Charting the ruthlessness of an ambitious bimbo telecaster in Little Hope, New Hampshire, this staccato black comedy sustains its brilliant exposition and narration until the plot turns to premeditated murder, complete with hapless and semicoherent teenage accomplices.

One can already tell that this film is on to something special during the opening credits.

The cynicism of the writer and director smacks of such self-hatred (fully acknowledged in the film's closing shot) that their disgust spills over onto all their characters (and their audience too), and inasmuch as everybody here is one kind of whore or another at virtually every moment, the fine moral distinctions this movie insists on making sometimes seem about as arcane and as loony as medieval theology about angels dancing on the heads of pins.

Without being any sort of miracle, this is an engaging and lively exploitation fantasy-thriller about computer hackers, anarchistic in spirit, that succeeds at just about everything "The Net" failed to--especially in representing computer operations with some visual flair.

Thanks to the performers (including Andie MacDowell and John Turturro), this has a certain amount of charm and warmth, but the period ambience feels both remote and uncertain.

The performances are strong, but the spectator often feels adrift in an overly busy intrigue.

A quirky, lyrical independent feature by writer-director Michael Almereyda. It's shot in luscious, shimmering black and white.

It's not your usual story line, but Widen makes it sufficiently plausible; unfortunately, the film's fireworks ending isn't as subtle or spooky as the rest of the movie.

What's mainly missing is the sort of conviction and passion that gave El mariachi its charge; one feels at almost every moment that Rodriguez is fulfilling a contract rather than saying something he has to say. There's a lot of panache here, but not much inspiration.

If you want to waste a couple of hours, you can surely do much better looking elsewhere.

Though it lacks the sensational pizzazz of "Blackboard Jungle", the politics here are arguably somewhat better, and the supporting cast -- George Dzundza, Courtney P. Vance, Robin Bartlett, Beatrice Winde -- isn't bad either.

The characters (both animal and human) are solidly conceived, and the storytelling and visuals are expertly fashioned.

This movie feels like it was made by a bank rather than a person.

Though this drifts at times as storytelling, it's mainly lightweight but personable fun.

This meticulous but ultimately rather pedestrian drama gradually won me over as a minor if watchable example of the "victory through defeat" brand of military heroism that John Ford specialized in.

Contradictions confound certain aspects of this project--such as the language spoken by Pocahontas (which, in the Hollywood tradition, oscillates between tribal talk and the unaccented chatter of a contemporary Valley girl)--but overall this seems like a reasonable stab at an impossible agenda.

Director Joel Schumacher submits to the Wagnerian bombast with an overly busy surface, and the script by Lee and Janet Scott Batchler and Akiva Goldsman basically runs through the formula as if it's a checklist.

The film's warmth and sympathy are underlined by some intelligence.

Despite a certain grace in the dialogue and casual plot construction, this is positively reeking of a desire to be cheerful in the face of adversity.

I don't know the novel, but judging from the script by Crichton and John Patrick Shanley, this must be scraping the bottom of the Crichton barrel.

This exudes trendiness at regular intervals, and otherwise manages to be reasonably charming about Manhattan's melting pot culture, but my general response was still "Wake me when it's over."

Clint Eastwood resurrects the star system, the Hollywood love story, and middle-aged romance, but despite all his craft and sincerity, he and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese can't quite turn Robert James Waller's cardboard best-seller into flesh and bone.

It's not clear why Steven Spielberg's Amblin decided to make a live-action entertainment starring the least interesting and most saccharine of all 50s cartoon characters, the friendly ghost who can't help scaring people, but here's your chance to search for an answer.

The virtues on display are very much those of the heroine: generosity, imagination, charm, and the capacity to keep an audience mesmerized with a good story.

If you can swallow one more amnesia plot and one more recycling of favorite bits from Godard's Bande a part, pressed to serve yet another postmodernist antithriller about redemption, this has its compensations.

Behind all the macho bluster stand (or, it would appear, sit) director Tony Scott, writers Michael Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick, and producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, trying (and failing) to get all the characters to behave like grown-ups.

