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.