Call it baseball interruptus, or just call it a missed opportunity.

Lawrence's style is purely will-it-stick-the-wall-or-not, and when it doesn't he looks pretty puny up there on the big screen.

Mildly amusing, both charming and diverting, it plays like a La La Land home movie.

The adherence to specific facts and actual events hampers the film, as it often does biographical movies.

A weirdly stillborn experience.

Beautifully shot, full of lush, vibrant colors and expertly wrought sets...a club-kid's frothy date flick.

If it is never really as profound as it seems to think it is, American Beauty is consistently entertaining, and it earns points simply for acknowledging that all may not be perfect in the current boom years.

Fancher seems uninterested in developing real suspense, or incapable of it, at least until the end, when there's plenty of it, but artificially imposed.

A sort of "Pretty Woman" for the underworld.

A painfully unfunny movie.

Gorgeous and troubling.

A careful, intelligent, and seamless design that makes room for a couple of unexpected twists.

An absurdist Eastern European version of "The Godfather," starring the Marx Brothers (and sisters and nephews and...).

Lurches on for the better part of two hours with a ludicrous plot and even worse dialogue, interspersed with what look like excerpts from a music video made by some naughty Catholic-school graduates.

Simplistic on one level, indecipherable on another, it's a most peculiar muddle.

Entertaining as it often is, Outside Providence feels as if it were a collection of installments from an unusually raunchy television series.

Isn't a bad action movie -- it's just an utterly forgettable one.

With the possible exception of the action sequences and the occassionally imaginitive set design, it's awful.

It can be treacly -- but in a crude way, it makes its point.

One of the least endurable films of 1999.

Derivative, cliché-ridden and old hat.

A rather flimsy but moderately charming British romance comedy.

As flat as the brim of a Mountie hat.

LL Cool J... is downright scary -- a mix of coiled charm and underlying menace.

The new dud from Miramax's Dimension label.

Atrocious comedy.

Custom-made for an audience of mouth-breathers.

A good-natured farce. It's also really, really funny.

Strangely enough, this movie provides a lot of the James Bond veneer that has been missing from recent James Bond movies.

Rohmer's trademark dialogue...is as poetic in its plainness as ever.

I'll be damned if I can figure out how its various ingredients are supposed to blend together.

A terrific feature-length cartoon.

The boy (Osment) has an uncanny ability to suggest Cole's secretive, haunted soul, and he seems to have inspired Willis to give perhaps his most self-effacing performance.

Starting small and building steadily, the movie reaps some fall-down funny laughs.

Atrocious bit of by-the-numbers screen filler. And anyone who easily lapses into sugar comas is advised to stay far, far away.

Best of all is a Halloween party where the Falls are complimented on their "costume," then outed.

Drop Dead Gorgeous eventually shows that it doesn't like anybody -- in the movie or in the audience.

A movie with the power and quality of dreams, where reality merges into symbolism and oddly juxtaposed elements crystallize into a single, electrifying whole.

While it has its scary moments, and while its central conceit is refreshingly imaginative, there's ultimately not much there there.

It plays lots of cool mind games with the audience -- if in an occasionally incoherent way -- and ends up providing a surprising amount of fun.

The fact that isolated bits are amusing shouldn't keep us from strongly noting that this movie really is pretty awful -- not at all worthy of guilty pleasure status.

Lots of laughs, lots of fisticuffs, lots of cool toys, lots of stuff getting blown up: Who could ask for anything more from a summer movie?

Surely, there will be audiences that see South Park as one of the signs of the coming apocalypse, which may be exactly why another audience finds it so ruthlessly, irresistably funny.

MTV, comic books and gangster flicks are all in Lola's cinematic family tree; it's a heady, breathless ride.

The film version of this civilized beauty, captures the amusing gloss of the story but not the sense that something grave is going on beneath it all.

I just really, really, really, don't like this movie, and I don't care who knows it.

Lacks dramatic tension and fails to bring this great music alive. It does not sing.

It's irresistible.

Story. Character. They used to mean something to George Lucas.

Here in the rotting depths of pulp horror/adventure territory, that's the entire point of the exercise.

Wickedly funny, scathingly original new comedy.

When the writing is good, Go is good, and when the writing is flat, things fall apart.

Barrymore's sunny energy pushes the movie along, but halfway through you realize there just isn't that much to push.

Unfailingly energetic, 10 Things is like a puppy that can't stop wagging its tail, begging for attention...Even more than "Cruel Intentions," this movie plays like an awkward high-school production of a classic.

An exercise in outrageous style over substance.

As the movie plods on, the jokes start to fall flat...Worst of all is a centerpiece scene, when Ben has to pretend to be a mafioso (but sounds more like a cross between Martin and Lewis), when Crystal is so unfunny that you almost feel sorry for him.

Mr Kumble: Keep your hands off the classics! You don't deserve to read them, let alone paraphrase them.

[Ritchie] cranks up the laughs and tension with equal aplomb, throwing wrenches in the plot so that the audience has no idea what to expect next -- and that's part of the film's thrill.

