On the whole, A Bronx Tale is an impressive work and it's easy to see why De Niro connected with Palminteri's story.

A bore... The film leaves you with the feeling, once again, of having enjoyed a lovely meal fit for royalty only to discover, too late, that the fruit was made of wax and the roast was little more than a Styrofoam mock-up.

While grown-ups are sure, at the very least, to respect Into the West's beauty and integrity, it may be a tougher sell amongst the very young where the Irish brogues and the lack of rugged Hollywood heroes and high-tech derring-do may prove impediments. But the aura of magic realism has never felt more tantalizing as it shimmers Into the West.

This is pop pornography, sex and violence without meaning. If you can't figure out the way Striking Distance is going in the first few minutes, it just means you've already fallen asleep.

If someone had spent half as much time thinking about the characters in Airborne as thinking about what filters to apply to the camera, then there might have been a semi-decent teen action movie here.

Household Saints restores one's faith in miracles while teaching us how to invent them ourselves. That, and also teaching us not to worry about getting stigmata on the carpet when Jesus comes to visit.

Consistently entertaining.

Turner, though as dewy-eyed as Doris Day, proves again that she is a comedienne to reckon with, and Quaid's playboy-tamed-only-by-domestic-bliss nonchalance is nearly as well played. Their repartee, while not up to the standards of Nick and Nora, is fast and funny and good-natured. In fact, this whole movie is so good-natured, I think I might have enjoyed a Shasta Black Cherry soda pop with my popcorn. Well, maybe some berry-flavored sparkling water…

Pierces through your tear ducts in its ultimate path toward your heart.

This film has all the pyschological depth of a wading pool. Anything you've imagined without seeing the movie is likely more interesting than what's here.

Blue is a movie that engages the mind, challenges the senses, implores a resolution, and tells, with aesthetic grace and formal elegance, a good story and a political allegory.

Even the requisite gore is sub-par, so it's not even neat when some poor sap explodes and his entrails whiz by. Perhaps Gordon should go back to mining H.P. Lovecraft's territory.

Needful Things is hardly a cinema milestone -- it's a bit too episodic in chronicling the downfall of the town, and some of King's best bits are glossed over in favor of some of King's worst bits, but all things considered, it's still a hell of a good ride.

Benigni isn't the brilliant comic actor Sellers was but this Italian star (also seen in Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law and Night on Earth) is a genuine clown whose ability to flail his limbs as if possessed by a Slinky makes him a rich comic lead.

Too strange for its own good, Careful is less interesting as a film than it is as a Canadian cinematic anomaly.

This is stilted stuff. The acting is disjointed, the movie should be subtitled Three Actors in Search of Their Characters. River Phoenix gives a somnambulant impersonation of Christian Slater impersonating Jack Nicholson, and Samantha Mathis spends much of the movie trying to figure out exactly who her character is.

Usually, I am not so persnickety about such things, especially with first-timers, but the accumulation of mis-matched shots is so great that you have to wonder why some of the more experienced crew members weren't climbing the rafters to say “Whoa, Mel.”

A far cry from his earlier films sex, lies, and videotape and Kafka, Soderbergh skillfully pulls off what could have ended up as a sappy glob of treacly nostalgia. Instead, the director populates his young hero's chaotic world with genuinely disturbing people, images, and events.

To be fair, this isn't The Killer. Woo's unique penchant for over-the-top male bonding is basically nowhere to be seen, but then this is, after all, a very American story, despite Woo's name at the top.

Fast and funny, it makes you wish this would-be American master was more often lightweight.

Neither talking down to children nor pandering to their parents, The Secret Garden functions something like a fairy tale in the way in which we all can latch onto different aspects of meaning during different stages of our lives and also in the way in which primordial and psychosexual concerns are made palpable in narratively distanced and socially acceptable terms.

Granted, the lavish set pieces are beautiful, and there really is quite a bit of amusingly acrobatic coupling going on, but in the end, it's extremely hard to fight down the giggles you'll find swelling inside you. It's all so relentlessly goofy, it makes you long for the early Eighties antics of Traci Lords, or The Dark Bros.

And even if, at times, it seems terribly episodic as it plunges into each character's separate story and then back and forth between drama and comedy, the performances are constantly fun and fresh.

Searching for Bobby Fischer is a story that sounds, on paper, like something that shouldn't succeed as a movie but when played out so remarkably by all the parties involved, it becomes an unexpected treat.

As far as the chase genre goes, there have been worse films (better ones, too).

The Wedding Banquet wins fans with its sunny disposition as it turns a contemporary story about a marriage of convenience into a deft bedroom farce and humanist drama.

The current media discussion over whether or not this is a racist film misses how much this is a classic hard-boiled detective novel, the Japanese functioning as an almost faceless evil.

But the film overall is a jumble, a stitched-together bunch of scenes that, while often funny, don't hang together very well, you know, like a TV Christmas special or a middling episode of SNL. Free-form sketch comedy can work in a vehicle like Wayne's World, but it leaves a story like So I Married... so, so marred.