The forced hybrid of a preposterous potboiler plot with genuine questions of medical ethics, Extreme Measures is weakened, not strengthened, by its strange bedfellows shenanigans. And the fact that director Michael Apted is able to put considerable realism and skill into his filmmaking merely emphasizes how out to lunch this picture’s story is.

As delicately and deliciously prepared as the dishes it features, Big Night is a lyric to the love of food, family and persuasive acting.

Yet with so much going for it, the film's creators have made the classic Hollywood choice and treated its actresses like flesh-and-blood special effects. If you've got talent like this, or so the theory goes, a coherent story is a luxury that can be dispensed with.

Surviving Picasso is quite well made and easy enough to watch, but it's not noticeably challenging or involving.

Hill, who brings considerably less humor to his film than Kurosawa did his, unfortunately hasn't anything new to add that makes it worth sitting through his blood baths, as skillfully staged as they are. [20 Sep 1996, p.F10]

The go-for-broke plot twists are daring, but because there's no sense of background to the characters, one gets the sense it's all being made up as Baigelman goes along.

By refusing to be cheap or insincere, "Fly Away Home" allows us to enjoy our emotions without feeling we've been criminally manipulated. [13 Sep 1996, p.F1]

Directed by Ernest Dickerson, the film looks fine, as one might expect, but isn't particularly funny and often makes no sense.

Despite conflicted circumstances, the cast is capable, but there's a feeling of loose ends, an overall lack of cohesiveness to this good-looking film. The Trigger Effect is on-target when it comes to the ills of modern society but is charged with ambivalence as to what makes a hero.

Warner Bros. quietly releases Hiller's latest film, Carpool, without advance critics screenings, without more than a whisper of promotion, without warning or apology to the lost souls who might wander in to see it.

Danny Elfman's intense score contributes crucial energy, John Thomas' camera work is first-rate, but the ambitious Freeway ends up merely trashy.

Cute and light and wafer-thin, this film is pleasantly similar to its successful predecessor, "The Brady Bunch Movie."

But the magic has deserted him with She's the One, which turns out to be one of those remixes that creates nostalgia for the original.

The disastrous new version of H.G. Wells' "The Island of Dr. Moreau" at least affords Marlon Brando a grand entrance and a great comic portrayal. [23 Aug 1996, p.F12]

The improvisational method with which this film evolved allows its actors to show us so many sides to their people, so much volatility, that it can take a while for its key figures to involve us. But snare us Taylor, Harris and Grace most surely do.

Squanders an appealing performance from Costner.

Even in thriller terms, nothing rings remotely true here, with even the baseball action--including a game that is not called despite enough rain to unnerve Noah--laced with a heavy dose of preposterousness.

Too much of some good things and not quite enough of others, Kansas City is the kind of film you're eager to like more than you do. It could never for an instant be mistaken for anything but a Robert Altman film, and that counts for a lot.

What it lacks in irony and suspense, Gilbert Adler's Tales From the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood makes up for in whimsy and cheeky self-assurance. The second feature to emerge from the long-running HBO horror show is a bawdy romp into vampire mythology, an empty-headed joyride into a crypt that resembles a costume party orgy. This is the version of "Dracula" that Bram Stoker would have written with the collaboration of Mel Brooks and the Marquis de Sade over drinks at Hooters. [16 Aug 1996, p.F10]

A paint-by-numbers version of an artist's life, Basquiat is amusing for all the wrong reasons, especially at those horrible moments when you realize you're supposed to be taking it seriously.

Jack is more depressing than the weight of its demerits because of the quality of the work both these men have done before.

At the top of his game, Carpenter and his cohorts boldly tap into the twin strains of paranoia gripping the present-day American society, suggesting that we face one or the other of two of our worst nightmares coming true. [09 Aug 1996, p.F1]

There's a beguiling throwaway quality to Flirt that has the effect of making it stick with you.

As the only Austen work to be named after its heroine, Emma must have an engaging performance in the title role to succeed at all, and fortunately Gwyneth Paltrow, after a slow start, completely wins us over.

