A work of superior craftsmanship, Wilde moves quite briskly, and the idea of approaching an unconventional life with a traditional narrative style pays off. [01 May 1998, p.F10]

An eager, earnest, broadly constructed pageant of ideas and characters whose greatest asset may be the service it pays to literature. [01 May 1998, p.F1]

It may be Howitt's greatest achievement that we're able to keep the stories straight.

That rarest of all genre hybrids, the screwball-romantic-action-situation-black comedy. Rare for good reason. Who'd want to see a thing like that?

A small movie with some big moments and a lot of unfinished business.

Satisfying, unpretentious fun.

Nightwatch is a seriously overcast B-movie with rote performances from everyone but Brolin, who gives James an edge of danger that says that if he isn't a killer, he will be.

The best advice to give anyone who wants to see Species II--other than "don't go!"--is "don't eat!"

A fascinating hybrid. A Hollywood fantasy at its most fantastic, the film is equal parts true innocence and shameless calculation. Deciding whether the glass is half empty or half full depends on which part you are willing to embrace.

Exceptionally well-made family entertainment, this 3 Ninjas is constantly inventive, action-filled and funny, with a flourish of good special effects.

In his sleek, punchy and altogether captivating Sonatine, Japan's fabled writer-director-tough guy star Takeshi "Beat" Kitano makes it seem as if we've never seen such a tale on the screen. In doing so, Kitano creates one of the most effectively anti-violence violent movies since The Wild Bunch. [10 Apr 1998, p.F10]

The Spanish Prisoner is the smoothest and most convincing of Mamet's elaborate charades and features intriguing performances by Steve Martin and Campbell Scott.

This effects-loaded extravaganza has more trouble finding its dramatic bearings than the Space Family Robinson has in figuring out where the heck in the universe they are.

Barney looks both more real and more magical on video; on film, he's clearly a doofus in a felt outfit.

The movie has more twists than Chubby Checker, and as soon as you think Stephen Peters' script has used up every conceivable opportunity, it twists again.

Such a smart and savvy piece of work it encourages us to feel we're eavesdropping on history.

There's a strong elliptical quality to Kiarostami's style, which underlines the filmmaker's ability to maintain focus with considerable emotional force and depth and with great precision. [27 March 1998, p.14F]

Wide Awake is a wonderful family film that deals sensitively, and even with humor, with a fairly unusual situation for the screen: a 9-year-old's struggles with his faith in God. [20 Mar 1998, p.F10]

Fireworks is bracing and original, an indefinable film made from familiar elements. "Hana-Bi," its title in Japanese, is a combination of the words for "flower" and "fire," and filmmaker Takeshi Kitano has, in the same way, adroitly fused genres, creating a film in which almost every moment pops out in unexpected ways. [20 Mar 1998, p.F4]

Heavy on swordplay and spectacle, it's so intent on reviving the costume epics of the past it doesn't realize it's trying to be too many things to too many people until it collapses under its own weight.

Go see it. But you'll feel cheap in the morning.

Love and Death on Long Island is sharp, sophisticated and completely delicious, a purposeful comedy that focuses on the power of screen images to uproot lives and the poignancy of amour fou, totally mad love.

This film feels completely haphazard, thrown together without much concern for organizing intelligence.

Hush is a would-be suspense film without a single major plot twist that isn't ham-handed. [9 Mar 1998, pg.F4]

By interweaving a very contemporary love story into these themes, DiCillo has at least given it all a fresh spin.

It's a laff riot that also contains a torrent of scathing social satire that couldn't be more timely in light of the dismantling of affirmative action.

Revelations of betrayals, faked identities and double-crosses come in waves in the last half-hour of Palmetto, but by then, the film has raised the one question it can't answer: Who cares?

Proyas is trying simultaneously to create a pure thriller and sci-fi nightmare along with his tongue-in-cheek critique of artifice. And this doesn't work out quite so well.

Oddly, it’s the bawdy silliness of “Dangerous Beauty,” and its jaw-dropping presumptions of Veronica’s liberated lifestyle, that makes the film occasionally entertaining. But it’s a movie without a consistent tone or creative vision.

