The Edge isn't particularly deep stuff, but Tamahori isn't a particularly deep filmmaker - he's just really, really good, with an affinity for the natural landscape that comes across brilliantly on screen. [26 Sep 1997, p.03]

With its rebellious themes and pharmaceutical props - Ritalin, Prozac, Xanax all get doled out - Charlie Bartlett isn't going to win any awards from parent-teacher groups. But the underlying message of the film, with its nods to "Catcher in the Rye" and - '70s throwback here - "Harold and Maude," is a good one.

The violence here is never in the service of spectacle, always of the story.

The "black Godfather" comes off as a cold-blooded narcissist whose vision of the American Dream is as twisted as it seems to have been rewarding.

An impossibly enjoyable live-action cartoon that plays on our real-life anxieties about vengeful cadres of foreign radicals blowing up people - and places.

Though the story dawdles at times, the visuals are splendid.

The coda to this fine, loving tribute offers restitution, though no tidy resolution.

Michael Jackson's This Is It looks beyond the reconstructed face and spindly body of the late King of Pop and basks in his meteoric light.

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

Megamind has momentum and dazzle.

A Very Long Engagement is "Cold Mountain" with French people.

The results are exhilarating, thrilling, and extend the wingspan.

He may be a barber, but by saving the community one strand at a time, Calvin is the heir apparent to populist banker George Bailey of "It's a Wonderful Life."

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.

Sweet, poignant, and winningly evocative of the period, though occasionally dogged by predictable scenarios and caricatures.

The film's humor comes in part from the gap between what Oliver says and what the audience sees.

The two generate more heart than they do heat, but that's the point. You want to see them together not just because they're adorable, but because you believe that their characters can take each other to a place neither could get to on their own.

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?

The movie is hipper than its L.A. establishment credentials would suggest.

An entertainingly hairy paranormal affair.

Has the confessional intimacy of a video diary and performances to match, particularly those of Kyra Sedgwick and Parker Posey.

The story is as basic as a peasant meal - and just as hearty.

It's a joyride until you think about the film's biggest contradiction. How come this movie celebrating the superiority of human feelings over machine precision is most alive when thrilling in the mechanical perfection of the Terminator and T-1000? Inside Terminator 2 beats a human heart. But its soul is that of a killer machine.

Definitely, Maybe gets too coy in spots, and Brooks is a sharper writer at this point in his career than he is a director. But for a film with a half-dozen fully-formed characters that spans 15 years and works in a swell detail about a 1943 edition of "Jane Eyre" - well, it definitely works. No maybes about it.

Abounds with zero-gravity action ballet, frisky interludes of sapphic foreplay, and weepy drama about doomed love. The film also has an irresistibly kitschy theme song: "Close to You," the treacly Burt Bacharach-Hal David smash by the Carpenters.

RoboCop is a solid near-future action pic that poses moral questions about artificial intelligence and remote-control combat systems without getting too preachy or ponderous about it.

Rogen and Efron's characters find a novel new use for automobile airbags, too. These guys are geniuses.

What makes Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead feel particularly vibrant is how the Lampoon's specific art direction is put to use.