The role of Jacob is greatly expanded from the book, and the unsatisfying way that Smith and Raimi resolve the brothers' relationship in the movie is the only major change--major compromise--made in transporting the novel to the screen.

Star Trek: Insurrection lacks the adrenalized oomph of its predecessor, but no adventure of the Starship Enterprise is without its gee-whiz affability.

One of those entertaining confections that's so pleasing to the eye and ear you'd have to be a genuine Scrooge to struggle against it.

You can't have Rushmore without Max, and though Anderson obviously planned it this way, the kid is finally too off-putting to tolerate.

The writers, and director Miller, an MTV veteran making his feature debut, are never able to mesh the film's contradictory tones. [11 Dec 1998, p.F14]

British actress Jane Horrocks plays Little Voice, and it is a transfixing, tour de force performance.

Hollow, simple-minded and about as profound an experience as stepping in a pile of road kill.

What A Bug's Life demonstrates is that when it comes to bugs, the most fun ones to hang out with hang exclusively with the gang at Pixar.

Undeniably clever and inventive, Babe: Pig in the City has nevertheless sacrificed part of the freshness and buoyancy that made the original "Babe" so luminous. This sequel is more elaborate, more calculated and more self-consciously dark than its deservedly beloved predecessor.

A roguish and delightful comedy of duplicity that's as entertaining as it is sly.

Scattered, phlegmatic and an all-around weak effort, Celebrity turns out instead to be one of Allen's periodic misfires.

For Fernanda Montenegro, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Italy's late Giulietta Masina (Federico Fellini's wife and frequent star) in appearance and talent, "Central Station" is a personal triumph and a rich cinematic experience.

The Rugrats Movie is warm yet minus the gooey sentimentality of so many animated movies for kids. With its lilting score and pleasant occasional songs, this Arlene Klasky and Gabor Csupo production has success written all over it.

A solid and satisfying commercial venture with more than enough pizazz to overcome occasional lapses in moment-to-moment plausibility.

Clocking in at a self-important two hours and 59 minutes, this elongated romantic fable is impossible to sustain at a running time better suited to the fall of the Roman empire.

A fairly silly and ultra-gory schlocker/shocker.

Dazzling and dizzying, confusing and even annoying, Velvet Goldmine is a feverish dream of a film, a riot of color and attitude that is all pop decadence, all night long.

A political thriller with more plausibility -- and yes, more thrills -- than most.

Follows a leadenly predictable path that will be more than familiar to anyone who's seen a recent sports movie, or any Sandler movie.

Period movies inevitably reflect more about the period in which they're made than the period of their subject, and rarely has that been more evident -- or more distracting -- than it is with Elizabeth.

There are so many colors to McKellen's performance, so many diverse emotions fleetingly play on his face, that resisting his art is out of the question. Better work by an actor will not be seen this year.

Unfortunately, Belly is highly uneven. Williams comes from music videos and knows all about flashy techniques. His sure sense of the visual reveals potential, but he needs to learn to tell a story far more coherently. [04 Nov 1998, p.F2]

For all its surface verisimilitude and for all its focus on a problem that couldn't be more current, this film can't manage to feel more than sporadically real.

While it's futile to pretend that Life Is Beautiful completely triumphs--it's simply too tough a concept to sustain--what is surprising about this unlikely film is that it succeeds as well as it does.

Ross' missive is earnest and well-intentioned, but it's difficult not to feel that his film both runs on too long and overreaches its dramatic resources in its attempt to deliver it.

Despite the riveting performances of Renfro and McKellen, we're left with classic horror-movie sociopaths, evil-doers without conscience, or much to say about the nature of evil.

Blissfully outrageous.

The Cruise validates beautifully a life that is its own validation.

What these five and others have to say may be familiar to many by now, but the experiences they lived through are so terrible and told in such riveting detail it’s as if you’re hearing about the Holocaust for the first time.

Solondz's filmmaking style tries to make a virtue out of flatness and distance, and is always more comfortable indicating where feelings would go than actually providing them.

Beloved is ungainly and hard to follow at times, like the proverbial giant not quite sure how to best use its strength. But that power exists, present and undeniable, and once this film gets its bearings, the unsentimental fierceness of its vision brushes obstacles and quibbles from its path.

It just doesn't add up to anything -- or break down -- to anything special. For good or bad, there's hardly a memorable scene in it.

