The movie has considerable intensity, particularly when it views hunting as a form of counter-guerrilla warfare, with the gunboys wandering into the thickets, daring the big cats to come bite them and get a bullet for their trouble. It's best trick, though, is a straight steal from "Jaws" in which the lion -- I couldn't tell if it was "Ghost" or "Darkness" -- slides across the savannah in the high grass, just a form in the seething stalks, its tail alone visible, like a fin in the glassy water. There's a primordiality, a natural human fear of things with teeth and fangs, really provoked by that image. Too bad the movie couldn't have checked into that vein more often. [11 Oct 1996]

A stunning documentary that examines life at the ground level in a patch of banally pretty but otherwise nondescript French meadow. [27 Nov 1996]

Crammed, cheek to jowl, with bleak moments, high hopes, sweetness and naked emotion.

The movie never seems to force its connections or its revelations upon us, but merely discovers them in their provocative places; in short, it doesn't seem to be working very hard, but the apparent simplicity is deceiving: There's a grand, clever and ultimately satisfying plan under all the running around and bumping into each other. [27 Sept 1996]

Extreme Measures, a new medical thriller with Hugh Grant and Gene Hackman as doctors with differing views on medical ethics, is an episode of "Beauty and the Beast" grafted onto an episode of "ER" as directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

The movie, in fact, is a lot like Willis' performance: impressive in an iconographic way, but really not nearly as much fun as it should be. It's like watching a spitting contest between totem poles. [20 Sep 1996]

The two guys are potentially amusing but the screenplay is so naked in its manipulation of emotion that it feels infantile.

Once the movie settles down to story, it turns out to play like an extended Twilight Zone episode that merely reiterates the theme of the first few minutes: that man is fundamentally a beast and he must struggle endlessly against his own worst instincts and that each victory over those instincts is merely provisional.

By contrast, the most amusing character is the ever-affable John Mahoney as the patriarch of the wayward Fitzpatrick clan. He gives consistently terrible advice, which his sons follow, which messes up their messy lives even more. I like that in a father.

What we deserved was "The Island of Jeanne Moreau." That I'd pay to see.

Add McKay's stylish direction (his experience in music videos is evident) and the pounding soundtrack, and you have a movie that young women in particular will really connect with. [20 Sep 1996]

So much love has gone into the physical details and the music of Robert Altman's Kansas City that it's a shame the movie isn't up to the effort. It's a movie you yearn to care for, but it refuses to allow you: It's too busy being singular to be good.

It's pretty off-handed, more a theory of a movie than a movie itself. [05 Oct 1996]

A strictly by-the-numbers job that, sans Freeman, would be beneath contempt. So congratulations, Morgan Freeman: Your contribution to Chain Reaction is to make it worthy of contempt. [2 Aug 1996]

Isn't a noble story, or even a cautionary one: It just feels pretty painfully real.

But the movie really just sort of peters out rather than reaching a sublime point. In "Groundhog Day," there was an exquisite moment where the wonderfully horrid Bill Murray actually regained contact with his humanity and rejoined his species. No such thing occurs in "Multiplicity"; the movie just staggers toward a point where it's gone on long enough to do everybody the favor of ending it. Send out the writers. [17 July 1996]

Director Andrew Bergman (Honeymoon in Vegas) has a deft comic sensibility, but less skin and more speed would have served him better.

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).

Sorry, Phantom, but the purple suit has got to go. No amount of buff bod can make an audience take a superhero in bright purple seriously...And while we're at it, that script has got to go, too. Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam apparently studied the first two "Indiana Jones" movies so thoroughly -- so that he could write "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" -- that he's carried many of the motifs to "The Phantom." The result is not breathtaking excitement, but rather a stunning lack of originality. [7 June 1996]

The Craft casts a spell with a cast of four kicky young actresses, atmospheric California settings, cool special effects and the attitude of a music video. [03 May 1996]

But the film's most annoying error is the arrogant conceit of revisionism. It postulates a world that did not exist, because it exorcises the entwined concepts of communism and Cold War.

About a third as funny as it thinks it is. Still, that's pretty funny and about twice as funny as most American comedies these days.

The secret reptile part of you yearns to see Berenger's laconic Shale enforce classroom discipline with his Uzi and back up the no-talking rule with a Claymore mine. But no. Rather, Shale tumbles quickly enough to the fact that more than routine violence is afflicting the school, that there is, in fact, a conspiracy.

Initially powerful and unsettling, the movie loses its hold when it becomes stupid and violent. [12 Apr 1996]

A visual feast of colorful stop-motion animation, offers many bite-size delights. Ultimately, though, it isn't nearly as flavorful as Roald Dahl's deliciously perverse children's book, upon which the movie is based.

Oshii is able to knit together action sequences with extraordinary power and conviction.... Ghost in the Shell is absolutely terrific.

About on the level of an After School Special put together by people in a real hurry to get on with their lives, Ed plays pretty dead for all except the very dumb at heart.

It's a miracle: A tough, honest, bloody film set so far from the bright lights it feels as if it's on a different planet, yet knowable and absolutely compelling from start to finish.