The smartest movie to come out this year, and it could hardly be better cast.

Without any believable characters or situations, Reindeer Games is about as appealing as leftover Christmas fruitcake.

Boasts several fine performances and some elegant, eerie black-and- white photography.

By far the best thing about Pitch Black is the cool-looking lighting and photography.

Inside Beautiful People, . . . there's a terrific film trying to get out.

A lame, glossy and disastrously misconceived film about three ditsy sisters dealing with the death of their horrible father.

Hits one out of the park.

An offer you shouldn't refuse: It's laugh-out-loud, side-splitting funny.

A sweet, lushly photographed but occasionally slow film.

Pays off with emotional dividends well worth the time investment.

The kind of sentimental, upbeat and inoffensive children's entertainment parents always hope their kids will like.

Uncommonly well-acted and beautifully shot on location in southern India, but it's not exactly riveting.

Makes the most of its wintry settings and never insults the audience's intelligence -- no mean feat for a family film. It's a real crowd-pleaser.

What could have been an intriguing look at a bizarre and complex woman plays like just another cog in the Annabel Chong publicity machine.

Cinematographer Darius Khonji does a superb job of conveying both the sensual beauty (there's a spectacular moonlight-on-the-water sex scene with Leo and the lovely Ledoyen), and the darkness of Richard's paradise lost.

This low-caliber Gun Shy has singularly ugly cinematography by Tom Richmond that at one point shows off Bullock's facial hair.

A talky, pretentious soap opera about Spanish intellectuals.

It's the chemistry between the Arquettes (they met on the first film and married after the second) and their rapport with Campbell that sustains Scream 3 through its overly convoluted plot.

A hapless family film that's too scary for little kids and too boring for everyone else.

Has its share of laughs.

So joyous it can actually shake viewers out of a bad mood.

The premise is so sad it's impossible to chuckle at the often heavy-handed humor.

Isn't great, but it's an enjoyable if overly discreet and romanticized look at a long-vanished show-business world.

Watchable even when what's going on makes no sense whatsoever.

Stinko movies often unwittingly critique themselves -- and the brain-dead romantic comedy Down to You (which Miramax understandably didn't screen in advance for critics) is no exception.

The latest vanity production by writer-director-star Eric Schaeffer, who still seems to think he's another Woody Allen -- despite a growing body of work that proves otherwise.

A perfectly enjoyable sci-fi thriller.

Grows on you like kudzu.

The whole movie is so ineptly written and directed that its 90 minutes seem to take twice as long.

More than lives up to its clever positioning as the first movie of the new millennium.

For all its wit and intricacy, the film is often ponderous. [31 Dec 1999, p.038]

An expertly crafted, deeply moving film.

A flawed drama offering a rare look at the Catholic Church's canonization process.

Morris' most gripping film since "The Thin Blue Line," is the year's scariest movie.

It's bone tired.

Rescues a rarely performed tragedy and makes a brilliant case that it is the Shakespeare play for our time.

An affectionate, often clever and unflaggingly funny satire.

This film of mistaken identity, murder, class envy and (bi)sexual tension doesn't live up to its own promise.

A testosterone- and cliché-fueled epic that will have some hoping for sudden death as it stumbles toward the three-hour mark.

Lacks the humor and charm that fills the book and makes it so much more than a catalog of suffering.

Less a conventional biography than a performance film - one that stuns and delights.

The year's most beautiful movie -- and surely one of the dullest.

It's an odd mixture of an unsentimental, darkly humorous take on mental illness with the usual Hollywood loony-bin cliches.

Revels in the sensual pleasure of music while capturing brilliantly the tension that grips any theater company before the curtain goes up.

The kind of unsophisticated family entertainment they supposedly don't make anymore.

The pace slackens a little after the first hour, but the photography by Remi Adefarasin and music by Magnus Fiennes keep the emotion stoked.

Such astounding computer-generated effects you'll suspend disbelief and root for the hero, a 3-inch talking mouse.

A non-starter.

The once-funny Robin Williams is still stuck in his excruciating touchy-feely mode.

Meanders along in a confused, confusing way for what feels like hours.

Hands-down the best movie of the year.

A relentlessly grim, rather heavy-handed drama of family dysfunction.

A major disappointment, The Cider House Rules pales by comparison with the gutsier, more full-bodied adaptation of Irving's "The World According to Garp."

There is hardly a moment during this overlong, stunningly smug exercise in moral self-satisfaction when you actually care about a character, real or invented.

Thanks to (Douglas), Diamonds is quite affecting -- even if it's not a particularly good movie.

A reminder of just how good Hollywood storytelling can be.

It's not to say that the adolescent humor isn't funny; some of it is hilarious. It's just that this movie lacks the overarching comic sensibility that made "Mary" and even Adam Sandler comedies like "Happy Gilmore" and "The Waterboy" so satisfying.

This intense psycho-sexual drama doesn't easily lend itself to the camera.

Studded with potent fright scenes and built on a rock-solid performance by the ever-dependable Kevin Bacon.

