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.

The film is often unintentionally silly, and it might have been better if it tried to be.

So inventive, confident, and accomplished is the production that it's a shock to learn Sliding Doors is the work of a first-time director-screenwriter.

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.