Zwigoff not only presents a complex human being and the range of his art but also guides us through a profound and unsettling consideration of what it means to be an American artist. Essential viewing.

The plot of this 1995 romantic comedy, directed by Jon Turteltaub ("Cool Runnings") from a script by Daniel G. Sullivan and Fredric Lebow, is pretty stupid throughout, and the filmmakers show no compunction in shaking its silliness in your face, but the film's casual warmth may make you tolerate some of the shortcomings.

A sensationalist grunge festival spiked with dollops of poetry on the sound track.

Even if you find Franken hard to bear, as I do, the movie's take on how he functions in the world is both authoritative and compelling, and the movie steadily grows in stature.

Formulaic sass machine... I was writhing in my seat.

This first feature by novelist and psychologist Jeremy Leven has a fairly rudimentary mise en scene, but the actors take over the proceedings with aplomb, and Brando and Dunaway have the grace to turn much of the show over to Depp, who carries the burden with ease.

By the time [James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala] get around to articulating a story, the inhibitions imposed by their "good taste" begin to seem more like gutlessness, and what initially promises to be an exposure of American liberal doublethink about slavery winds up as a querulous wimp out on a subject that the underrated "Mandingo" is better equipped to deal with.

Lori Petty does a nice job in the title role of this enjoyable 1995 feature based on the postapocalyptic SF comic book and set in the year 2033; it's basically aimed at teenagers, though it's a lot more feminist than what usually passes for adult fare.

Although most of the elements are familiar and virtually all of the characters are unpleasant, this is a better than average melodrama--mainly because of the volcanic power of Kathy Bates in the title role.

This fumbling and formulaic semiremake of The Private War of Major Benson (1955) is basically just an excuse to let comic Damon Wayans—functioning here as cowriter and executive producer as well as star—strut his stuff. But he's strutting in a void, and not even two gold teeth will light his way. The initial premise [is] good for a couple of laughs at most.

What I like about these camera movements, combined with the exotic, erotic ambience of Mychael Danna's score, is that they simultaneously implicate us in the characters' fantasies and place us at some distance from them. We literally view the action from shifting perspectives, but the rhythm and direction of our drifting gaze seem to place us directly inside the obsessions of the characters.

Oscillating back and forth between insulting its two central characters (Muriel and her dad) and showing they have hidden depths, this movie only shows true tact and understanding when it comes to flattering the audience; everyone on screen is strictly up for grabs.

At once upsetting and highly involving, it packs an undeniable punch.

A curiously sour movie in its amused contempt for this fatuous family laced with affectionate nostalgia for its unshakable slickness and insularity, but also an undeniably strange one in its adoption of TV formats and cliches, as if these were the only indexes of contemporary reality that we have left.

Sam Raimi tries to do a Sergio Leone, and though this 1995 feature is highly enjoyable in spots, it doesn't come across as very convincing, perhaps because nothing can turn Sharon Stone into Charles Bronson.

This is a fairly accomplished first feature -perky, visually inventive, and unusually nast

Richard Linklater goes Hollywood (1995) -- triumphantly and with an overall intelligence, sweetness, and romantic simplicity that reminds me of wartime weepies like The Clock.

For better and for worse, it's still a Hollywood movie (and a white boys' movie to boot), but one with a more alert eye and feeling for American life than most of its competitors.

The silly story is basically just an excuse for some thrills and goofy one-liners, but even if the more likable characters tended to get killed off too early for my taste, I wasn't bored.

Based on a true story, Ken Loach’s powerful and disturbing British drama (1994) about a single working-class mother with four children from four different fathers is made unforgettable by stand-up comedian Crissy Rock’s lead performance and by the filmmakers’ determination to make the story as messy and as complex as life itself.

Aiming at a microcosm of American life comparable in some ways to Do the Right Thing, Singleton can't quite justify or explicate his parting message ("unlearn"), but his passion is exemplary.

