Bee Season is lit by human sunbeam Flora Cross as Eliza.

It's all head-spinning and lovely - and a little exhausting, too.

One of the problems with The Dark World is that its monsters and angry armies and visual effects are interchangeable with Peter Jackson's Tolkien pics, with Clash of the Titans, with The Avengers, with Man of Steel, and on and on. These superhero movies. These Middle Earth movies. These mythic god movies. It's getting hard to tell them apart.

The contrast to Ramis' last picture, the inspired Groundhog Day, is marked. [12 Apr 1995, p.F03]

Almost certainly, The Last Stand will not be Schwarzenegger's last. For better or for worse (and this is somewhere right in the middle), he is back.

Ultimately, it's the romance that feels forced and phony, not the group meetings, the confessions, the anguished moments alone.

Unfortunately, it lacks a compelling story or characters of any complexity.

Parker has honored the core of the work and in the process turned a great memoir into a memorable movie.

Now in his late 40s and hairier than ever, Jeremy seems a simple enough, likable guy, and he has no pretensions about what he does. And no apologies either.

Clones makes the Frodo-speak of "Lord of the Rings" sound like Noel Coward.

A sleek little meditation on beauty, desire, love and time. Now and then, it's fairly sophisticated stuff.

While Scott's movie has a consistent aura, it lacks a consistent tone. What are we to make of the movie, gauzy as a mist-shrouded lake and brutal as "Lord of the Flies?"

Effie Gray is peculiarly compelling, even if the issue of sexual repression, all the Victorian manners, seem light-years gone and close to unfathomable.

Hidalgo is the first Middle East western.

A lush, lovely snooze-fest.

However improbable this sounds, The Brady Bunch Movie is to the original television show what real grass is to Astroturf. [17 Feb 1995, p.03]

As the film devolved from satire to slapstick horror, I didn't believe in it at all. But in his beetle-browed intensity and tremulousness, I completely believed in Minghella's Jerome.

Finally - and the news should really come as a relief - here is a role Streep should not have tried, in a movie that should not have been made.

Sparkle is a solid entertainment with a winning debut by Jordin Sparks in the title role.

Completely unhinged, a garish and gonzo walk on the wild side.

This should have been an easy knockout. Yet the pieces just don't fit together. Hands of Stone lurches back and forth between well-crafted dramatic scenes and shabby, cliché-ridden sequences that sap the viewer's energy.

With its themes of family tradition, heated passion and parent-daughter conflict - not to mention lots of splendid preparing-the-meals sequences in the Aragon kitchen, and not to mention the contents of Keanu's case - A Walk in the Clouds could just as easily been called Like Wine for Chocolate. But anyone hoping for a second helping of the sensual romance of Like Water for Chocolate will come away disappointed. The movie's glinting incandescence is oppressive. [11 Aug 1995, p.14]

The dialogue rings tinny in the ear, as if enunciated in the phony arc of a stage light.

Only in its aggressively imaginative profanity is the film consistent.

A crude, cringe-worthy, and intermittently funny affair that triggers the gag reflex. I sincerely can't tell you whether I was choking with laughter or keeping from choking.

Puccini for Beginners, which takes its title from its heroine's passion for opera, isn't just another trendy toe-dip in sexual experimentation. It may not be the real world of New York, or even of most relationships, but it's worth a visit.

All that's missing is the spirit and the anarchic humor of the sitcom created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. The result is an overdressed, carefully stitched scarecrow of a comedy.

She (Hunt) is perfection even when her movie falls a little short.

Feels stagy, stiff and entirely unnecessary.

A goofy combination of screwball farce and Dogma-style verite grit and gloom.

William Friedkin's Blue Chips, somewhat flawed but pungently honest, is one film that manages to beat the odds and stretch beyond the formula manipulations. [18 Feb 1994, p.05]

One of the most uncinematic pieces crafted by an otherwise fine stylist, Cymbeline befuddles with its ineffective blocking and lack of art direction.

There's whimsy and raunchy humor here, but also an underlying sense of darkness and despair.

