Johnny Mnemonic is brash, flashy, and loud, but it lacks a few key ingredients -- namely heart, soul, and intelligence.

Offeris an exhilarating, and occasionally touching, experience that has viewers leaving the theater caught up in an afterglow of wonder. These days, heros like William Wallace are as rare as motion picture displays of this high, uncompromising quality.

To be sure, A Little Princess has a few missteps. For one thing, Miss Minchin could have been played with less villainy, but younger viewers will probably appreciate the one-dimensional nastiness. There are also a few moments of overt sweetness, but these are easily forgiven. Actually, there's very little this movie has to apologize for -- it's the rare kind of picture that can be enjoyed by viewers of eight, eighteen, and eighty.

All the explosions and fights are filmed with consummate skill, and are thrilling in their own right. But that's where it stops. The pacing is erratic and the level of tension ebbs and flows.

Amateur is a curious mixture of high art and delicious campiness, and the result is a funny, insightful, and almost-hypnotic motion picture.

Little Odessa is an extremely complex motion picture, layered with powerful themes and fascinating characters.

It's a thrill-a-minute ride that concludes with a whimper, like a roller-coaster that has all the drops and twists early. Make no mistake, this is a good source of early summer fun, but with a little extra imagination, it could have been a whole lot more.

This is a slice of life with an imperfect beginning and conclusion, but what transpires between those two endpoints is strong enough to leave an impression on anyone with the patience to commit to a movie of such unhurried temperament.

The delicate air of romance that often makes this sort of film worthwhile is absent. French Kiss does it by the numbers, not from the heart.

Crumb is a rare and powerful documentary that completely absorbs the viewer and leaves an impression so blindingly clear that the afterimage cannot be blinked away even when the theater is far behind.

The strengths of The Underneath -- its atmosphere and character-centered basis -- are also its weaknesses.

The plot runs out of steam just past the one-hour mark and the charade, although necessary to the story, goes on for too long. The ending is, of course, the requisite happy one, but it seems a little anticlimactic.

The tale related here isn't all that original, but the honest presentation lends impact to a wrenching scenario.

With a theatrical trailer far better than the actual picture, Schroeder's film delivers little more than a healthy dose of disappointment. The picture is watchable, but nothing about it will linger, except perhaps the feeling that, with a more polished script, it might have been significantly better.

There's only so far a movie can go on loud music, nicely-framed shots, testosterone, and adrenaline. Bad Boys takes the often-traveled road, and leads the audience to a dead end.

Writer/director Jeremy Leven takes pleasure in clouding the division between what's real and what isn't, but he never stretches matters to such an extreme that Don Juan DeMarco is reduced to a mindless farce.

As embodied by Liam Neeson, Rob Roy is a tremendous protagonist -- a naive man whose belief in honor and whose love for a woman, family, and clan make him a figure to cheer for.

Regardless, though it may be occasionally slow-moving and perhaps a half-hour too long, this film is put together with care and a mindfulness of quality.

With a breakneck, don't-bother-to-stop-and-think-about-it pace, Tank Girl zips along for over one-hundred moments, only occasionally lapsing from its zaniness.

Although the forced ending, which seems deigned to create an unnatural moment of triumph, weakens the climactic catharsis, it doesn't diminish the naked honesty which forms the foundation of Dolores Claiborne.

Egoyan has taken a seemingly-simple story and woven it into a near-masterpiece, creating images and an atmosphere that establish the perfect backdrop for a tale of loss, grief, and eroticism.

From that point on, the movie becomes distressingly predictable, with nary a surprise to be found.

While Muriel's Wedding has its moments of exhilarating humor, it is, as often as not, downbeat and even mean-spirited.

This movie is an entertaining and sometimes wildly-exhilarating ride.

Once Were Warriors works, to some degree, on three levels: the visceral, the emotional, and the intellectual, and it is the amalgamation of these that makes this a memorable film.

The length is the film's undoing. No matter how tantalizing the premise, overexposure leads inevitably to boredom.

Despite its tendency to tread well-traveled roads, Just Cause is filmed with enough energy and craft that, for the majority of its one-hundred minute running time, it's reasonably entertaining.

If movies were rated solely on the basis of style, The Quick and the Dead would score highly indeed. With its dazzling photography, inventive camera angles, and throbbing bass score, the film is an experience for the eyes and ears. Director Sam Raimi and cinematographer Dante Spinotti have woven a beautifully elaborate tapestry: colorful and evocative -- and depressingly two-dimensional.