What's admirable about Save Me is that it grounds its religious and cultural debate not in vilifying one side but in sympathizing with both.

A Very Brady Sequel isn't quite as successful as its big-screen forerunner. The contrast between the time-warped Bradys and the '90s world around them seems a little forced here, and the sexual double entendres - and there are lots of them - are almost painfully arch. But the cast is dead-on in its impersonations of the original Brady gang, great pains have been taken to re-create the cheesy pop furnishings and fashions of the 1970s, and the writers have crafted some inspired bits of lunacy, even if more than a few of the gags are destined to rocket right over the heads of non-aficionados. [23 Aug 1996, p.03]

Crafty, cutting movie.

There are sniff movies and there are snuff movies, but Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is both. It has the bouquet of balm and blood. Imagine "Fragrance of the Lambs."

Hip, stylish, funny.

Lizzie McGuire is an old-fashioned, harmless dolce, made all the more charming by Duff's winning appeal.

Not even Halle Berry, emerging from the blue Caribbean in an orange two-piece -- can bring this thing to life.

Dark Blue World is "Pearl Harbor" without the product placements, without the Hollywood bombast, and certainly without the $100-million-plus budget.

At 116 minutes, this third installment lumbers along like a serial killer in shackles.

Fever Pitch works. At times, it works brilliantly.

Represents a brave undertaking on Jolie's part. It's impressively steady filmmaking for a first-timer, and a powerful, powerfully disturbing subject to take on.

A mopey meditation on family and its dysfunctions, Winter Passing is in fact of more than passing interest.

A bizarre counterculture jukebox musical.

Bale brings intense energy (and a convincing American accent) to the proceedings, and the film manages to make this borderline Travis Bickle into a sympathetic character - with a sweetheart, and a sweeter life, beckoning from south of the border. Strong stuff.

A bewildering but never boring yarn.

Raunchily entertaining farce.

For high-speed action, eye-popping locales, and chopsocky fight-fests galore, watch The Transporter - on video.

A torn-from-the-headlines tale of institutional racism and injustice in the Lone Star State of not-so-long-ago, American Violet might not be subtle, but it's certainly powerful.

While even believers can support Maher's skepticism, when he denounces the faithful in sweeping absolutes at film's end, he sounds as absolutely certain as those he has mocked for the previous 100 minutes.

This buoyant, multigenerational comedy that takes its title from the African American wedding ritual has other distinctions as well. It's relatively raunch-free, it has a sparkling cast that reunites "Waiting to Exhale" stars Angela Bassett and Loretta Devine as combative matriarchs, and it likes its characters well enough to forgive them their faults.

The slapstick weeper The Family Stone is a lump of coal brightened by four diamond-sharp performances.

Well-written, gorgeously shot, and expertly edited, the film is also an exasperating exercise in good intentions gone wrong. For all its strengths, Genius often trades in tiresome clichés.

Olyphant has a cool, amiable vibe, kind of postmodern Jimmy Stewart, while Mitchell brings intelligence and quietude to yet another role that doesn't deserve such consideration.

It can be argued that Adam uses Asperger's as a kind of metaphor for the barriers that people erect to fend off strangers, to guard against intimacy. It can also be argued that writer/director Mayer is shamelessly manipulative.

Roth, who has taken more than a few cues from Raimi, David Lynch (whom Roth worked with), and George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), is working in a horror tradition that goes way back -- and he's working it with nasty glee.

Despite its visual beauty and Rahim's extraordinary, and silent, performance, the film never quite manages to connect on an emotional level.

The film delivers what it promises - an education and a thrill.

On the Road is an honorable homage to the bennies-and-booze-and-bebop-driven hegiras undertaken by the fiercely dedicated anti-establishment duo. But in Salles, screenwriter Jose Rivera and company's effort to get the details right, they only get so far. And it's not quite far enough.

This movie will shake your windows and rattle your walls.

Like "Mr. Holland's Opus," only in French, with an all-boy cast in white shirts and short pants, The Chorus is the kind of sugary, crowd-pleasing fare that only the most curmudgeonly moviegoer can frown upon.

The film doesn't hold together in any compelling way.

The movie has workmanlike, uninspired direction from Thor Freudenthal (Hotel for Dogs), who gets an especially lovely performance from Capron.

The movie pulls off the worst kind of con: the one that disappoints.

Offers two hours of luxury and loveliness, music and art, and a bit of sexually charged madness, too.

A larky throwback to the breakneck screwballs of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. Problem is, it isn't breakneck enough.

