But as badly as the younger women in The First Wives Club are treated, none of the three central characters, with whom we're supposed to identify so strongly, comes off that well either.

With one foot in the grind house and one in the art house, the smarts in Freeway are more than equal to its visceral kick.

For a first feature, this surprisingly likeable film might just revitalize Schnabel's persona in art circles, as well as make a splash with hip young filmgoers.

The most original, daring, thrilling movie to be released this year, Trainspotting is one of those occasional, astonishing triumphs of risk and imagination that gets you excited about what smart people, pushing themselves and the medium, can accomplish in the movies.

A colossally dumb epic that happily traffics in third-hand imagery and ideas while feeding its audience maintenance level doses of humor, adrenaline and spectacle.

Sayles speaks the language of cinematic formula so automatically -- his reunited lovers slow dance to a jukebox in a dark, deserted cafe and wait unannounced outside each other's workplaces when they want to talk -- that he's forgotten that real people don't do this stuff.

Director Brian De Palma is having too much fun zipping around curves and hitting the accelerator to slow down. He's a supremely confident engineer, and if you're game enough to make a jump for it and hold on, he offers the giddy excitement of watching the ground rush by beneath your dangling feet.

In the title role, Lili Taylor continues her campaign to become the female Harvey Keitel, a consistently engaging character actor with a penchant for droll, oddball parts. She's wildly fun to watch.

As Eunice, Plummer gets a rare chance to stretch, and she doesn't disappoint. Her performance is a cocktail of despair, charm, self-hatred, bitterness, religious ecstasy, coquetry and homicidal rage. She's genuinely frightening after the fashion of early Robert De Niro, with all the hair-trigger potential violence of the truly mad.

It should have been sent straight to video. As a courtroom drama, it stumbles from one ludicrous howler to another. Were the movie's "legal technical advisers" on another planet while the rest of the world was learning about legal procedure courtesy of the O.J. trial?

Solondz's staunch commitment to depicting Dawn's humiliation sans sentimentality is honorable, and his eye for everyday human nastiness apt, but his intentions are rather cautious.

Instead of effervescent and mercurial, the movie is simply muddled. Lee has far too much skill to be delivering work that so often degenerates into incoherence.

To the extent that the joke is on us, the audience, and the decadent taste we've acquired for flashy violence, it works; point taken.

Almodovar, who in the past has made dark comedy out of jealousy and infidelity and even rape and suicide, here casts a less absurdist, more empathetic eye on his characters. The world they navigate is still full of bizarre coincidences and random cruelties, but the filmmaker's stance is a little less distant, the laughter degrees warmer and the emotions correspondingly magnified.

To Gilliam's quiver of attributes this new movie adds a quality that's on the endangered list in today's Hollywood: coherence.

Possesses that rarest of qualities: moral humility.

A 3 hour fusillade of cliches.

For my money, The Usual Suspects was the pulp fiction of the '90s.

It's an exceptionally intelligent and controlled piece of direction, and for once Polanski didn't hide his emotions in a death's-head grin. The movie is raw and passionate and unresolved in a way that's unique among his work.

The Last of the Mohicans is a striking mixture of the ersatz and the genuine. In other words, it’s vintage Hollywood. It’s also a smashingly entertaining and satisfying adventure.

I didn't need to understand every word to see what a beautiful film this was - each camera shot a carefully composed masterpiece that immerses the viewer in a realm of luxuriant imagination.

It's a lovely, measured and deeply earnest work. It balances a realistic view of first century Palestine against a sincere consideration of how an ordinary man might learn he is divine.

With little more than table scraps for a budget, Surf Nazis Must Die features rotten acting, cheesy action and effects, a grainy picture and poor sound. It is, in short, a typical Troma film -- not quite in the same league as "Toxic Avenger," perhaps, but no less a treat for fans.

No other film captures more accurately what it’s like to be dead inside during the end of the Cold War, the height of MTV and the invasion of concerned but impotent parents.

The best Hannibal Lecter movie and one of the greatest suspense movies ever made... A lurid masterpiece that pays homage to the seductiveness of pulp, not by dressing it in the trappings of fine art but by stripping it to the essentials of what we responded to in the material in the first place.

The startling thing about "Aliens" is how obsessed it is with women as child bearers. It's the theme that allows the movie to have all the trappings of a typical science fiction/action movie while creating a primal emotive connection for the audience.

Everything about Pee-wee's Big Adventure, from its toy-box colors to its superb, hyperanimated Danny Elfman score to the butch-waxed hairdo and wooden-puppet walk of its star and mastermind, Pee-wee Herman, is pure pleasure.

Stop Making Sense is so beautifully choreographed that in some ways it's more like theater than a rock show. [Review of re-release]