Sometimes it works, but more often than not, it's just cute. In the editing, the characters, general style and attitude, Crowe seems to have drawn heavily from Slacker for inspiration, but in his insecure reliance on traditional narrative and Hollywood convention, he undermines his more interesting experimentations. As a result, Singles winds up being a date movie with pretensions.

There's no doubt that the slow disintegration of Allen and Farrow's relationship inspired this work, but that is where the comparisons end. This is not an instance in which art imitates life, as so many have claimed. Here, real life is the stuff of tabloids, while Husbands and Wives comes close to the exquisite stuff of art.

The film's glorification of the America's Cup as an exclusive prize in The Wealthy WASP World of Sports can be a tad bit alienating. Nevertheless, Wind manages, for the most part, to be harmless entertainment -- a sort of elitist cotton candy floating in the sea breeze.

By far the weakest of the trilogy. Spurting arteries and random acts of horror are not enough to sustain a film with such a supposedly bold groundwork. Let's hope Barker himself can find the time to return to directing before he ends up like Stephen King.

At a time when conspiracy theories, in their relentlessness, their humorlessness and in their assumption of the monolithic, seem almost to protect the conspiracists by promulgating a sense of hopelessness, Sneakers's sense of fun, by contrast, seems empowering and almost subversive.

Blessed with an ensemble cast of young actors without Brat Pack pretensions, Where the Day Takes You is often so authentic in its depiction of street life that you'll find yourself flinching, a response undoubtedly intended to result in a little consciousness-raising.

So fascinating is Brother's Keeper that you almost don't quarrel with things like the biased portraits of the prosecuting team and the Deliverance-like banjo-shuffling soundtrack. Brother's Keeper intrigue factor is enormously high and, it could almost be said, that this movie is good enough to be fiction.

This Tim Robbins-helmed political satire about demogougery makes for an appropriate election-season re-release.

Everything is a puzzle and it's as though Lynch lost track of his reasons for making this prequel and got hung up on filming the sordid details that TV won't allow: shots of peeled-back corpse fingernails; close-ups of oscillating uvulas; visions of strange-looking, backward-talking, gyrating weirdos; and uncensored whiffs of sex, cocaine, and families undone.

Like the dead dog that it is, though, Pet Sematary deserves to be buried very, very deep.

Honeymoon in Vegas is what every stupid comedy should be to justify the price of admission, sadly it is no more than that.

This biography, to our surprise, is extremely respectful and earnest and lacking Morris' usual transformational touch.

Emotionally urgent, The Living End excites you about the state of independent filmmaking; it's a road movie that leaves a skid mark on the psyche.

DiCillo's humorous insight into the post-modern culture manifests into vivid characterizations that are enhanced by credible cast performances.

For the most part, it works well at this level with the added bonus of some unexpected intellectual twists. The predominant thing that bogs down SWF is the script. It has too many plot holes to be fully believable and too little psychological background on our unbalanced roomie (and when it is revealed, it's revealed all in one stroke).

As a take on contemporary television culture, Stay Tuned has a lot to say, but much of it is presented in such a broad comedic format that it passes by unnoticed. This is a comedy, after all; politics aside, though, it never really rises above the level of mediocrity, and never actually descends to the level of television itself.

But in the genre, as both a movie and a conscious addition to the ongoing celluloid Western mythology, the film is a masterpiece, a stunning and awe-inspiring statement.

3 Ninjas is basically harmless, but it's not entertaining enough to fully engage adults or the under-12 set -- especially once the popcorn and sodas have been polished-off.

When teamed with her former husband, the director James Cameron, Hurd produced some of the most memorable action films of the Eighties, including The Terminator and Aliens. Her first collaborative effort with new husband De Palma, however, has produced one of the worst efforts from a major talent in a long while.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a fun movie; so much better than it has to be and so much better than you expect it to be. Buffy is to vampire movies what Valley Girl is to Romeo and Juliet stories: a fresh reworking of an old formula staged by up-to-the-second California teens.

In the movies, black comedy is a difficult proposition: it's a genre more suited to a ten-minute sketch than a two-hour film. For every brilliant black comedy like Dr. Strangelove, there are a hundred duds. Unfortunately, the $50-million-plus Death Becomes Her doesn't quite make the grade either, although its wicked take on modern vanity is often hysterically on-target.

