Despite the elements I could have done without, the movie is often very funny, and a lot of the credit goes to Del Toro, who creates a slow-talking, lumbering character who's quite unlike his image in "Usual Suspects."

She's So Lovely does not depict choices most audiences will condone, or even understand, but the film is not boring, and has the dread hypnotic appeal of a slowly developing traffic accident (in which we think there will probably be no fatalities).

Duke and his screenwriter, Chris Brancato, don't make Hoodlum into a violent action film, though it has its bloody shoot-outs, but into more of a character study.

The training sequences are as they have to be: incredible rigors, survived by O'Neil. They are good cinema because Ridley Scott, the director, brings a documentary attention to them, and because Demi Moore, having bitten off a great deal here, proves she can chew it.

But Mimic is superior to most of its cousins, and has been stylishly directed by Guillermo Del Toro, whose visual sense adds a certain texture that makes everything scarier and more effective.

The two women are very beautiful, gentle and sad together, and the movie is all but stolen by Chowdhry, as the servant who lurks constantly in the background providing, with his very body language, a comic running commentary.

I was surprised to find myself seduced by the film’s simple, sweet story, and amused by the sly indications that the Cleavers don’t live in the 1950s anymore.

The characters are all over the map, there are too many unclear story threads, our sympathies are confused, and there's an unconvincing showdown in which the story's lovingly developed ambiguities are lost.

The screenplay creates a sense of foreboding and afterboding, but no actual boding.

The director, Peter Cattaneo, takes material that could would be at home in a sex comedy, and gives it gravity because of the desperation of the characters; we glimpse the home life of these men, who have literally been put on the shelf, and we see the wound to their pride.

Unfortunately, the parts of the movie that are truly good are buried beneath the deadening layers of thriller cliches and an unconvincing love story.

What is the use of a film like this? It inspires reflection... Mike Leigh's films realize that for most people, most days, life consists of the routine of earning a living, broken by fleeting thoughts of where our efforts will someday take us--financially, romantically, spiritually or even geographically. We never arrive in most of those places, but the mental images are what keep us trying.

What is remarkable is how realistic the story is.

It's a shame the plot is so contrived, because parts of this movie are really pretty good.

It walks and talks like a big budget horror film, heavy on special effects and pitched at the teenage audience, and maybe that's how it will be received. But it's more impressive if you ignore the genre and just look at what's on the screen.

At the end, I know, Trevor has come unhinged. I accept that and believe it. But it feels like the movie lost the nerve of its original story impulse and sought safety in elements borrowed from thrillers. Its destination doesn't have much to do with how it got there.

A fairly competent recycling of familiar ingredients, given an additional interest because of Harrison Ford's personal appeal.

It's a kid movie, plain and simple. It didn't do much for me, but I am prepared to predict that its target audience will have a good time. I'm giving it two stars. If I were 8, I might give it more.

Star Maps is not, to be sure, boring. But it is wildly unfocused.

A love story about two strong-willed people who find exhilaration in testing each other. It is not about sexual love, or even romantic love, really, but about that kind of love based on challenge and fascination.

A movie with a lot of funny one-liners, but no place to go with them.

A movie that is sort of funny some of the time and then occasionally hilarious.

Sagan's novel Contact provides the inspiration for Robert Zemeckis' new film, which tells the smartest and most absorbing story about extraterrestrial intelligence since "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

There is mostly sadness and regret at the surface in 4 Little Girls, but there is anger in the depths, as there should be.

When the plot finally does click in, it slows down the trajectory a little, but not fatally.

The high-tech stuff is flawlessly done, but the intriguing elements of the movie involve the performances.

The wonder is that it took Disney so long to get to the gods of Greek mythology. Hercules jumps into the ancient legends feet-first, cheerfully tossing out what won't fit and combining what's left into a new look and a lighthearted style.

Batman & Robin, like the first three films in the series, is wonderful to look at, and has nothing authentic at its core.

One of the pleasures of Ronald Bass' screenplay is the way it subverts the usual comic formulas that would fuel a plot like this.

Movies like this embrace goofiness with an almost sensual pleasure.

Nunez has a gift for finding the essence, the soul, of his actors.

This is a movie that knows it is absurd, and does little to deny it.

The Pillow Book, starring Vivian Wu, is a seductive and elegant story.

It is always a problem in a love story when the rival seems more interesting than the hero, and that's what happens here.

Steven Spielberg, a gifted filmmaker, should have reimagined the material, should have seen it through the eyes of someone looking at dinosaurs, rather than through the eyes of someone looking at a box-office sequel.

