Does have the enclosed, slightly overheated feel of a family theatrical.

The movie is so chilly and fundamentally empty at its core that we're more or less on the outside looking in.

The film musical is at the moment an even more devitalized art form than the Broadway musical. But Moulin Rouge doesn't revive it. It only rearranges the bones.

A high-impact, high-powered mess that raises the bar for over-the-topness.

One wishes Incantato was made of something other than musty air. Avati provides no real emotional counterweight for all the whimsy and nonsense, and the movie carries neither the force of morality nor the titillation of trashiness.

The only victims in Paid in Full are the dealers and their families -- and the only word for that is one this paper can't print.

There is almost no drama, nor any surprise, in this long effort.

There are many things that Better Than Sex is better than, although sex is not among them. It is better than a root canal, an IRS audit, or a rained-out ballgame.

There are moments, too, where the forced hipness falls aside and the two lead characters just plain relate, realistically and maturely, with a seasoned playfulness that is truly charming.

The movie is only sporadically interesting.

Beverly D'Angelo, Rufus Sewell, Georgina Cates, Leo Bassi - tumble with zest through a daisy chain of sexual capers. But while warmly energized, their carryings-on also seem a little generic.

The movie is so dependant on its source material that it fails to put Carter, Thompson, Penn, and Christy to better use.

More machine than mean, although it's anything but a smoothly running operation.

A pleasant puff-pastry throwback to Sandra Dee movies, ''Bye Bye Birdie,'' and other pre-Beatles effluvia.

Invites us to both hate King David and admire his style, and there will probably be some hand-wringing about that.

For every insight, there are a half-dozen meandering conversations and unguided reminiscences.

Might give you a few decorating ideas if you happen to have been wondering about a home bomb shelter, but it's a thriller that doesn't thrill.

Isn't just lame; it's neutered.

To answer your first question: like a cross between Shrek, the Frankenstein monster, and a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot.

The best thing about the new film of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine is the machine.

Contains more than its share of implausibilities and absurdities.

Story lines don't come any clammier.

Rich as it looks, it lacks the feverishness of Goya's art.

Lots of sex, but little joy.

Bait ends up seeming pretty wormy.

Its commendable, if juvenile, sense of erogenous adventure is sullied by bland technique, canned suburban punk music, and the fact that all the exploration does amount to maturer characters.

Eckhart, who gets more rugged by the picture, certainly works hard to bring the audience along. But he's a nervous wreck for nothing. This movie isn't talking to us, it's talking to other serial killer movies.

Beautiful to look at and acted with full and tempestuous conviction, it still seems to be taking place in an apartment far across the way.

Everything about this curio is claustrophobic.

Daredevil the movie strains itself trying to catch up with Sam Raimi's web-slinging megasmash. It's a faceless copy, right down to the muscle-rock groaning on the soundtrack.

Never gets horribly bad, but can't sustain its moments of inspiration either.

If there's nothing here for romantics, there's even less for gourmands. Nettelbeck fails to produce a good food metaphor, let alone an impressive, palate-aching preparation montage

Walking Tall, which is credited to four different writers, is wanting for a reason to be.

So appallingly slipshod in all the usual departments is this sequel to the engaging martial-arts comedy Western ''Shanghai Noon'' that you're tempted to cite its makers for contempt.

The loosest, silliest, broadest thing the Coens have yet committed to celluloid, and that includes "Raising Arizona," one of this critic's favorites.

This dog will inevitably let down purists looking for the elusive combination of smart and funny.

In sum, a big, honking tutti-frutti sundae of a movie that nonetheless is shot through with authentic feeling.

Blew its chance to be an epic drug opera. It's only nostril-deep.

Hopped up on standard action riffs, most of the film feels like hand-me-downs purchased from the John Woo outlet.

The movie has none of the embarrassing absurdity and cheap effects that made last year's trip back to the 14th century, "Timeline,'' such a joke. We should be so lucky. Instead, we get a listless avenger drama.

It's an exercise in 1970s mood. But all the film does is conjure, channel, and allude, until there's really no movie of Green's own for an audience to grab onto.

Freeman and Hunter are both overqualified for material this ponderous, but she plays along, while he appears to have made a minimal emotional investment in the oncoming avalanche of coincidences and cliches.

The people who've made White Oleander appear to have spent a lot of time worrying about the audience. They should have told the story and let us take care of ourselves.

Ford and Pfeiffer deliver craftsmanlike work, but the film steadily unravels as Zemeckis tries to ratchet up the suspense.

The imagery is lush, but the story is pretty cornball, with an ending that can only be called pure Hollywood. Only the marvelous Cate Blanchett transcends stereotype.

A formulaic script, a tired plot -- and uninspired dialogue all point up the real star. It's the house,

It is spectacularly average. Neither an inspired reimagining nor a painful dud,

Supposed to be a cheeky little lark but instead runs a narrow gamut from labored to aimless.

There is no central drama, no surprise, no tension in his comedy. The ads for Along Came Polly make it look so upbeat and simple that you're convinced it must be hiding something, like death or a disease. But the truth is there in the advertising: nothing happens.

Muniz has better secret-agent toys to play with, funnier lines and sidekicks helping him out, and a bit more discerning director in Kevin Allen ("The Big Tease").

Gets by on the watchability of its young stars.

Long on mood and moodiness, but at a loss as how to break any interesting human ground.

Primarily a one-man show for Darroussin, and the actor, a longtime pro in the French film industry, comes through with a scarifyingly believable portrayal.

