Those who deplore Beavis and Butt-Head are confusing the messengers with the message.

This is not a great comedy and will be soon forgotten, but it has nice moments.

Pfeiffer looks, acts and sounds wonderful throughout all of this, and George Clooney is perfectly serviceable as a romantic lead, sort of a Mel Gibson lite. I liked them. I wanted them to get together. I wanted them to live happily ever after. The sooner the better.

The famous faces make it difficult, at first, to sink into the story, but eventually we do; the characters become so convincing that even if we're aware of Keaton and Streep, it's as if these events are happening to them.

Huston films the horrifying assault scenes to provoke disgust, outrage, fear and pity. She doesn't flinch. She refuses to soften the situation. Her Carolina is painful to watch. It's meant to be. [13 Dec 1996, p.65nc]

There are a couple of moments in Jerry Maguire when you want to hug yourself with delight. Both of those moments involve the actress Renee Zellweger, whose lovability is one of the key elements in a movie that starts out looking cynical and quickly becomes a heartwarmer.

Mars Attacks! has the look and feel of a schlocky 1950s science-fiction movie, and if it's not as bad as a Wood film, that's not a plus: A movie like this should be a lot better, or a lot worse.

A satire with the reckless courage to take on both sides in the abortion debate.

Daylight is the cinematic equivalent of a golden oldies station, where you never encounter anything you haven't grown to love over the years.

There is pain, humor, irony and sweetness in the character, and a voice and manner so distinctive, he is the most memorable movie character I've seen in a long time.

What's funny in cartoons is not always funny in live action, and some of the dunkings in unsavory substances left me less than amused.

The Crucible is a drama of ideas, but they seem laid on top of the material, not organically part of it.

Certainly the best in its technical credits, and among the best in the ingenuity of its plot.

I liked a lot of the movie, which is genial and has a lot of energy, but I was sort of depressed by its relentlessly materialistic view of Christmas, and by the choice to go with action and (mild) violence over dialogue and plot.

What is fascinating about Ridicule is that so much depends on language, and so little is really said.

The fact that David Helfgott lived the outlines of these events--that he triumphed, that he fell, that he came slowly back--adds an enormous weight of meaning to the film.

The kind of movie you can see twice--first for the questions, the second time for the answers.

Space Jam is a happy marriage of good ideas--three films for the price of one, giving us a comic treatment of the career adventures of Michael Jordan, crossed with a Looney Tunes cartoon and some showbiz warfare.

Not many movies like this get made, because not many filmmakers are so bold, angry and defiant.

The movie would have benefitted from a tight rewrite (it is too ambitious in including plot threads it doesn't have time to deal with), but Gibson's strong central performance speeds it along.

This project is dead in the water. Read the book. Better still, read "Victory."

Set It Off is advertised as a thriller about four black women who rob banks. But it's a lot more than that. It creates a portrait of the lives of these women that's so observant and informed; it's like “Waiting to Exhale” with a strong jolt of reality.

I have never seen anything remotely approaching the mess that the new punk version of "Romeo & Juliet" makes of Shakespeare's tragedy.

They say an elephant never forgets, which means that I have an enormous advantage over Tai, who plays Vera, because I plan to forget this movie as soon as convenient.

The movie makes two mistakes: (1) It isn't very funny, and (2) it makes the crucial error of taking its story seriously and angling for a happy ending.

It is a new documentary of a past event, recapturing the electricity generated by Muhammad Ali in his prime.

Unfortunately, there's otherwise not much meat to King's Thinner.

The movie is sweet, funny, observant and goofy with a small ``g,'' which means you don't get paid, but at least you don't have to wear the suit.

As entertainment, the movie functions successfully. But I don't believe the story is true--not true to the facts, and not true to the morality it pretends to be about.

Together [Christopher Eccleston, Rachel Griffiths and Kate Winslet] stake a difficult story and make it into a haunting film.

What makes Get on the Bus extraordinary is the truth and feeling that go into its episodes. Spike Lee and his actors face one hard truth after another, in scenes of great power.

The films portray the Klan as criminal, racist and anonymous, but those have always been its selling points; it is not portrayed as boring and stupid.

The movie moves confidently when it focuses on Collins and his best friend and co-strategist Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn). But it falters with the unnecessary character of Kitty Kiernan (Julia Roberts), who is in love with both men, and they with her.

I liked it in the same way I might like an arcade game: It holds your attention until you run out of quarters, and then you wander away without giving it another thought.

