From its brilliant and sublime opening sequence to its self-reflexive ending, The Player distills everything that's wrong with the American film industry with the precision of someone who's been there.

Set in some sort of post-apocalyptic Parisian deli o' the damned, this lunatic's take on the future of man is so delightfully warped that it's impossible to shake it out of your head and go get a decent night's sleep.

Apted manages to say a lot by cutting between the squalor of life on the reservation to the magnificence of the land around it. Unfortunately, when the characters speak for themselves, they are often forced to deliver lines that are unspeakable. There is an element of misty romanticism about Native Americans that Apted just doesn't manage to pull off. His yarn, however, is a good one even if it could be told a little better.

Shelton's enthusiasm is remarkably refreshing, but it's not enough to mean well, and we don't know much more about these people or their world at the end than we learn at the beginning.

Avildsen is a master at pulling populist heartstrings, Johnny Clegg provides the African music which is so essential to the movie's plot and the panoramic shots of the veldt are frequently breathtaking. But these things alone do not a good movie make.

Ladybugs is a clapboard of a movie, but it's a genial, harmless one. The misfit antics of the soccer games are good for a few laughs, although Michael Ritchie's 1976 film The Bad News Bears is far superior in that area of comedy. Regardless, when you find yourself ashamedly laughing at Ladybugs, remember that comedy was never meant to be politically correct.

The skating sequences are also well-thought out and fun to watch. The movie loses momentum at times with directionless subplots about Kate and her boring fiance, Doug and his family back home who think that taking up figure skating is tantamount to turning a gay blade and the manipulations of Kate's father whose vicarious attachments almost put a permanent hex on her life. Certainly, The Cutting Edge is a well-timed vehicle for those who couldn't get enough of the Winter Olympics on TV, but it pushes past simple opportunism to deliver a backstage story that works in any season.

Verhoeven's film is fascinating, if stupid and stylish, if shallow. The story has to move along at a fair clip because otherwise we'd notice how nonsensical it all is. And there is very little to connect with emotionally.

The charm of the film is that's it's so clever a play, but that cleverness wears thin quickly.

The performances in this costume drama are wonderful.

American Me is crafted with heart and conviction and intelligence. It demands no less of its audience. It insists that there are no quick fixes, but that solutions are of the utmost urgency. It demonstrates how the capacity for change resides within each individual.

There's a lot of wasted effort here trying to distract us from what we know good and well is going to happen. Nevertheless, it's time pleasantly spent.

It's been all the buzz on the “net” (electronic bulletin boards like CompuServe, Genie, or Prodigy) for some months now, but if as much care had been taken with the human elements -- the actors, the story -- it would have been a much better ride. After all, movies always happen in Virtual Reality.

This frothy little comedy is a pleasant enough amusement. It's not a big belly-laugh of a comedy, but it's quickly paced, fun and entertaining.

The special effects feature the most up-to-the-minute flash and dazzle that the Industrial Light and Magic gang has to offer -- but it plays like someone forgot to plug in the power cord; in other words, no sparks or electricity.

Stunning rainforest vistas and shocking ravaged forest footage matched to what was probably a pretty funny script featuring one fine performance and too obvious good intentions adds up to tedium.

The plot twists and turns on itself endlessly and incriminates everyone. It's as if the filmmakers are trying to incorporate all the plot details from all the classics they so obviously love. But love isn't enough either. You gotta have brains, baby, and a heart and soul would be nice.

It takes love to bring all these elements together into harmony, and Nair makes it look easy even when it's most difficult for her characters.

While Fried Green Tomatoes often veers between being too pat and too vague, too obvious and too unclear, too much of the “I laughed, I cried” school of storytelling -- it still has a charm that stems from its vivid and unique characterizations.

Dickerson's story of street kids at risk breaks no new ground. It is better than most, but not by much. Sure looks good, though.

It rings true. Living in the twilight, between right, wrong, legal, illegal, good, bad, is dangerous but it's sheer hypocrisy to deny its attraction.