A complex and truly original film. [19 Jul 1993, p.F7]

Levin brings to "Slam" a raw, impressionistic style that expresses its highly charged emotions effectively and goes a long way to offset that there's not much in the way of traditional-style character development. [21 Oct 1998, p.F5]

Watching it is like being in a room with a couple locked in a torrid embrace. It might be fun for them, but what's in it for everyone else?

Kattan and Ferrell do their best to fill out the shallow Butabis.

Brief enough, clocking in at 83 minutes, but its story is too predictable to make an impact even in such a short space. Unlike "Toy Story," the dialogue here, written by Todd Alcott and Chris & Paul Weitz, is pro forma all the way.

Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone has an exhilaration that comes from looking at life at its meanest so unflinchingly that you can actually be amused by the absurdity of the human predicament. [07 May 1999, p.F6]

"You've got a sense of humor, I like that," Lester Long proclaims at one point. Well, we all like that, but would it be asking too much to have a little coherence to go along with it?

It's a welcome throwback to the days when the world didn't have to end or tanker trucks explode to get an action audience's attention.

A low-voltage drive-in movie, made strictly by the book.

Think of writer-director Waters as the Frank Capra of an alternate universe and this film as his genially twisted version of "It's a Wonderful Life," and you'll begin to understand.

Mike Armstrong's relentlessly downbeat script allows Demme to develop an ensnaring camaraderie coupled with a dark destructiveness that recalls Eugene O'Neill.

One True Thing demonstrates that the power of simple things, the transcendent nature of the ordinary, can make for riveting filmmaking.

Rush Hour effectively teams Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in a formulaic but funny action comedy that should please fans of both stars.

Somehow, against considerable obstacles, it has captured something true about families and friendship, creating a texture of believable emotions on screen.

Permanent Midnight's Hollywood segments are clever and amusing, but the more Stahl's life unravels in his demeaning search for drugs, the more the film inevitably goes down along with it. Watching Stahl searching frantically for an unused vein in his neck with a baby fussing next to him (don't ask) may be unnerving, but it is far from irresistible.

Like Malkovich's out of control Russian accent, Rounders ends up reaching a place too hard to understand and even harder to believe in.

Johnson, on his maiden voyage as director, treats every scene as if it were a bonbon, almost too precious to consume, and Marc Shaiman's score is a running series of mood cues.

Even though there are tedious stretches with less-than-riveting characters, the film gradually pulls you into its claustrophobic spell and becomes acutely suspenseful in its final half-hour.

It's fast, light and funny and not top-heavy with special effects and epic-scale destruction.

Decadence has rarely looked so pathetic, lethargic and dispiriting as it does in this listless film.

Under Alan Cohn's straight-on direction, the film, written by various hands, huffs and puffs mightily just to keep a strenuously labored plot going.

It once again confuses a kind of juvenile titillation with insight and treats the ability to make audiences squirm as a pinnacle of film art.

Smart and beguiling, it manages the impressive feat of believing wholeheartedly in the power of love without checking its mind at the door.

The noir atmosphere doesn't quite smother the dialogue's cheesy smell.

Imamura's mastery of tone has always matched his capacity for compassion and acuteness of observation. [18 Sep 1998, p.F16]

It feels like a vague, upscale knockoff of "The Beverly Hillbillies," and Jenkins' eagerness to please with class-conscious jokiness often comes at the expense of her solid underlying issues.

Stella may be frothy and paper-thin, but it's also another great success for star Angela Bassett, who transforms the film into an infomercial for her considerable abilities.

So how then do you duplicate a magic aura from 30 years ago? You don't.

Though the Strick-Robinson script is solid from line to line, the film's plot is finally too implausible for anyone to rescue.

Halloween: H20 is as stylish and scary as it is ultra-violent. It's a work of superior craftsmanship in all aspects.

At one point, Michaels expresses his excitement at the outcome of a game. "You're excited?" Costas yells. "Feel these nipples!" If you're old enough to see this movie without a parent or guardian and all that sounds encouraging, this review has failed, and failed badly.

While it's difficult to dislike what this film tries to do, the way it does it is more problematic.

Driver, who steadfastly carries Rosina/Mary through every stormy stage of her self-discovery, is consistently better than the picture, as is Wilkinson.