Brassed Off is a sweet film with a lot of anger at its core.

Yet Love! Valour! Compassion! has power and insight, and perhaps what makes it strong is its disinterest in technical experiments: It is about characters and dialogue, expressed through good acting--the very definition of the "well-made play."

This movie is knowledgeable about the city and the people who make accommodations with it.

La Promesse was written and directed by the brother duo of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who were previously known as documentary makers. They bring an unblinking realism to the story, but aren't limited by documentary-style objectivity. They tap into the interior lives of the characters with tremendous subtlety and originality. [22 Aug. 1997, p.36]

Depp is one of the very best of America's young actors, but "The Brave" is a lightweight and unbelievable story that takes itself with terminal seriousness. [14 May 1997, p.45]

I would not have missed seeing this film, and I recommend it for its richness of imagery. But at 127 minutes, which seems a reasonable length, it plays long.

A brainless feature-length sitcom with too much sit and no com.

For all the outlandish style and heaps of energy in Nowhere, Araki's most expensive and mainstream film, it can be reduced to one big pessimistic shriek. How do you spell Life is a bummer? Apparently, by never shutting up. [06 June 1997, p.32]

A funny movie that only gets funnier the more familiar you are with the James Bond movies, all the Bond clones and countless other 1960s films.

Breakdown is a fine thriller, and its ending is unworthy of it.

It is enormously ambitious -- maybe too much so, since it ranges so widely between styles and strategies that it distracts from its own flow.

If the rare vitality and wit of Irma Vep weren't enough to shake jaded viewers in their seats, its climactic blast of optically enhanced images will. The only new world Assayas is prepared to accept is a brave one. In and out of film, that's the only kind to pursue. [13 June 1997, p.32]

It has charm, a sly intelligence, and the courage to go for special effects sequences.

This is a surprisingly cheesy disaster epic.

Pesci has a lot of scenes that strike just the right note.

A lot of Murder at 1600 is well -done. Characters are introduced vividly,; there's a sense of realism in the White House scenes, and some of the dialogue by Wayne Beach and David Hodgin hits a nice ironic note. But then the movie kicks into auto - pilot. The last third of the film is a ready-made action movie plug-in.

The screenplay by Jim McGlynn, which plays a little like something Eastwood might have made, is subtle and observant; there aren't big plot points, but lots of little ones, and the plot allows us the delight of figuring out the scams. [25 Apr 1997]

McHale's Navy is an astonishingly bad film. Even if you never saw the early '60s TV series on which it is loosely based, you'll hate it. [18 Apr 1997, p.39]

The film takes the form but not the feel of a comic thriller. It's quirkier than that.

A slick, scary, funny Creature Feature, beautifully photographed and splendidly acted in high adventure style.

One of the more completely entertaining movies I've seen in a while--a well-crafted character study that, like a Hollywood movie with a skillful script, manipulates us but makes us like it.

But what the movie lacks is a story arc to pull us through.

While the surface of his film sparkles with sharp, ironic dialogue, deeper issues are forming, and Chasing Amy develops into a film of touching insights.

The picture is haunted by a story problem: It isn't about anything but itself. There's no sense of life going on in the corners of the frame.

Compared with the sensational stunts and special effects in the Bond series, The Saint seems positively leisurely. The fight scenes go on too long and are not interesting, the villains aren't single-minded enough, and the Saint seems more like a disguise fetishist than a formidable international operative.

And Dennis Rodman? He does a splendid job of playing a character who seems in every respect to be Dennis Rodman. He seems at home on the screen. He's confident, and in action scenes he'll occasionally do a version of the high-spirited hop-skip-and- jump he sometimes does on the court. He looks like he's having fun, and that's crucial for a movie actor. His agent should have told him, though, that if you can't be the hero, be the villain. That's always a better role than the best friend.

There's a lot of potential charm here, but the director, Emma-Kate Croghan, is so distracted by stylistic quirks that the characters are forever being upstaged by the shots they're in.

The moral reasoning in the film is so confusing that only by completely sidestepping it can the plot work at all.

Cats Don't Dance is not compelling and it's not a breakthrough, but on its own terms, it works well. Whether this will appeal to kids is debatable; the story involves a time and a subject they're not much interested in. But the songs by Randy Newman are catchy, the look is bright, the spirits are high and fans of Hollywood's golden age might find it engaging.

Selena succeeds, through Lopez's performance, in evoking the magic of a sweet and talented young woman.