It's too fragmented and diffuse to ever bring its parts together in any really satisfying manner.

Narrated from start to close by an 8-year-old, it often seems like a coloring book on tape.

In the end, promotion, as good as it may be, doesn't make for a real documentary. Faster is a kind of bone-crushing fun, but there's little drama and certainly no insight.

The actors give it their best, Thomsen and Werlinder in particular.

The film feels long when it should be brisk, and it's bloated with stretches of hot, dead air. The racial kitsch goes nowhere.

As an up-to-the-minute representation of the specifics of the teen universe, Sleepover lacks authenticity.

These are not the marks of true cinema; they're the makings of a droopy karaoke video.

The film is gentle and carries a simple moral.

The movie feels padded. And Hopkins's deft touch as a writer and director leaves him when it comes to casting.

The unworthy new Hollywood remake of Japan's horror phenomenon, ''Ring,'' has packed on a definite article and a whole lot of hooey.

Directed by F. Gary Gray and written by Christian Gudegast and Paul T. Scheuring, the movie isn't even worthy of former NFL linebacker turned straight-to-video action figure Brian Bosworth.

The movie ends with a sentimental vision of unity that, admittedly, warmed this weary moviegoer's heart. If that vision was earned, I might even have melted.

Had Stealing Harvard merely been a stupid movie about people stuck in a string of silly moments, it could have gotten by on charm. As written by Peter Tolan and directed by Bruce McCulloch (''Kids in the Hall'') it's a stupid movie about stupid people.

Will parents be able to sit through Kangaroo Jack without plunging sharp sticks into their eyes? The short answer? Yes. Barely.

At one point in ''Praise,'' Godard mentions that the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian park, is all that's left of the French forests from the time of the Roman conquest. In Praise of Love, glowing like an ember, is all that's left of genius.

Neither hot nor square, it's as simple and earnest as any after-school special and as cameo-laden as any rap video.

'Trainspotting'' Lite.

Like many of us who cherish the safe harbor of old movies, Rose and Cary mourn the fact that they don't make 'em like they used to. If they'd paused to ponder why not, they might have a better movie.

Slow and ultimately distressing.

Achingly slow, at times bleak and, in the end, frustratingly and regrettably, rather pointless.

You have an overstuffed story line, sloppy filmmaking, a general thinness of conception (if you've seen "Sister Act," you've pretty much seen The Fighting Temptations), and a lead performance that starts out obnoxious and becomes actively grating.

Degenerates into a lot of dull declaiming and attitudinizing, despite a sly tongue-in-cheek quality brought by a preening Stuart Townsend to the Lestat role he inherited from the utterly humorless Tom Cruise.

Notably Wayansless. It's also notably devoid of a point of view.

Too much of Taxi is just tired.

Despite the Gallic source material, what we truly have in Unfaithful is a tasteful, adult-contemporary ''Fatal Attraction'' redux, right down to the mister's Soho address and the happy family tucked away in the New York hinterlands.

What you might call conditional whimsy, predicated on the audience overlooking so many plot implausibilities that it might get tuckered out from all the charity.

As long as Saw stays in that big, nasty bathroom, all we need to believe is the knot in our stomachs.

Hard, gleaming images and an oblique storytelling style come to Wang the way the bike comes to Jian -- secondhand.

An opaque kidnapping drama that features three expertly crafted performances operating on three different planets.

Any ESPN commercial at all leaves it in the dust when it comes to imaginative firepower.

A gorgeous screenful of period eye candy.

The movie is weak on attempts at survivalist philosophy (anyone bit by a zombie is likely to become one). Even the religious overtones feel tinny and unpronounced.

Snazzy visuals, of which she (Moss) is one, carry The Matrix past its klutzy script.

Skips lightly along the sewers of human depravity as if the trip alone was worth the telling.

Cool killers - Kitano's stock in trade - do not necessarily make for cool movies.

The B-movie is still very much with us.

Weaver's randy, impatient, very funny performance is the main reason to see Imaginary Heroes.

She's (Dunst) the big reason the film rises above instantly rejectable formula to campy pop.

A well-intentioned but self-defeatingly manipulative film that amounts to an impassioned commercial for national health care.

The main, if not only, reason to see The Machinist is for Christian Bale's title performance, and even then you have to be a fan of hardcore martyrdom in the service of craft.

You get the sense that the cheap thrill of cheating is like putting a Band-Aid on a broken bone. The movie feels just as inadequate emotionally and psychologically. There's a lot of outward behavior but no inner life.

As it is, Behind Enemy Lines will satisfy only those in search of a rousingly, if simplistically, patriotic bloodbath.

Hartley's loquacity and arguable pretentiousness are stemmed by his sense of play. Even when they run afoul, his movies still have the conviction of their fun. No Such Thing barely has any convictions at all.

once Carpenter delivers his throwback-to-the-'50s visuals, complete with plump little B-movie flying saucers, and makes his point that the rich are fascist fiends, They Live starts running low on imagination and inventiveness. The big alley-fight scene between Piper and David, in which the former tries to punch some awareness into the latter and make him put on the X-ray sunglasses, is as contrived as it is brutal. And the ending isn't much. The acting has the good sense not to try to be anything more than two-dimensional, though, which keeps the entertainment value at a lively comic-strip level. As sci-fi horror comedy, "They Live," with its wake-up call to the world, is in a class with "Terminator" and "Robocop," even though its hero doesn't sport bionic biceps. [4 Nov 1988, p.52]

Takes a leaf from the "Psycho" handbook and abandons its star for stretches here and there.