Not just a cute romp but an involving story that has something to say.

Has a kind of calm, sneaky self-confidence that allows it to take us down a strange path, intriguingly.

A sly little comic treasure.

After seeing Gere and Roberts play much smarter people (even in romantic comedies), it is painful to see them dumbed down here. The screenplay is so sluggish, they're like Derby winners made to carry extra weight.

In its quiet, dark, claustrophobic way, this is one of the best films of the year.

After slogging through the predictability of countless would-be action thrillers, I admired the sheer professionalism of this one, which doesn't transcend its genre, but at least honors it.

The plot was an arbitrary concoction.

The script must have been a funny read. It's the movie that somehow never achieves takeoff speed.

The story is a mess, but for long periods of time that hardly matters. It's beside the point, as we enter one of the most striking spaces I've ever seen in a film.

Feels a little uncertain, as if it's moving from present to past under the demands of a screenplay rather than because it really feels that way. But the growing-up stuff is kind of wonderful.

The reconciliation at the end of the film is the one scene that doesn't work; a film that intrigues us because of its loose ends shouldn't try to tidy up.

At a time when digital techniques can show us almost anything, The Blair Witch Project is a reminder that what really scares us is the stuff we can't see.

The movie is pretty bad, all right. But it has a certain charm. It's so completely wrong-headed from beginning to end that it develops a doomed fascination.

Maybe Muppets from Space is just not very good, and they'll make a comeback. I hope so. Because I just don't seem to care much anymore. Sorry, Miss Piggy. Really sorry.

A conspiracy thriller that begins well and makes good points, but it flies off the rails in the last 30 minutes.

It is not inspired, but it's cheerful and hard-working and sometimes funny, and--here's the important thing--it's not mean.

Lee has a wealth of material here, and the film tumbles through it with exuberance.

All concept and no content.

I laughed. I did not always feel proud of myself while I was laughing, however.

Big Daddy should be reported to the child welfare office.

I saw Tarzan once, and went to see it again. This kind of bright, colorful, hyperkinetic animation is a visual exhilaration.

A well-made thriller with a lot of good acting, but the death of Elisabeth Campbell is so unnecessarily graphic and gruesome that by the end I felt sort of unclean.

I would not want to see a sequel to the film, and at 81 minutes it isn't a second too short, but what it does, it does cheerfully, with great energy, and very well.

The two leading men, Northam and Everett, are smooth and charming.

There really is a little something here for everyone: music and culture, politics and passion, crime and intrigue, history and even the backstage intrigue of the auction business.

There is an underlying likability to Austin Powers that sort of carries us through the movie.

If there's anything worse than a movie hammered together out of pieces of bad screenplays, it's a movie made from the scraps of good ones.

It is a touching story, and the musicians (some over 90 years old) still have fire and grace onstage, but, man, does the style of this documentary get in the way.

Sayles has started with a domestic comedy, and led us unswervingly into the heart of darkness.

The movie is bright, the dialogue has wit and intelligence, and Roberts and Grant are very easy to like. By the end, as much as we're aware of the ancient story machinery groaning away below deck, we're smiling.

Not all of it works, but you play along, because it's rare to find a film this ambitious.

An astonishing achievement in imaginative filmmaking.

It is an enchanted folly suggesting that romance is a matter of chance, since love is blind; at the right moment we are likely to fall in love with the first person our eyes light upon.

The movie seemed the stuff of anecdote, not drama, and as the alleged protagonist, Luca/Franco is too young much of the time to play more than a bystander's role.

Kore-eda, with this film and the 1997 masterpiece "Maborosi," has earned the right to be considered with Kurosawa, Bergman and other great humanists of the cinema. His films embrace the mystery of life, and encourage us to think about why we are here, and what makes us truly happy.

There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased.

Exhibiting high spirits and a crazed comic energy. It doesn't quite work, but it goes down swinging--with a disembodied hand.

