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.