A miracle of data retrieval as the grown schoolchildren are measured against their footage from the earlier films.

Stylish and arrives at a satisfying cumulative weight, even if it isn't Austen pure.

Both a lovingly crafted remembrance of things past and a deliberate broadening and darkening of the canvas Levinson previously filled in "Diner," "Tin Men," and "Avalon."

Aims its big, bold mother-daughter conflicts straight at the heart by way of the tear ducts, and connects.

Has more ambition than the usual serial killer film, but curiously less urgency.

A lot of striking pictures in this would-be feminist "Braveheart," but a film that's pretty flat and earthbound because of the limitations of the figure at its center.

Has that rarest of qualities in movies that think of themselves as religious. I'm talking about the vision thing. And the ability to make morality entertaining.

Light It Up isn't a great movie, but it's a cut above most so-called urban thrillers.

The Japanese animation is beautiful, and the script adaptation for the English-speaking audience is well-paced, clever, and absorbing enough to keep parents from squirming.

The bleakness of Rosetta will not be for all, but it's one of the best films of the year.

A vapid, charmless update of Buster Keaton's 1925 film "Seven Chances."

Reflective, haunting, hilarious documentary.

Another phantasmagorical tale of life among the Nazis, is upon us. This one works much better.

It seems more a geek show than a slab of marketing wizardry.

Washington and Jolie earn their stripes here, but more texture would have resulted, I think, in more terror.

A big, dark juggernaut of a movie about a big, dark juggernaut of a subject.

It leaves you with an odd, sweet-and-sour taste - nostalgia painted in pastel colors, streaked with black smears.

Avoids the potentially suffocating pall of uplift hovering over its quite exhilarating story.

Its protagonist haven't enough emotional substance to carry them through the long, darkly lit introspective sequences.

Its breadth, profundity, and stunningly rendered vision make idealism seem renewed and breathtaking again.

But then Being John Malkovich is a brilliant juggling act, too, brilliantly brought off.

Breathes fresh life into old formulas.

Trips early and never gets up off the floor.

A reassuring little cheeseball of a movie.

Beneath its glitz, poses, and pub crawlers and club prowlers, it's an old-fashioned morality tale.

The pieces don't always fit together smoothly, but there's a lot of flavorful work to savor.

Charming and, compared with most Hollywood films like it, refreshing.

While heartfelt and beautifully crafted, Bringing Out the Dead is too freighted with its protagonist's failed savior complex and is surprisingly lacking in primal impact.

At its best, it will impale you on its raw urgency. At other times, it's a slog through long improvisations that never achieve dramatic liftoff.

Conspicuously short on the kind of texture that makes us feel we're watching real people living real lives.

Whaley's self-effacing but strongly etched and wrenchingly effective film.

Farnsworth's embodiment of old American values, with their combination of delicacy, reserve, and stand-alone independence, is a one-of-a-kind treasure.

Begins with that invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz. But its chic indictment of empty materialist values fizzles.

A-list soap opera, high-class and high-gloss.

A solid, humane, old-fashioned film in the best sense of the term.

Can't outrun its very visible limits.

Part of the reason for the comic surehandedness is the obvious chemistry between Shannon, Ferrell, and director Bruce McCulloch.

"In Cold Blood," "Badlands," "The Executioner's Song," and now, joining those grisly milestones on the heartland hit list, and every bit their equal, is Boys Don't Cry.

Scott makes it easy to overlook the conventionality beneath his sometimes overdone but almost always enjoyable combination of atmosphere and propulsiveness.

Individual performances...are flavorful and simpatico.

The Jim Henson folks...come up with another winner.

I can't imagine anyone not feeling entertained by Happy, Texas.

You walk out amazed and refreshed by the way it kicks the assumptions out from under the genre.

Gets by on the watchability of its young stars.

Judd is pretty much on her own - an assignment she mostly can handle with aplomb.

Has the impact of a left-right combination to the chin.

The performances are disarming and Mumford is the kind of comedy that grows on you if you give it a chance.

Deserves a place alongside "Life Is Beautiful" and, yes, even "Schindler's List."

A romantic comedy with an adult sensibility, a film that avoids characters-as-caricatures (with one exception), and deftly mixes cynicism and hope.

While the appeal of Guinevere is decidedly intermittent, it's there, and the acting is right on the money.

Runs out of helium and lands pretty heavily after its airy beginning.