The very embodiment of a star vehicle: a movie with a preposterous plot, exotic locations, absurd action sequences, and so much chemistry between attractive actors that we don't care.

Sixty seconds of wondering if someone is about to kiss you is more entertaining than 60 minutes of kissing. By understanding that, Mamet is able to deliver a G-rated film that is largely about adult sexuality.

As loaded with special effects as "The Matrix,'' but they're on a different scale. Many of his best effects are gooey, indescribable organic things, and some of the most memorable scenes involve characters eating things that surgeons handle with gloves on.

Alexander Payne is a director whose satire is omnidirectional. He doesn't choose an easy target and march on it. He stands in the middle of his story and attacks on all directions.

In asking us to believe David Spade as a romantic lead, it miscalculates beyond all reason.

The movie is worth seeing, for the good stuff. I'm recommending it because of the performances and the details in the air-traffic control center.

[Lillard's] performance dominates the film, and he does a subtle, tricky job of being both an obnoxious punk and a kid in search of his direction in life. He's very good.

The movie is ribald, funny and sometimes sweet, and well acted by Murphy, Lawrence and a strong supporting cast.

An entertaining, clever black comedy that takes place entirely in Tarantino-land.

The movie's screenplay is contrived and not blindingly original, but Barrymore illuminates it with sunniness, and creates a lovable character

There are a lot of movies about escaping from the middle class, but Metroland is one of the few about escaping into it.

Jogs doggedly on the treadmill of comedy, working up a sweat but not getting much of anywhere.

Has no ragged edges or bothersome detours, and flows from surprise to delight. At the end, when just desserts are handed out, it arrives at a kind of perfection.

It's an ambitious undertaking, this mix of Mamet and Godard, and it is to Nolan's credit that he takes it on so early in his cinematic career. It doesn't completely click, but there is plenty in this 70-minute black-and-white exercise to keep us involved.

And yet ... gee, the movie is charming, despite its exhausted wheeze of an ancient recycled plot idea.

A visually dazzling cyberadventure, full of kinetic excitement, but it retreats to formula just when it's getting interesting.

The movie's problem is that it loads the casting in a way that tilts the movie in the direction of a Harlequin romance.

I enjoyed a lot of the movie in a relaxed sort of fashion; it's not essential or original in the way "The Truman Show'' was, and it hasn't done any really hard thinking about the ways we interact with TV.

Has an intriguing cast, a director who knows how to use his camera and a lot of sly humor. Shame about the story. When you see this many of the right elements in a lame movie, you wonder how close they came to making a better one.

Clever in the way it avoids most of the cliches of the vampire movie by using cannibalism, and most of the cliches of the cannibal movie by using vampirism. It serves both dishes with new sauces.

Leads us down the garden path of romance, only to abandon us by the compost heap of uplifting endings. And it's not even clever enough to give us the right happy ending. It gives us the wrong happy ending.

Wickedly effective thriller.

Seemed kind of stuffy.

A painfully stolid movie that lumbers past emotional issues like a wrestler in a cafeteria line, putting a little of everything on his plate.

Trekkies talk at length about how the world would be a saner and more peaceful place if the "Star Trek" philosophy ruled our lives. No doubt it would be a lot more entertaining, too, especially during root canals.

These actors, alas, are at the service of a submoronic script and special effects that look like a video game writ large.

Bad films are easy to make, but a film as unpleasant as Baby Geniuses' achieves a kind of grandeur.

The original "Carrie'' worked because it was a skillful teenage drama grafted onto a horror ending. Also, of course, because De Palma and his star, Sissy Spacek, made the story convincing. The Rage: Carrie 2 is more like a shadow.

The director is James Foley, who is obviously not right for this material.

The comedy here isn't all on the surface, and Viterelli [the bodyguard Jelly] is one reason why.

It crash-lands with an ending of soppy moralizing, but until the end, it's smart and merciless in the tradition of the original story.

