You can enjoy the way they create little flashes of wit in the dialogue, which enlivens what is, after all, a formula disaster movie.

Lee uses visual imagination to lift his material into the realms of hopes and dreams.

Stephen Fry brings a depth and gentleness to the role that says what can be said about Oscar Wilde: that he was a funny and gifted idealist in a society that valued hypocrisy above honesty.

Les Miserables is like a perfectly respectable Classics Illustrated version of the Victor Hugo novel. It contains the moments of high drama, clearly outlines all the motivations, is easy to follow and lacks only passion. A story filled with outrage and idealism becomes somehow merely picturesque.

As we switched relentlessly back and forth between A and B, I found that I wasn't looking forward to either story.

The characters in these movies exist in a Twilight Zone where thousands of rounds of ammunition are fired, but no one ever gets shot unless the plot requires him to.

The movie is essentially a filmed stage play, one of those idea-plays like Shaw liked to write, in which men and women ponder their differences and complexities.

All of this promising material is dealt with on that level where characters are not quite allowed to be as perceptive and intelligent as real people might be in the same circumstances.

It's a visually effective and often scary film to watch, but the story is so leaky that we finally just give up.

What I did appreciate is that City of Angels is one of the few angel movies that knows one essential fact about angels: They are not former people. ”Angels aren't human. We were never human,” observes Seth. This is quite true. Angels are purely spiritual beings.

It shows how violent gangster movies need not be filled with stupid dialogue, nonstop action and gratuitous gore. Sonatine is pure, minimal and clean in its lines.

The Spanish Prisoner resembles Alfred Hitchcock in the way that everything takes place in full view, on sunny beaches and in brightly lit rooms, with attractive people smilingly pulling the rug out from under the hero and revealing the abyss.

It's got cheesy special effects, a muddy visual look, and characters who say obvious things in obvious ways.

Here are the two most obvious problems that sentient audiences will have with the plot. (1) Modern encryption cannot be intuitively deciphered, by rainmen or anyone else, without a key. And, (2) If a 9-year-old kid can break your code, don't kill the kid, kill the programmers.

If you like him on TV, you'll like him here, too, because it's more of the same stuff, only outdoors and with animals and shooting stars and the kinds of balloons people can go up in.

The film chronicles their criminal career in a low-key, meandering way; we're hanging out with them more than we're being told a story.

It's a superb film -- funny, insightful and very wise about the realities of political life.

It's like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir. I liked it.

Excruciatingly boring.

I wonder who the movie was made for. Smaller kids, I'm afraid, will find it both slow and depressing, especially the parts about why God allows bad things to happen.

The new Japanese film Fireworks is like a Charles Bronson "Death Wish" movie so drained of story, cliche, convention and plot that nothing is left, except pure form and impulse. Not a frame, not a word, is excess.

I could see how, with a rewrite and a better focus, this could have been a film of "Braveheart'' quality instead of basically just a costume swashbuckler.

Some may complain The Big Lebowski rushes in all directions and never ends up anywhere. That isn't the film's flaw, but its style.

These opening scenes of Love and Death on Long Island are funny and touching, and Hurt brings a dignity to Giles De'Ath that transcends any snickering amusement at his infatuation.

The result is unconvincing and disorganized. Yes, there are some spectacular stunts and slick special effects sequences. Yes, Jones is right on the money, and Snipes makes a sympathetic fugitive. But it's the story that has to pull this train, and its derailment is about as definitive as the train crash in the earlier film.

The kind of movie where you walk in, watch the first 10 minutes, know exactly where it's going, and hope devoutly that you're wrong.

A meandering movie that usually meanders in entertaining directions.

A great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like "Metropolis" and "2001: A Space Odyssey."

This is not great comedy, and Wayans doesn't find ways to build and improvise, as Carrey does.

The movie has elements of the genre and lacks only pacing and plausibility. You wait through scenes that unfold with maddening deliberation, hoping for a payoff--and when it comes, you feel cheated.

Most movies are made by males and show women enthralled by men. This movie knows better.

The screenplay reads like a collaboration between Jekyll and Hyde.

A watered-down take on the sci-fi classic "Solaris," by Stanislaw Lem, which was made into an immeasurably better film by Andrei Tarkovsky.

It's a high-gloss version of a Hong Kong action picture, made in America but observing the exuberance of a genre where surfaces are everything.