Davis choreographed another rash of spectacular action sequences, but Chain Reaction is doomed by a premise so simple and so absurd, it's easier to sympathize with star Keanu Reeves (poor guy, his career was going so well) than with his character. [2 Aug 1996, p.F8]

With its finely shaded portrayals, Cyclo, which took the Golden Lion at Venice last year, is another superb picture from Hung, a world-class filmmaker if ever there was one. [01 Aug 1996, p.F2]

Oblivious to niceties like subtlety, plausibility and discretion, it rushes heedlessly toward its destination of audience arousal. Like a flood, the impact is undeniable but it's not something everyone will want to get in the way of. [24Jul1996 Pg. F.01]

Exuberant and pitiless, profane yet eloquent, flush with the ability to create laughter out of unspeakable situations, Trainspotting is a drop-dead look at a dead-end lifestyle that has all the strength of its considerable contradictions.

Saucy, scary and pleasantly unsettling.

It's a downright refreshing experience to be presented with people you can identify with, recognize yourself in them, without being asked to like them.

Directed by Harold Ramis and starring Michael Keaton at his most satisfying, "Multiplicity" is the latest film to benefit from the unprecedented visual miracles that special effects can now produce. It is also one more example of a picture where technical inventiveness outstrips the pedestrian story line it's meant to animate. [17 July 1996, p.F1]

Cities engulfed by rolling walls of flame, sinister aquamarine power blasts turning beloved national monuments to toast, even the roiling clouds the spaceships appear out of, they are all disturbing, unsettling and completely convincing.

Well-meaning and convinced it has something of value to say, its "Reach Out and Touch Someone" sensibility ensures that all its satisfactions will prove hollow, and so they do.

Tasteful, subtle and sophisticated are a few of the words that aren't going to be applied to Eddie Murphy's version of The Nutty Professor. But funny, funny is something else again.

Striptease isn't in the kind of shape Demi Moore is. While her role as exotic dancer Erin Grant has the actress buffed and toned enough for the cover of Muscle & Fitness, the film itself could use a lot more definition. [28 Jun 1996, p.F1]

Leisurely yet intense (Sayles does the editing himself), Lone Star reveals a director whose mastery does nothing but increase. Perhaps now his audience will as well.

Eraser does have a few big-ticket stunts that hold the attention, but director Charles Russell, fresh from "The Mask," isn't able to infuse them with the intensity and believability that James Cameron brought to comparable sequences in "True Lies."

Though Hugo's fatalistic story has been given the inevitable happy ending, Hunchback is in many ways the most satisfyingly dark and adult of the Disney versions. [21 June 1996, p.F1]

The script (written by Susan Minot from a story by Bertolucci) suffers from the same tired blood as his characters, and his direction is often ponderously self-conscious.

Not funny enough to be a successful comedy and not coherent enough to be taken seriously, the latest film to star the talented Jim Carrey is a baffling combination of Ace Ventura, Pet Detective and Cape Fear, a misguided attempt to extend the actor's range by having him play someone who is demented and dangerous.

Slick and forceful, largely unconcerned with character, eager for any opportunity to pump up the volume both literally and metaphorically, The Rock is the kind of efficient entertainment that is hard to take pleasure in.

Everything about The Phantom is pleasantly old-fashioned, the opposite of avant-garde and cutting edge. Not intended for those who yearn for greatness, this unassuming adventure film is so cheerful and sweet-natured it's difficult to resist warming up to its modest charms. [7 June 1996, p.CF]

In his feature debut, writer-director John Mangold brings remarkably sensitive powers of observation to bear upon ordinary people living ordinary lives.

While Twohy has some fabulous technology at his disposal and uses it to great effect, the answer to that second question is obvious: He keeps us on the edge of our seats not by dazzling us with lights and sound (even if the sound is spectacular) but by tantalizing his audience with basic, well-wrought suspense.

Any movie whose computer-generated effects are more believable than its actors is asking for trouble. A frustrating combination of the magical and the mundane, Dragonheart has less difficulty creating a creditable dragon than a recognizable human being. [31 May 1996, p.F1]

It could have used several more passes on the screenplay to strengthen the gags and flesh out the characters.

Mission: Impossible proves something of a letdown, not just because it's fairly easy to guess who the bad guy is but also because we've hardly gotten to know anyone in the movie well enough to become more than superficially involved with them.

Flipper is push-button family filmmaking that could have used a stronger sense of porpoise. Plotwise, it ain't much.

Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to the rush of raw excitement "Twister" creates is that it makes it possible to ignore the painful awkwardness of the film's expository sequences and thudding dialogue of the "OK, boss lady, hold your horses" variety.

Its characters are as entertainingly quirky as any he's given us before, and his familiar themes -- strangers in a strange land, lives reformed by chance encounters -- are played out with much higher stakes and with greater purpose.