The film is fun to watch, but you never emotionally buy into the story or its world, and when you leave the theatre, they're gone. There's a lot to this speedy little complex science fiction adventure but what's missing is imagination.

Hell of a nice try, but I've seen it all before.

Tamra Davis' directorial debut is a noir-ish, adrenaline-fueled tale of a love on the border between teen angst and homicide, and it packs a mean, unrelenting punch.

Light Sleeper represents Schrader at his best, giving us a character we've become familiar with over the years and Schrader's intimate mastery of our fascination with decadence, loss and redemption.

Ultimately, Naked Lunch is more about the act of writing, while the original is concerned with the phenomenon of addiction. Each does what it does well… but differently.

Neither slave nor mammy, junkie nor maid, these dawn-of-the-twentieth century African-American women are an unstereotypical breed unto themselves.

There are great scenes (many) and terrific performances, especially Glover and Woodard.

Streisand's been in front of cameras so long she's thinks of them as mirrors. Luckily she has a good eye and it, more often than not, has the ability to look straight to the soul.

What starts out promisingly enough continues considerably beyond the end of the world and wears out even the most determined Wenders fan.

High Heels becomes mired in its own best intentions - primary colors and all.

Stone makes it virtually impossible to leave the theatre convinced, beyond all shadow of doubt, of the lone gunman theory.

One wishes Beatty would stay out of the epic business, but in that poor man's defense, he's become too large, too much of an icon on the screen to do much else. Perhaps he's doomed to play cartoon characters as he did last time out in Dick Tracy. His Bugsy is not anything close to a fully realized character. Bening, as his starlet/moll, does a better job, but her role doesn't give her much to work with.

Producer Joel Silver and Willis keep trying to remake Die Hard. This time they call in Top Gun director Scott. The result is mildly interesting, but there are so many weird and gratuitous scenes of insane violence that the effect is drained of impact.

Though mildly interesting for their individual merits, there is little sense of their connection to each other as a film and to us as an audience. It's as though this cab ride of a movie keeps moving forward with no clear destination or purpose.

Hook has you marveling at the nuts-and-bolts work of producers and assistant directors, but never at the intrinsic imaginativeness of the story. It's as if Spielberg calculatedly set out to make a perennial classic -- certain folly if ever there were.

One of the dullest films of the sextet thus far.

Of course, the selling point of this movie is the boy wonder Culkin, making his first screen appearance since the inexplicable megahit Home Alone. Relegated to a supporting role, Culkin is natural and appealing, a picture of blue-eyed innocence. What a more interesting movie you'd have if it were entitled My Guy.

Hearts of Darkness gives a privileged glimpse of the artist's hell, but it also says something about grace.

This movie achieves a rare grace: it tells a story that could only exist in the form of a movie (or, perhaps, as a piece of poetry). The story is told not so much in customary narrative structures, but in glimpses, hints, and intimations. It has a way of taking the solid and making it chimerical.

Beauty and the Beast, one of Disney's latest animated features is even better than The Little Mermaid. At the same time, it's vaguely disappointing.

Truthfully, it's hard to imagine a better screen adaptation of this queer household. Addams would have been proud.

Humor is a key ingredient in Kafka, though it definitely leans toward the wry and quirky. The movie loses some of its clarity and narrative force in mid-story however, though it never abandons its original visual style and focus.

If this is Scorsese's bid for the commercial big time, then let the cash registers ring.

Although Scott Frank's screenplay has more than a few holes in it...they're forgivable, mostly because this movie is so utterly likable. Little Man Tate is a small movie by industry standards, but it nevertheless stands pretty tall.

The acting is terrible,with Connery, at his lowest common denominator, stealing the show. For those of you who worry that MTV video art will destroy cinema, the ineptitudes of this film vividly detail the radical difference in forms. It sucks. But it would have made a great comic book.

