The good-hearted Galaxy Quest delivers fun and confusion in equal measure, as it gently tweaks the fanaticism of "Star Trek"/"Star Wars" fans while validating it at the same time.

Ray Liotta and Jason Patric do some of their best work in their underwritten roles, but don't be fooled: Nobody deserves any prizes here.

Is it a bad thing that Disney has commercialized, denatured and inflated the story to make it indistinguishable from any handsome sword-and-sorcery epic? Perhaps not, for it IS handsome on its grand scale.

Alfred Hitchcock once said, "Drama is life with the dull bits left out." Well, Rachel Getting Married is drama with the dull bits left in.

How odd that some of the most appealing elements of this new animation should be action sequences as old as cinema itself.

Heartwarming drama.

You must cast aside all rules of our space-time continuum to appreciate a fantasy like this one, though even then you might consider 130 minutes to be too much of a good thing.

As a remake of "It's a Wonderful Life" or "Back to the Future," the movies it borrows from most heavily, the relive-your-senior-year comedy 17 Again falls a little short of the mark. But as a funny, sweet and smart star vehicle tailored for Zac "High School Musical" Efron, it's right on the money.

DiCaprio is up to all but the heaviest emotional lifting; when he enters a maniacal phase, you wish for Martin Sheen, who did the "back to the jungle" thing better in "Apocalypse Now."

Asks questions worth pondering. I only wished the writer-director-editor answered more of them.

Has more psychological complexity than the average suspense drama, and the results prove more satisfying than not.

In the end, your reaction to "Hour" may depend on your feelings about humanity's collective common sense.

It seems perverse to say a musical is at its best when nobody is singing, but Nine is a perverse kind of musical.

If the longest and beefiest "Spider-Man" movie to date were a baseball player, it would be tested tomorrow for steroids. That won't stop "S-M 3" from hitting a home run at the box-office, where fans will roar.

Hawn always appears to be acting with a vengeance, but Sarandon just breathes her part.

An endearing, well-acted trifle with lovely intentions.

Without Gibson, this soufflé would fall pancake-flat.

You know the feeling you get when you make a meal of two mildly savory appetizers that don't quite go together, and you leave you wishing you'd eaten one hefty entrée? That's Julie & Julia. Half an hour later, I wanted to watch another movie.

Polly works best when writer-director John Hamburg gets his mind out of the water closet, and it's in there about two-fifths of the way. The rest of the time, he's assembling a hit-and-miss comedy with reasonable numbers of laughs and lots of personality from its two leads.

Bits can be extremely funny. I howled at the ranting, mustard-splotched, wiener-waving Michael Moore.

The vigorous, unsubtle acting provides consistent pleasure, once you stop expecting it to seem realistic.

Maybe this is a case of too many cooks spoiling a simple broth: The movie had four producers, five executive producers, three writers (credited ones, anyhow) and three editors.

By the end, I felt like a beetle going round and round in a toilet bowl that just wouldn't stop flushing.

One thing the movie does well is skewer Bill Clinton. Though Hayes works for him and nominally defends him to detractors, we see old sins rehashed: Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky, his impeachment.

It combines elements of "Lord of the Rings," "Star Wars" and James Bond flicks with generically satisfying results.

The director is strong on setups, and the hunt for the virus is tense. [10 Mar 1995, p.1F]

Paul Schrader's movies depict dark nights of the soul, but sometimes you feel like you have to end the dark night with a shower. Auto Focus is such a movie.

I admire Cameron Crowe for daring to write and direct a movie as strange as Vanilla Sky. I lament the casting of Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz in the leads.