It romps along with infectious good humor but continually imparts a sense that underneath all the surreal frivolity lurks a scathing allegory of modern-day Balkan troubles.

Less and less a skillfully creepy B-movie and more and more a plea for ecumenical reform.

The standout is Baldwin, utterly convincing as a gruff cuss whose life has been forever stained by the death of his wife.

Terrible, unnamable enemies turn out to be uncompelling indeed.

You're looking for the mammoth home run, and the film is merely a bloop single.

Goes on too long and doesn't have much to say.

The tone of the film malingers somewhere between hyper-real comedy and thriller, but neither element really shines through.

A lifeless, confused mess, peppered with laughs, yes, but illogically and crudely plotted and smothered in tonedeaf music cues.

Offers a lot of laughs, a heartwarming core.

The acting is so persuasive as to be transparent.

It isn't, finally, satisfying: It's too uneven, indulgent, fey.

One of the best children's movies in years. Spunky, inventive and filled with life and wonder.

Sometimes verges on silliness.

Dick works best as a catalog of style: It's the story and the acting that are the window dressing.

Some truly memorable moments, but they come early and, as the film wears its way along, become increasingly hard to call to mind.

It breaks so sharply from the practice of contemporary horror film that it requires us to return to the most basic understanding of what it is to be frightened by a movie.

Distinct from others of its lowly stripe because of the credibly real-feeling performances by much of its youthful ensemble.

Parker jams South Park with so much comic "stuff" that the effect is dizzying, at least for those who haven't left the auditorium in a huff before the end.

For long stretches, the film is just as funny as the first -- which is saying something, since the first is one of the funniest comedies of the decade, the only film in years to truly infiltrate our communal language and sense of humor.

A pure, sweet romance that moves along with bouncy comedy and a touch of grown-up realism and rue.

There's not much of a spell to The Loss of Sexual Innocence, which is a shame, because anything this moody and pretty ought to be spellbinding. [16 Jul 1999]

Phantom may not be the best entry in the series, but it's the most technically accomplished, and it makes you as hungry for the next film as you've been for this one.

After Life is a thoroughly original, wholly realized work that leaves a profound and nagging bug in your brain for days after you've seen it: What in your life is worth holding on to? What one thing would you wish never to forget? It's a question as relevant to the lives we live each day as it is to our final moments. [24 Sept 1999, p.26]

Bounces along magnetically even when the storytelling goes a bit flat.

The Matrix slams you back in your chair, pops open your eyes and leaves your jaw hanging slack in amazement.

Foley is an actors' directors stuck here with a genre piece, and it shows: The action (save a killer car chase) is clumsily staged. Still, the story about corrupt police in New York's Chinatown has occasional moments of depth. [12 Mar 1999]

It's written almost without wit or romance, it's populated by bland actors, and it's photographed as if through a Jell-O mold. If this is adolescence, then senility can't come soon enough. [29 Jan 1999]

Searing, intense and unrelenting, Affliction moves to the deepest centers of experience and desire and brings its characters to unflinching life.