The engine that drives Jerry Maguire is Cruise, giving the kind of performance that all but deconstructs his recent series of glib leading-man roles.

(Thornton) does a remarkable job in all three categories, but what you're likely to remember most clearly is his performance.

A very moving and surprisingly funny experience.

Minghella shapes Ondaatje's sprawling story into something miraculously cohesive, and at the movie's center is one of the most compelling love stories in recent memory.

Whether or not Breaking the Waves succeeds as a profound work is something that's hard to say after one viewing, but it is certainly a wholly original piece of work.

This is a pretty leaden cinematic experience.

So meticulously acted that you feel you're reading the characters' minds.

There's an almost natty precision about this picture that's so rare these days in American movies that it provides satisfaction in itself.

A surprisingly vital film.

Uniquely fascinating.

Overpraised, intellectually soft, narratively unfocused, and thematically ambivalent.

Someone should confiscate Mann's synthesizer. Just when a scene starts rolling along, this synth beat fades in and destroys the mood.

Funny, expansive, and a delight to spend company with.

This might have been a very good movie if it had lost about one of its three hours.

Furiously uncompromising, and therefore absolutely alive.

Director Barry Sonnenfeld captures Hollywood in sunny tones, with fluid camera moves providing maximum comic effect.

Van Sant and crew appear to have had a blast making this film, and I had a blast watching it. The subject matter is very dark and yet it is handled with a very light touch.

An imaginative and disturbing work; well worth a look.

It's not a profound film, but it is heartfelt, and Burns has done his best to keep it clear and emotionally direct.

Snappy heist film that keeps changing the rules of a mystery so that one is never sure whose hands are at the controls.

The graphic battles may grow repetitious toward the end, the final scenes are almost sadistically drawn out, and the script often lacks humor. But this movie moves.

There isn't a scene or a character in the film that plays just one way. Bloody bits turn hysterically funny, relief gets riddled with tension, and the lurking question marks are as intriguing as the story resolutions -- rec.arts.movies has been filled for months with theories about what was in the briefcase.

What we remember are the visions of genius and the total turkeys. Rarely do you get both in the same movie, but director Tim Burton pulls it off in this oddly affectionate bio-pic of Ed Wood.

This is an ambitious movie that attempts too much rather than too little.

The other key part is Schindler's Jewish accountant, played with self-effacing brilliance by Ben Kingsley, who gives the movie just the touch of warmth and sanity it needs.

Altman lucked out when he cast a singer, Ronee Blakley, in a major role in "Nashville," but he has not been as fortunate here with Annie Ross and Lyle Lovett, who lack Blakley's soulful dramatic presence.

All of it is vital and involving, and some of it is hilarious...I've rarely seen a group of people in a darkened theater react as viscerally as they do to Reservoir Dogs.

If Unforgiven occasionally overstates its case, this is the best work Eastwood has done as a director since The Outlaw Josey Wales 16 years ago.

An appalling masterpiece.

A sweet, funny exercise in nostalgia, though it's also self-congratulatory and awfully calculating.

An exhilarating piece of popular entertainment.