Fire shows what happens when a government systematically denies rights to one racial group for decades, but its message is more current.

Blethyn glides through the proceedings elegantly, a comic swan among ducks.

If you're fond of wigs, you may be in heaven. If you're more interested in Whigs, you may wish the movie had dug deeper under the lovely powdered surface of Lady Georgiana Spencer.

City Hall is more Cusack's movie than Pacino's, and he gives a more interesting performance. Cusack never reveals himself right away: With his watchful eyes and tight lips, he seems to be deciding whether he can trust the audience with his deepest thoughts. He warms up thoroughly in this Jimmy Stewart-like role, though he never gets a handle on a Louisiana accent. (Calhoun couldn't have come from Chicago, like Cusack?)[16 Feb 1996, p.1E]

It's a mass of interchangeable moving images, none much more significant than the others, linked to a plot looser than a 2-year-old's shoelaces.

The funniest, crassest, wildest, most musical, most satirical and most scatological of the Powers trilogy. And you get to watch Britney Spears' head explode. What more could you want?

Roberts, perhaps the nation's most fresh-faced actress five or six years ago, now seems to be a pair of tear ducts mounted atop a thousand-watt smile. Whether anything is going on behind that assembly remains to be seen, but there's not much proof here. [4 Aug 1995, p.1F]

If it were 10 minutes shorter, it would've been just the right length and almost wholly honest.

I don't mean to be negative, but I want Orny Adams hung naked over a pit of snapping crocodiles. That said, Comedian is a lightweight but appealing backstage film about two performers.

If you wanted this "Snicket" movie (and the presumed flood of sequels) to be faithful to the novels, you have come to the wrong franchise.

For now, the franchise has enough zip and humor to be worthwhile.

One dazzling (if overlong) bridge: technologically advanced, brilliantly designed, spectacularly executed, solid as steel in its unspectacular elements. But unlike its 1999 predecessor, this is a movie that nobody but avid video gamers and motorcyclists needs to see more than once.

In rare cases – and The Woman in Black is one of them – a story may be more atmospheric when less is left to the imagination.

Henry James' tangled, turgid prose always seems to me like a thicket of thorn trees -- so I should be grateful when somebody does the job for me on film. But I'm not - at least, in the case of The Golden Bowl.

There's plenty to offend Christians and non-Christians in Saved! but little to trouble either: The movie vanishes in memory like morning mist expelled by the first stiff breeze.

A clever blend of the high school comedy and the superhero genre.

It's a gentle look at people who cut themselves off from others and realize consequences too late. If Southern Baptists believed in karma, this would be their touchstone.

Someone in most Farrelly movies deserves the Good Sport Award; here it's split between Meryl Streep, who befriends Walt in a long cameo as herself, and Eva Mendes, who plays Walt's galpal in a way that mocks perceptions of her as a well-endowed ninny. Cher should get a share of this prize.

Kasdan ends up with an intellectually dishonest movie about intellectual dishonesty.

Whatever he (Shyamalan) did, he shouldn't have tried to send the same lightning bolt down to Earth in the same place.

Vardalos is of Greek ancestry, which makes stereotyping permissible: She can tease Greeks, just as Italians can safely mock Italians or Jews can poke fun at Jews. But isn't it demeaning to reduce your heritage to clich?s?

Wes Anderson's movies taste that way to me. They're dryly funny, well-acted, never less than quirkily entertaining. But they're never more, either.

Goes awry within moments and never gets on track. The scripters and director Harold Ramis have no idea whether to aim for cynical humor, film-noir romance or post-crime tension, so they miss all three targets completely.

An old-fashioned suspense drama with an old-fashioned belief at its core: Justice can be done in the world, and the United Nations is the global organization to do it.

The movie holds no clear answers. Every time you think you know where it’s going, it veers. And at the end, I’m pretty sure even Tommie and Lamb – who alternately thinks he’s enriching her life or ruining it – don’t quite know what they’ve been through. But the journey seems to have been worthwhile for them and us.

Whether you take to it will depend on whether you consider “high-octane” or “nonsense” the more important word.

It's a self-blunting satire, a toothless attack on fashionistas that twists around tortuously and ends up biting (well, gumming) its own tail.

A slow, grim, atmospheric but virtually plotless look at a blank-faced loner who is obsessed with his work, has no friends except for one woman inexplicably attached to him, and ends up making those around him miserable.