A difficult time rising above the level of a reasonably nice TV-movie.

I would rather have been scraping gum off my shoe than sitting there another minute.

Though the film is generally weak, treading very familiar ground, those dashes of insight and humor - along with Griffiths' performance - pull you into the film.

When your characters are only skin deep, so is your message.

It's not easy to go 12 rounds against a cliche-ridden story like Price of Glory and remain standing. But somehow stars Jimmy Smits and Jon Seda, and first-time director Carlos Avila, manage to survive.

A too-familiar road.

Not quite good enough to leave more than a vaguely pleasant, vaguely disappointing aftertaste.

For anyone who wants to see wildly inventive, peerless filmmaking that's oblivious to market-place formulas, Beau Travail is an absolute must-see.

(Cusack)'s genius, however, is in his continual ability to be the most likeable of everymen.

Don't be surprised if you exit Here On Earth feeling both moved and incredulous.

Crudup tends to take average parts in standard genre films and turn them into something special.

Westerners may find the religious aspects wearying and a little fantastic. The Color of Paradise is both parable and fable, a retelling of Isaac and Abraham.

Lost its chance to be anything but an endurance test for the viewer.

It's a notch above average, but Whatever It Takes can't get too far above that notch.

As he did in "Run Lola Run," he has clearly patented an original combination of cinematic eye and ear candy and a profound, irresistible fascination for the role of chance in this world.

The gravity-defying harness maneuvers popularized in the U.S. with "The Matrix" -- ... look really cool, but seem out of place in a realistic gang-style action movie.

Retains enough of Soderbergh's usual indie sensibility to make some sly but contentious points.

Takes an easy target and turns it into something naggingly weird.

It's hard to root against Death when the people involved are never brought to life in the first place.

For a good 40 minutes or so in the middle of this movie, De Palma is in his element.

A nonsensical mishmash.

Almost unbearable.

Steadfastly conventional.

A long portrait of someone who outstays his welcome fairly early on.

Let your children have their childhood while you have a rare, grown-up experience at the multi-plex for a change.

What makes the film so special is that while tickling your postmodern funnybone, it never forgets to make you care for its characters, in a welcome, and almost traditional way.

An endlessly contrived exercise in self-referential "black comedy", can't help but strike me as no kind of triumph of anything over anything.

A dismal film, a flop as both 21st-century romantic comedy and gay "Kramer vs. Kramer."

Could have afforded to be a little loftier and still be quite funny. Instead, it's a waste.

When it counts, this film is absolutely successful.

The audience for this film would be those people who like their cinematic fare pre-digested and painfully familiar.

An acerbically comic fable.

For those seeking even a little adventurousness in their filmgoing experiences, the movie will wear thin very quickly.

Comes across as a deceptively streamlined comic-drama; an unnervingly violent, gritty film noir with a wink.

Unlikely to draw the audience it deserves, but those who do see it will have a hard time shaking its gentle, ghostly echoes.

Quite shameless in imitating its predecessors.

More whimsical than gloomy, for all the horrors it alludes to or depicts.

This is basically a movie about one neurotic woman and her neurotic L.A. life. .

What director Aviva Kempner has done is shine a light into the past and recover a classic American hero, one with all the integrity, decency and largeness of spirit that we have been taught makes up the American character.

A dark comedy that squanders its potential and never quite, as they say, suspends disbelief.

Simple but charming.

Mostly this film skims by on the surface, its conflict and climax visible from the opening five minutes.

Exemplifies the subpar state of movies today.

Not a waste of time, but not quite in control of its destination.

A largely unenlightening work.

Obvious in its observations, predictable in its conclusions, and a little dull in the telling.

Gun Shy can't rise on wobbly legs, and its real potential is lost for good.

Simply can't sustain interest for much of its final hour.

Does a lot of little stuff right, and it sparkles at times.

Too slow-moving and too understated in much of its humor.

A Mexican film that reaches for a very weird and risky tone, and, I think, fails.

What on earth is Stockard Channing doing in this mess?

Self-conscious clunker.

Floating this material slightly above the assembly-line level is the energetic cast and the efforts of writer-director Kris Isacsson.

Looks and moves like a film whose vital organs were yanked before shooting commenced.

The film has smarts, but what really makes it fascinating is its huge heart...and the film soars because of that.

But it's the boy and the dog who make My Dog Skip resonate. The formula may be an old one, but it's still a good one.