It's been brought to the screen by director John Schlesinger and writer Malcolm Bradbury with such deftness, giving it a life of its own, that it's not necessary for audiences to be familiar with the literature it satirizes.

Ought to be disreputable fun. Instead it ends up, all its explosions and exposed flesh notwithstanding, rather inert.

The Craft is well-made with a hard-driving pace. It places heavy demands on its four lead actresses, who come through in impressive fashion. Director and co-writer Andrew Fleming makes sure he and his stars deliver the goods. [03 May 1996, p.F16]

Might have benefited from a more satirical edge.

From the moment we meet Abby, whimsically soothing her callers, we're turned into lap dogs, ready to follow her -- ready to follow Garofalo -- anywhere.

The filmmakers set themselves to the daunting task of involving us in two people they couldn't remotely ask us to like or care about. But Plummer and Reeves create two profoundly damaged and dangerous people with such wit, insight and comprehension that if you're so disposed you can actually see in them your own frustrations, anger and capacity for denial and easy rationalization.

It's not "Chinatown," Jake, but Mulholland Falls has a brutal power of its own. A Los Angeles-based period thriller strong on amorality and corruption, not to mention sex and violence, Mulholland Falls combines a vivid sense of place with a visceral directorial style that fuses controlled fury onto everything it touches. [26 Apr 1996, p.F1]

Ricki Lake, who occupies one of the lower links on the TV trash-talk food chain, is promoted to ugly duckling in Mrs. Winterbourne, a film that waddles through the movie-memory super-mart shoplifting everything but charm.

Helping to make these pleasantries funny is their spur-of-the-moment quality, the same quick spontaneity that characterizes chance remarks overheard at raucous movie houses. Capturing that bright and unexpected quality is what the MST3K crew does best. Too bad that's not all they do.

Brain Candy is not for kids. But adults, especially those cursed with a twisted, jaded or perverse sense of humor, will find plenty in it to laugh about. [12 Apr 1996, p.F12]

This is a bad time for NBA fans in Boston. Just as their beloved Celtics are about to wrap up a dismal season, with nearly 50 losses and no berth in the playoffs, Hollywood comes out with a comedy about the Celtics that’s even worse than the team. And not half as funny.

This Orion release has the usual quota of violence for urban exploitation pictures, but its people have been drawn with exceptional dimension. Amid the mayhem, wit and emotion develops; "The Substitute," handsomely photographed by Bruce Surtees, actually has more on its mind than just bone-crunching. [19 Apr 1996, p.F8]

The odd truth is that the film's novice star is better than the material.

Intelligent, involving and serious, it is as honestly emotional as Hollywood allows itself to get, a story of the search for wartime truth whose own concern for the genuine makes all the difference.

Fear, thanks mostly to Foley's stylish direction and a couple of strong performances, is a much better movie than "Whispers," but those familiar with the formula will get no major surprises. [12 Apr 1996]

the first techno-misfire from Walt Disney Pictures, an over-elaborate film that leaves you feeling harangued, harassed and assaulted.

A tight courtroom melodrama that serves up twist after twist like so many baffling knuckle balls, this film handles its suspenseful material with skill and style.

Neither flashy nor dishonest, a wizard with restraint, Pearce has a gift for discovering the excitement in honest human behavior, and working from an acute script by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, he's able to dramatize the story's essence without forcing the issue.

Sgt. Bilko is one of those joyless comedies that have lately become so prevalent, a halfheartedly amusing film that avoids originality while relying on old and tired material. [29 Mar 1996, p.F1]

With his ability to understand and convey these absurdist scenarios in both adult and preteen terms, writer-director Solondz catches the unlooked-for humor in poignant, hurtful situations.

Too slight to be taken seriously and too off-putting (especially when the phone callers get hostile and the work demeaning) to be funny, Girl 6 feels like the first draft of a potentially interesting project. It just hasn't been made good on here.

These despairing, ambiguous pieces are always emotionally unsettling, and that is due in part to Kieslowski's complete assurance as a director. His spare, minimal visual preferences dominate each episode. The camera work is fluid and precise, and the films are so rich they seem to be feature-length though they're not.

What makes Ed such a dreary experience is that literally no one here seems to be trying--someone came up with the hey-let's-put-a-monkey-in-funny-outfits idea and no more creative meetings were called.

Everything about Executive Decision is familiar except how crisply its conventional story is executed. Since most action thrillers think blowing things up is enough to attract an audience, it's a nice surprise to come across a savvy piece of work that relies on suspense and is as professional as the elite anti-terrorist unit it celebrates.