The movie's main weakness is the premise that sun, flowers, Mediterranean air and, certainly, castle living, are magical restoratives strong enough to salve all social ills. But these actresses and their mates are all pleasurable to watch as they go through their paces and interact.

The performances are all strong (particularly Landau's) but, as a whole, the movie suffers from competing impulses that push and pull Mistress from comedy to drama and back again. It can't quite seem to make up its mind and as a consequence loses a lot of its steam and momentum.

Take this one for what it is, an entertaining Disney comedy of really large proportions, and you'll have a ball.

The interfacing of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional characters is so shabbily accomplished that it makes you start noticing all the other technical glitches in the work.

As the robotic duo, Lundgren and Van Damme have found roles tailored to their acting abilities.

It's too bad that Gas Food Lodging is as disconnected as it is because there's a real current of feeling here, especially in Balk's sympathetic performance and the film's unflinching depiction of a single woman trying to raise a family on her own. Rather than make a lasting impression, it makes only a passing one, as impermanent as the momentary view of a dying town on the highway.

For those looking to be stylishly entertained while learning more than anyone might ever want to know about the formation of the Bergman psyche, well, here it is.

Prelude to a Kiss holds its own as a comedy, especially considering the lightweight competition this summer. It's just too bad it never really rises to its promise as a romance.

It's not even funny. Nor does it contain half the wit or charm as the old Doris Day sex comedies it so resembles.

The story of the short-lived women's baseball league gives Marshall the opportunity to examine the roots of modern feminism and have a darn fine time doing it.

Oddly enough, Unlawful Entry can keep you from sleeping but when you wake up the next moring, it's hard to remember much about the movie.

Visually, Batman Returns is marvelous to behold. There are images on that screen that make you laugh with delight and admiration for the sheer imaginativeness of it. But Burton also brings up some really interesting themes only to lose interest somewhere along the way.

The problem is more the overall tone: unpleasant, divisive, snarling and deceptive.

It comes across as yet another in a long line of poorly produced horror/paranoia bloodbaths, short on everything except cheesy effects.

Despite the lame narrative, Kid 'N Play also manage to prove that they are a smooth team who can roll with the flow of intermutual comedic energy.

Despite its predictability and sappiness, this conventional comedy about a worldly lounge singer who masquerades as a nun as part of a witness protection program busts loose as one of the funniest -- and happiest -- films in a long time.

There is a richness to Far and Away that seems wasted on its simple love story straight out of "It Happened One Night."

Fincher's camerawork gives the movie a jittery feel, and his video-trained eye lends the prison sets the look of a dilapidated cathedral, but again, there's really nothing here that we haven't seen before, and better, at that. Nice title, though.

Like some sort of evil Hollywood hybrid, Encino Man begs, borrows and steals the worst bits from both Iceman and Fast Times at Ridgemont High and ends up being just as vacuous as you think it is.

In the end, Zentropa is above all unique in its radical take on the inherent confusion of postwar Europe, offering the viewer a glimpse like none he has had before.

It's bigger, but it ain't necessarily better.

The way the destinies of four people converge in a small Arkansas town in One False Move is nothing short of wondrous.

Problem is, the movie shifts gears abruptly in mid-story and what had previously been merely melodramatic extremism turns into hyperbolic horror.

Split Second turns out to be one of those dreaded “so-bad-it's-good” debacles, and a marginal one at that. Ed Wood, where are you when we need you?

Even the usually unbearable Rourke, who plays yet another psychopath here, is surprisingly subdued and effective -- his performance gives the film its menacing undercurrent. Although Daniel Pyne's otherwise sharp screenplay falls short in explaining why who's doing what to whom, perhaps a little ambiguity is necessary in a movie in which appearances are deceiving. After all, sometimes, you've just got to take these things on faith.

Turturro-Nelson-Smith come across as nothing more than three strangers with an out of synch, watered-down routine that flounders as a pale imitation of their hallowed predecessors.

It starts out promising, using the conventions and trappings of the fondly remembered Ward cartoons, but after a bit of good silliness with maps, stock footage, and the flustered narrator, a convoluted espionage plot, and way too much effort in fleshing out our two heroic villains results in a film that's as hard to follow as it is to laugh at.

Director Duke (A Rage in Harlem and countless TV work) rivets our attention with his tightly framed shots and crisp editing that intelligently revives that bygone tradition of jump cuts (though they confusingly disappear completely midway through the movie).

This is primarily a children's movie and I have a hard time working up much rancor against a movie as campily perverse as this one is.