The problem with this film's earnest script about corruption in college basketball is that the usually witty Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump) wrote it long before he developed his familiar jivey style. Not even an unsentimental basketball fan like director William Friedkin can wash away all the corn syrup.

If you care whom she winds up with or why, you probably caught more of the TV references than I did.

The most obnoxious case of masculine swagger since Andrew Dice Clay, with just a tad of Paul Lynde thrown in for spice, Jim Carrey defies you not to bolt for the exit while playing the title hero in this 1994 comic mystery.

The film certainly held me, and even fooled me in spots (when it wasn't simply confusing), but when the whole thing was over I felt pretty empty. It would be facile to say it substitutes style for content; actually, it substitutes stylishness for style.

The main focus is on everyday household chores and sensual discoveries, all made mesmerizing by elaborately choreographed camera movements that link interiors and exteriors in the same fluid itineraries.

For my money, this version doesn't match the Siegel film, though it's a lot scarier and more memorable than Kaufman's low-key, New Agey version.

An entertaining if humdrum 1993 documentary...Seeing the actual deliberations behind image making has a certain built-in interest, but I expected more surprises.

But the acting's so good it frequently transcends the simplicities of the script, and whenever Day-Lewis or Postlethwaite is on-screen the movie crackles.

This has plenty of designer gore to go with its periodic spurts of bloodletting, and a lot of care and attention were obviously devoted to selecting locations, designing sets, and grooming handlebar mustaches. Much less attention went to making one believe that any of the events took place circa 1879, but at least the bursts of action keep coming, and most survive Cosmatos's addiction to smoldering close-ups.

Even a good performance by Tom Hanks and noble intentions can't save this mainstream look at AIDS from the worst effects of nervous committeethink.

It's too bad that Pakula allows this 1993 movie to dawdle after its climax, but prior to that he's adept at suggesting unseen menace and keeping things in motion.

Spielberg does an uncommonly good job both of holding our interest over 185 minutes and of showing more of the nuts and bolts of the Holocaust than we usually get from fiction films. Despite some characteristic simplifications, he's generally scrupulous about both his source and the historical record.

The talented director Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem, Deep Cover), who brought distinction even to The Cemetery Club, his previous outing, goes to sleep here, and it's hard to blame him; why stay awake for insulting hackwork like this? James Orr and Jim Cruickshank wrote this malarkey.

Though the director is Walter Hill, the dominant personality is John Milius, who wrote the story and collaborated on the script with Larry Gross, and despite some narrative stodginess in spots, Milius’s sense of warrior nobility and his talent for writing juicy parts for actors serve the picture well.

Better-than-average sitcom stuff, enhanced by the lively performances, Doyle's own adaptation, and the able direction of Stephen Frears.

This is a fascinating and easy-to-take set of musings on a fascinating artist.

Now that Robin Williams has been emasculated--dangerously schizoid comic turned into nice-guy movie star--it isn't too surprising that a commercial hack like Chris Columbus would use him the way he does in this cutesy 1993 comedy: cutting between Williams trying on different voices rather than holding the camera on him as he lurches between these voices without notice.

The actors keep this interesting, but as a story it drifts and rambles.

Thanks to a natural and highly charismatic performance by Judd, Ruby in Paradise has a graceful lyricism--as well as a complex sense of what living in today's world is like--that will stay with you; the tempo is slow and dreamy, but the flavor is rich, and it lasts.

"Sweetie" and "An Angel at My Table" have taught us to expect startling as well as beautiful things from Jane Campion, and this assured and provocative third feature offers yet another lush parable--albeit a bit more calculated and commercially minded--about the perils and paradoxes of female self-expression.

Considering the degree to which Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct are already self-parodies, writer David O'Malley and director Carl Reiner don't have to do much to show how silly they are; in order to understand how silly this movie is, on the other hand, all you have to do is sit through it.

As adapted by Michael McDowell and scripted by Caroline Thompson, this 1993 release is at worst a macabre Muppet movie, at best an inspired jaunt. The set designs are ingenious and the songs (music and lyrics by Danny Elfman) are fairly good.