The collapse of Office Space's second half is so egregious that one can't help but suspect Judge's Achilles heel may be his writing. It's not that he can't write -- it's just that his ideas tend to shine better within a pool of fellow scribes, as proven in his television career.

Eventually fizzles out badly.

I was so taken by the film's sublime visual poetry, its telling silences, its finely orchestrated editing rhythms.

We marvel at the almost perfect realization of a character whom we're not necessarily meant to like.

As a primer on the arcana surrounding the profession of personal injury lawyer (more familiarly known as ambulance chaser), A Civil Action is deeply, and even passionately, informative. As a drama and character study, though, it mostly misses the mark.

What makes A Simple Plan an exciting, thoughtful thriller isn't the plot twists, but the twists and turns of Hank's tortured conscience as one lie leads to bigger and deadlier deceits.

Stoppard's luxuriant, richly comic language cascades and washes over you, and, for once, more than keeps pace with the sprightly pictures.

Battling back with droll seriousness, Murray imbues his sad-sack loner with a touching, funny dignity, and comes up with his best work in a very long time.

Little Voice is that rarity, a filmed adaptation of a stage play that actually works.

It's blatantly manipulative pairing of an adorable young boy and a selfish, honesty-challenged older woman [is] so calculating that I could never get emotionally involved.

What's best about the film is not the hot romance, but the coldness that lies at its heart.

A strange and lovely combination of cinematic nostalgia and offbeat (gay) love story.

Despite a cheap, Hollywood ending and despite Kaye's kooky campaign, X is a killer.

The story moves beyond the limitations of its setting, transforming itself into an affecting parable about the lengths to which parents will go to protect their children from trauma, cruelty and knowledge of evil.

Eventually falls into the same candy-coated trap it's trying to expose. But the fact that a movie can acknowledge the trap exists is a step in the right direction.

One of the most troubling views of the human race I've seen in years. Luckily for us, its depressing, almost pathologically ironic vision is redeemed by the sublimity of Solondz' filmmaking. I first saw the film at Cannes last May and it's haunted me, both for its nastiness and its brilliance, ever since.

Script, setting, attitude, and especially casting add up to a smart exercise in dark comedy that's never over-the-top funny, but always engaging for its clever details.

It's "The Hustler with poker and without soul...For all its flash and occasional sizzle, "Rounders" is a disappointment.

A pulsing, wooshing, visceral experience that amounts to great fun and an entirely disposable movie.

In striving to duplicate reality, Spielberg has gone reality one better -- he's playing war, but it's a game no one would ever willingly join in.

This reprehensible and deeply unfunny film is obviously critic-proof.

Quite a spicy brew.

A brilliant and daring film.

For all the cynicism on the soundtrack and the occasional lapses in tone, this is a remarkably generous comedy.

There are some cheap shots, and there's an argument to be made about whether the film is sending up stereotypes or simply perpetuating them. But for every dubious moment, there are plenty that connect.

As with Bill Clinton himself, Primary Colors forces one to take the disappointing with the good, the letdown with the promise, the compromises with the hope.

It may be a very good, very Brooksian sitcom, but it's accomplished entirely with the broad strokes and resolutely flat surfaces of television.

Like it or hate it, Titanic lives and breathes as a piece of pure cinema.

The script also happens to be quite literate and laceratingly funny, and Damon -- no big surprise here -- turns out to be the perfect actor to deliver Will's zingers.

So campy that it almost plays like a sendup of the series. It is to Alien what "The Bride of Frankenstein" was to other 1930s Frankenstein movies, and it even shares some of the same themes.

Egoyan's films have always been about the intricacies and basic strangeness of human relationships, rather than about plot or snappy one-liners, but a new moral urgency seems to invigorate this film.

He [Anderson] simply doesn't allow for dull moments, and his gifts for irony and showmanship are clearly appreciated by a collection of actors who have rarely been better.

L.A. Confidential is at the same time his (Hanson) most personal movie and Hollywood filmmaking at its best.

A very funny film that never sacrifices the lives of its characters to the needs of its story.

One of the best films of the year, a polished, contained piece of provocation.

Best of all are the supporting players. Everett (who played the Prince of Wales in "The Madness of King George") is smartly urbane, giving a polished refinement to the stereotypical "gay best buddy'' role.

A very pleasant experience in watching life unfold in its own direction and time.

I see Austin Powers as Myers' desperate cry for help -- a plea to stop him before he does schtick again.

Armitage, Cusack and his Evanston chums have their work cut out for them to turn a stone killer into a sympathetic romantic character. That they succeed in such a shrewdly funny way is downright amazing.

Its honesty and insights are refreshing.

Forman imbues the material with exactly the right dry, satirical flavor, yet this story is still a Frank Capra little-guy-against-the-system picture.

Craven creates his savviest and most frightening movie since the original "A Nightmare on Elm Street" by spoofing the horror cliches and simultaneously reinventing them to scare you all over again.

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.