If you like Ryan and Robbins as much as I do, you'll probably feel indulgent and even charmed in spots; if you don't, you'll probably run screaming out of the theater.

Even though he's psychologically expanded his source, the material is a bit too schematic to work as much more than a scaled-down thriller.

Even though it stars Albert Finney, this is a picture of no importance, undone mainly by its self-ingratiated cuteness.

The film has a fresh and imaginative feel for period detail that the talented cast - which also features Gabriel Byrne, Christian Bale, Eric Stoltz, John Neville, and Mary Wickes - obviously benefits from.

A few of the bad-taste gags are funny, and Carrey's grimaces have a certain inspired delirium, but this is a long way from the social comedy of Jerry Lewis.

Unfortunately, the relationship between Cobb and Stump as depicted here isn't very substantial or interesting, and the fictionalized Stump's offscreen narration feels rather concocted; what the movie has to say about Cobb mainly leaks through around the edges of this cumbersome apparatus.

If Frank Capra had directed the Three Stooges in a Disney Christmas release, the results would have been considerably better than this godawful Fox comedy (1994) by writer-producer-director George Gallo.

Alan Rudolph's 1994 feature about writer Dorothy Parker and the famous Algonquin wits she hung out with in the 20s certainly has its pleasures, but someone should tell Rudolph that, for all his skill and charm, period movies aren't really his forte.

The sheer oddness of the New York world constructed for this film--where cops and crooks are literally interchangeable, and Oldman and Danny Aiello are stranded in roles that pick over the leavings of earlier parts--ultimately seems at once too deranged and too mechanical.

At least the special effects and outer space vistas are more handsome than usual.

Overly familiar in its themes, though still somewhat potent in its depiction of an alienated 14-year-old boy from a well-to-do family who's preoccupied with video technology and winds up commiting a monstrous act. In some ways, the portrait of his parents is even more chilling.

Unlike the campy excess of Jackson's earlier Dead Alive, this kind of deliberate overkill—which extends to the broad caricatures of the girls' families as well as the girls' feverish fantasy life—ultimately points toward a dearth of ideas rather than a surfeit, though the story remains sufficiently interesting and troubling to hold one's attention.

But if you can get swept up in the story, the movie is imaginative and compelling.

Unlike the classic noirs, this is grounded in neither a recognizable social reality nor a metaphysical sense of doom--just a lot of sexy attitude, humping, and heavy breathing.

As for remakes, it stands to reason that if you try to redo a work of art without the original artist, you're bound to damage the artistry as well.

If not all the gags work, the overall irreverence and all-American anomie are fairly contagious.

Tarantino's mock-tough narrative--which derives most of its titillation from farcical mayhem, drugs, deadpan macho monologues, evocations of anal penetration, and terms of racial abuse--resembles a wet dream for 14-year-old male closet queens (or, perhaps more accurately, the 14-year-old male closet queen in each of us), and his command of this smart-alecky mode is so sure that this nervy movie sparkles throughout with canny twists and turns.

Unfortunately, without even the most cursory effort to establish some notion of normality, the movie progressively gets duller and duller as its mechanical horror fancies spin themselves out.

Curtis Hanson (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) directed this 1994 thriller effectively from a fairly routine script by Denis O'Neill; what really makes this movie worth seeing are the stunning Oregon and Montana locations (filmed in 'Scope), as well as Streep's sexy pluck in playing the most capable and resourceful character around.

What ties all this material together is the force and humor of Moretti’s eclectic personality.

If, like the filmmakers, you're willing to settle for a myth that flatters your sensibilities and shortchanges the past, you're likely to find some agreeable kicks here.

Robert Redford's best and richest directorial effort.

It illustrates the truism that the biggest difference between European and American directors using America as a site for fantasies is that the Europeans are likelier to know what they're doing.

Poised somewhere between a movie-familiar (i.e., semiscurrilous) look at inner-city life as trench warfare and a farfetched Hollywood revenge fantasy, this is kept alive largely through its first-rate performances, beginning with Sean Nelson's as the boy; Giancarlo Esposito is also a standout.