While The People Under the Stairs may leave some horror fans unsatisfied and other horror detractors repulsed, it ought to satisfy those viewers who appreciate a thoughtful and visceral movie entertainment.

Life Is Sweet observes this constellation of people without ever really commenting on their lots. Very little occurs and thus, if you don't find yourself drawn to these characters, you will find yourself wondering when it will all be over.

It's a daredevil's ride that keeps you glued with fascination.

Frankie & Johnny is an episodic romantic comedy of opposites attracting; there's a real joy in watching the courtship of these lovers and the consummation of their undeniable attraction for one another.

Although the scares in this movie are minimal, Ernest Scared Stupid nonetheless offers the frightening prospect of yet another installment of the Big E's misguided antics.

Homicide may not be Mamet's most accessible film, but it combines those elements of the playwright/director's work -- theatricality, stylization, rough poeticism -- that might be most off-putting to the typical movie audience with enough tension and mystery to keep them in their seats.

It's staged like something straight out of King Kong with the look of an old 1930s Universal horror movie where the lightning flashes strobe across the undulating coils of tubing in the mad scientist's laboratory. There's a lot of really ugly violence in Ricochet, the kind of images and thoughts that just make you feel scummy to be involved with, no matter how passively.

By trying to be about so little, telling a simple fragile romantic story, Dogfight is about so much -- war and peace, love and romance, sex roles and cultural myths. What it understands is that to be really anti-war, rather than glitzy moralizing, a film should just be full of life, its characters so richly nuanced and detailed that they resonate with energy.

Mulligan has an impeccable sense of where to place the camera in each scene, positions that disclose without interfering and reveal without unveiling. His sensibility guides this movie with just the right tone and understated emotion.

I wish that movies, like scholastic football, could be judged on a "no pass, no play" basis.

A Better Tomorrow isn't his best film ever -- that title remains securely attached to The Killer -- but it is required viewing for anyone remotely interested in Hong Kong cinema. After all, there might not be any filmmaking in Hong Kong come 1997.

A fanciful spiral of mythology, madness, cynicism and salvation.

It's an interesting film, with fine acting performances. Penn acquits himself in this project, his first as a behind-the-camera talent, though The Indian Runner never quite establishes an assured rhythm or fluidity.

It's even worse than you thought it might be.

The movie isn't about the band, really; it's about having a chance when the cards are stacked against it. It's about climbing out. When they sing those great soul songs, it feels like a better world for everyone and that's how Parker manages to get us into his box with him.

Director Bender has fashioned a film without any surprises, though after the first two films, anyone would be hard-pressed to make audience members jump.

Hopelessly muddled but doggedly entertaining.

The movie's not bad in the action department, especially if you're a perennial fan of the gun shots and verbal quips combo. But it's so cynical, so brazen about its cardboard iconography, so calculatedly cool, that you just start longing for that crystal dream -- any dream but this one.

For once, the Coen brothers' neurotic filmmaking style works to their advantage; it's giddily appropriate for a movie about a man who's losing his mind.

Pure Luck manages to deliver only four decent laughs in its entire 105-minute time.

One brother grows up to be a dashing smuggler, the other is a dork and it's a tribute to Van Damme's acting ability that it's frequently impossible to tell which one is which. I could go on, I'm having a pretty good time at this, but I think I'll save my usual rants about homophobia, racism, and generally insensitive stupidity for a movie that attracts an audience that reads film reviews.

Predictable as sunburn on the 4th of July, it is a film as ingratiating as its star. Visiting the town of Grady is a fairly pleasant pastime, but there's no excuse for a film this light to last over two hours as this one does.

The sequel is not as bad as the original, but it doesn't have to be much to accomplish that small feat and it isn't.

As much a movie about class, race, and sexual orientation as anything you've ever seen.

There's a serious teen angst movie somewhere in all this as well as an unflinching look at suburbia.