[A] well-crafted piece of middle-American uplift...For once it really does matter most how you play the game.

Four writers worked on the script, and they all should hang their heads in shame.

This film's extraordinary unity of style, theme, and plot is what sets it apart from the superficial historical epic. Behind all the color, movement, and elaborate decor of this "commercial" film lies an exceptionally taut structure.

Nearly all the SF premises are accorded the status of Andrew Dice Clay one-liners - which means that they, along with the characters, keep changing from one scene to the next.

Another chapter in the ongoing struggle between the talented Mike Figgis (Stormy Monday, Internal Affairs, Liebestraum) and studio recutters and reshooters, this intriguing but unsatisfying love story between a manic-depressive (Richard Gere at his best) and his sympathetic therapist (Lena Olin) makes memorable uses of both its west-coast settings and its cast (which also includes Anne Bancroft), but, like Liebestraum, it seems to come to us with several parts missing.

Inevitably it's a mixed bag, though the film's assurance in keeping it all coherent is at times exhilarating.

The fundamental problems with David Cronenberg's disastrous 1993 adaptation, written by Hwang himself, are twofold: the unsuitability of such a premise for film, where the actors and audience no longer share the same space, and the miscasting of Jeremy Irons as the accountant and John Lone as the diva.

Disappointingly conventional though well-made...An OK teen movie, but not a whole lot more.

There's wonderful use made of a Maine port town, and Ruben gets a dizzying thrill or two out of overhead shots, but the conceptual overload finally prevents this from coming together.

Despite some sentimentality and occasional directorial missteps, this is a respectable piece of work--evocative, very funny in spots, and obviously keenly felt. With Francis Capra, Taral Hicks, and Katherine Narducci.

As beautifully mounted as this production is, Scorsese has a way of letting the decor take over, so that Wharton's tale of societal constraints comes through only in fits and starts. But it's a noble failure.

As usual, Tarantino's sense of fun is infectious but fairly heartless.

A highly emotional epic about what it means to be both Chinese and American.

Technically speaking, this feeble effort is the ninth Pink Panther or Inspector Clouseau comedy, but only the third without Peter Sellers. Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful) does what he can as Inspector Clouseau Jr. (which isn't much, given the degree of prominence accorded to a hackneyed kidnapping plot).

If you like the early work of David Lynch you should definitely check this out; Maddin's films are every bit as beautiful and in certain respects a lot more sophisticated.

Mathis and Bullock are especially good, and Phoenix and Mulroney, playing out a jealousy-prone friendship as if they were Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms in Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, do a fair job with their roles.

Woody Allen's welcome return to straight-ahead entertainment, after 15 years of slogging through art-house hand-me-downs, happily coincided with a return to Diane Keaton as his leading lady, and she deftly steals the show.

As a children's movie with a fine sense of magic (without fantasy) and a great deal of feeling (without sentimentality), this beats the usual Disney junk hands down, and adults will find it an expert piece of storytelling.

There isn't a whole lot of Zen here, barring the opening and closing scenes with a priest, but there's plenty of lively sex, both conventional and otherwise, in this high-spirited porn romp from Hong Kong.

There's enough whimsy and Capracorn here to choke a horse, and things get even more complicated when the four dead people enter the body of Downey in turn—to help him help them. Fortunately the talents of the actors—especially Downey and Woodard—sometimes make this effective (i.e., funny or moving) in spite of all the goo.

One of the craftiest and most satisfying pieces about gender politics to come along in ages.

Though it's a good half hour too long, this belated, overblown spin-off of the 60s TV show otherwise adds up to a pretty good suspense thriller.

A very adroit and entertaining social comedy.

I found it pretty entertaining, as well as provocative in some of its comments about contemporary life.

Myers pumps out a river of inventive shtick, but it doesn't cohere or connect; he seems less a character than a comedian doing couch time on a late-night talk show.

Though it's not unlikable, John Singleton's second feature ("Boyz N the Hood" was his first) is an unholy mess in almost every respect.

