A metaphysical shaggy-dog story, whose unpredictable punchline is its only redeeming feature.

Dunst and Williams...turn ditsiness into a frenetic comic duet.

It's no Runaway success, but Gere and Roberts still glow.

Has the gentlest feel of any movie I can remember.

Drop Dead Ugly is more like it.

Ultimately, Eyes Wide Shut doesn't rank among Kubrick's best work.

The inexplicably terrifying ending is good for a month's worth of nightmares -- no small thing for a movie in such a saturated field.

Muppets From Space has its share of whimsical lines aimed over children's heads at their parents, but speaking for one parent whose kids are grown, it's not enough. [14 July 1999, p.36]

The successful bits, along with an amiable cast of losers and their prom-night prey, make American Pie a winner.

The film, written and directed with an intimate, hand-held camera by Assayas, is notable for the details how love that is ended sometimes flares up in little brush fires, only to be banked down again; how lovers awkwardly balance the push and pull of new relationships; how things neither start nor end with any punctuality or precision. [07 Jul 1999, p.38]

Furiously paced.

Turns out to be less than the sum of its wonderfully silly and bizarre parts.

The overall result is a romantic comedy that indulges fantasies, calms insecurities (can an ordinary bloke stack up?), and breaks and mends hearts with surgical precision.

It's beautiful to look at, and marvelously edited, but it's hard to know exactly what he's getting at. [28 May 1999]

In the end, Phantom needed more human and less digital scale. The magic of "Star Wars" lay in Lucas' ability to play the human comedy in a fantastic future. With Phantom, he has brought the series to the brink of total artificiality, the future as a video game.

The memories recalled here aren't epic tales, just moments that make life worth living. Like seeing a good movie. [12 May 1999, p.44]

Even if The Mummy is imitation Spielberg, it offers more bang for the buck than we're used to getting.

Ill-timed "Hands" has a very limited grasp of comedy.

Hell has not yet frozen over, but here's something equally unexpected: David Mamet has made a G-rated movie for adults.

David Cronenberg is one of the most intellectual film makers around.

The actors are solid at every position, but Broderick, who seems to get better with each performance, is especially good at playing the impulsively self-destructive yet sympathetic loser.

Uneven but fitfully entertaining.

A surprisingly genial and affecting comedy about the trials and tribulations of teenage rebellion during the Reagan '80s.

Darkly hilarious.

Bale fails to make Chris a character compelling enough to stand out from that heavy dose of '70s clothes and hair.

A dazzlingly original visual adventure.

About two faces of healing.

Carrie is back and she's all the rage.

The movie works as well as it does ­because the cast knows the material so ­intimately. (review of re-release)

There are so many balls in the air in the cheerfully violent Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, you'll want to wear a helmet for fear they'll all come crashing down.

This vapid '80 punk party reeks of 200 Cigarettes.

Work was never funnier.

Well, it's not that hard to predict how this comedy with a little emotional depth will end. And that's not such a terrible thing, because She's All That delivers a lot of charm and quite a few nice comic touches. [29 Jan 1999, p.68]

Here is something great and startling -- not necessarily the kind of comforting, consensus-creating film that wins Oscars, but unquestionably a movie that will live in the history of the medium.

Schrader and Nolte are both at the height of their expressive powers in a film that, in its concentration and sobriety, leaves a lasting impression.

This alien high school sci-fi tale has clever wit, clever FX.

Patch Adams is either a brilliantly sly, straight-faced parody of the standard Robin Williams tearjerker or the soggiest movie of the season. [24 December 1998, p. 29]

Theory of Flight follows the standard inspirational formula. [23 Dec. 1998, p.43]

Apt to scare kids. [18 December 1998, p.72]

Boorman doesn't shy from showing Cahill as a complicated man who, in one famous incident, nearly crucified one of his own men for a minor infraction. But the portrait is a loving one, full of empathy for an oddly principled man who, in another line of work, could have made a difference and lived to enjoy it. [18 Dec 1998, p.72]

It's a Master "Plan."

Inordinately clever, sprightly romantic comedy.

One of the freshest, richest, most original films to come out of Hollywood in a very long time.

Cold, dull, lifeless. [5 December 1998, p.3]

Very Bad Things only getes worse. [25 November 1998, p. 44]

A strange, somewhat icky romantic comedy. [25 November 1998, p. 45]

For older kids and adults, it's an amazing piece of work, far more complex in its talking-animal effects and far more ambitious in design than the first film.

Normally the sound in movie theaters is of popcorn crunching. But the sound at theaters where Central Station is showing is of hearts breaking.

Ain't exactly the Bahama Mama of all horror pics. [13 November 1998, p. 56]

A fascinating whirl of politics and palace intrigue.

Working a lisping Southern accent that sounds like Truman Capote on Seconal, Sandler plays Bobby Boucher, a swamp-dwelling Cajun. [6 November 1998, p. 56]

It has the most beautiful ending of any American film in years, a coda of reconciliation and remembrance set in a gentle L.A. rain.

