Brooks's sweetness, innocence, and boundless love of the infantile inform everything from the brassy production numbers (capped by an homage to Jailhouse Rock) to the final credits.

Mike White contributed to the script, and though he shares with the Hesses an innocence that can be both sweet and slightly grotesque (e.g., Chuck and Buck), his influence is most evident here in the conventional plotting.

The lead performances, by Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen as two college friends who become competing novelists in later life, have the Cukor audacity without the Cukor grace, and his visual expressiveness is in evidence only sporadically. Yet the film stays in the mind for its dark asides on aging, loneliness, and the troubling survival of sexual needs.

The mixture of sincerity and sitcom phoniness is bewildering at times, but on some level, I guess, the film works.

A delightful script and an equally delightful performance by Collins.

The hinted romance, featuring Aaliyah, makes for some decent drama and some fine comedy.

Only Depp and Ray Liotta (as Jung's father) manage to animate this tired formula.

Inspired, elaborately plotted, and unusually satisfying variable-speed chase comedy.

Rises only slightly above the level of a Harlequin romance.

Slapdash but good-natured romantic comedy.

For me, part of the fun of Snake Eyes is the genuine satisfaction of seeing Brian De Palma finally arriving at his own level.

While Cazeneuve's story is about gay love, it also charts universal truths about adolescent romance and high school politics with great aplomb.

The ugly, aggressive, proliferating effects were all I could begin to contend with, and trying to keep interested in them was like trying to remain interested in a loudmouth shouting in my ear.

Espinosa never conveys any sort of perspective on the material, as Scott does through his obsessive attention to production detail; the stylization feels empty, distracting from whatever simple pleasures the routine plot (involving double agents and stolen microchips) might have delivered.

The obsessive conjunction of lesbian sex and flowing blood suggests a deep-seated misogyny, but neither this nor any other theme is registered with enough clarity to offend.

Modestly engaging despite several improbable, cornball moments.

Some of the gags here are funny, but they aren't executed effectively enough to score.

More witty than laugh-out-loud funny.

No real film lover could help but muster some affection for this bedraggled action movie, shot in an extremely unpicturesque Yugoslavia on a budget that must number in the hundreds of dollars. The lead, Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas, is clearly a stranger to the thespian arts, but it's pointless to single him out in a cast that seems to have been assembled from all the expatriate American used-car salesmen living on the Adriatic coast.

Charming, if a bit claustrophobic.

Gene Kelly directed, a long way from Terpsichore apparently, though not, alas, from the Thanksgiving turkey.

An innocuous, passably entertaining effects extravaganza.

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.

Proves that the Disney people can sell just about anything--including a misogynistic celebration of big business and prostitution.

Despite some of the sentimentality that is also Woo's stock-in-trade, I was moved and absorbed throughout.

Gardos -- treats it competently, though without much freshness or imagination.

The documentary bravely risks giving Zizek its own one-way hug.

Moodysson’s meticulous attention to surfaces allows him to draw a stark contrast between the Americans’ affluence and the Asians’ poverty, but his final observation--that somehow the rich will muddle through--is hardly a bold statement.