The performers are all keen at expressing different variations on uptightness and with-itness. And McDormand is sensational.

A razzle-dazzle lower-depths melodrama.

Connery and Cage are a compelling team and redeem the film from ruin despite the mechanical plot, an excessive body count and a miraculous recovery (you'll know it when you see it).

The story of the triumphant underdog is irresistible, even when every single plot point comes marching down Main Street.

Too bad Kidron, Fielding and company pay only cafe lip service to satire.

Even as trick movies go, Confidence feels surfacey to a fault.

Nell doesn't jell. Earnest and well-intentioned, the film never quite breaks through a membrane into believability, and hence into empathy. [23 Dec 1994]

Tykwer made Potente a star in Run Lola Run, and here she repays him 10 times over. Without her force of gravity, this film would waft into the ether.

Nearly everything fresh and exciting about the 2002 documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys" - the story of the Santa Monica-Ocean Park-Venice area misfits who revolutionized skateboarding in the 1970s - becomes studied and secondhand in The Lords of Dogtown.

Undeniably charming -- a dog movie that's more lovable mutt than stately pedigree.

Yet what is most impressive about the movie are the odd notes of grace it provides its ostensible villains. [4 Aug 1995]

Simply twiddling with the fine-tuning on the central character is not enough to warrant remaking a film. Both Glover and Willard deserve better.

A film as clever and embracingly ribald as this shouldn't have to resort to cliche in the end; director Nigel Cole should have kept his girls in Britain and kept the mood light.

Heaven is so determined to be poetic and beautiful, it comes across as forced and didactic, a lesson in relative morality whose storyline doesn't so much flow as lurch from one stretch to another.

Partially financed by the liberal Move On.org, speaks most eloquently when it lets Fox News do the talking.

Paid In Full's performances - especially by the always-engaging Phifer -- are strong, its message worthwhile and its sincerity doubtless.

In an era of exploding documentary innovation, Girlhood simply follows unfamiliar characters down familiar paths. It's not a negligible experience, but it's not an eye-opener, either.

Kingsley gives the movie a jolt and blows the rest of it to pieces.

It lands the characters in a shambles of farce, melodrama and forced chivalry. For all its promise and accomplishment, the screenplay, like Eva, needs a knight on a white horse.

Now and Then tells twin stories. One is a delight. One is a disastrous distraction. [20 Oct 1995]

Because it's by the Coens, The Big Lebowski is studded with visual and verbal jokes and flourishes, but ultimately they amount to pearls without a string. The Coens have thrown their considerable talents into making the world's smartest dumb movie, a dubious distinction that for their admirers will have to suffice, at least for now.

The cognoscenti will no doubt follow the plot permutations a little bit more easily than those of us on the outside. But even we of the uninitiated will appreciate the cleverly escalating tension. [18 Nov. 1994, p.12]

Too much fun to ignore.

The action is thrilling enough.

Could have been a contender, but it lacks the courage of its own ambivalence.

A plot that seems stretched for the big screen.

At its best, The Mystic Masseur is like a tall tale that grows more beguiling and credible the taller it gets.

Spielberg's inchoate attempts at cultural observation stretch the movie out and dilute the giddiness instead of adding a pleasurable spike. When the movie doesn't feel inflated, it feels soggy.