In returning to what is basically the same premise, Carpenter gives us an update as well as a sequel. [09 Aug 1996, p.5]

A triumphant, feel-good, laugh-out-loud, sports biopic.

Bobby has its heart in the right place (on its sleeve). But it doesn't have its screenplay anywhere - or at least, anywhere near the heft that its subject demands.

A sweet, if predictable, kids' comedy. But you have to overlook the conveniently inconsistent behavior of all the characters - except in Garner's case. She never establishes a character.

Gives audiences something more than just a heart-stopping beauty to contemplate.

Think of the film from director Adam Salky and screenwriter David Brind as "Pretty in Pink" crossed with "Cruel Intentions."

By the end of the film, Leo is beginning to sound suspiciously like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Robotic, and more than a little peeved.

This is one of the smarter, more honest scripts to be filmed in quite some time. And Jenna Fischer, star of "The Office," gives one of the smarter, more honest - and vulnerable, and tough - performances by an actress on the big screen in an even longer stretch.

It is intended for the target audience of arrested-development stoners who stay up late being thrilled rather than confused by the show's non-sequiturial humor.

With his sleepy, So-Cal inflections, Costner is an actor who summons urgency and drama with, well, I'm not sure exactly how he does what he does. He's the least dynamic of stars, but still, he is one.

The choppy film is like a composition crowded with competing themes.

If it were a landscape painting, Gerry would deserve a place in the National Gallery. But as a movie...deserves its own wing in The Old Curiosity Shop.

As funny as it is sick (and it's plenty of both).

Despite a great cast and several terrific action sequences, Fuqua's film is largely forgettable.

Great? No. But Bran Nue Dae is great good fun.

Rock Star sinks into a morass of melodrama.

It has enough buzzing wit and eye-popping animation to win over the kids - and probably more than a few parents, too.

Despite a terrific performance from Shane West, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Crash, Secret is a chronology, not a biopic.

Students of sound design and horror-movie scores should see - or hear - Closer to God, which elicits more creepy scares than its transparent plot warrants, thanks to an unsettling audio mix and pulsing, percolating music from Thomas Nöla.

The big shift between Carpenter's B-movie and filmmaker Jean-François Richet's comic book-style remake is that instead of a troop of bloodthirsty gang members encircling the precinct, the bad guys here all look like good guys.

The Signal is a road movie turned upside down and inside out.

Vacancy, in the end, simply offers a particularly aggressive brand of couples counseling.

Deadpan and a bit dopey, Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best has a shaggy charm, and the chemistry between the tuneful twosome's would-be Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty makes up for the inevitable rock-and-roll road movie cliches.

There's a lot of rambling and shambling going on in these overlapping stories, often to the point where Explicit Ills no longer feels like it has a point.

At its best, the film is undeniably tender. Sweet, even.

You'll need a strong stomach for some of the scenes in A Girl Like Her, one of the most moving and intelligent of the recent glut of films and TV specials about teenage bullying.

Fast, funny.

A woefully thin and pointless musical comedy boasting the no-chemistry coupling of Cuba Gooding Jr. and Beyonc?

Dramatically speaking, the movie version of The Notebook has a first act and a last act but lacks a transition. If it were a sandwich, it would be two slices of bread without filling.

Like "Jumanji," Shorts runs out of momentum before it's half over. That leaves it treading slapstick and killing time until its strained and preposterous big finish.

The tiny, intrepid rodent is so cute it's impossible not to ooh and aww, just looking at him. Which is a good thing, because you'll need something to get you through the long stretches of fairytale pastiche that make up this overwrought yarn.

If there were truth-in-titling, Burton's movie rightly would be called "Alice in Narnia: With Stops at Disneyland, the Shire, Rohan, Naboo, and Oz."

With ambitions greater than comedy and results that fall short of character study, The Big Year is neither fish nor fowl.

There's more voyeurism going on here, and less insight into a certain culture (the young and the wasted), than the filmmakers would probably admit to, but the performances are scarily real, and the outcome, well, is just scary.

