A mean-hearted, ham-handed and gratuitous effort to exploit it's teenage audience's conviction that, underneath it all, their teachers really. do hate them.

A bland also-ran in a post-"Sopranos" universe.

As close to a perfect piece of satire as filmmakers have seen in quite some time.

Perhaps the best thing about Better Than Chocolate is that it works as a comedy of characters, not of morals. If there's such a thing as a screwball same-sex comedy, this is it. [10 Sep 1999]

It's the talk...and the extraordinarily expressive faces of those who do the talking, that accounts for its engrossing, enchanting powers.

John Turturro's farce about life and theater that is by turns elegant and bawdy, but always transfixing.

Surprisingly formulaic. So many scenes seem lifted from a 1950s melodrama, from Blake and Francis' repentent mother (Leslie Ann Warren) to the film's tearjerker of a final scene.

An uninteresting take on a tired formula that is only occasionally funny and usually pretty gross.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is belabored, pretentious and often willfully opaque. [25 Jun 1999]

A lyrical, mysterious and provocative meditation on the power of memory and narrative, After Life is a fascinating speculation on life and death -- until its plot takes a turn so melodramatic that the spell is broken. [20 Aug 1999, p.3E]

As a tasteful take on a minor novel, Metroland is genteel enough, but it lacks the urgency and scope of a must-see movie. [07 May 1999]

Aside from Lillard, the stand-out here is Cook, who plays a new breed of post-feminist Cinderella with a convincing mix of seriousness and vulnerability (although just once, it would be nice if Cinderella could keep her glasses on and still be beautiful). With her doe eyes and peaches-and-organic-yogurt complexion, Cook resembles a young Winona Ryder (if that's possible), right down to the appealing blend of sweetness and self-assurance. [29 Jan 1999: 1E]

Playing by Heart is a disheartening example of how episodic, prime-time- style storytelling has taken a stranglehold on Hollywood films, even at their most "independent." [22 Jan 1999]

Affliction turns the sound on with sudden, crystalline clarity, and echoes with the haunting power of a suppressed truth that has finally been released.

Disney is creatively bankrupt and bereft of ingenuity -- especially in its live-action films. [25 Dec 1998, p.8F]

By the time it's ended, past and present have fused inextricably to create a movie that, in its own down-home way, is nothing less than epic.

Jack Frost can't possibly straddle its emotional shifts between morbidity and sheer nonsense. [11 Dec 1998]

In Babe: Pig in the City, the sunny mood of the Hoggett Farm has been supplanted by darker urban tones, suggesting the arrival of a new cinematic genre: Barnyard Noir.

Although some clever touches are clearly directed at adults -- much of the film's humor is quite likely to go under your head. [20 Nov 1998]

Clockwatchers has a terrific, submerged feel, in keeping with its themes of corporate lassitude, isolation and paranoia. [24 Jul 1998]

Wilde is a worthy movie that, although helped considerably by Stephen Fry's bravura performance, never breaks out of its static, episodic structure. [05 Jun 1998]

Great book, great cast, average film: Les Miserables is all pedigree, no passion.

Nightwatch is passable stuff for undiscriminating fans of the ickier-the-better genre; for the rest of us, it offers nothing new. [17 Apr 1998]

An exquisite return to cinema at its most intimate, allusive and humanist. Without a firebomb, muscle-bound star or gunfight in sight, it explodes with the most fragile and combustible substance on earth: human nature.

Helped immensely by a lush and poignant musical score by Joe Hisaishi, Fireworks makes a quietly powerful impact. [22 May 1998]

Funny Games condescends to its audience like a pretentious, preachifying graduate student in post-modernism. It would help us out of the cultural quagmire we're drowning in, if only we could understand its highly convoluted and exclusive language. [29 May 1998, p.1E]

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.

Blues Brothers 2000 doesn't tell much of a story, but it makes for one smokin' concert. [06 Feb 1998]