A long, warm, satisfying farewell encounter.

Likable, but at times it's also inescapably sketchy and ramshackle.

Consumerism is running more amok than ever, but this satire of it isn't.

Seems so preoccupied with genuflection that it never achieves its subject's heart-pounding immediacy.

Captures just enough behind-the-scenes flavor to qualify as a light, bright divertissement.

A rather witty, streetwise comedy/action movie with a lot going for it.

After revitalizing baseball movies with "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham," he's now three for three with the funny, quirky, rueful, and richly textured For Love of the Game.

Lots of sex, but little joy.

Spacey is diamond-brilliant in a role that plays as if custom-made for him.

The sly and subtle Minus Man is a wicked little sidewinder of a black comedy.

Hurls its Holocaust at us in a series of justifiably horrific images.

It would have done better to go straight to video, where it belongs.

Could have been a classy thriller. But all the Aramaic in the world can't save it from its own pounding slickness.

The gusto in the flying bullets, the fleeing lovers, and the flowing music will make you want to hang around until the party is over.

Involvingly acted, surehandedly crafted.

It's much closer to a European film in sensibility than to one of Hollywood's factory products.

Gooding plays the worst role I've ever seen him play in a movie...he perpetuates a kind of black stereotype that should have become history years ago.

The season's brightest piece of counterprogramming.

What a disaster -- a dog.

About everything is big in The 13th Warrior except the writing, which is microscopic.

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

Invigorating excellence.

It brings an enlivening wit to a comedy of culture collision.

Mostly a screenful of nothingness.

Devoid of personality and has an annoying gratuitous sentimental streak.

Just enough laughs to keep you watching.

A semisweet nugget, an insinuating, low-budget little charmer. [27 Aug 1999, p.E4]

Few, if any, films this year will approach, let alone equal, Autumn Tale in its subtle sparkle.

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.

A solid, not to say ironclad, winner in the less than overcrowded family animation arena.

Hedaya is sublime.

Bizarre, shadowy, enticingly eerie...more poetic, more tantalizingly original.

By placing all its faith in production design and high-powered computerized effects, and not enough where it really matters, namely character and atmosphere, The Haunting relegates itself to the slag heap of embarrassing claptrap. [23 July 1999, p.D4]

Gross and tasteless...this high-school romp mixes the gross and tasteless with sentimental mush.

Assayas and his engaged, responsive cast finally beat the odds, subtly and beautifully enabling the film to genuinely seem to be about a handful of friends approaching - not always easily or even gracefully but ultimately very touchingly - the September of their shared and individual lives. [13 Aug 1999, p.D4]

Give your brain the night off, and Myers will make you smile too.

Until it goes off course, Limbo not only is up to Sayles's high standard, but extends it. [04 Jun 1999, p.C4]

Juicy acting and an intense individual and communal commitment that seems to boil up from the streets carry Southie past its structural and technical limitations. [28 May 1999]

There's no getting around the fact that it's an uneven exercise that shows signs of having gestated too long. [04 Jun 1999]

It's poetic, resonant, wistful, convulsive, regretful, exultant. There also are times when it's demanding to sit through, when time passes slowly, urged on only by flickers of uncertainty on the face of its protagonist, or by his insistent peering after meanings that may not even exist. But it's also a film that offers the kinds of rewards possible only to the contemplative mindset. [25 Jun 1999, p.D5]

Good enough, but only just. It's got the hardware, but neither the characters, the imagination, nor the resonance one had hoped for.

It isn't conventional drama or plot twists that make After Life moving. Rather, it's the exquisitely tender memories that come floating to the surface of this or that interviewee's mind. [11 June 1999, p.D6]

Seems to be going through a series of motions so obviously virtual that it makes you wish that the filmmakers had stayed away from the computer keyboards entirely and stuck with the rotting tape look.

Refn's direction in Pusher exhibits an uncanny prescience for techniques that would peak a decade later as reality TV -- low-budget, digital video; the use of a tipsy, peripatetic camera; and a wide-angle lens to engulf all the action.

An invigoratingly mordant comedy that proves that Alexander Payne's rambunctious debut, "Citizen Ruth," was no fluke.

"Pulp Fiction" wannabes don't get much slicker or edgier than Go.

Bale and Watson make most of the film more interesting and watchable than it might otherwise be, finding flesh and blood in a script that isn't always equal to their talents. [23 Apr 1999]