If anybody ever wrote a Field Guide to Alcoholics, with descriptions of their appearance, sexual behavior and habitats, there would be a full-color portrait on the cover of Tommy, the hero of Trees Lounge.

“The Ghost and the Darkness is an African adventure that makes the Tarzan movies look subtle and realistic. It lacks even the usual charm of being so bad it's funny. It's just bad. Not funny. No, wait . . . there is one funny moment.

The movie is a work of art and whimsy as much as one of science.

It's pure cinema, spread over several genres. It's a caper movie, a gangster movie, a sex movie and a slapstick comedy.

The movie may be inconsequential, but in some ways that's a strength. Without hauling in a lot of deep meanings, it remembers with great warmth a time and a place.

Aside from some fancy handiwork with a combination credit card/switchblade, Seagal appears stiff and arthritic during his karate scenes, lending worrisome credence to the notion that Seagal couldn't fight his way out of the Wrigley Field bleachers. [08 Oct 1996, p.34]

It moves us on a human level, it keeps us guessing during scenes as unpredictable as life, and it shows us how ordinary people have a chance of somehow coping with their problems, which are rather ordinary, too.

It's fun to watch 2 Days in the Valley” in the moment, and then fun afterward to think about the way the story was put together, and all of those lives connected.

I found myself debating the film's moral questions on the way out of the theater.

By the end of the movie, we have been through an emotional and a sensual wringer, in a film of great wisdom and delight.

There is undoubtedly a movie to be made about this material -- a different movie.

The movie breaks down into anecdotes that don't flow or build, and everything is narrated by the Gilot character.

Last Man Standing is such a desperately cheerless film, so dry and laconic and wrung out, that you wonder if the filmmakers ever thought that in any way it could be ... fun.

The tension between the slimefest milieu and the charm of the performances is maybe what makes Feeling Minnesota work.

What I will remember is the photography, and the bliss (just this side of madness) with which the Jeff Daniels character invents his foolhardy schemes.

That it works as well as it does is because the stars, Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler, have an easy rapport and some good one-liners, and the film is short and manic.

From the start, Koepp sets out to get under the viewer's skin, which he does with relentless ease. [30 Aug 1996, p.32]

First Kid wouldn't be my first movie choice this weekend, but my 9-year-old consultant thoroughly enjoyed Sinbad's antics, personality and style. [30 Aug 1996, p.32]

It seems aimed at people who loved "Pulp Fiction'' and have strong stomachs. Like it or hate it (or both), you have to admire its skill, and the over-the-top virtuosity of Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland as the girl and the wolf.

I didn't laugh much during A Very Brady Sequel, but I did smile a lot.

She's the One plays like an overhaul of “The Brothers McMullen” with a larger budget, and it's time for him to move on.

It's ironic that a movie taking aim at the dangers of science run amok would invest so strongly in the science of its slick filmmaking and special makeup effects and so little toward the development of a cohesive screenplay, but such is the case with The Island of Dr. Moreau.

I would like to see another movie in three or four years, about what has happened to these angry, gifted friends.

Well written. The dialogue is smart and fresh.

The Fan would have worked better had it dissected the mechanics that shape celebrity adulation. Instead, The Fan takes a knife-wielding action route that leaves film fans feeling - dare I suggest it - cheated? [16 Aug 1996, p.35]

What he asks of the actors (those who are “soloists,” anyway) is not realism but the same kind of playful show-off performances he's getting from the musicians. And to understand the acting, it's helpful to begin with the music.

But genre fans likely will enjoy Bordello of Blood, which delivers lots of dazzling special effects by Available Light Ltd., including exploding bodies galore.

The New York art world quickly makes Basquiat a star. His work is good (when you see it in the movie, you can feel why people liked it so much), but his story is better: from a cardboard box to a gallery opening!

[Robin Williams] has been ill-served by a screenplay that isn't curious about what his life would really be like.

John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. is a go-for-broke action extravaganza that satirizes the genre at the same time it's exploiting it.

Like many other cultural experiments (minimalist art, "Finnegan's Wake," the Chicago Tribune's new Friday section), it is more amusing to talk about than to experience.

Yet in its high spirits and wicked good humor, Emma is a delightful film--second only to "Persuasion" among the modern Austen movies, and funnier, if not so insightful.

Matilda doesn't condescend to children, it doesn’t sentimentalize, and as a result it feels heartfelt and sincere. It's funny, too.