A sparkling romantic comedy, the kind of picture that glides by so gracefully and unpretentiously that it's only upon reflection that you realize how much skill, caring and good judgment had to have gone into its making.

The script is muddled and unsatisfying, as ponderous on its feet as its protagonists are in their heavy diving suits.

A provocative though murky thriller from the horrormeister that's heavy on gore and laced with more irony than perhaps intended. It's far from first-rate King, but his fans probably will feel it delivers the gory goods. Best of all, it affords a big star role for Miguel Ferrer, a fine and distinctive actor.

Oldman, working with ace cameraman Ron Fortunato, has a real feel for the cinematic, and Nil by Mouth has a driving, jagged style that is complemented by Eric Clapton's often melancholy score. Oldman's key achievement is to make you feel for people you wouldn't want to know in real life. [06 Feb 1998, p.F12]

There are funny sight gags strewn throughout, but because so many scenes and confrontations are repeated from the original, there’s a staleness and sense of melancholy to the whole affair.

Suffers from being neither here nor there. In its rush to modernize its story and attract a young audience with stars like Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, the film ends up problematic both in relation to the original and on its own terms.

An exhilarating rush of a movie, with all manner of go-for-broke visual bravura that expresses perfectly the free spirits of his bold young people. [22 May 1998, Pg.F9]

Well-crafted in most aspects, Phantoms is finally more ambitious than satisfying. It also could have used more humor. But it can't be accused of insulting the intelligence of its audiences.

This documentary-like realism, alas, only underlines the preposterousness of its plot with its torrent of contrived, credibility-defying cliffhangers.

A limp, predictable less-than-sitcom of a movie. It's a bomb, man, not the bomb.

Live Flesh is an effortlessly articulated tragicomedy by Pedro Almodovar, a world-renowned filmmaker at the height of his powers. [30 Jan 1998]

For those who go along with it, it's a crafty piece of work nonetheless, ending with a pair of marvelous twists. [16 Jan 1998, p.F1]

Flawless contributions by Armstrong's crew make Oscar and Lucinda a vibrant period piece, buoyant yet incisive, and easily sustaining interest, if not generating deep involvement, throughout a just-under two-hour running time. [31Dec1997 Pg.8]

Goofy and gee-whiz when it isn't being post-apocalyptic glum, it is such an earnest hodgepodge that only by imagining "Mad Max" directed by Frank Capra can you get even an inkling of what it's like.

A gloriously cynical black comedy that functions as a wicked smart satire on the interlocking worlds of politics and show business, Wag the Dog confirms every awful thought you've ever had about media manipulation and the gullibility of the American public. And it has a great deal of fun doing it.

A stunningly beautiful object offered in tribute to a holy man, a gorgeous film that is nevertheless burdened by the defects of its virtues. Careful and respectful, it is everything a movie about the Dalai Lama should be except dramatically involving.

A raunchy doodle, a leisurely and easygoing diversion that goes down easy enough but is far from compelling.

Crashingly unimaginative. But its real offense is making such poor use of Nielsen.

In As Good as It Gets, his (Brooks) mastery of the nuances of language and emotion has turned the most unlikely material into the best and funniest romantic comedy of the year.

Veteran director Roger Spottiswoode has tried to pep the old warhorse up, but the combined inertia of all those pictures over 35 years proves hard to budge.

What audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality.

A virtual replay of the original "Home Alone." It's darker, meaner, sillier, more scatological, and, in rare moments, funnier.

Robert Duvall's performance as a Holy Roller who shakes off his secular life to become a man simply known as “the Apostle” is a masterpiece of emotion.

A bravura act of self-revelation, its vivid portrait of one man's fears, fantasies and neuroses uses a mixture of reality, imagination and comedy to create one of the writer-director's most involving films.

Contrivance and a horrendous body count combine to yield a morbid effect for discriminating filmgoers, despite a comic tone. Still, there's enough ingenuity and scariness to please plenty of fans of the first film.