Decidedly loopy and nonlinear, Mister Lonely is precious and artsy, but there are moments when Korine's, er, unique vision brings something bold and beautiful to the table.

If you enjoy visuals with substance as well as flash, look no further than this exuberant movie.

A charmer.

While it flirts with "After School Special"-ness, at least has the courage to address racial and cultural cliches with a degree of honesty.

Too bad the filmmakers didn't trust the material. For Ella doesn't need music and references to other, better, movies to cast its unique spell.

An engaging if transparent tearjerker of the first water.

The aquatic and surf scenes are spectacular. The story, a clichéed climb to inspiration. Soul Surfer is more parable than plot.

Then Death feels the need to intrude again. And again. If his accent weren't so charming, his voice so resonant, it would be depressing, all this meddling and mortality.

Tautou, who looks even smaller and more fragile alongside her towering leading man, conveys the hurt and hesitancy that are pulling at her character's heart - and does so with seeming effortlessness. It's as though she knows this woman, deep down.

Carpenter, an old hand at this horror stuff, delivers some convincingly creepy effects, but the narrative lacks any sustained dramatic pulse - its gallery of hallucinogenic scenes doesn't add up to much more than, well, a gallery of hallucinogenic scenes. [03 Feb 1995, p.5]

What's not to like about a girl detective who is a good citizen and better student, a leader rather than a follower, a resourceful seamstress who won't cut her clothes to fit this year's fashions?

Sitting in the theater, watching Knight of Cups, you hear an incredible amount of thought-balloon babble, but you don't hear anything approaching the sublime.

It's a bloodsucker's paradise.

Beneath the predictable serving of sex, lies and, yes, videotape - as his characters betray each other in and out of bed - is a satire of tabloid trashiness that is truly withering.

The four women couldn't be better - or better matched. As always, Parker is the standout, cracking your heart and cracking you up with equal ease.

Whether or not the story makes any sense, The Promise promises to transport - and does.

An uneven, mildly amusing, and highly derivative flick featuring a wonderful, quirky cast as a crew of art thieves who run a complex scam on the art world, and on each other.

Fans of Brooks and his wry, dry neuroticism will not be disappointed as he whines and whimpers around New Delhi.

It's an involving journey, remarkably free of sentimentality, deepened by the performances.

Overwritten, over-designed, and too clever by 200 percent, the film does offer the pleasure of actors enjoying themselves.

Unravels a bit heading toward its finale, as buildings explode and characters are forced to explain themselves and their nefarious motives. But the payoff at the end - at once kind of radical and gratuitous - delivers a wallop.

Scott's reimagining of the legend of Robin Hood has more heft than it does humor, more soulful brooding than snappy thrust-and-parry retorts.

A yawning affair that would be a perfectly fine video rental but doesn't really require the big screen.

Several notches above the usual gay-themed indie, and mostly manages to avoid -- or at least legitimately deploy -- the gratuitous throbbing beefcake scenes that are part and parcel of the genre.

Despite excellent elements - great actress, taut plot, slick visuals - Flightplan is like airplane food. No matter how good the ingredients the air chef has to work with, the entree inevitably ends up tasting like a Xerox of a facsimile of a meal.

If only RocknRolla's characters were at all believable - even in the context of its own cartoon universe.

It's old, old hat.

The gift of Imaginary Heroes is getting to know these anything-but-ordinary people.

As silly as Multiplicity is, there is an adult sensibility at work here. The movie gets some of its biggest laughs when the clones, one after the other, proceed to break rule number one: No clone nooky. There's nothing explicit about the sexual shenanigans, but the duplicates' respective dalliances with the missus serve as the basis for much of the comedy. [17 July 1996, p.E04]

A whimsical tale of serial murder in the English countryside, Keeping Mum benefits immensely from the charm and pitch-perfect gravitas of Kristin Scott Thomas.

What really matters is that the film works. It's a genuinely suspenseful, no-holds-barred masterpiece of sex 'n' horror exploitation.