An unpretentious, funky, fast-moving work every bit as enchanting as the book.

The flashy sensationalism of The Sixth Sense -- maybe the best thing about it -- is at war with its desire for contemplation.

A gentle, beautifully realized tale of love and intimacy...It moved me to tears.

Not everything in the film happens according to the traditional, overly familiar blueprint.

Are there really legions of postboomers out there sighing nostalgically over the happy hours they spent watching Inspector Gadget?

Unspools slowly and erratically without ever hitting an emotional or comedic stride.

It is, as his films usually are, dense, complex, and challenging. It is also, sad to say, ponderous, often inscrutable, and ultimately not much fun.

Easily the scariest horror picture of the '90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers.

The only genuine surprises on hand are the few moments when the film defies the expectations that have been programmed into our collective neurons by the past 25 years of horror movies.

It's painful, it's real, and it's probably the funniest thing you'll see this year...a teen sexploitation classic.

The cast has plenty of room to emote, but their task feels a bit empty and thankless. For the most part, they're carrying the director's water.

Bigger, Longer & Uncut delivers: It's never less than funny, and at its best, it's truly hysterical.

A perfectly entertaining little French comedy that doesn't quite lodge in your brain in the way you hope it would.

It's a hilarious, dumb comedy that's smart enough to be something more. And all it does is make Sandler the most soulful -- and the funniest -- comic in the business.

A fine entertainment value. It's beautifully made, drenched in deep, rich emerald, with sinuous tracking visuals driven forward by pleasantly African-flavored songs from Phil Collins.

It should be said that Travolta delivers a wonderful performance that's lost in a mediocre -- and, at times, rather misogynistic and homophobic -- film.

It's unlikely that anyone will be bored. But it's just as unlikely that anyone will be swept off his feet either.

Kills whatever charm the first movie had by recycling its few serviceable parts.

Instinct offers gorillas in the midst of one mediocre movie.

Notting Hill offers another example of moviemakers consoling themselves about how tough it is to be famous while congratulating themselves on how down-to-earth they really are.

It doesn't help that the special effects aren't spectacular, the pace is numbing, and Bierko is an even less mesmerizing presence than Keanu Reeves.

This ain't no movie. It's a very long, very tedious infomercial for Phantom Menace action figures, on sale now at a Target or Toys "R" Us near you.

One of the best of the many delights of director Michael Hoffman's new film -- is that he manages to have it both ways -- the gauzy fantasy and the bacchanal.

Tea With Mussolini doesn't come close to John Boorman's captivating "Hope and Glory," which managed to address the terrible destructiveness and misery of the war as well as the magical adventure it offered its young protagonist.

Even with so much in its favor, The Mummy seems to fall all too easily. If only generating a soul for the film itself were so easy.

There is not even the slightest trace of freshness or originality in either the script -- which was written by Ron Bass and William Broyles from a story by Michael Hertzberg and Ron Bass -- or in Amiel's stodgy direction.

This engaging film proves a total pleasure, suitable for moviegoers who like their films a bit old-fashioned but still mainstream.

For many, eXistenZ will probably be more trick than treat. But the film epitomizes the phrase sui generis ("of its own kind") and still maintains a wry attitude toward itself.

Happily, this irreverent, sharply observant comedy sweeps us into the maelstrom too. Amid the glut of teen movies rolling out of the studios every week, Election deserves special attention.

In the little war between charm and belligerence that is the real centerpiece of Lost and Found, romantic comedy takes a beating.

Ultimately, though, it is Angelina Jolie who ends up stealing the show. As Mary, she lets her eyelids droop and her lower lip swell as if she were just so full of sex that she's almost drunk.

As a result, the film doesn't seem to know what sort of comedy it wants to be -- it comes across as more confused than funny.

As the harried household head in The Out-of-Towners, the thrill is gone. Martin's character is dull, and his performance is fatigued -- Hawn, a trouper, locates all the available giggles and wins applause for her big tantrum scene. And John Cleese is riotously funny.

