Being John Malkovich, which contains not a frame of extraneous footage, is more than a must-see movie: It's a must-see-more-than-once event.

A cute, often very funny romantic comedy and an effective vehicle for Matthew Perry.

An ultra-stylized, empty mess.

Risks trivializing history and pandering to feminist fantasies, but it may be the year's most fearless movie.

A lobotomized attempt to make a no-budget John Waters movie, Men Cry Bullets is a painful reminder of just how bad indie cinema can be - especially when it plays with gender roles. It's desperately unfunny and dreadfully acted, written and directed.

The performances by the attractive ensemble cast are uniformly solid.

Filming in gritty, black-and-white 16mm, Riker gets terrifically natural, often moving performances from his mostly non-professional cast.

Downbeat and at times strangely slow-moving despite all its beautifully shot high-speed ambulance rides.

Its portrait of adolescence seems so authentic that it puts most Hollywood products to shame.

Not especially scary or funny, this lame comedy-thriller wastes a decent cast in a plodding tale.

Doesn't live up to the promise of its trailers.

Talky, overlong and, ultimately, just as predictable and repetitive as the maddening relationship it depicts.

As a work of historical documentation, The Source suffers from Workman's wholly celebratory take on the movement.

A poignant, graceful little film.

Amateurishly written and directed, and so predictable that it hurts.

Sucker bait for the sort of credulous cinast who'll buy anything ugly and boring that looks like it's avant-garde...rancid stew of cheap shocks, sleaze and phony artiness.

An engaging documentary.

Lynch's first G-rated feature, turns out to be one of the year's best films...a wonderful surprise.

Fight Club badly wants to be "A Clockwork Orange" for the millennium - and succeeds to a surprising extent until director David Fincher ends up sucker-punching the audience.

Undercut by funereal pacing and an ending that seems more than a little contrived.

The cinematic equivalent of enduring a cross-country airplane flight trapped in a seat next to a manic depressive.

A witless and vulgar romantic comedy wrapped inside a mock documentary.

Shallow and blatantly manipulative variation on "Awakenings" in which every plot development is telegraphed.

A genuinely clever plot.

It's clever, cool fun and it looks great.

Without a real story to go with the notion of Farm Belt "wiggas," the humor wears thinner and thinner until it disappears.

The funniest "SNL" movie since "Wayne's World."

A haunting, superbly made film. But it's also an unrelentingly sad and depressing experience.

It's moody and atmospheric. But with the exception of a few cool moments that remind you of Ferrara at his best, it's dull and written with little attention paid to basic storytelling.

Basically a feature-length rock video from Germany with appealing performers, decently written characters, a killer score, and an interesting premise.

Should entertain less jaded youngsters.

The awkwardness and drama of finding and losing love has rarely been portrayed so gracefully on screen in recent years.

It's a funny and occasionally poignant movie.

Does offer solid laughs, engaging performances and a captivating setting.

A noisy, amateurish mess that doesn't work on any level - an extended, clich-ridden MTV video set to anachronistic bad music.

Recycles the teen romantic comedies of the last few years...and it's easily the worst of the lot.

An extraordinary experience: an original and brilliant combination of comedy, action and sophisticated political comment -- the best American movie of the year thus far.

There are a few ingenious zig zags in its otherwise by-the-numbers plot...but what keeps you interested... is the sheer movie-star presence of the actors in the lead roles.

What the film lacks in freshness...it makes up for in its sympathetic and compelling portrayal of its subjects.

A crowd-pleasing ensemble piece, whose story goes exactly where you want it to.

A particularly gross exploitation of the Holocaust for financial gain.

Vastly superior to the small and independent films that have come out during the last six months.

Dennis Rodman isn't half bad as a blond, multiply pierced Interpol agent.

Should make Polley, memorable in "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Go," into a bona-fide star.

A slack-paced, surprisingly bland affair, filled with jokes that sound like they should be funny but aren't.

An odd, unexpectedly interesting little movie.

An exhausting, overindulgent film, at least for American audiences...the experience feels like Grampa Simpson meets "Cinema Paradiso."

A real pleasure, a sweet, funny, ensemble comedy...utterly authentic.

Despite many flaws...Romance is unquestionably an important film.

It's "The Postman" on a pitcher's mound.

It isn't particularly subtle or original. But it's a good-natured late-summer romp fueled by Lawrence's manic shtick.

An irresistible documentary tribute that's as yummy and insubstantial as a sackful of Twinkies.

Oddly undramatic.

A crude, manic and embarrassingly unfunny satire that feels off from beginning to end.