A satisfying Irish stew made from very familiar ingredients.

It's hard to feel anything but disappointment and boredom by the time the picture grinds to a mystical ending.

All of the characters in this story of love, guilt and redemption feel like real people, facing real dilemmas, and you truly care about what happens to them

It lurches ineptly from lame comedy to hokey melodrama.

Isn't Allen's finest work by a long shot, but an undeniable part of its fascination is trying to figure out what -- if anything, even unconsciously -- he's trying to say about how he treated Farrow.

Worth seeing for McTeer's touching, funny and richly detailed performance, which should put her on the map in Hollywood.

A hokey, overblown and deeply unsatisfying movie.

Toy Story had a simpler, stronger story and the advantage of being the first of its kind. But it's quickly apparent that TS2 represents a major step forward in computer-animation artistry.

De Niro gives a technically brilliant performance as Walt, struggling with a body that will no longer obey him.

Comes closer to what a Bond movie should be and once was.

As a horror movie, even one inspired by the kitschy Hammer horror films of the 1950s, it's disappointing.

The year's best foreign-language movie an absolute must-see.

Easily one of the year's best movies.

The latest episode of this ongoing masterpiece of reality TV -- which every seven years revisits a group of English people first interviewed as 7-year-olds in 1964 -- is every bit as enthralling as the earlier ones.

Kevin Smith's attempt to combine sketchy low comedy with long-winded theological speculation results in a mostly unfunny and occasionally tedious mess.

But given the potentially gripping subject matter, the film is fatally underedited: Every scene feels too long.

Well worth seeing for the incandescent Portman.

Besson is unable to weave the comic scenes together with the serious gory ones, so both seem increasingly jarring and unbelievable.

Light It Up would be a strong candidate for the year's most irresponsible movie - if it were remotely believable.

Some wonderful films have come out of Iran in the past few years, but A Moment of Innocence, by highly regarded director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is too smug and too self-indulgent to count as one of them.

Strictly a kids' movie, but parents may be relieved to sit back and enjoy the fact that for two full hours, they won't have to hear the kids asking them to buy any more Pokemon trading cards.

So unremittingly vulgar and inept it makes "The Best Man" and "Runaway Bride" look like masterpieces by comparison.

Isn't particularly funny, romantic or well-acted. It drags on endlessly.

Something most have gotten lost in the translation.

Bleak, demanding stuff, and its hand-held documentary-style photography is harder on the stomach than "The Blair Witch Project."

Entertaining but terminally dopey.

A misguided exercise - a crude merger of "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Schindler's List" that somehow reminds you of "Hogan's Heroes."

A rare and welcome reminder of how original, provocative and moving a low-budget independent film can be.

A beautifully shot, well-acted movie that manages to make a complicated, real-life story without much drama feel like a thriller.

German director Werner Herzog's fascinating, fond and often bitchy documentary recalling the late star of his most celebrated movies.

Frequently hilarious, if overlong.

Grows tiresome rather quickly.

This one is often more interesting than involving.

Occasionally amusing, extremely gross, but mostly tedious.

Beautifully shot and often moving.

A campy docu-drama about the secretly gay world of 1950's muscle magazines.

Good-natured but mostly unfunny.

Watching Meryl Streep act can be an exhausting experience - and never more so than during Music of the Heart.

The movie isn't bad, only scattered and incomplete.

Slow-moving, yawn-inducing remake.

A visually stunning film.

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.

Breakneck, raucous and thoroughly exhilarating.

It's like animation come to three-dimensional life, and f/x addicts as well as sci-fi fans will not want to miss a split-second.

Only sporadically amusing. (review of re-release)

It tries to be an update of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" crossed with "Pygmalion," but while it has some funny and even original moments, it's too predictable to be "all that."

A compelling, at times bone-chilling study of the male character in crisis.

Greengrass' direction is uninspired, but there is powerful chemistry between a workmanlike Branagh and (real-life girlfriend) Bonham Carter. And her original, seductive and always believable turn as the difficult-but-lovable Jane raises the movie above all its flaws. [23 Dec. 1998, p.44]

Shot in luminous black and white, John Boorman's The General is an off-puttingly adoring homage to a complete savage [18 Dec 1998, p.65]

If she (Paltrow) were the only good thing about Shakespeare in Love, it still would have been worth seeing; that she is the crown jewel in a glittering tiara of a film studded with writing and acting gems testifies to the deep pleasures to be found in this remarkable movie.

The picture is smothered by solemn right-mindedness, and hobbled by scripter David McKenna's simplistic, knee-jerk liberal take on suburban white racism.