It's a strange, entertaining little film that derives its weird tension from a blend of comic and serious tones.

This full-tilt visual and aural bombardment is simply a lot of fun. It never lets up. Nor does it ever want to.

By the end the movie audience, like the electorate, is less satisfied than strung-out and exhausted.

It's easy to ignore these knockoff movie versions of retro TV shows, because they're almost always atrociously made. But it can be instructive to watch them because of the template they provide for culture compare-and-contrast between the old show's era and ours.

Unfortunately, Bullock and Affleck don't strike many sparks or produce many yuks…they're not exactly built for comedy.

The whole project feels lazy and half-hearted.

For adults, the film does, at least, offer up most of the lovely, schmaltzy Rodgers and Hammerstein score. Even here, though, the pleasure comes with a wearying price tag.

Although the movie doesn't go in for quick fixes, it's not particularly revelatory or insightful. It's a textbook paradigm of grief, loss, and regrouping laid out in three acts.

This valentine to Trekkiedom (produced by, who else, Paramount) doesn't go in very deep--probably doesn't intend to--but it's also not quite the promotional piece the studio may have envisioned.

October Sky may be set around coal mines, but ultimately it's Field of Corn, Part II.

Get out your hankies and weep for the heart-tugging disaster Message in a Bottle.

Helgeland makes a solid debut as director here, finding a new angle through which to view the Parker character, and doing so without exhausting the possibilities.

What Malick has fashioned here is less a conventional narrative than an impressionistic mosaic of our common, yet varied experience of life and death, as focused and clarified through the relentless lens of war.

This is anything but pleasant stuff, but it's a must-see for anyone interested in men and women, fathers and sons, and the kind of murder mystery in which the real casualty is the human soul.

The movie felt fresh and resonant in spite of its overall familiarity.

The producers of this glorified latter-day frieze have gone nuts for computer-generated extras without clinching the essentials of character and catharsis.

These filmmakers have taken a historical figure and made him into a hot-blooded romantic hero. Shakespeare did that a time or two himself.

By the end, were it not for Murray, watching Rushmore would be like reading an article on "Why adolescents need Prozac."

Funny and sort of creepy--a not bad little thriller with some peculiarly dated plot development.

Lasseter and Stanton and the rest of the animators and gagsmiths use the computer with staggering imaginative freedom.

It poses as an unblinkered look at the hangups and hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie. In reality it's an empty, narcissistic tantrum.

Overloaded with oddities but a bit short on horse sense, this is one of those stubbornly defiant, attitude-driven movies that's so busy scrambling genres, breaking rules, and dashing expectations on the road to becoming art that it slips off into the ditch.

Waking Ned Devine works up enough feel-good momentum that in the end it's irresistible.

Here Branagh and his writer-director have managed something more haunting than town-square self-flagellation: they've created a man whose appetites will always be greater than his abilities. And for an artist like Woody Allen, who possesses plenty of both, there can be no scarier fate on the planet.

Meet Joe Black takes an interesting idea--Death assumes human form and comes to earth to learn about human existence--and reduces it to a flat, uninspired, interminably slow movie.

A political film in the form of a thriller, rather than a garden-variety potboiler gleefully helping itself to stock political tropes from the genre's grab bag.

This chamber drama is a deeply felt and oddly moving reverie on death and the process of taking stock of one's life.

Fails dramatically as well as ideologically.

Scary or not, there's energy in the way Carpenter frames and cuts his movies, and there's energy to spare in Woods' performance.

If, like Benigni, you were born after World War II, it reassures us that he hasn't forgotten the innate seriousness of his subject matter, and that despite its grimness, he still thinks life is beautiful.

This uncommonly clever, surprisingly poignant fairy tale packs a social wallop that we're not quite prepared for.

This brutal film borders on the brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central performance by Ian McKellen and an exceptional score by John Ottman, who also edited the picture, it churns up emotions and leaves the viewer feeling stunned and depleted.