Another takeout—untidily slapped into a Styrofoam container—is more like it. Aimed at less discriminating viewers, this sequel to the 1987 Stakeout, again directed by John Badham, isn't too bad if you're looking for nothing more than good-natured silliness, low comedy, gratuitous tilted angles, and protracted dog jokes.

If you don't care about such motivations, this is a pretty good thriller, though not one you're likely to remember for very long.

A smashing piece of entertainment.

Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed this, repeatedly alludes to the 1957 "An Affair to Remember" as her principal point of reference, yet at no point does she indicate any awareness of what makes that tragicomic love story sublime and this one merely cutesy.

As a truthful account of the life of Tina Turner or as a faithful adaptation of her as-told-to autobiography, I, Tina, this 1993 film can't be taken too seriously. But as a powerhouse showcase for the acting talents of Angela Bassett (who plays Turner) and Laurence Fishburne (who plays her abusive husband, Ike) and as a potent portrayal of wife beating and the emotions that surround it (in this case, Ike's professional envy and Tina's stoic acceptance of abuse), it's quite a show.

The performances of both Schwarzenegger and O'Brien are labored, the pacing uneven, and maybe only half the gags work, but there's a certain amount of creative energy and audacity mixed in with all the confusion.

Choreographically stunning like most of Woo’s work, especially before he headed west.

There's more soul to be found in any Kong close-up than in this film's overplayed reactions, which are used to instruct us what we should be feeling at any given moment. This is never boring, but I can't recall another Spielberg film that left me with a more hollow feeling.

On the other hand, the brutality and sadism it delivers at every opportunity, which we're supposed to take for granted as part of the "fun," left me feeling that any civilization that can create such an entertainment may not deserve to survive.

This shocking, violent, and unsentimental (albeit sensationalized) drama about a second-generation drug dealer (Turner) and the callous world he lives in, produced by "To Sleep With Anger's" Darin Scott, is terrifically acted.

This is a long way from the inspirations of Airplane!

Unfocused, condescending, and corny.

As in New Jack City, Van Peebles displays a distinctive visual style of tilted angles and frequent camera movement, and the script by Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane also keeps things moving, but perhaps the best sequence of all is the opening one, which features the great Woody Strode.

The movie remystifies as much as demystifies presidential politics, but an overall mood of sweetness may help one to forgive the archaic and childish aspects of the would-be analysis, which splits everyone between angels and devils.

Boiling Point essentially plays with and parodies the principle of symmetrically matching sound bites in order to create rhymes and continuities in its parallel plots.

The leads work overtime to make their characters and their relationships pungent, believable, and moving (though with regard to the rest of the cast, the movie seems less focused and confident).

With a shamelessly cliched script by Amy Holden Jones (based on a novel by Jack Engelhard) that includes a speech plagiarized from Citizen Kane, the results are only for those who can take fare like "Valley of the Dolls" with a straight face and want to see Redford play Jay Gatsby again.

Harris’s refusal to treat her heroine strictly as role model or bad example makes her portrait a lot livelier and less predictable—as well as more confusing—than the standard genre exercises most reviewers seem to prefer. What’s exciting about this movie is a lot of loose details: frank girl talk about AIDS and birth control, glancing observations about welfare lines and the advantages of a boy with a car over one with subway tokens.

This is stronger in terms of characters (male ones, that is) than in terms of story or mise en scene, but the actorskeep this pretty watchable.

A corny but sincere weeper written by Jonathan Marc Feldman, directed by Thomas Carter, and shot mainly in Prague.

Cage is the only actor allowed to do riffs on his assigned part, something he takes full advantage of; the others are stuck with their two-dimensional satirical profiles, which grow increasingly tiresome and unyielding as the comic plot predictably unfolds.

Juicy, adroit, and likable.

None of the characters ever rises beyond the level of his or her generic functions, and by the end the overall emptiness of the conception becomes fully apparent.

Enjoyably campy hokum.

Ordinarily I don't care for this kind of thing at all, but something must be said for Jackson's endless reserves of giddy energy; perhaps because this is so clearly meant to be silly, he generally avoids the calculated mean-spiritedness of more prestigious directors like Spielberg and Renny Harlin.

