Manages the seemingly impossible task of being very funny indeed and being as dark as anything Wong has ever made. This is an almost painfully bleak comedy that makes you squirm in the manner of “The Out-of-Towners.”

The work of an obsessive who has developed a light touch--though some of his more outright themes and pronouncements can be heavy-going.

Writer-director David Mamet delights in his own supposed cleverness; he wants you to scratch your head while he manipulates your brain.

Some directors can profit from the strictures of a strong narrative, but, for Linklater, the conventionality of The Newton Boys works against the glide of his free-floating style.

Wild Things reaches such dizzying heights of wretched dialogue, creaky contrivances, and panting performances, you're forced to wonder if the filmmakers realized how bad their script was and switched gears into pure camp at some point during the shoot.

It's neither the clean strike Coen-heads expected after Fargo nor the gutter ball anticipated by Coen-phobes like myself.

It's been said that a thriller is only as good as its chief villain, and, in the same way, most noirs are only as good as their suckers. Palmetto has a good sucker but not much else.

Fuqua has done an admirable job staging the action scenes, but the script is little more than a thin framework to justify those scenes.

Cuaron is a special talent, and, as botched as Great Expectations often is, it's the kind of failure that deserves an audience--if only to experience Cuaron's way of seeing, which is at its best in the early parts of this film.

Rarely has one movie seemed so predestined to reduce any and all attempted criticism to so many column inches of impotent gibberish.

It lacks both the shiny surfaces that enlivened the director's earlier films and the depth of character that allows us, in a traditional film, to identify, empathize, or connect psychologically.

It can't compare to what might have been: a full-scale performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as an Irish raging bull--a rebel with a cause. There are still traces of greatness in what he attempts, and it's more than enough to make the movie worth a lingering look.

No matter how hard the filmmakers work their narrator (Geoffrey Rush, as Oscar's great-grandson), he can't make the damn thing explicable, much less bring it to life.

Although Afterglow bears the lyrical slow-zooms, tracking shots, and idle character development Rudolph learned while working as an associate director on such Altman classics as Nashville (where he first met Christie), it's safe to say that much of the film's strong critical reception is due to the director's showcasing Christie's undiminished movie-star grace so reverently.

Except for a few of his trademark time-sequence zig-zags, Tarantino's storytelling is boringly linear. At a running time of two hours and 35 minutes, it often feels like we're slogging through a B-movie that got too big for its sprockets.

Director Barry Levinson has given this swift, sure-footed film a matter-of-fact, improvisational look and feel. To appreciate its brisk, confident, wild comedy, all you need is a funny bone and a BS meter.

I wanted to be transported by this movie; I wasn't quite. But I respect it.

Experiencing this movie is a little like watching a manic-depressive's medication wear off.

It's a powerfully ersatz experience, but at least it's powerful. There's a lot to like here: At three hours and 14 minutes, the film takes longer to watch than the Titanic took to sink.

Brosnan proved his worth last time around; but, sad to say, the rest of Tomorrow Never Dies lacks the wit and inventiveness of GoldenEye, let alone of Goldfinger.

In the end, The Apostle feels like a con, a movie that embraces its contradictions only because it's not smart enough to reconcile them; everything feels complex, but, in fact, it's far too simple.

Handily in a league with its predecessor...as good a follow-up as one can imagine, given the built-in difficulties of sequels.

The movie has tremendous scope and charge and a dense period fabric, along with a volcanic performance by Djimon Hounsou, the West African actor who plays Cinque.

Damon--as actor, not as co-screenwriter--is the best thing about Good Will Hunting.

Weaver is able to take a schlock conception and turn it into a tour de force. Sky-high and straight-backed, she's imperiously graceful in this film; at times she resembles Martha Graham in the swooping, lyrical severity of her movements.

Williams is so unique that his presence automatically changes any project he stars in. Surprisingly, in this case, the change isn't particularly welcome.

Winterbottom has never before done such potent work; he's created a fiction film about the siege of Sarajevo that bristles with the raw, unnerving textures of a battlefield documentary.

In Eastwood's hands, Berendt's characters--ranging from a narcissistic merry widow to a bon vivant who entertains in vacant mansions--register with all the subtlety of the orangutan in "Any Which Way You Can."

John Grisham's The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a bestseller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie!

The Jackal isn't much--it certainly isn't up to the 1973 Fred Zinnemann Day of the Jackal it loosely adapts and updates--but it does offer the fascination of watching big-ticket actors attempt to spin their images.

What makes the claptrap in Starship Troopers so flabbergasting is that it's monumentally scaled.