The movie has its moments but it plays like a ball of confusion. Life Stinks seems to be Brooks' bid to be taken seriously and leave the fart jokes behind. And something about that stinks.

At once perplexing and joyous, Maddin has crafted a film that, for all the confusion inherent in the tale, unfolds on its own unique (and rather tedious) terms. Love it or hate it, this is one film that just doesn't give a damn what you think.

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey isn't much of a trip. In a word...NOT!!!

All of the major players turn in powerhouse performances, and Fishburne nails his best role yet as Furious.

Bigelow stages the film's action sequences with a brutal efficiency (they almost redeem the movie), but she can't keep the increasingly silly script in check.

Ford, as usual, is a delight to watch; his portrayals of both Henry the Ruthless Lawyer and Henry the Reborn are dead-on, unerring in their accuracy. Bening is likewise excellent.

The movie buries its treasures in the crevasses of its drollery and craziness.

What is notable, though, is the amount of compassion invested in the film by Cameron and co-screenwriter William Wisher. There's a fairly well-drawn moral message in T2 that was more or less absent in the first film.

What's missing is absolutely nothing. No joke is passed up or thrown away. There just might be a little too much.

The Rocketeer is a gung-ho all-American summer flick with the guts not to try and be anything else.

Although City Slickers lacks incisive wisdom, its well-honed witticisms should make this a refreshing summer crowd-pleaser.

Home Alone meets Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and then visits Working Girl – none of it works.

There are two powerful movies here, unfortunately, they don't coexist easily. Lee has to fight his way out and he opts for narrative stopping violence when perhaps he should have continued the dialogue. He's a man on a tightrope and it's hard not to watch him without worrying about him.

Absolutely marvelous special effects are the salvation and the curse of this movie.

This is a movie to love, that touches you in places you never suspected, that shows you that the road less traveled is the road to your dreams.

Everybody figured producer Joel Silver and Willis couldn't lose and guess what? They all rolled craps.

This is a wonderful, disarming film, sort of like Ghost, but with all the Hollywood drained from it, leaving nothing on screen but the truth of the matter. Which is the way it should be, of course.

Somewhere between conception and execution the movie turned sour and most of the cuteness was replaced with venom and malice.

There are some good gags here, and I caught myself grinning more than a few times, but Hughes and Columbus are so set in their ways that everything they work on seems to look, feel, and sound the same.

A chancy work of self-promotion. Of course, Madonna is a master of image manipulation, forever reinventing herself, so it's difficult to assess exactly what was up her sleeve when she commissioned this movie. Whatever her purpose, Truth or Dare succeeds in somewhat demystifying the icon she's become, giving her a human dimension that has eluded exposure since her rise to superstardom.

What About Bob? is a one-joke movie, but what a funny joke!

But let's face it. This whole movie is based on stereotypes.

Valiantly tries to recapture the spit and polish indie feel of the original, and comes up looking more like something Franklin might have directed on a Bad Day.

The only redeeming thing in Switch is Barkin's vulgar and adept physical performance of a man literally trapped in a woman's body. She's in a constant state of discomfort, whether it's trying to walk in high heels (a sight gag that quickly gets old), scratching her breasts, or sitting with her legs apart in a tight miniskirt. Her presence, however, is a small consolation in a movie that takes the battle of the sexes and turns it into a pointless skirmish.

As a personal, autobiographical tale, Europa Europa is a fascinating narrative. As a historical memoir, its details are compelling.

Toy Soldiers is little more than macho posturing for young men searching for their identities. As such the image of a beefy Astin sporting a machine gun is not especially healthy nor is it especially imaginative. There is an attempt at balance with the younger, nerdier intelligent kids having a role in their own salvation and a representative cast including kids of all colors. For those concessions and for directorial competence, I am grateful.

Director-screenwriter Dearden, who wrote the script for Fatal Attraction, does a terrible job of making the pieces of the who's-he-going-to-kill-next narrative stick; jumping around with an unnerving frequency, this film self-destructs before your very eyes.