Considering that none of the characters is fresh or interesting, it's a commendable achievement that the quality of the storytelling alone keeps the movie watchable and likable.

A festival favorite in 1992, this flamboyant Australian crowd pleaser and first feature by Baz Luhrmann ("Moulin Rouge") struck me then as one of the more horrific and unpleasant movies I'd seen in quite some time.

It's a sure sign of how good Tomei is that she can even occasionally do something with Tom Sierchio's lachrymose script; the usually wonderful Rosie Perez, stuck with an uninteresting part, is less lucky.

Lugubrious and rather contrived... Because this whole project seems detached at times to the point of indifference—no one ever seems to be having any fun, including the filmmakers—even one's clinical interest eventually begins to evaporate.

Although I have no facts to support my impression, this erotic courtroom thriller looks as if it grew out of Madonna seeing Basic Instinct and saying, “I wanna do one of those."

In its own quiet way this is an astonishing film, both as a medical detective story that sustains taut interest over an extended running time and as a piece of cinema combining unusually resourceful acting and direction. If any movie of recent years deserves to be called inspirational--a much-abused term that one hesitates to revive apart from exceptional circumstances--this one certainly does.

Handsomely mounted and stylishly directed but otherwise rather unpleasant.

The simple fact is that in Trespass one finds perfect unity between form and content, to the point that they become indistinguishable.

Given the talent on board, there's an undeniable flair and effectiveness in certain scenes (such as Pacino dancing the tango with a stranger in a posh restaurant), but the meretricious calculation finally sticks in one's throat.

I'm usually a sucker for courtroom dramas, but Rob Reiner's highly mechanical filming by numbers of Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of his own cliched and fatuous Broadway play kept putting me to sleep.

This is the dullest and least successful adaptation of the Christmas chestnut I've ever seen, possibly because the mixture of Muppets and humans creates anomalies of scale and degrees of stylized behavior that the film tries to ignore rather than work with.

The filmmakers treat all the characters, not to mention the audience, as sitcom puppets.

An adroit piece of storytelling from Irish writer-director Neil Jordan that's ultimately less challenging to conventional notions about race and sexuality than it may at first seem... The three leads are first-rate.

The animation seeks to dazzle, but with a self-consciousness that's relatively new to the Disney studio. The results are fun and fast moving, but far from sublime.

There's an undeniable formal elegance in the way Ferrara, who coauthored the script with Zoe Lund, frames and holds certain shots, and Keitel certainly gives his all in this 1992 entry in the Raging Bull redemptive sweepstakes.

The action has been transferred from suburbia to New York City, but otherwise the filmmakers stick like glue to the formula of the original: a little boy from a well-to-do family left on his own is threatened by low-life working-class crooks whom he repeatedly foils and tortures, and upscale property values prevail.

Lee has tried hard to give this shapeless picture some visual patterning though the cluttered effect created by his mistrust of silence is even more harmful than in the past.

Francis Coppola's ambitious 1992 version brings back the novel's multiple narrators, leading to a somewhat dispersed and overcrowded story line that remains fascinating and often affecting thanks to all its visual and conceptual energy.

Duras has reportedly disowned the film, and it's not hard to sympathize with her chagrin. By stripping away the voluptuous veneer of her language and the gauze of her memory, Annaud's adaptation has reduced her artful tale to a white woman's wet dream.

Like so many post-Val Lewton horror films, this 1992 feature starts out promisingly while the plot is mainly a matter of suggestion, but gradually turns gross and obvious as the meanings become literal and unambiguous.

An admirable if frequently soporific 1992 adaptation of Norman Maclean's account of life in Missoula, Montana.

It's unclear whether this macho thriller does anything to improve the state of the world or our understanding of it, but it certainly sets off enough rockets to hold us and shake us for every one of its 99 minutes.

All-expert cast.

A bewildering mixture of fairly accomplished storytelling (I enjoyed it more than Dead Poets Society, which isn't saying a lot), awkward contrivances in the script, and lies in the overall conception so egregious they undercut any pretensions the film might have to social seriousness.

So lightweight that you're likely to start forgetting it before it's even over.