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]