French director Claude Berri's exquisite, methodical Lucie Aubrac is a romantic thriller so tightly drawn it almost leaves one breathless.

An extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the comedy game.

Apart from Lawrence's goofing, Blue Streak isn't much of a movie.

It is impossible to think of anyone but Costner in this role. His commitment and sincerity are never in doubt.

It's like watching a bad update of an Antonioni film.

A wonder of a film -- a luminous, beautifully executed drama that gathers the best cast of the year -- the best American film of the year.

A half-baked disappointment...never flies, never comes close to meeting its own expectations.

It's a passionate, beautifully mounted film -- but the agenda she sets for herself is too large and the conflicts she portrays too complicated to be illustrated in a single drama.

A mean-spirited comedy...that steals the rampaging-psycho-chick formula from ``Fatal Attraction'' and tries to make it funny.

What is bloody and full of holes?

This is not comfortable comedy.

Everything comes up forced and predictable in the nostalgic overload of bongs, Top 40 rock and boys' bluster about sex.

This poor excuse for a thriller turns, with a great crunching of gears, into a mess of a buddy comedy. Either way, it misfires.

Largely and insider's joke.

It's scary. It's well-acted. It's filmed with a degree of flash and elegance.

There are times when watching this film is like a near-death experience.

It falls short where it counts: In the final confrontation.

Eric Idle--a royal among sillies--turns in a wonderfully wacky performance.

Epps is a leading man on the rise, and Cool J. is something to see.

A sour misfire.

Williamson's script, which he also directed, is spiteful and shallow.

Has a shameless B-movie exuberance.

Perfect Blue manages, through animation, to take the thriller, media fascination, psychological insight and pop culture and stand them all on their heads.

The specifics of their predicament are well handled -- being thrown in a Third World prison may be every tourist's nightmare -- even if the movie eventually goes soft and squishy.

A venemous Valentine to Hollywood sugarcoated with laughs.

While it's possible to have a great time with the movie without having any interest in Kiss, it should be noted that the band does make an appearance.

Better Than Chocolate is smart, funny adult entertainment -- the sex scenes are bold and convincing -- with a love story that is touching and surprisingly cheerful.

They talk and talk, and somehow it's delightful.

Maybe it's no mystery how they did it, considering the aggregate comic talent, but this bunch achieves peaks of sublime nuttiness.

What The Thomas Crown Affair has to sell audiences is a fantasy of the life of the super-rich who jet off to Martinique on the spur of the moment, and the super-smart who operate outside the rules.

A blast of manic energy in the form of a film.

Self-satisfied -- an undisciplined brat of a film.

Heart and tenderness are rare in cartoon movies. But in an age of frenetic children's fare, the new animated adventure The Iron Giant dares to show a lot of both, and it comes up a winner.

If this isn't the single best performance ever by a preadolescent male (Osment) in a motion picture, then it's tied for whatever is first.

A breezy, occasionally funny spoof.

Pretentious but absorbing.

Wonderful characters keep the movie from gagging on sweetness.

One of the few big-fish horror films that still has the power to surprise.

One of the year's funniest acts of malice.

While it is a spectacle of animatronics, digital graphics and other special effects, the actors are never overwhelmed by them as personalities.

The only thing scary about the new version is realizing that someone keeps giving director Jan De Bont money to make movies.

The strange thing is that for all of Fonda's whining, Pullman's wary squinting and muttering, the bad dialogue, the cheesy effects, the severed toes, the severed heads, the severed bodies and the cliched directorial choices, Lake Placid adds up to a halfway enjoyable time at the movies.

The picture, directed by Rick Famuyiwa, becomes a juggling act, contrasting the efforts of the three grown-up buddies to get to a wedding on time, with flashbacks of their youth.

Totally absorbing even when it, too, strays.

Certain to nauseate a portion of its audience.

Small kids ought to love this entry, but die-hard Muppet fans are likely to find it tepid and uneventful -- a minor addition to the Muppet canon.

Although it takes something of a slog to get there, this thriller finally comes through where it counts.

In addition to being extremely funny, the film has a warm spirit and respect for the characters.

The film doesn't leave the audience with a moral. It just leaves a sense of having been in the stimulating company of passionate people -- all of them in the arts or on the fringes of that world, all of them struggling to make something intense and amazing out of their lives.

The most refreshing thing about Summer of Sam is that it doesn't try to impose a moral or define the limits of its story.

A sly variation on the buddy movie.

Nonstop crudeness, vulgarity and unpleasantness. It's without any redeeming social value whatsoever. And it's funny from beginning to end.

The picture, written and directed by Francis Veber, the screenwriter of "La Cage Aux Folles,'' is a complete success.

Nasty to women, cruel to old people and tosses in a cardboard gay couple for gratuitous laughs. It's also got one of those annoying soundtracks that lays rock music right over the dialogue -- as if it wanted to distract us from it.