With the perfect assist from their actors, all of whom are well in on the joke, this affectionate look at the frozen North brings the Coens back in from the cold.

Not without its funny moments, much of Birdcage seems pro forma and predictable. What felt original in 1978 is no longer half so inspired.

Beautifully wrought and wonderfully acted, The Flower of My Secret is in fact the kind of film that George Cukor often made - and he surely would have been delighted at Almodovar's deft blend of humor, tenderness and wisdom. [13 Mar 1996]

Chungking Express ravishingly, seductively exudes the immediacy of everyday life as its spins its classically timeless tales of love lost and almost regained.

A dialogue polishing by Barker, plus his own direction, might have made a crucial difference. What it got instead was a script inescapably convoluted by the need to justify a third sequel...Like the other sequels, Hellraiser: Bloodline goes in for elaborate special effects and decor, but the film is murky and morbid, laden with a heavy dose of grisly sadomasochism that's more repellent than intriguing.

Take a ridiculous premise, marry it to a situation that is bound to resolve itself in the most obvious way, and keep the whole thing rolling with juvenile gags. What do you have? Television. Or “If Lucy Fell,” whose writer-director, Eric Schaeffer, certainly knows television. Or knew it.

The Neon Bible is elegiac, formal and sometimes boldly stylized. The result is an extraordinary experience in which the familiar is made deeply and effectively unsettling.

A routine, mildly funny service comedy. [01 Mar 1996, p.F6]

For serenely rising above all the foolishness is Chan himself, a performer whose belief in broad and harmless fun gives his films a clear and present connection to the classic silent comedies to go along with its action fixation. For once a film's ad line has a whiff of truth about it: "No Fear. No Stuntman. No Equal." [23 Feb 1996, p.1]

There is nothing to be embarrassed about here, neither is there much to relish, for Mary Reilly has more of the sheen of art than its essence.

Though Bottle Rocket is wryly amusing from beginning to end, the hard edges of the real world are never too far from its surface. And it is the particular grace of the film that though all its characters end up with something like what they're looking for, its not exactly how they'd imagined it would be.

The result is a movie that's hard to laugh at when its hero would surely be either in jail or perhaps even a mental institution were he to behave the way he does on screen in real life.

City Hall is inside information in search of a movie, a forced marriage between the trappings of reality and the fantasy of a jerry-built plot. Reasonably intelligent, neither offensive nor enticing, it passes its time on the screen without providing compelling reasons for audiences to either go or stay. [16 Feb 1996, p.F1]

Beautiful Girls follows the boys as they work their way through these crises, and it's about as much fun as a neighborhood bar on a Tuesday night. Its crisis: not much happening.

Woo has turned out a slick piece of business, filled with explosions and assorted acts of violence brought off with considerable movie-making skill.

The 20 or so minutes we spend with the Albatross in the squall is high adventure, to be sure. Everything else is ballast.

While Black Sheep isn't as consistently funny as the Farley-Spade debut feature, "Tommy Boy," it's a crowd-pleaser directed with maximum energy and panache by Penelope Spheeris, who's just the person you need to make material funnier than it really is.

A film of epically hollow sentimentality, a movie that tells you how to feel every step of the way and ends on a symphony of false notes. The moment when we learn what Mr. Holland's Opus really means makes the ending of It's a Wonderful Life look like an exercise in restraint.

[Shore] seems convinced that the antics of his retarded persona amount to some manner of postmodernist anti-comedy and this makes the resultant boredom seem all the more pathetic.

Dunston Checks In is a delightful and funny family film of exceptional high style.

What makes this film more than mere visual vigilantism is John Schlesinger, of whom it can be safely asked, what happened? He shows flashes of the old brilliance here -- the talent that made "Midnight Cowboy" so moving and "Marathon Man" such a nail-biter -- in telling this modern horror tale of the court system gone awry. It's unfortunate that after the messy construction of his last film, "The Innocent," he hasn't directed his gifted self toward something with a bit more intelligence. [12 Jan 1996, p.F6]

Not bad in the aggressive, ambitious, over-the-top way that “Showgirls” epitomized. “Two If by Sea” is more like a zero, an inert lump of a movie with so little going on that fidgety viewers can sneak out for a hot dog or some popcorn and return without fear of having missed anything significant.

Mystifying, intriguing, even infuriating, it shows what happens when an unconventional talent meets straightforward material.

Unusual in both its subject matter and its approach, this film guides us on a pair of intertwined paths American movies rarely venture down.