With style to spare, Hype Williams' gangsta rap epic Belly applies a wide range of MTV techniques slow motion, strobe effects, seemingly more fish-eye shots than there are fish in the sea to tell a confusing, fundamentally undramatic story about two holdup men from Queens (played by rappers DMX and Nas) who graduate to dealing a new kind of superpowered heroin. [06 Nov 1998, p.56]

Unflinching in its depiction of racism, anti-Semitism, violence and jailhouse politics.

It's just as well that John Carpenter makes horror movies, because here's a horrifying thought picture James Woods as an action hero. [30 October 1998, p. 44]

A rare blend of comedy and tenderness whose point is not the horrors of war but the lengths a parent will go to protect his child's innocence.

Giddily inventive.

Masterful.

Has a great deal going for it. [16 October 1998, p. 57]

A bug-eyed marvel. [2 October 1998, p. 56]

Cold-blooded comedy.

A beautifully rich performance by Meryl Streep, [18 September 1998, p. 57]

Soldier's Daughter is at its best when alluding to the quasi- romantic attachments and undefined crushes that develop in small groups and keep the engines whirring. The inchoate longings go round and round, as subtly as befits the movie's rather smallish canvas. [18 Sep 1998, Pg.57]

Oughtta be much bettor.

Pure hackwork.

Offers a brilliant raw look at sexual heeling. [19 August 1998, p. 35]

Directed with great skill and intelligence by Joseph Ruben, Return to Paradise, is a rare thing among today's movies a drama of conscience. [14 Aug1 998, Pg.51]

A dicey thriller visually, De Palma kicks off the movie on quite a roll, but the story craps out. [7 August 1998, p. 57]

Satire goes 'south' in gross mismatch of hot comic duo and "Airplane" director. [31 July 1998, p. 46]

The pleasure of Ever After is that it never takes itself seriously. [31Jul1998, Pg. 47]

Though Driver's offbeat beauty and Wilkinson's weathered visage make for an unlikely pairing, it works because their passion wells from something deeper than physical apperance. [31 Jul 1998]

Steven Spielberg's best war film -- and one of the two or three best movies the director has made.

A shocking and hilarious triumph.

An on-again, arf-again comedy. [26 June 1998, p. 54]

When boy meets girl in Steven Soderbergh's jaunty, sexy Out of Sight, it happens with a bang.

Truth is, it' not very good.

Flunks the freshness test.

A painfully unfunny vehicle for Norm Macdonald, who here shows exactly why he was ousted from NBC's Saturday Night Live. [13 Jun 1998, p.27]

A sunny-looking movie about the darkest paranoia.

A small miracle of comic social portraiture, a sometimes affectionate, sometimes ironic study of a specific group at a specific moment. His work is deeply evocative and enjoyable.

Opposite attracts with its wit.

A brilliant and astounding black comedy.

Mark Wahlberg could lose some of the good will he generated from his performance in "Boogie Nights" by playing an idiotically gentle killer for hire in The Big Hit. [24 April 1998, p. 53]

A brutal and preposterous action movie about a guy, a kid and a secret code. And a whole lotta shattering glass.

This stunning work by Iran's leading film maker, Abbas Kiarostami, won the grand prize at last year's Cannes festival. Open and simple in its visual style, the film takes place largely in real time, giving it a firmly anchored sense of reality to set against its abstract philosophical concerns. The atmosphere is calm, yet the film is mysteriously, powerfully affirmative. [20 March 1998, p.60]

Denying us any catharsis, Haneke becomes a stern, finger-wagging lecturer; he seems to mean his movie as punishment, conveniently forgetting his own role in the crime. [11 March 1998, p.38]

Tommy Lee Jones seems to have misplaced the flinty resolve, gruff charm and fatherly concern that defined his earlier outing. [6 March 1998, p. 48]

It's a tired idea, and it produces an episodic, unstrung film. [6 March 1998, p.49]

A choppy, incoherent science-fiction thriller that does no credit to its expensive cast. [13 February 1998, p. 57]

A grade better than the made-for-cable market whence it came.

Lean's wonderful 1946 movie are taken down a peg with a tawdry update of Great Expectations set in modern-day Florida and New York. [30 January 1998, p. 44]

Dull it is not, but Wong's trademark sense of romantic melancholy fails to jell amid all the excess, and the film turns frankly silly once the mute starts imagining himself in love with a can of sardines. [21 Jan 1998, Pg.37]

Phantoms is fear-less.

Reefer mildness.

Armstrong is usually a strong and original director of actors (her 1979 "My Brilliant Career" launched the inimitable Judy Davis). But here, her taste seems to have deserted her. [31Dec1997 Pg.30]

At his best, as he is here, Rudolph is always able to locate the emotional reality inside the dream. [26Dec1997 Pg53]

Brilliant. [24 December 1997, p. 24]

CRUSHingly unfunny. [24 Dec 1997, p.34]