Will eventually be remembered as a disposable farce, but one that leaves a happy memory.

Expertly done, and a real joy to watch.

An often affecting, if standard-issue, Hollywood biopic.

A very competent film, but it barely pulls you in.

Morris seduces us into stepping into Leuchter's world of delusion and ego.

This is still Ron Shelton in good -- not great, but good -- form here, and the rewards are plentiful.

An often gorgeous, dizzying assault of ideas and visual flourishes...it's just not very good.

For fans of science fiction...Galaxy Quest is a sweet, funny valentine to their obsessiveness.

A dark film that raises more questions than it answers -- and it's meant to.

The kind of minor work that may very well speak greater volumes about (Stone's) thoughts and feelings right now than another masterpiece would.

Never more than a dull, paint-by-numbers, overly literal transcription of the book.

Regretfully, the beginning of this movie is as good as it ever gets.

You just watch one carefully constructed but emotionally vacant image piled up on another - sometimes with regard to an overall effect, but often just for the sake of style over substance.

An excellent coming-of-age story that is, for once, and very happily, focussed on a teenage girl.

Leigh and his solid cast make sure that inside jokes translate to a broad audience, and that their rendering of the back-stage drama is smart, engrossing and often very funny.

It is Foster who presents the biggest single problem, delivering a monochromatic performance that finds her character not much more than flinty and strained.

A deliciously romantic story, in all senses of the word.

The single best thing about Stuart Little is Nathan Lane.

Tired, overcomplicated mix of macho bullshit.

Captivating an audience from the get-go and drawing our attention and emotions ever deeper into the layered mysteries of a dreamy fable.

It's epic in every sense of the word, and like most of Chen's historical dramas, not easy to follow.

What leaves you breathless, though, is the knockout acting by the cast.

Its grimness is so unrelenting that I can only recommend it to filmgoers who need a movie to tell them that incest is bad.

Part of the appeal of John Irving's writing is its sense of bounty, the way the world is offered up as a horn of plenty. The Cider House Rules movie, by contrast, feels narrowed down to small slices of experience.

Thoroughly artificial and overly schematic, to the point of caricature even, but often lively and witty nonetheless.

There's nothing here but a messy lump of coal.

While writer-director Frank Darabont often fails to make King's story plausible, that's no fault of the actors. The performances are the movie's strong suit.

Rob Schneider's stab at an "Ace Ventura"-like gamble for stardom.

Using current hand-held camera technology to ape the political and esthetic sensibility of the 1960s.

It certainly has a place among the year's more accomplished productions.

It is -- in mood, execution, and shameless sentimentality -- a Bette Midler movie with an Irish accent.

It's swell when a film really does capture a book in some exactitude.

There's not a single moment when you forget it's Weaver; she always seems to be inhabiting this poor character's soul for her own purposes.

I'm not even sure the movie makes sense at times, yet Campion's offbeat rhythms and eye for startling images always made me happy to be looking at the screen.

But the movie is so confused about where it wants to go, it suffers from the same identity crisis as its protagonist.

This is independent acting (and movie-making) at its best -- true, tight, anything but trite.

A gorgeous and enduring piece of work.

Full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing, End of Days is the loudest and least of the year's end-of-the-world movies.

Doesn't have the purity, the sense of discovery, of the first Toy Story, but it's still an utter delight. Its images and gags keep replaying themselves in the mind well after the film is over.

Crass and depressing drama.

Puts the Bond film series (this one makes number 19)-- back on track by stressing the fundamentals and applying a bit of authentic drama for a change.

It is thrilling to look at, and that's more than one can say for the majority of pictures out there.

Funny and wise, lively and contemplative, intriguingly postmodern and powerfully moving, all at the same time. It's not to be missed.

Although Mansfield Park is an enjoyable film, you can't help but wish that it were as brave, feisty and unconventional as it keeps telling us its heroine is.

Levinson is at the top of his game with Liberty Heights, his instincts acutely cinematic, his purpose clear.

Perhaps the most remarkable documentary project ever undertaken, and certainly the longest, is Michael Apted's Up series, which he began shooting for the BBC in 1962.

A surprisingly adult exploration of religion refracted, as always, through (Smith's) insistently pop-culture kaleidoscope.

Egoyan and Hoskins fans will definitely want to see this film. Others will feel their fingernails grow as they watch it.

This relationship might be strong enough to carry an observational novel, but the movie feels like it's missing something.

Stretched too thin, looks cheap, and can't quite go the distance.