Scene for scene, it's like a gorgeous painting come to life, magically illuminated with a warm, orange glow. Unfortunately, those very sets and costumes take priority over a plot that - at best - is glacially paced. [06 Oct 1998, p.070]

For all the drama's canonization of a runner who valued guts over everything else, Without Limits takes no risks. It's just not all that it could be. [11 Sep 1998, p.069]

Writer-director Imamura's film seems as deceptively simple as the eel, and yet generates deep emotional ripples. [21 Aug 1998, p.064]

A film of such cyclonic visual and emotional power, of such dazzling virtuosity and shattering humanity, that it is difficult to endure, yet alone describe. Savagely beautiful and savagely true, Saving Private Ryan is an excruciating masterpiece.

Here, Saget can't even find a consistent tone, varying between all-out slapstick and attempts at dark comedy. Then again, it's hard to milk yuks out of murder, prison rape, bestiality, incest, homelessness and guns in school. [13 Jun 1998, p.023]

As the fourth entry of a painfully uninspired series, this version features new actors portraying the trio of adolescent warriors. [10 Apr 1998, p.49]

The violence in the existential gangster poem Sonatine is as flat and matter-of-fact as the antihero's face. Kitano, the Japanese Harvey Keitel, is a bullplug of a man whose very presence has gravity. [10 Apr 1998, p.048]

Indeed, one never doubts that cast and crew went into Wide Awake with anything but the best intentions. Yet, spiritual kiddie flick or not, one knows what the road to hell is paved with. [20 Mar 1998, p.50]

As Tears Go By doesn’t measure up to Wong’s later classics, such as In the Mood for Love (2000) and Chungking Express (1994), but it shows a master in the making.

It's like watching Alfred Hitchcock try to solve a Rubik's cube in a roadside diner.

If you can stomach the lavish gore, The Beyond also treats you to a three-ring circus of atrocious acting, loopy dialogue, a cheesy wah-wah guitar and synthesizer score and endless jump-out-at-you shocks. [12 Jun 1998, p.053]

It’s as if a ruthless gang of Richie Cunninghams terrorized the Fonzies of the world.

We now have the distance to see just how close to a flawless and utterly timeless a film Steven Spielberg and his collaborators crafted – one that transcended genres (sci-fi and kids’ movies) to become of one of the greatest and most durable of American movies. [2002 re-release]

North Dallas Forty wasn't intended to be a traditional sports flick as much as an examination of the cold business side of the game and its institutional pressures, especially during that era, when the paychecks usually weren't commensurate with the pain these disposable players endured. [17 Apr 2020, p.39]

Mostly it's worth seeing Alien, which established Scott as an A-list director, in a theater because his brilliant and often expansive visuals have always worked better on a big screen than on video.

House is a spooky fairy tale mixed with martial arts, slow motion, black-and-white flashbacks — even a little upskirt action. A demonic white cat and a people-eating piano add spice. Movies as original as this one don’t come along very often, so grab it while you can.

Basically Jaws, but, you know, on land. With a bear. [29 Jun 2014, p.20]

Not only does Black Christmas provide real chills, it introduces devices - like the opening, which is shot from the slasher's point of view - that inspired John Carpenter's Halloween and countless genre flicks to follow. [20 Dec 2009, p.61]

Director William Friedkin, (“The French Connection” and this year’s “Rules of Engagement”) has always been a provocateur, a master of the shock. But his very lack of subtlety is both the strength and weakness of The Exorcist in the 21st century. [2000 re-release]

Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor are good, but the real surprise is Ross. She's so magnetic that you can't believe this melodrama didn't lead to a real movie career. [06 Nov 2005, p.76]

You’re a Big Boy Now is no “The Graduate” but it holds up far better than most comedies from this era I’ve revisited.

Bruce Brown’s 1966 documentary, perhaps the greatest surfing movie ever made, follows California surfers as they travel the globe in search of the perfect wave.

Bursting with energy and originality even after 36 years, A Hard Day's Night is easily the best show in town.

Simultaneously funny and frightening, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical masterpiece. [25 Apr 2004, p.3]

An effective damsel-stalked-by-psycho horror tale, only more lush, as befitting any film produced by Ross Hunter. [15 Aug 1999, p.035]

A truly superb courtroom drama. [02 Jan 2008, p.35]

Sorry, the beloved Singin’ in the Rain isn’t the finest of the legendary MGM musicals. For my money, it’s a close second to The Band Wagon, which has better music, better dances, better direction, more lavish sets and costumes and a wittier script (by the same writers).

In Raoul Walsh's potent portrayal of a criminal gang roving backroads America, Cagney permanently redefined psychopathic criminality in the movies. [22 May 2005, p.25]

Basically, Katharine Hepburn could do no wrong, and with Cary Grant, the ultimate screen actor, you've got an instant classic. Screwball comedy is one of the hardest to bring off, and director Howard Hawks realized that you have to play real to make it succeed. [12 July 1998, p.30]

Moving at a leisurely pace, Cavalacade is primarily of historical interest for everyone except Coward completists and hard-core Anglophiles.

Classic shipboard romantic dramedy involving a condemned prisoner (William Powell) who hooks up with a dying woman (Kay Francis). Excellent support by Frank McHugh and Aline MacMahon as a pair of con artists. [31 Jan 2010, p.6]