The draggy ones make you restless while the best ones, like the movie's title ingredients, provide a buzz that doesn't last long enough.

Just because a movie was inspired by real life and has good intentions doesn't mean it can't wind up as phony as a three-dollar bill.

In this defiantly ridiculous movie, David Zucker, of the old Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker Airplane! movies, once again unleashes on the world the sexiest (and dumbest) 66-year-old accident-prone cop in the history of the movies, Leslie Nielsen's Lt. Frank Drebin. The jokes still come at you in a dense Hellzapoppin' blizzard. But more of them seem crude, mean-spirited, a little sour.

Director Richard Rush is one of the more talented and mysterious figures in American filmmaking. But though it has been 14 years since his last feature (the 1980 live-wire classic "The Stunt Man"), his new movie, The Color of Night, is sometimes just as hip, lively and blast-your-eyes funny as ever.

Storks is at times cacophonous and overly busy, and the animation tends toward the goofily humorous rather than the spectacular. However, Stoller manages to pull off a third act and emotional resolution that's genuinely moving.

Despite an overly broad third act, one can't fault the film's message of family unity, underscored by a memorable use of the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love."

A big, creepy dollhouse of a movie--a sometimes engrossing shocker with a surprise ending that isn't especially shocking or surprising.

The results go only so far. Yet already Ferrell has come a long way as a seriocomic screen presence.

Like the cerebral palsy-stricken Irish artist Christy Brown of "My Left Foot," Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar-winning role, Ami is forced to fight such overwhelming odds to express himself that his very limitations become an aid to his vision.

It's an extraordinary performance in an often brave and intelligent film that, unfortunately, tends to collapse around him in the end -- just as the world of Kline's character, tweedy but likable William Hundert, deconstructs around him.

Like so many lovely cinematic dreams, Mister Lonely inevitably descends into nightmare, with an unsettlingly grim conclusion that, again, seems more imagistic than idea-driven.

When it works it’s enjoyable; when it doesn’t, it falls into a generic sort of bustle, missing the darker, more troubling layers underneath.

It is a film of many ploooooches, meaning: stake in the chest? Ploooooch goes the sound effect. Yank it out again: ploooooch. Wipe. Rinse. Repeat.

Kika is kind of a mess. But it's a charming, stimulating, talented and ingratiating mess, none-the-less.

A grim yet snappy little thriller.

Hits more laughs than it misses and its characters are likable, empathetic people.

So intent on driving home its worthy if not mind-blowing message that it becomes surprisingly conventional.

The movie overflows with action, slapstick and cliches, but the cliches never impede the action, and the slapstick is so expertly performed, it doesn't annoy you -- much.

The men here are negligible, but all the actresses are good -- especially Dunst, who shows a previously unrevealed gift for blending cold conservative roots, starchy appearance, forgiveness and unexpected redemption.

Tries to blend old film noir and new high-tech thriller styles with only sporadic impact.

Much of Puzzle feels schematic and, in the convenient solution to the family’s financial problems, a bit lazy. Yet Macdonald is so good, on her own or with a scene partner, director Marc Turtletaub’s movie refuses to fall apart.

Democracy might not really come from a bottle of shampoo, but "Beauty Academy" teaches us that, sometimes, mascara really matters.

It's a misfire--but a fascinating, magnetic misfire, a film full of first-rate talents forced into absurdity, struggling to bring believability to nonsense. [22 September 1995, Friday, p. C]

Even if the film should be retitled "For a Fairly Good Time, Call ..." at least we're not back on the couch with another variation on the same old group of arrested-development young adult males, hanging on to their adolescence with as much determination as their marijuana intake allows.

It’s absorbing. The world came perilously close to losing so many Rembrandts, so many Klimts. The cultural casualties, near and actual, may be dwarfed by the millions slaughtered in the same churn of history. But we are what we create, and when emblems of a civilization are reduced to pawns of wartime, there is no victor.

Vol. II turns into a battle (like most von Trier films) between the filmmaker's baser instincts and his searching ones.

Forgettably entertaining/entertainingly forgettable.

Is this the modern version of "Going My Way," with those squabbling, heart-warming Irish Catholic priests mixing up pop songs and hymns? Well, in a way it almost is, though its mood is far different and it's set in a far different world that moves to a different tempo and has graver and more troubling social crises.