Nil by Mouth is not an unrelieved shriek of pain. There is humor in it, and tender insight.

The film is lame comedy surrounded by high-energy blues (and some pop, rock and country music).

Begins as a great movie (I was spellbound by the first 30 minutes) but ends as only a good one, and I think that's because the screenplay, by Mitch Glazer, too closely follows the romantic line.

To describe the plot is to miss the point. Fallen Angels takes the materials of the plot -- the characters and what they do -- and assembles them like a photo montage. At the end, you have impressions, not conclusions.

A movie, based on the popular Dean Koontz novel, that seems to have been made by grinding up other films and feeding them to this one.

It's all atmospheric, quirky and entertaining: the kind of neo-noir in which old-fashioned characters have updated problems.

They're so detached they can't even successfully lip-synch their own songs.

One of those movies that never convince you its stories are really happening.

Kazan writes plausible, literate dialogue and Hoblit creates a realistic world, so that the horror never seems, as it does in less ambitious thrillers, to feel at home.

Although it seems to borrow the pattern of the traditional boxing movie, the boxer here is not the usual self-destructive character, but the center of maturity and balance in a community in turmoil.

Here there is a dry wit, generated between the well-balanced performances of Fiennes and Blanchett, who seem quietly delighted to be playing two such rich characters.

The plot to this point could be the stuff of soap opera, but there's always something askew in an Alan Rudolph film, unexpected notes and touches that maintain a certain ironic distance while permitting painful flashes of human nature to burst through.

You savor every moment of Jackie Brown. Those who say it is too long have developed cinematic attention deficit disorder. I wanted these characters to live, talk, deceive and scheme for hours and hours.

There are those who will no doubt call The Postman the worst film of the year, but it's too good-hearted for that.

The movie is a satire that contains just enough realistic ballast to be teasingly plausible; like "Dr. Strangelove," it makes you laugh, and then it makes you wonder.

It provides a deep spirituality, but denies the Dalai Lama humanity; he is permitted certain little human touches, but is essentially an icon, not a man.

Mr. Magoo is transcendently bad. It soars above ordinary badness as the eagle outreaches the fly. There is not a laugh in it. Not one. I counted.

There's so much good here, in the dialogue, the performances and the observation, that the movie succeeds at many moments even while pursuing its doomed grand design.

It is flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted and spellbinding.

There's a high gloss and some nice payoffs, but not quite as much humor as usual; Bond seems to be straying from his tongue-in-cheek origins into the realm of conventional techno-thrillers.

Not very funny, and maybe couldn't have been very funny no matter what, because the pieces for comedy are not in place.

Duvall's screenplay does what great screenwriting is supposed to do, and surprises us with additional observations and revelations in every scene.

Only a few sequels have been as good as the originals; the characters especially like "Aliens'' and "The Godfather, Part II.'' As for Scream 2, it's ... well, it's about as good as the original.

This is in many ways his most revealing film, his most painful, and if it also contains more than his usual quotient of big laughs, what was it the man said? "We laugh, that we may not cry."

What is most valuable about Amistad is the way it provides faces and names for its African characters, whom the movies so often make into faceless victims.

It's the individual moments, not the payoff, that make it so effective.

It's a nine days' wonder, a geek show designed to win a weekend or two at the box office and then fade from memory.

Although the movie may appeal to kids in the lower grades, it's pretty slow, flat and dumb.

The problem is that Winterbottom has imagined both stories and several others, and tells them in a style designed to feel as if reality has been caught on the fly.

This is one of the best films of the year, an unflinching lament for the human condition.

Picks and chooses cleverly, skipping blithely past the entire Russian Revolution but lingering on mad monks, green goblins, storms at sea, train wrecks and youthful romance.

Clint Eastwood's film is a determined attempt to be faithful to the book's spirit, but something ineffable is lost just by turning on the camera: Nothing we see can be as amazing as what we've imagined.

The Rainmaker, unlike most Grisham films, doesn't have to drag a high-paid superstar around and give him all the best lines. DeVito's role is in the fading tradition of the star character actor.

The Jackal, on the other hand, impressed me with its absurdity. There was scarcely a second I could take seriously.