Seductive from the start, the film grows more stimulating and involving as it goes along because these three are original people who mate and recombine unpredictably.

Bean represents a dismal dumbing-down of a very bright creation. Is nothing sacred?

Actually, that shift in moral perspective is the freshest thing in the movie--it keeps the action absorbing even when the script keeps hammering us with lessons about the commercial exploitation of the news and TV audiences' craziness and gullibility.

What's missing is romance. Despite the engaging friskiness of its two stars, the film is romantically vapid. Watching it is like trying to warm up to a hologram.

It's a deeply divided film--hugely ambitious and uneven, with sequences that seem to point to a new, comically flagrant movie sexuality and others that drag one into the funky muddle of the dreariest dopehead downers from the '70s.

Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come alive--not even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach hives.

A movie that leaves you wondering what the fuss was all about when its end credits appear; it's a mish-mash of a dozen other, better films ground up and watered down--Seven, Silence of the Lambs, and Manhunter, to name a few of the usual suspects.

In U-Turn Stone is reaching for the pulp without the politics. He's trying for noir as ritual dance. But Stone is too frenzied a filmmaker to keep the dance steps simple.

It's during the shift to seriousness that The Ice Storm makes its missteps. The intrusion of tragedy, while altogether believable, still seems like a device, a calculated tug at the heart strings. It is, in short, a once-effective ploy that now feels like a cliche. A near-miss might have been more effective.

It's big and loud, but this Peacemaker is still a dud.

He's (Hanson) never before generated the kind of heat inside a picture--and out of it--that he has with L.A. Confidential.

Klein's the perfect actor to play Howard--a man so actory he probably signs his checks in that thin movie-poster type.

In The Game, Fincher pulls back from the total gross-out but sustains a tone of aggravated anxiety. Hitchcock could have done this material and still made its perversities pleasurable.

Excess Baggage, Alicia Silverstone's first feature from her First Kiss Productions, turns out to be a rather shaggy and uninvolving jaunt.

G.I. Jane is liberated, all right--from good acting and a good story.

Mimic is static, highhanded, and confused, wasting most of its 105-minute running time simply spelling out the premise.

Mangold never ventures beyond the obvious. We're set up with righteous anger against the liberal establishment and then fobbed off with goombah melodramatics. The film should be called Cop Out.

It's too bad, then, that Anderson (whose only other major credit is "Mortal Kombat," but of course) and first-time screenwriter Philip Eisner felt so compelled to do away with suspense and turn Event Horizon into a big-budget slasher film.

Even when Conspiracy Theory is jammed or rushed or overly jittery, Gibson's command--of Jerry's fractured psyche, his freak perceptions, and his ardor--gives the picture blue-eyed soul.

Contact sure is pretentious. It doesn't deliver on the deepthink, and it lacks the charge of good, honest pulp. It's schlock without the schlock.

Face/Off wouldn't work without two great actors, and it doesn't always work with them. But their gifts justify the whole loony enterprise.

The fourth installment in the Batman franchise is one long head-splitting exercise in clueless cacophony that makes you feel as though you're being held hostage in some haywire Planet Hollywood while sonic booms pummel your auditory canal.

First, the good news: Unlike most action film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been.

While tyro director Simon West fills Con Air with all the slam-bang action and well-honed wisecracks that were the more positive qualities of its predecessors, the film brims even more with all their worst qualities.

The Lost World is a smoother, scarier ride than its predecessor, with twice as many dinosaurs twice as well designed eating twice as many people...But he's not particularly playful with his terrors here, and that's a disappointment coming from a filmmaker who can mix scares and laughs the way no one else ever has.

Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning work has been called "one of the major plays of our time." Moviegoers who aren't stage-struck may wonder, "What's the fuss?"

As satisfying as much of the film is, there are a few missteps, large and small, that may require indulgence on the part of viewers.

With Besson, it's all eye candy; despite all of his mythic posturing, his loop-the-loop camera moves and in-your-face fandangos are the true substance of his films. And that's not much substance. He's a dry-hump orgiast.

What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Michael Myers. That's not all bad.

A true killing comedy would require a great deal more sophistication than first-time writer-director Peter Duncan brings to the party. He hasn't made a black comedy, really; it's more like a black spoof.

Watching this film is a little bit like getting mauled and tickled at the same time. The filmmakers have given the whole shebang a hefty levity, and that's not easy to accomplish in a full-scale disaster movie.

Appears to have been made by people with nothing between their ears.

[The movie's subject] sounds like great movie material, but the film, except in flashes, doesn't do it justice.