An embarrassing misfire...feels like a long, slow TV pilot about L.A. twentysomethings, only it lacks the polish and wit of your average sitcom.

A flat-out masterpiece, surely the best movie of the year; indeed, an all-time classic.

A slow, self-consciously low-key, very dull film that strains for eeriness with long silences and affectless performances.

That insinuating, sublime atmosphere is consistently being intruded upon by the distractingly silly plot.

A lame TV sitcom with big-screen ambition that's almost touching in its hopelessness.

A remarkable accomplishment. It takes one of the century's vast tragedies...and makes it heart-rendingly real and intimate.

A cast almost talented enough to distract you from Ted Griffin's gimmicky screenplay.

(Kusturica) celebrates its gaudy humanity in a joyous picture that is his most lighthearted and amusing work to date.

What a bloody disappointment Stigmata is!

Presumably Zane & Co. had a lot more fun filming this inexplicable low-budget indulgence than any sane person will have watching it.

A surprisingly nasty fable about a particularly silly, very English brand of animal-rights extremism.

Peter Farrelly is angry at Miramax for marketing his and his brother Bobby's new film as a follow-up to their surprise smash hit, "There's Something About Mary."

A ho-hummer of a "Speed" knockoff that will leave most audiences cold.

A deeply pleasurable, old-fashioned blood-'n'-guts adventure film.

A film that parents can confidently and with pleasure take their little ones to see - but which is not quite a good movie.

Could have been written by a computer programmed to cannibalize previous sci-fi films.

Begins so briskly and promisingly to stumble aimlessly and flat-footedly to a surprise finale.

It's as light as a feather yet tickles all the same.

A kindler, gentler comedy that's perfect for children and parents to see together.

Slow and predictable, and the characters are so poorly written that its hard to react to them in any way.

An ugly, failed attempt to pull off a "Heathers"-style, teen-oriented black comedy.

An enjoyable minor-league lark. But another "Notting Hill?" Fuhgeddaboutit.

The Return is about bullets, bombs and boobs - the biggest boob being Van Damme, natch, but there are also mammaries aplenty.

Bowfinger's terrific set-pieces... more than make up for the odd weak moment or thin performance.

Better Than Chocolate is well-filmed and for the most part well-acted. But its technical professionalism only serves to make the amateurishly crude patches of Maggie Thompson's script more obvious. [13 Aug 1999, p.062]

Somnolent, draggy but occasionally warm-hearted.

Like a thick slice of ham - tasty, elegantly prepared and served - that aspires to be gourmet fare but in the end turns out to be only half-baked.

In most respects, The Iron Giant is one of the better animated children's films in recent memory, which makes its strident political correctness all the more frustrating.

(Osment) delivers what may be the greatest performance ever by a child actor.

A gleefully cunning comedy.

A runaway bore.

The whole film could use a jolt of caffeine, and a lugubrious woodwind score doesn't help.

It's shocking only in its banality, impotence and utter lack of heat.

May be the creepiest and most original horror film since John Carpenter's classic "Halloween."

But on evidence of the likable but draggy and awfully thin Muppets from Space, Kermit & Co. are showing their age. Miss Piggy is about five years away from Norma Desmondhood, and Kermit is ready for his pipe and cardigan, Mr. DeMille. [14 July 1999, p.048]

Vulgar and lewd and raunchy like you wouldn't believe, and absolutely hilarious from beginning to end.

Late August, Early September is less a living, breathing movie than a dry exercise in theory. [07 Jul 1999, p.048]

It all gets repetitive, and after about the halfway point, you get the feeling that Myers and Co. don't know where to go next, and are making it up as they go along.

The frothy, feel-good Notting Hill is about as enchanting as movies get these days.

Forget the hype, and the backlash. The Phantom Menace is captivating.

At first, it seems stagy and slow and even to verge on the pretentious, but the film steadily accumulates dramatic power as its carefully sketched characters reveal their internal lives. By its end, After Life has developed into one of those haunting movies whose scenes can pop back into your consciousness hours or days after you have seen it. [12 May 1999, p.56]

Cheerful, slightly cheesy entertainment that uses the latest special-effects techniques to breathe life into a venerable film tradition.

[Refn] mixes jittery hand-held camerawork, improvised dialogue and available light to create a nightmarish world of sex, drugs and horrific brutality that will turn off many viewers while delighting others.

A terrific work of political and social satire set in a Nebraska high school that has the intelligence of (the less coherent) "Rushmore," while painting a much darker picture of politics and human relationships.