[It's] like Tarantino crossed with the Marx Brothers, if Groucho had been into chopping off fingers...Fun, in a slapdash way; it has an exuberance, and in a time when movies follow formulas like zombies, it's alive.

Dreadful...Maybe another 200 cigarettes would have helped; coughing would be better than some of this dialogue.

The film has the obnoxious tone of a boring home movie narrated by a guy shouting in your ear.

I cannot imagine a Hollywood movie like this. Audiences would be baffled.

It is a real film. Not a slick exploitation exercise with all the trappings of depravity but none of the consequences.

Shameless in its use of mental retardation as a gimmick, a prop and a plot device. Anyone with any knowledge of retardation is likely to find the film offensive.

The movie's dialogue is smart. It doesn't just chug along making plot points.

One of the best elements of the movie is in breaking free, he is respecting his father. This movie has deep values.

A slick production of a lame script, which kills time for most of its middle half-hour. If anyone in the plot had the slightest intelligence, the story would implode.

The movie is funny and entertaining in all the usual ways, yes, but I was grateful that it tried for more: that it was actually about something, that it had an original premise, that it used satire and irony and had sly undercurrents.

The climactic events are shameless, contrived, and wildly out of tune with the rest of the story. To saddle Costner, Penn and Newman with such goofy melodrama is like hiring Fred Astaire and strapping a tractor on his back.

My Favorite Martian is slapstick and silliness, wild sight gags and a hyped-up acting style. The Marx Brothers would have been at home here. The movie is clever in its visuals, labored in its audios, and noisy enough to entertain kids.

Old-fashioned and obvious, yes, like a featherweight comedy from the 1950s. But that's the charm.

There is much cleverness and ingenuity in Payback, but Mel Gibson is the key. The movie wouldn't work with an actor who was heavy on his feet, or was too sincere about the material.

To give the movie credit, it's as bored with the underlying plot as we are. Even the prom queen election is only a backdrop for more interesting material, as She's All That explores differences in class and style, and peppers its screenplay with very funny little moments.

Children of Heaven is very nearly a perfect movie for children, and of course that means adults will like it, too.

It's easy to like the movie because we like the actors in it, and because the movie makes it easy on us and has charming moments. But it feels too much like an exercise. It's yuppie lite--affluent, articulate people who, except for those who are ill, have problems that are almost pleasant.

Its moments of fascination and its good performances are mired in the morass of romance and melodrama that surrounds it.

"Deep Rising" was one of the worst movies of 1998. Virus is easily worse.

A movie that doesn't buy into all the tenets of our national sports religion; the subtext is that winning isn't everything.

The movie's schizophrenia keeps it from greatness (this film has no firm idea of what it is about), but doesn't make it bad. It is, in fact, sort of fascinating: a film in the act of becoming, a field trial, an experiment in which a dreamy poet meditates on stark reality.

Nolte and Coburn are magnificent in this film, which is like an expiation or amends for abusive men. It is revealing to watch them in their scenes together--to see how they're able to use physical presence to sketch the history of a relationship.

The movie makes no attempt to soften the material or make it comforting through the cliches of melodrama.

Civil Action is like John Grisham for grownups.

The skill of the actors, who invest their characters with small touches of humanity, is useful in distracting us from the emotional manipulations, but it's like they're brightening separate rooms of a haunted house.

Made me want to spray the screen with Lysol. This movie is shameless. It's not merely a tearjerker. It extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anesthesia.

Mighty Joe Young is not meek and harmless; it's a full-blooded action picture, all right, but with a certain warmth and humor instead of a scorched-earth approach. You feel good at the end, instead of merely relieved.

Angelou's first-time direction stays out of its own way; she doesn't call attention to herself with unnecessary visual touches, but focuses on the business at hand.

The Theory of Flying is actually fairly enjoyable. At least it doesn't drown its message in syrup and cornball sentiment.

The appeal of You've Got Mail is as old as love and as new as the Web.