The movie name-drops the cool stuff, the rebels of word and song, but the essence of the story and the cardboard characters who inhabit it are as mundane as can be.

Doesn't have the dramatic heft to warrant all its angst and anguish.

Thoughtfulness and artistry ...raise this small, quiet picture to moments of pure epiphany.

Starts having the same effect as one too many tequilas: the Hong Kong-style stunts, the goofy wisecracks, the foxy presence of Eva Mendes -- all of it becomes blurry and numbing.

Non-Stop gets increasingly far-fetched as the jet makes its way across the Atlantic. Certainly, there are more red herrings on the plane than there are in the sea below. And Neeson has to stare down every last one of them.

Apted's movie puts flesh - and a considerable amount of blood - on problems that usually get lost in the winds of empty political rhetoric. [27 Sept 1996, p.03]

Nunez's dialogue, and the paces he puts this threesome through, just don't ring true. Coastlines is the stuff of pulp, seriously at odds with what the writer-director has always done best. That is, show the inner workings of people, their needs, their fears, their small dreams.

Eloquent, moving, and deeply troubling, Little Accidents is a true contemporary tragedy.

Storks feels way too much like a belabored and mediocre SNL sketch. Each character has some neurotic tic or crazy fixation, which they expound upon in monologues that feel like material for a stand-up act or a sitcom.

Mostly, Doremus' movie rings true, as some truly jerky behavior ensues.

Joltingly graphic and atmospheric (Nixey and his crew at least know how to set up a few good shocks), Don't Be Afraid of the Dark fails to involve us in any meaningful way with its characters.

In addition to Carell and Fey, Date Night boasts a deft supporting cast...Best of all are a very droll James Franco and Mila Kunis as the downtown hipsters for whom the Fosters are mistaken.

It falls short of the mark, even as it hits every one of the genre's conventions.

Yun-Fat is magnetic and majestic, and the story, no matter that it is not entirely true, continues to fascinate.

Looks as if was cobbled together from stuff hanging around the cutting room at MTV.

Despite an exceptional performance by Paltrow, whose Plath is a layer cake of infinite intelligence and bottomless need, Jeffs' film is an icy affair lacking the fever of Plath's and Hughes' poems.

Ford plays Linus as a consummate actor so good at feigning emotions that he fools even himself. It is a nuanced performance, astonishing in an otherwise innocuous film. Though Ormond's Sabrina doesn't exactly generate the heat to melt Ford's glacial CEO, his transformation from polar ice cap to volcano is heartstopping. Who'da thunk we were watching Cinderfella? [15 Dec 1995, p.03]

Intelligent, scary (scorpions! lots of scorpions!) and full of the possibilities of scientific fact taken to far-reaching (but credible) extremes, The Arrival delivers more bang for the buck than its high-profile multiplex-mates. [31 May 1996, p.3]

A lot of energy and effort has gone into this endeavor, and I can't say some of it's not fun. But more of it, alas, is just tedious. Say uncle already.

At the film's inconclusive conclusion, the filmmakers strand Erica and Sean in the moral twilight.

All nutty, all nonsensical, all aboard.

It is earsplitting, crowd-pleasing, and, no doubt, 'bot-pleasing, too. If you told me I would get emotionally and viscerally involved in two machines punching the hard drives out of each other, I would tell you you were crazy. I would be wrong.

It's all very Hitchcockian, at least for a while. And clever and exciting, too, even if the convergences begin to strain credulity, and, when you think about it, defy logic, too.

Jazzy and colorful, full of men and women in swell clothes driving cool cars, The Rum Diary has a bit of a seedily exotic Graham Greene vibe, and Robinson moves things along at a nice, casual clip, even in the film's more overheated moments.

The overall tone of the film is sunny, with Ramona and Beezus resiliently turning life's lemons into lemonade.

Breaking and Entering is smart and smartly done, as it describes these inter-circling worlds - the well-to-do Brits and the newly deposited foreigners, trying to shake off their homeland tragedies and start anew.

It's a comedy that knows that no matter one's ethnicity, human foibles, follies and hopes are universal.

It's a film about dumbing down that has the effect of wising up its audience.

Eastwood and Morgan's movie, with its epic natural disasters (and a terrifying, man-made one) is optimistic. Hokey, even. But it's beautiful, too.

CQ is a movie for movie-lovers, by a movie-lover: Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford and a successful commercial and video director in his own right, making a witty, whimsical feature debut.

Has a loose, improvisatory feel that rings true.