I am gradually developing a suspicion, or perhaps it is a fear, that Jim Carrey is growing on me. Am I becoming a fan? In Liar Liar he works tirelessly, inundating us with manic comic energy.

Cronenberg has made a movie that is pornographic in form, but not in result.

Maborosi is one of those valuable films where you have to actively place yourself in the character's mind. There are times when we do not know what she is thinking, but we are inspired with an active sympathy. We want to understand. Well, so does she.

Rather than trusting in the verbal powers of this master storyteller, who requires only a desk to sit behind, Soderbergh subjects him to light-show effects, tilted camera angles and projected backdrops -- urban setting, forest, eyeball blowup. [1 August 1997, p.27]

The film, directed by Daniel Sullivan, is brave, I think, to offer us a complicated scenario without an easy moral compass.

Many love stories contrive to get their characters together at the end. This one contrives, not to keep them apart, but to bring them to a bittersweet awareness that is above simple love. Some audience members would probably prefer a romantic embrace in the sunset, as the music swells. But "Love Jones'' is too smart for that.

Howard Stern has been accused of a lot of things, but he has never been accused of being dumb. With Private Parts, his surprisingly sweet new movie, he makes a canny career move: Here is radio's bad boy walking the finest of lines between enough and too much.

The only reason I am rating this movie at one star while Little Indian, Big City received zero stars is that Jungle 2 Jungle is too mediocre to deserve zero stars. It doesn't achieve truly awful badness, but is sort of a black hole for the attention span, sending us spiraling down into nothingness.

The outcome of this journey is going to be predictable and disappointing. Mottola does his best to make the trip itself enjoyable.

The violence in this movie is gruesome (a scene involving the disposal of bodies is particularly graphic). But the movie has many human qualities and contains what will be remembered as one of Pacino's finest scenes.

Movies like Hard Eight remind me of what original, compelling characters the movies can sometimes give us.

Here is a movie so absorbing, so atmospheric, so suspenseful and so dumb, that it proves my point: The subject matter doesn't matter in a movie nearly as much as mood, tone and style.

Although the movie is a wall-to-wall exercise in bad taste, it somehow retains a certain innocence; it challenges and sometimes shocks, but for me at least it didn't offend, because its motives were so obviously good-hearted.

It's a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences.

But if the movie were simply the story of this event, it would be no more than a sad record. What makes it more is the way it shows how racism breeds and feeds, and is taught by father to son.

A tight, taut thriller with a twist.

A sweet, entertaining retread of an ancient formula, in which opposites attract despite all the forces arrayed to push them apart.

The plot of Touch sounds like a comedy. But the experience of seeing the film is subduing; the movie plays in a muted key.

The movie is dark, intense and disturbing.

Dante's Peak, written by Leslie Bohem and directed by Roger Donaldson, follows the disaster formula so faithfully that if you walk in while the movie is in progress, you can estimate how long the story has to run. That it is skillful is a tribute to the filmmakers.

Hotel de Love is a pleasant and sometimes funny film, without being completely satisfying.

The movie doesn't bludgeon us with gags. It proceeds with a certain comic relentlessness from setup to payoff, and its deliberation is part of the fun.

Doesn't quite click.

What sets Prefontaine aside from most sports movies is that it's not about winning the big race. It's about the life of a runner.

Brooks, who co-wrote (with Monica Johnson) and directed as well as stars, is much too smart to settle for the obvious gags and payoffs. All of his films depend on closely observed behavior and language, on the ways language can refuse to let us communicate, no matter how obsessively we try to nail things down. In his scenes with Reynolds, they are told quietly, conversationally; they're not pounding out punch lines, and that's why the dialogue is so funny.

Spacey does what can be done with the material, but it never achieves takeoff velocity.

The movie works well on its chosen level. The big action scenes are cleverly staged and Eddie Murphy is back on his game again, with a high-energy performance and crisp dialogue.

All of this is actually a lot of fun, if you like special effects and gore.

It closes a chapter in history, but scarcely brings it to life.

Love proves she is not a rock star pretending to act, but a true actress, and Harrelson matches her with his portrait of a man who has one thing on his mind, and never changes it.

But Parker's visuals enliven the music, and Madonna and Banderas bring it passion. By the end of the film we feel like we've had our money's worth, and we're sure Evita has.

Michael doesn't set up big drama or punch up big moments. It ambles.

Thieves doesn't have the Hollywood kind of ending, where everything is sorted out by who gets shot. It is about the people, not their plot. It is about how the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and the grandsons.