The film successfully walks the thin line between slick commercialism and "serious" realism. It is sentimental, but it comes by its sentiment honestly, through well-observed performances by the leads and a keen insight into the quirks of the Japanese middle-class culture.

At first glance, Schizopolis may seem like no more than a grab-bag of tricks and gimmicks, but repeat viewings reveal a more coherent pattern.

The film is about how much you're willing to give up for love--a tune that has been played many times before, but never with quite this much slacker brio.

Drowns in vanilla carnality.

The Saint exists almost entirely as a vehicle for Kilmer's quick-change smarty-pants swagger, and it's inconceivable without him. He's great fun to watch--a squirish master thief with a wide streak of lewdness.

Even though The Devil's Own reportedly cost close to $100 million, it comes across as a sleek, medium-grade character study occasionally punctuated by gunfire. If this is what $100 million buys these days, can $200-million movies be very far off?

Cult auteur David Cronenberg crashes and burns--his talent, that is--in Crash, a vain attempt at a techno-age Persona.

Because the filmmakers have skewed the story into a Donnie-Lefty lovefest, the breakage of their trust signals the breakage of Donnie's spirit even in triumph. Case closed. It's the kind of fade-out we might expect from the it's-all-hopeless era of '60s counterculture movies. It's emotionally effective, but also a cheat.

His most thoroughly surreal work since Eraserhead, this two-hour-plus fever dream is more of one piece than Fire Walk with Me and less desperate and jokey than Wild at Heart.

Singleton may spend the rest of his career chasing the kind of critical and commercial success he won at an early age with "Boyz N the Hood". But even if Rosewood fails to meet that standard, it is a film that reaffirms that depth of his talents.

This really should have gone straight to video--or, better yet, to the nearest landfill.

What's weird about subUrbia is that Linklater's zoned-out technique is wedded to Bogosian's in-your-face power-rant oratory. The result is like local anesthesia--you can see the incisions, but you can't feel them.

Such a funny mess that it keeps you laughing even when you realize it's not much better directed than a cable-access talk show.

A lovely little comedy that--like its predecessor--will, one hopes, buck the odds and find its audience.

As an actress, Madonna has to work on her vulnerability more.

Craven's other accomplishment here, besides resuscitating the genre, is the way he keeps things scary even when they're at their funniest. The grand finale, while thoroughly bloody and tense, has some genuinely hilarious shtick.

Inspirationalism wafts off the screen in little perfumed puffs.

An indictment--a prime example of promising material that's been Cruisified.

Part homage and part demolition job, Mars Attacks! is perhaps the funniest piece of giddy schlock heartlessness ever committed to film.

Both Fellini and Woody Allen have remarked that casting is 90 percent of directing--and Citizen Ruth bears witness to that notion. While this is primarily Dern's show, the casting is perfect all around.

Sling Blade is perhaps the year's most impressive debut because it is an uncompromisingly told tale with a minimum of frills.

The entire remake has been dumb-dumbed by John Hughes, who wrote the script and produced.

The gaga uplift in Shine knocks the malaise right out of your head--along with just about everything else.

This intelligent, affecting work is squishy at the core.

The documentary is, in essence, not much more than a record of what happened in Zaire, but it has been assembled with a real feeling for the historical moment. It's literally a blast from the past.

Film critics are put in a difficult position when they see a movie that's well-made but features characters so unbelievably odious you wouldn't want to spend two minutes with them in real life.

The long hours Davis says she spent training with knives and guns can't rescue her character from drowning in the story's hokiness. Fans will be aghast at what they see--a movie so garish and silly, even Geena Davis can't save it.

The writing-directing team of brothers Larry and Andi Wachowski has chosen as its filmmaking debut a tightly constructed, stylishly (but rarely self-consciously) executed, gripping little noir parable that couldn't be more firmly grounded in American movie tradition if the filmmakers created a wacky romantic farce about mismatched paramours.

That Thing You Do threatens the shameless stereotypes it constructs with cats' claws, but when the deserving targets present themselves at their most vulnerable, the movie rolls over and expects audiences to stroke its tummy.

Secrets & Lies is all about wounds and our tendency to embrace placebos rather than the harder courses of treatment.

Surviving Picasso falters in its careless structure.

Creates a sense of understanding that crystallizes the essence of the drug subculture with startling clarity.

Hilarious--a terrific updating of ancient farce conventions for the '90s.

Fargo is a concert performance--an illuminating amalgam of emotion and thought. It glimpses into the heart of man and unearths a blackly comic nature, hellishly mercurial and selfish, yet strangely innocent. If it weren't so funny, it would be unbearably disturbing.