An inspired mix of spirited family entertainment and harrowing drama.

Director- writer Oliver Parker saps much of the juice from Wilde, slows the pace and directs his actors in an inappropriately naturalistic style.

The action is so fast that the viewer almost breaks out in a sweat...Ultimately vapid. Lola never does develop as a character, and the fuss seems ultimately pointless.

The acting is fine. The ensemble is strong. The story moves along. Yet a coating of sleaze clings to the film, like bread dipped in batter.

Some will say this film is overly ambitious, but what the hell. The man put five years of his life into making this epic mystery. We can surely give it two hours of ours.

Places Myers firmly on the top rung of movie comics.

A poetry of love, longing and affirmation bleeds through the music of Cuba, and some of the best sounds the island ever created are captured with embracing humanity.

The warning against actors playing with dogs or children should be expanded to include men in gorilla suits.

Both halves of the film are exquisitely acted and written, both are emotionally true, and yet they don't quite fit together.

There is a very good movie stuck somewhere on The Thirteenth Floor trying to get out. Too bad this isn't it.

It comes as a bonus that this romantic comedy is one of the rare pictures of its type that actually is about something -- the double-edged sword of celebrity.

It's visually stunning, especially in scenes of the African countryside, and takes more risks than most independent films.

Angelopoulos returns to the same poetic terrain he explored in Ulysses' Gaze and Landscape in the Mist. In place of "action" and conventional narration, Eternity deals in philosophical ruminations, slippery shifts in time and long, hypnotic tracking shots that seem to whisper to us, "Slow down, observe. Listen."

In special effects, Lucas has moved a galaxy beyond. In energy, not yet.

A playful, sexy piece of work -- just what the Bard might have conjured up for a movie adaptation of his beloved spring-fever comedy.

It's warm, spontaneous and heartfelt. Zeffirelli cared about his memories, and he's done justice to them.

He never indulges in schmaltz or melodrama, as most American filmmakers do when approaching this theme -- think of "It's a Wonderful Life" or the awful "When Dreams May Come" -- but delivers a delicate meditation rich with emotion.

Digs up both laughs and chills from timeworn material.

When a movie sets out to be awful and achieves its goal, does that make it a success?

A study in unexpressed emotion, but Mamet turns the flame so low that his film lacks the emotional payoff we expect.

Entrapment is an adventure movie without two brain cells to rub together.

Takes viewers into a unique world. It's not just about air traffic controllers. It's about controllers in a specific place and from a specific social background.

Why was the sight of scrawny Woody Allen kissing pretty Diane Keaton never revolting, while scrawny David Spade kissing beautiful Sophie Marceau in Lost & Found is the creepiest cinematic sight of the year?

Leigh is perfectly cast as the game-pod goddess.

The screenplay by Payne and Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Tom Perrotta, sees the lives of these suburban students and teachers through a prism of absurdity that refracts more truth than any straightforward telling.

Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence are back together and give both of their careers some new life in this sentimental comedy.

So forced and contrived in delivery that it's tedious. That's not good when the intention is to be audacious.

An American reissue, with a fresh new soundtrack and all the dialogue dubbed.

A nasty little picture with a lot of wit and impudence.

Some so-so movies are just easy to be around, and this is one of them.

A sexy, moody comedy that plays like a dreamy comic novel.

Altman has delivered a lot of surprises in his long directing career, and his new comedy, Cookie's Fortune, is one of the most refreshing -- not because it's so good, but because it's so sweet and affectionate.

The movie is a mess of bits and pieces that try to gel but don't. Still, it is stupidly fun.

That the movie succeeds as thoroughly as it does -- getting deeper and creepier as it goes along -- is evidence of a far-seeing creative imagination. Nolan is a compelling new talent.

It wimped out by blanding down the story and the characters to the point where she isn't really a shrew and he isn't really a maniac.

It's astonishing that so much money, talent, technical expertise and visual imagination can be put in the service of something so stupid.

The results are comical and unexpected -- and just a bit eerie.

Curiously enough plays like a 90-minute version of the old television show. That's not necessarily bad.

First-time director Tony Goldwyn (scion of the family that started MGM) brings a freshness to an old story.

A so-so, OK, perfectably acceptable, nice, rather charming romantic comedy with two stars who are entirely watchable.

In concept alone, Ravenous is anything but appetizing, but in execution it's worse than you'd imagine.

Still, it's almost impossible to entirely wreck this great chestnut of Broadway and film. Thanks mostly to the terrific songs, the new version has transporting moments. [20 March 1999, Daily Notebook, p.B1]

It's hokey, implausible and packed with red herrings, and yet it's a lot of fun.

While the plot is worthless and the battle scenes cheap-looking and unengrossing, Wing Commander has clearly defined characters and relationships. In other words, the film's young actors have nothing interesting to say, but they say it well.