Gripping...compelling.

Killing Zoe has little of the style, pacing, characterization, or wit of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction (though Avary worked on the scripts of both).

Somewhat preposterous but fairly watchable mystery thriller. The plot gets so convoluted and farfetched that you still may be scratching your head after the denouement, but you probably won't be bored.

This nicely made 1994 comedy-drama could be described as an Australian "Easy Rider," with Sydney drag queens instead of bikers and no apocalyptic ending.

The results are easy to watch, though awfully familiar and simpleminded.

The comedy is extremely broad (with Curtis eliciting almost as many laughs as Schwarzenegger), the action sequences are as well crafted as one can expect from Cameron, and the meaning is as root basic as anyone would wish.

Despite a certain originality, the movie isn't really a success, not only because the plot bites off more than it can chew (the film doesn't conclude; it simply stops), but also because, like its hero, it has some trouble distinguishing between petty irritations and cataclysmic traumas.

But as a neo-Dickensian Disney exercise in old-fashioned sentiment this has a certain charm and a sense of human decency that tended to win me over.

The results are skillful, highly affecting, and ultimately more than a little pernicious.

In all, the most pleasure-filled Hollywood movie of 1994.

Running beyond three hours, the movie more than overstays its welcome, and despite some vague genuflections in the general direction of The Godfather regarding family ties and revenge, there are simply too many years and locations covered, too many crane shots and rainstorms.

The result is a step toward multiculturalism and ecological correctness, though not without a certain amount of confusion. The movie is not quite as entertaining as The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast.

The deft arabesques of cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak juice up the suspense, and if you're not too put off by the sheer ridiculousness of the story you won't be bored.

Considering the 32 writers (including Tom S. Parker, Jim Jennewein, and Steven E. de Souza) who worked on this live-action adaptation of the 60s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series about a Stone Age family, one might have expected a few funny lines here and there, but this is mirthless (and worthless) from top to bottom.

If Bertolucci had restricted himself to Siddhartha’s story he would have remained on solid ground, at least as a storyteller, for the interpolated religious tale is far and away the best thing in the movie, full of enchantment and wonder.

While the results are both cheerful and occasionally inventive, they can't hold a candle to his previous features; too many jokey asides and cameos - not to mention an overdose of plot - keep getting in the way.

Despite very good performances, this is anemic and uninspired filmmaking: shapeless as narrative, awkward and drifting as drama.

Some of the precise meanings of this Bill Forsyth comedy eluded me, but the vibes couldn't have been nicer.

Good, amusing, disreputable fun—until it starts getting solemn and preachy.

A rather ho-hum if watchable neo-noir.

[It] may not be your cup of tea, but you have to admire the style, sincerity, and overall sense of craft even if you don't fancy the comic-book gore.

A step down from the first Naked Gun cop-thriller spoof, which was a step down from Airplane! and Top Secret!; but if you care about such fine distinctions, this may be marginally better than Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear. Or at least it is when the movie finally arrives at the climactic Academy Awards ceremony; prior to that, it's mainly just one little-boy gag after another.

With its American, English, and French characters representing the three cultures Polanski has known since he left Poland, it's also quite possibly his most personal film—and certainly his most self-critical.

All this is supposed to be as cute as bugs and chock-full of worldly wisdom, but even with lead actors as likable and as resourceful as these, the material made me alternately want to gag and nod off.

At its best it's a free-form fantasy with glitzy, well-executed effects and assorted metaphysical conceits but little feeling for any of the characters apart from derision (with a few touches of racism here and there).

The charm, humor, and healthy eroticism of Australian writer-director John Duigan (The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting) are back in force in this pleasantly recounted tale, set in the 30s, about a newlywed Anglican clergyman and his wife, freshly played by Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald, who stop off at the remote home of a controversial (i.e., erotic) painter (Sam Neill).

The Davis-Spacey-Leary triangle and their unmanageable contempt is something to see and hear. Which is another way of saying this is the funniest comedy so far this year.