What saved "Schindler's List" from this self-conscious nobility was the ambiguity of Oskar Schindler's personality and Spielberg's willingness to treat incendiary material coolly. The lesson he seemed to have learned there, that the strongest stories call for the greatest restraint, is one he has at least partially forgotten here.

While the charismatic performances of Damon and Affleck make Good Will Hunting a difficult entertainment to resist, doing just that is not as hard as the film would like to think.

Director Les Mayfield ("Miracle on 34th Street") has his moments, of course, but what ultimately was needed in the case of Flubber was a movie with more bounce and less talk.

But bearing witness can be a complex thing and in its concern to illuminate Sarajevo is prone to overkill, to trying too hard to squeeze in every troubling wartime incident.

Egoyan understands how potent a deliberate pace can be, how effective it is in making already powerful material strong enough to tear at your heart.

Though he's adapting the same story Grisham always tells, that of an ethical, talented and inexperienced attorney taking on and outwitting powerful and corrupt legal opponents, Coppola has infused The Rainmaker with enough humor, character, honest emotion and storytelling style to make it one of the year's most entertaining movies.

Listless, disjointed and disconnected, this meandering two-hour, 32-minute exercise in futility will fascinate no one who doesn't have a blood relation among the cast or crew.

Though originality is not one of its accomplishments, Anastasia is generally pleasant, serviceable and eager to please.

The sequel is quite serious, charmless and critic-proof (in fact, it wasn't screened for the media), and it may attract the teenagers who have made the game so popular. [24Nov1997 Pg.10]

Sporadically effective, it appears not to have particularly excited the people who made it, and that lackadaisical quality is a drawback.

What Ed Neumeier's script provides instead is a cheerfully lobotomized, always watchable experience that has the simple-mindedness of a live-action comic book, with no words spoken that wouldn't be right at home in a funny paper dialogue balloon. Not just one comic book either, but an improbable and delirious combination of "Weird Science," "Betty and Veronica" and "Sgt. Rock and His Howling Commandos."

Wings of the Dove is richly appointed and beautifully mounted, with lush location shooting in Venice given the place of honor.

The idea of Bean fitting into this situation, even disastrously, requires more than suspension of disbelief. It requires a full blackout of reasoning. But for the converted, and for people with a low threshold for visual comedy, Bean amounts to a hill of laughs.

Lemmons' command of cinematic style, her appreciation of the chimerical aspects of life and her ability to inspire actors to give remarkably faceted portrayals mark Eve's Bayou a first film of exceptional promise.

Mad City is an example of how enervated polemical filmmaking can become when its plot loses contact with plausibility.

A painfully anemic variation on John Landis' 1981 winner, "An American Werewolf in London." While the original had both wit and poignancy--and an affectionate and knowing tip-of-the-hat to werewolf movies past--this slapdash, silly new edition is so cut-rate it has Luxembourg and Amsterdam standing in for the City of Light.

The result is a take-no-prisoners movie from one of Hong Kong's most idiosyncratic, shoot-from-the-hip filmmakers that's the very antithesis of sentimental gay love stories. [31 Oct 1997]

Niccol's script, which has the earnest simplicity of a freshman philosophy paper, is merely naked exploitation, a sci-fi snow job that projects a contemporary ethical question--would a perfect human be human?--into a solemn future where the worst-case scenario unfolds as conventional Hollywood melodrama.

But the result is no more than a forced fable, a self-consciously smarty-pants concoction that is too clever by half and too pleased with itself in the bargain.

Directed in bold, energetic strokes by Taylor Hackford, "Devil" is fine disreputable fun at first, a stylish and watchable hoot. But then its tone changes, the plot goes gimmicky and bombastic speeches about the nature of good and evil clutter the airwaves and confuse the issue.

If nothing else, Gummo does challenge perceptions and presumptions: Is the perspective of youth in this country really so devoid of significance, and their existence so septic? These are good questions, although "Gummo" provides neither answer nor solution, nor even thematic cohesion.

The film is also strengthened by a pair of adroit lead performances by Brad Renfro and Kevin Bacon, actors who completely understand their characters and know how to make the most of them on screen.

A true storyteller, able to easily mix and match moods in a playful and audacious manner, he (Anderson) is a filmmaker definitely worth watching, both now and in the future.