It's all overblown: too much music, too much cutting, too much zooming, too much computerized special effects, too much clanky symbolism that never works.

Look to the cast as the best reason to see this film.

There isn't a moment of wonder or poetry in its very long 69 minutes.

The true star of this film, funny and often breathtakingly lovely, Zellweger carries virtually every scene in which she appears -- which aren't nearly as plentiful as one might like.

This kind of film, in its various manifestations recurring through the decades, gives us confidence that cinema can ultimately get to the heart of things.

Sometimes star power alone can keep you from walking out of a movie, and this is one of those times.

Every bit as reverent as "Schindler's List," and no less successful.

If the current flood of pre-millennial tension movies teaches us nothing else, it demonstrates how desperate we've all become to see whether we could make our peace in the time provided, if forced to by circumstances beyond our control.

It's great that this movie exists.

The evidence Herzog serves up is impossible to dismiss.

Hilarious and often moving.

It's really too bad the film remains so resolutely flimsy, because the novice cast is so clearly delighted to be putting on a show, their glee is contagious enough to carry us along -- for a while.

A magic-realistic fable whose lows soon prove as infuriating as its highs are intoxicating.

Leaves almost no impression at all.

Like the melancholy remininces of an old relative who lived through an exciting, even harrowing time, but no longer possesses the mental faculties to really flesh out the tale they're spinning.

Wants to be many things, but ends up being not much of anything.

Streep delivers another of her chameleon-like transformations in appearance, accent, and manner.

The effects never really get ahead of the characters or the script's layered personality.

Much more mythic and risk-taking than the usual Hollywood product.

Surreal to the point of poeticism, amusing and tragic by turns.

Does have its share of bona fide chuckles, but it falls shy of its possibilities.

I haven't got the slightest idea whether these characters are meant as satirical targets or as a reasonably fair cross-section of Today's Youth.

Appears to be several different movies spliced together, with unfortunate results.

A class act, from top to bottom.

Certainly one of his (Scorsese's) most profound works.

Show Me Love has the pulse of teen life down-pat, shaming its many sleek and glossy American counterparts at every turn.

So campy...may be good for a few laughs.

Tries so hard to push all the pre-ordained buttons, and it's so anxious to be liked, nay, adored, that it left me sullen and uninvolved instead.

Has its clunky and wince-worthy moments, it does explore some new territory, and there are moments when it's quite fresh and moving.

An occasionally powerful, always heartfelt drama.

A wonderfully witty homage to the very king of disco movies -- "Saturday Night Fever."

Rung with numb inarticulateness.

Clear-eyed and open-hearted, The Straight Story (which is based on reality) tells a simple tale, and it does so with a rare, blessed simplicity.

It always surprises, never bores. It's also just damn good, on every possible level -- so go see it. Now.

Dreadful suspense piece that has "Mystery Science Theater" appeal written all over it.

Few movies this year have been quite so rewarding with their 11th hour epiphanies.

What we have here is a small story in an oversized setting.

Has a cute idea. Which it promptly runs into the ground.

Perhaps you have to have lived through the 1960s to relate.

This meeting of two giants of European cinema only briefly comes to life.

The film's light success really comes down to Shannon, though, the exuberant "SNL" star whose alter ego actually seems more real and sympathetic here than she does in brief TV skits.

To watch Sevigny's Lana slowly thaw to Brandon is to see the transformative, heartbreaking power of romance in a way that Hollywood is rarely able to capture anymore.

The film is simplicity itself.

What makes the film ultimately successful, though, is the outstanding comic talents that inhabit it, especially Zahn and Macy.

Drama, swift action, and low-key, character-driven comedy.

It doesn't really hang together. And waaay too much style. Pity.

Doesn't go the distance in either story or style, unwilling to liberate itself from real or presumed expectations about what it takes to sell a movie featuring teenagers.

A biting satire of military myopia and political double-dealing -- possibly the best wartime comedy since Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H."

A generally dumb movie with a smart, appealing, gutsy leading lady.

It has every element necessary to be a classic, and it never comes anywhere near achieving that potential.

It's witty, entertaining, often funny as hell and even, at times, surprisingly wise about the human condition.

The audience is ready for an unhappy ending -- and Hollywood should have the courage to provide it.

A good, though unremarkable, film.

If McCulloch can draw this much humanity out of his actors, and do it in comedies with a deceptively easygoing poignancy, he's definitely a director to watch.