Most dances are for people who are falling in love. The tango is a dance for those who have survived it, and are still a little angry about having their hearts so mishandled. The Tango Lesson is a movie for people who understand that difference.

Faithfully represents Heinlein's militarism, his Big Brother state, and a value system in which the highest good is to kill a friend before the Bugs can eat him. The underlying ideas are the most interesting aspect of the film.

In The Wings of the Dove, there is a fascination in the way smart people try to figure one another out. The film is acted with great tenderness.

There are many moments here that are very funny, but the film as a whole is a bit too long.

All of these moments unfold in a film of astonishing maturity and confidence; Eve's Bayou, one of the very best films of the year, is the debut of its writer and director, Kasi Lemmons.

Mad City might have been more fun if it had added that extra spin--if it had attacked the audience as well as the perpetrators. As it is, it's too predictable.

What makes Sick bearable is the saving grace of humor. Apart from the pain he was born with and the pain he heaped on top of it, Bob Flanagan was a wry, witty, funny man who saw the irony of his own situation.

Any plot discipline (necessary so that we care about some characters and not the others) has been lost in an orgy of special effects and general mayhem.

This is one of the smartest and most provocative of science fiction films, a thriller with ideas.

The film expends enormous energy to tell a story that is tedious and contrived.

The best shot in this film is the first one. Not a good sign.

It is not a serious film about its subject, nor is it quite a dark comedy, despite some of Pacino's good lines. The epilogue, indeed, cheats in a way I thought had been left behind in grade school. And yet there are splendid moments.

The sideshows in Gummo offer no particular form -- or even formlessness -- despite the visual momentum created by Jean Yves Escoffier's arresting camera work. [6 March 1998, p.40]

I liked this movie a lot - not just for Bacon and Renfro, but also for the work of the wonderfully-named Calista Flockhart, as the girl who dates Karchy.

Has the quality of many great films, in that it always seems alive.

When the film was over I was not particularly pleased that I had seen it; it was mostly behavior and contrivance. While it was running, I was not bored.

Seven Years in Tibet is an ambitious and beautiful movie with much to interest the patient viewer, but it makes the common mistake of many films about travelers and explorers: It is more concerned with their adventures than with what they discover.

It's all shot in muddy earth tones, on grainy Super 8 film, Hi Fi 8 video and 16-mm. If you seek the origin of the grunge look, seek no further: Young, in his floppy plaid shirts and baggy shorts, looks like a shipwrecked lumberjack. His fellow band members, Billy Talbot, Poncho Sampedro and Ralph Molina, exude vibes that would strike terror into the heart of an unarmed convenience store clerk.

For most of the film, I sat in quiet amazement: I was witnessing a complex, well-crafted, clearly told story, in a screenplay that moved well and had dialogue that sounded colorful without resembling a Quentin Tarantino clone. [8 Oct 1997, p.47]

David Klass, the screenwriter, gives Freeman and Judd more specific dialogue than is usual in thrillers; they sound as if they might actually be talking with each other and not simply advancing plot points.

This is a repetitive, pointless exercise in genre filmmaking--the kind of movie where you distract yourself by making a list of the sources.

What we sense after the film is that the natural sources of pleasure have been replaced with higher-octane substitutes, which have burnt out the ability to feel joy.

It looks great. The technical credits are impeccable, and Clooney and Kidman negotiate assorted dangers skillfully. But it's mostly spare parts from other thrillers.

George Tillman says Soul Food is based in part on his own family, and I believe him, because he seems to know the characters so well; by the film's end, so do we.

The Edge is like a wilderness adventure movie written by David Mamet, which is not surprising, since it was written by Mamet. It's subtly funny in the way it toys with the cliches of the genre.

Seductive and beautiful, cynical and twisted, and one of the best films of the year.

The result is one of the jollier comedies of the year, a movie so mainstream that you can almost watch it backing away from confrontation, a film aimed primarily at a middle-American heterosexual audience.

Claire Denis, born in French Africa, is a director who seems drawn to stories about characters who want to build families out of unconventional elements. With Nenette et Boni, she makes a more delicate film. She feels affection for the characters, especially Boni, and is very familiar with them. Maybe that's why she feels free to tell the story so indirectly.

Going All the Way is a deeper, cleverer film than it first seems.

The movie's thriller elements are given an additional gloss by the skill of the technical credits, and the wicked wit of the dialogue.