A high-concept hostage drama of absolutely no value to anyone -- except maybe Bell Atlantic, whose titular street-corner pay phone is on screen for almost every agonizing frame.

So what if the movie isn't finger-lickin' good like the original? The performances by Hanks as a crook and Irma P. Hall as his honorable landlady are mighty tasty.

When the film focuses on the Trojans, it's splendid. But when Troy attempts to sort out the competing agendas of the Greeks, it drags.

A stalwart military inspirational.

So realistic are Phoebe's quicksilver emotions that at first it doesn't seem Fanning is acting at all. That helps to ground the film, which swings seamlessly from the world of grown-up expectations to that of childhood reverie and rebellion.

Jolie's Maleficent is magnificent.

Michael Hoffman, whose credits include the far more lively Soapdish, directs this predictable business in a predictable fashion. [20 Dec 1996, p.03]

Although Schrader is an otherwise accomplished director and screenwriter, Touch's two moods combat rather than complement each other. [14 Feb 1997, p.04]

A great story - and a true one, more or less - Bottle Shock nonetheless fails to deliver much in the way of entertainment.

The movie would pour nicely onto a thick stack of pancakes.

The material is so charged that it threatens to electrocute any who would touch it. Yet from the moment that Bette Midler, as Bernice the bio-Mom, appears, she becomes the instrument of its emotional release, catharsis teetering on high heels.

If Manglehorn is to be remembered at all, it shall be for the excruciating first date that its title character goes on with a chirpy bank clerk he has long been chatting up. Her name is Dawn, and she is played by Holly Hunter.

It touches on serious - and ridiculously complex - ideas but always cuts them down to manageable, middle-brow morsels.

Dinner for Schmucks goes up in flames. Amusingly, perhaps -- but creatively, too.

An undeniable and, indeed, unprecedented technical feat that's a feast for the eye, Dinosaur is less easy on the ear.

Probably better than anyone else working today, Donaldson knows how to knit a thriller. Each time you think this taut yarn is about to unravel, that's when he pulls the wool over your eyes.

As The Cable Guy progresses, its psycho-comedic tone gets sicker and its plot more predictable, until, by the end, we may as well be watching Ray Liotta as The Cop From Hell or Marky Mark as The Boyfriend From Hell. It's strictly generic, by the book, and downright exhausting. [14 June 1996, p.03]

2 Days in the Valley has a real sense of place, and a pace that allows time to discover its characters' twisted troubles and fears. They may be a mess, but the movie, happily, isn't. [27 Sept 1996, p.03]

Joy's entry into the world of entrepreneurship has the crazy trajectory of a rocket gone haywire, and Russell's movie is kind of haywire, too.

Somehow, this rollicking day in the life of a band of skateboarding Latino punk-rockers doesn't exude the voyeuristic smarm of previous Clark forays.

The intention is clear: Garneau wants to make his points as persuasive and accessible as possible. Yet, the truths That Sugar Film contains were already obvious decades ago. It's sad that we need reminding.

Full disclosure: I saw Monsters vs. Aliens in 2-D. No dorky plastic glasses, no alien ooze flying at my head. More full disclosure: I liked it.

A former Bean hater, I've been converted by Holiday, Atkinson's second, and far superior film version of his TV hit.

Unlike the filmmaker's previous stabs at presidential biopic-ing and conspiracy theorizing - "JFK" and "Nixon" - this one doesn't have the luxury of historical perspective.

By the halfway mark, Rogen's performance, like his voice, is less cuddly than grating, and the carbonated giggle that is Elizabeth Banks grows flat. This one's for the Smith cultists.

Twilight - directed with savvy humor by Catherine Hardwicke - turns vampirism into a metaphor for teen lust.

This film is a philosophical musing -- a humanitarian speculation, not a drama about real people, historical figures or not, who seem fully formed.

Strange and gloomy.

A sly and surprisingly sublime little noir romance.

It is not unforgettable, like the original Love Affair. It is not An Affair to Remember, like the remake. It is not laden with ironic humor, like Sleepless in Seattle. This Love Affair is . . . fair. [21 Oct 1994, p.03]

A Tale of Love and Darkness loses itself in dreamy imagery, in its studiously crafted aesthetic. But there are times when Portman lets the toughness, the tenacity, the emotional heart of Oz's story shine through.

Zemeckis and Gale obviously paid attention to quality control in finishing the trilogy. They could not, however, hope to reach the quality of their first effort. [25 May 1990, p.5]