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.