In addition to its terrifically bratty performance by the epically bratty Posey, House of Yes contains some of the smarter (and smarter-assed) writing of the year.

Though Pitt is as attractive as ever, "Seven Years" offers other things to look at and in fact functions better as a travelogue than as a drama.

By getting out of the way as much as he does, Jarmusch makes Year of the Horse as much a statement about creative freedom as it is about music itself. [17 Oct 1997, p.F20]

"Implausible" is a mild word for the shenanigans Gang Related expects us to swallow. Writer-director Jim Kouf has loaded a lifetime's worth of ploys and contrivances, feints and jabs, into this unpleasant, interminable, more-than-usually pointless film. [8 Oct 1997, p.F4]

Fleder has directed three-quarters of a terrific movie and one-quarter of pure Hollywood baloney. After carefully building up the suspense and tension through Cross and McTiernan's search, spiked with nail-biting encounters on both coasts, Fleder lets it trail off in anti-climax and banal violence.

The latest in an unending series of bleakly comic, nihilistic neo-noirs to reach the screen, U-Turn's story of a bad day in an Arizona hell invests a lot of skill and style in a trifling tale. So it manages to sporadically amuse even while it's wasting your time.

As frigid as its name. Burdened with a story of some of the world's least interesting people going through a holiday crisis, director Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus get as close as any creative team could to making matters involving, but the task is finally too much for them.

What The Peacemaker doesn't do well, though it tries, is bring much in the way of emotion or character development to the table.

Humor, sentiment and melodrama strike a balance as he brings to life nine major characters and a host of others as well.

The Edge's fusion of Mametspeak with a true life adventure remains brawny entertainment, even it it is difficult to take as seriously as the filmmakers intend. But when Bart is on his game, nobody is going to notice anything else.[26 Sep 1997, p.F4]

L.A. Confidential, with an exceptional ensemble cast directed by Curtis Hanson from James Ellroy's densely plotted novel, looks to be the definitive noir for this particular time and place.

Pellington bestows on the film a distracting, if occasionally effective, amount of video technique, and Wakefield’s story is rich and often truthful.

It's a decorous film, conventionally well-made, but don't be fooled. Its emotional impact is considerable.

Smart and provocative.

Excess Baggage, a scruffy romantic comedy about a despairing rich girl who hatches a kidnapping scheme to test her father's love, is an aimless waste, a star vehicle without a compass. It wants very much to be both funny and poignant, but is more often just noisy and pointless. [29Aug1997 Pg 14]

The second half, picking up 10 years after Eddie was institutionalized, is pure screwball comedy. It's as if Cassavetes had written the first half for himself to direct, and the second for Carl Reiner. [29 Aug 1997, p.F10]

Laurence Fishburne is one actor who has charisma to burn, but even his incendiary performance can't ignite Hoodlum, a would-be gangster epic that generates less heat than a nickel cigar. [27Aug1997 Pg 8]

Director Paul Anderson, whose last film was "Mortal Kombat," well knows how to build suspense and increase tension. But counterbalancing all of that is Event Horizon's position as a sci-fi splatter film, intent on drenching the screen in blood and gore whenever possible. [15Aug1997 Pg 16]

Sachs' ability to draw deeply affecting, completely open and unself-conscious performances from Chan and Gray and other nonprofessionals as well is most impressive and highly effective. Working with masterly New York cinematographer Benjamin P. Speth, Sachs has created in The Delta an achingly poignant portrait of alienation and longing so evocative that it is poetic in its impact. [15 Aug 1997, p.F4]

There's a funny, entertaining, good vs. evil movie built around O'Neal--lots of plot and strong support from "Suddenly Susan" boss Judd Nelson, Richard Roundtree, Annabeth Gish and the city of Los Angeles, home of Shaq's day job with the Lakers. [18 Aug 1997, p.F4]

If you don't go expecting the depth and subtlety of a Mike Leigh working-class film, The Full Monty can be heart-warming fun with more serious undertones than you might have expected. [13 August 1997, Calendar, p.F-5]