By movie's end, I'd seen some swell photography and witnessed some thrilling chase scenes, but when it came to understanding the movie, I didn't have a clue.

What I like about movies like this is the way they keep us involved until the end. There is no formula that we can project; “Thelma & Louise” was clearly heading for an act of self-destruction, but here we have no idea what to expect, except (inevitably) the birth of a child.

A Time to Kill, based on the first novel by John Grisham, is a skillfully constructed morality play that pushes all the right buttons and arrives at all the right conclusions.

It uses a colorful vocabulary, it contains a lot of energy, it elevates its miserable heroes to the status of icons (in their own eyes, that is).

Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.

One thing I like about the film is the way it teasingly introduces elements that, in other films, would lead to big dramatic formulas, and then sidesteps them.

Watching the film, I enjoyed a lot of it, especially Keaton's permutations on the theme of himself. But I wondered why the possibilities weren't taken to greater comic extremes.

For all of its huge budget, Independence Day is a timid movie when it comes to imagination. The aliens, when we finally see them, are a serious disappointment.

It's about change, acceptance and love, and it rounds those three bases very nicely, even if it never quite gets to home.

And the movie succeeds in two different ways: It's sweet and good-hearted, and then again it's raucous slapstick and bathroom humor. I liked both parts.

The movie's fatal flaw is to treat her [Moore] like a plucky Sally Field heroine. That throws a wet blanket over the rest of the party.

This film is a wonder - the best work yet by one of our most original and independent filmmakers - and after it is over, and you begin to think about it, its meanings begin to flower.

Eraser is more or less what you expect, two hours of mindless nonstop high-tech action, with preposterous situations, a body count in the dozens, and Arnold introducing a new trademark line of dialogue (it's supposed to be "Trust me," but I think "You're luggage" will win on points).

A whirling, uplifting, thrilling story with a heart-touching message that emerges from the comedy and song.

The movie plays like the kind of line a rich older guy would lay on a teenage model,suppressing his own intelligence and irony in order to spread out before her the wonderful world he would like to give her as a gift.

As it is, the movie goes in one direction and the cable guy goes in another, and by the end we aren't really looking forward to seeing Jim Carrey reappear on the screen.

A first-rate, slam-bang action thriller with a lot of style and no little humor.

The movie is wonderfully entertaining, red-blooded and rousing, and with a production design that makes it uncommonly handsome.

You don't guess the true horror of the place, which is that there are no secrets, because everyone here knows all about everyone else, inside and out, top to bottom, and has for years.

The Arrival fulfills one of the classic functions of science fiction, which is to take a current trend and extend it to a possible (and preferably alarming) future. The Arrival gives its aliens credit for reasoning that we might almost be tempted to agree with. We're just finishing what you started, one of the aliens tells Zane, referring to the smokestacks, auto exhausts, rain forests and so on. What would have taken you 100 years will only take us 10. He, or it, has a point.

While no reasonable person over the age of 12 would presumably be able to take it seriously, it nevertheless has a lighthearted joy, a cheerfulness, an insouciance, that recalls the days when movies were content to be fun.

The bottom line on a film like this is, Tom Cruise looks cool and holds our attention while doing neat things that we don't quite understand--doing them so quickly and with so much style that we put our questions on hold, and go with the flow.

Like the original 1963 movie and the TV series, it expects us to be endlessly amused by a dolphin that does things that are endless but not amusing.

You want loud, dumb, skillful, escapist entertainment? Twister works. You want to think? Think twice about seeing it.

Dead Man is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning.

The movie, based on the famous comic novel by Stella Gibbons, is dour, eccentric and very funny, and depends on the British gift for treating madness as good common sense.

The filmmakers must have known they were not making a good movie, but they didn't use that as an excuse to be boring and lazy. Barb Wire has a high energy level, and a sense of deranged fun.

The movie’s failure is one of imagination. It tilts too far in the direction of horror and special effects, when it might have been more fun to make a satirical comedy about punk teenagers.

Lili Taylor plays Solanas as mad but not precisely irrational. She gives the character spunk, irony and a certain heroic courage.

Some of the gags don't work, and yet I laughed at the Farrellys' audacity in trying them. And the humor isn't just gags and punch lines, but one accomplished comic performance after another.

Janeane Garofalo in this movie... is so likable, so sympathetic, so revealing of her character's doubts and desires, that she carries us headlong into the story.