It's a measure of how pulsating and energetic a visual style director F. Gary Gray has, and how vividly actors Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey come across on screen, that this film is intensely watchable from minute to minute, even though a lot of what's happening doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny.

Irresistible family entertainment.

A startling reminder of exactly how spectacular a director Spielberg can be when he allows himself to be challenged by a subject (in this case World War II) that pushes against his limits.

Western is a delightfully subtle and perceptive blend of romantic comedy and road movie. [07 Aug 1998, p.F8]

Except for a memorably haunted performance by Jeremy Irons as the conflicted Humbert Humbert, what the new version lacks most of all is inspiration.

A lively, old-fashioned adventure yarn with just a twist of modern attitude, it's the kind of pleasant entertainment that allows the paying customers to have as much fun as the people on screen.

The Farrellys here show a gift not just for finding humor where others have feared to look but for presenting it in a way that is surprisingly close to irresistible.

It is a brilliant intellectual adventure that fans of bold independent filmmaking will want to experience, even though the ending is something of a letdown.

The result is a calculated, cynical piece of business that epitomizes the creative bankruptcy and contempt for the audience that infects so much of the blockbuster side of Hollywood.

Director Michael Bay's filmmaking style is so frantic and frenetic that it's often impossible to figure out exactly what is happening.

Engaging and consummately entertaining.

Alternately satirical and romantic, full of pain and humor, Buffalo '66 is a winner.

A complete waste of time and potential.

The way I Went Down, with its lovely score, plays out under Breathnach's gentle, compassionate touch becomes wryly amusing, ironic and entirely satisfying. Its cast is a glory, adept at setting off a sly humor with a touch of pathos, and it brings to the fore Brendan Gleeson, so good in so many supporting parts, as a seriocomic powerhouse in the central role. [1 July 1998, p.F4]

With its shrewd mixture of paranoia and the paranormal, the way its elaborate mythology combines enigmatic phenomena with potent cabals intent on running the world, The X-Files experience resembles "Twin Peaks" crossed with "The Twilight Zone."

Mulan has its accomplishments, but unlike the best of Disney's output, it comes off as more manufactured than magical.

The result is a career milestone [for Hal Hartley] and a film that could become a landmark in American independent cinema.

A classic gay coming-of-age story, told with the utmost perception, sensitivity and humor by writer Todd Stephens and director David Moreton. [16 Jul 1998, p.F16]

High Art is, unfortunately, full of itself and its artistic pretensions.

An acceptable star vehicle, no better or worse than it should be, a well-worn standard diversion that gets the job done without eliciting either howls of fury or paroxysms of delight.

For all its nonstop energy and high spirits, Can't Hardly Wait allows its characters to emerge as fully dimensional individuals; they've been written with care and perception and played with equal aplomb by a roster of talented young actors.

Phrases like terminally stupid and brain dead leap readily to mind.

A Perfect Murder begins better than it ends, and the pleasures it offers turn out to be more of a transitory nature.

Adventurous, provocative, even daring.

Its easygoing and engaging quality masks how rare an accomplishment it is to create something achingly true as well as amusing, as wise about people as it is about the craft of film.

Disco's exceptional acting ensemble is especially successful at capturing the brittle rituals of this specific group of genteel, well-spoken young people on the cusp of adulthood.

A sharper edge could have taken a pretty good, if uneven, picture to greater heights, considering its potent ingredients and actors.

A brilliantly written black comedy in the tradition of "To Die For" and "Flirting With Disaster," The Opposite of Sex was worth the wait.

Frequently awkward, peppered with moments that make you shake your head, Bulworth's singular nature makes it a film that can't be shrugged off.

An expertly designed theme park ride of a movie that packs nonstop thrills.

Robert Redford, who for the first time stars in a movie he's also directed, has taken this soap opera material and treated it like something inscribed on yak vellum by the Dalai Lama.

Clockwatchers opens with fresh, quirky panache, but by film's end, those most closely consulting their watches may be those in the audience. [15 May 1988, p.F8]

Unexpected fun. A brave young woman and a young hermit rescue King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, saving Camelot from an evil knight. With fluid, often beautiful animation, a deft, tuneful score and the voices of such notables as Gary Oldman, Cary Elwes and Jane Seymour, Eric Idle and Don Rickles. [03 Dec 1998, p.E]