Beloved tries to be an anthem of the spirit, and that's just about the most difficult--and unfilmable--thing you can attempt in the movies. Demme stretches things out to epic length, but what was really needed here was an epic imagination.

As witch movies go -- even lighthearted, supposedly comic witch movies -- Practical Magic is conspicuously lacking in supernatural phenomena.

As is common in a Frankenheimer picture, the plot lines get a bit tangled in Ronin, but the atmosphere is tense, the style impeccable.

Pecker is a satire, but an incredibly good-natured one, which is not quite the contradiction in terms it might seem.

In a confused world, this is a movie with answers.

A major weakness of A Soldier's Daughter is that it has no real plot.

The film is a feeble shadow of a book that won over even those of us who are no special fans of Irving -- it's probably his funniest, least self-conscious work.

Cube is essentially a glossy, beautifully designed 90-minute Twilight Zone episode.

In the end narration, Shane gripes that the new corporate owners who took over Studio 54 after Rubell and Schrager's crash made the club "safe and boring." But that's exactly what Christopher has done to 54.

While too many things about the story don't ring true for the film as a whole to work, there is enough in Next Stop Wonderland to keep the viewer wide awake and entertained.

In Your Friends and Neighbors, LeBute is having a high old time giving himself the creeps. For the rest of us it's all kind of...well...nasty.

It's one of those movies that gets bonus points for being "personal" -- it bops along from episode to episode, as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she went along.

This is escapism, pure and simple. And few know the power of such purity better than Terry McMillan.

Instead of a gripping, conscience-bending thriller, Paradise plods along, determined to be some sort of master chess game ruminating on personal and cultural value systems and the complex and often contradicting facets of loyalty, honesty, friendship, love, responsibility, self-preservation, and exploitation.

The entire film takes its cue from Cage's spritzes and jags; it's a delirious performance in a delirious landscape.

The Governess, a surprisingly luminous film that deftly stands somewhere between a Harlequin paperback and Jane Campion's "The Piano."

An engaging, family-oriented romantic comedy that should appeal as much to fans of the original movie as to viewers unfamiliar with the 1961 Hayley Mills version.

Instead of the cat-and-mouse cogitations and psych-outs one might rightly expect from this high concept, we're fobbed off with a lot of sub-Die Hard theatrics and stinko plotting.

He (Spielberg) commemorates the soldiers in that vast Normandy cemetery in the most absolute and honorable way possible.

And so the chief complaint one can lodge against Lyne's film is central: It's not that funny. Which is another way of saying that, for all its controversy, it's not that daring.

A romantic adventure-movie slapstick that's too screwy for the action crowd and too old-fashioned for the Home Alone contingent.

Whatever its faults -- and it has more than a few -- it is unquestionably different. It at least takes a stab at interpolating cerebral ideas into the format of a thriller.

When it's all over, you can't remember if you've been watching a movie or just a jumbo-sized coming attraction.

The film is bound together around the oral tradition and the act of storytelling, and this is where the filmmakers shine.

It's a kiddie comedy that really shouldn't be on the big screen at all; it has all the creative range of an Afterschool Special.

It's nothing more than pleasant matinee fodder with some jarring tones and clunky stretches.

With more angst than you can shake a stick at, High Art sets a new course for the indie American film. Instead of the usual Scorsese-esque buddy confab, we have something closer to the funky Fassbinder world of marginalized, pansexual depressives.

A lack of fire is ultimately the problem of the entire film. Six Days tries hard to recall Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn riding the rapids in "The African Queen," but the film falls short even of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in "Romancing the Stone."

The film is a nightmare but an oddly comforting one.

The picture's biggest problem is that no one is sympathetic.

Hope Floats comes lumbering along, scourging all in its path with saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions.

They do it up big, but their frame of reference -- mostly old sci-fi movies and TV shows -- is pint-sized.

It's nothing more than a very long movie about someone, literally and metaphorically, having to get back up on a horse.