Does what good horror movies do: It taps into the baser emotions.

A stupid comedy with toddlers talking like hip '90s grown-ups.

The Corruptor' quickly turns into a good bad-cop drama of fascinating moral complexity.

More than a high concept stretched to feature length. This is a funny and extremely satisfying comedy, the best in a while.

It is maliciously entertaining, up to a point.

If the dialect is hard to comprehend, that soon becomes part of the joke. It's unlikely that even the British audiences who made Lock, Stock a big hit got it all.

Talky, emphatically unsteamy psychological drama.

One of the downsides of living in a free society is that every so often someone like Myles Berkowitz gets hold of a camera.

200 Cigarettes doesn't have a bad scene or a false note. The picture is a succession of pointed little moments, nicely written by Shana Larsen and acted with comic assurance and sensitivity.

Neutralizes these characters, makes them cute and one-dimensional like fluffy dolls.

Voyeuristically wallows in the sadistic violence it professes to deplore. What hypocrisy!

Jennifer Aniston...doesn't have much screen time, but in playing this slightly insecure, affable young woman, she does her best film acting to date.

This film is family.

It's so low it scrapes through the barrel and deep into the earth's core. It's the lowest piece of garbage to hit screens in months.

It would be nice to say that Blast From the Past is, but it ain't exactly. Half-blast is more like it.

An exceptionally good movie in its first hour and an exceptionally bad one in its second.

An intermittently pleasing children's film.

It's a movie, a goofy little movie. Not so bad, but as far as food and sensuality go, ``Like Water for Chocolate'' still has the edge.

Payback has a completely different spirit from "L.A. Confidential'' -- more wild, more silly -- but it has the same attention to the fine points of plot and character.

About one idea short of being an excellent teenage romance. As it stands it's a pleasing but routine effort.

It's entertainment, but mild entertainment.

Haunting in its charm, Children of Heaven opens a window on both contemporary Tehran and the hopeful heart of childhood. This lovely, amusing film deserves a big audience -- especially families. It touches on the innocence of children with tremendous affection.

It earns respect through good writing and some unexpectedly terrific performances. Viewers may walk away surprised, thinking that this film is more satisfying than it seemed at first.

No one is likely to claim it's a great, or even good, movie, but it does offer some guilty pleasures.

We are aware going in that Varsity Blues' cannot be a landmark of world cinema. Yet working within the tired formula, the picture turns out to be not so bad.

The sweetest little movie about a neurological disorder that we're ever likely to see.

Unique and courageous. It may be counted as one of the year's few steps forward in cinema.

Schrader seems to understand these characters implicitly, and the result is probably the best film he has directed.

Emily Watson is ravishingly good -- and brings an amazing focus and intensity to what could have been a disease-of-the-week picture.

Sly and very savvy.

A film that's sad and poignant but not without humorous moments.

In place of the tension, climax and easy resolution of the old "Perry Mason'' show, A Civil Action offers murkiness, bitter successes and frustration.

A perfect vehicle for Robin Williams. He again plays the compassionate, manic clown that has been his main character throughout his movie career. And audiences love his wild end runs.

Mighty Joe Young is a mighty fun movie. The trick? They didn't try to out-monster those bloated King Kong and Godzilla franchises. But it's still a hoot of an adventure about an overgrown ape having trouble adjusting to life in California.

A joyful film -- and hopefully one that will not slip away unnoticed.

It's a sweet, low-key and satisfying film -- and it deserves a heap of credit for treating its subject with humor and humanity.

Boasts a collection of oddball characters, some more sharply written than others.

An inspiring translation of biblical grandeur, turning the story of one of history's greatest heroes into an entertaining, visually dazzling cartoon.

Boorman enlivens The General with a number of scenes, like that one, that play against the con ventions of crime movies. He and Gleeson, both of whom were denied the Oscar nominations they deserve for this film, do exemplary work and give us one of the liveliest, smartest and most surprising films in a long time.

[Raimi]'s drawn lovely, complex performances from Paxton and Thornton and proven that he can work effectively -- and movingly -- in a minor emotional key.

Star Trek: Insurrection is out there where the imagination collides with roaring spaceships, exotic planets, wonderfully nutty costumes, a few choice jokes and some fascinating ideas.

Anyone not romantically inclined going into Shakespeare in Love surely will be by the end.

With its dry, throwaway humor and constant stream of chuckles, it creates its own category of stealth comedy.

Jack Frost starts out with sweet promise, then loses steam and gets a little too strange for its own good. It also gets cloyingly manipulative, but its heart is in the right place.

They're great, every one of them, but the real joy of Little Voice is Horrocks: her impeccable evocation of a timid soul and that eerie voice that sounds so surprising coming out of her.

Norman Bates is alive and well, and just a tad kinkier than you remember him.

One of those comedies in which almost everything good about it is extraneous. There are funny lines and quirky bits, but in terms of story and character, the movie is empty and pointless.

The result is a film that's far superior to Neil LaBute's "Your Friends and Neighbors'' and more entertaining than Todd Solondz's "Happiness.''

One of the great movies -- a triumph of storytelling and character development, and a whole new ballgame for computer animation. Pixar Animation Studios has raised the genre to an astonishing new level.

A desperate, pathetic mess.

This one's so much fun, it's worth taking the whole family.

If your tolerance for Branagh's shtick and Woody's narrowness of focus is as low as mine, you can take solace in the director's joke on himself.

Fernanda Montenegro gives a landmark performance.

Drawn with the big-headed, big- eyed appeal that has made the TV show hot among the diaper crowd, the film has a satirical edge that won't be lost on adults but retains a sense of innocence and a joyful toddler's outlook.

A frustrating film that feels cobbled together.

It's not just that Pitt's performance is bad. It hurts.

It's standard slasher fare but has its moments.

One can admire it, but it's hard to get caught up in it.

In an attempt to be complex and fair-minded, a simple story becomes a jumble of confused motivations.

An unabashed wallow in the moronic humor of Adam Sandler.

Elizabeth works in a number of ways. It's a feminist film. It's also a kind of spy thriller and a superior historical drama.

An actors' feast.

The heart of the picture has to do with the heroes realizing the error of their ways and finding redemption, but it takes a lot for an audience to forgive two murderers. Belly comes up short.

Much about Living Out Loud is pretty far-fetched, but at least it accurately portrays the dating possibilities for newly divorced women of a certain age.

The lead actors on both sides of the vampire divide are all strong personalities.

As a visit to a world and a way of life most of us will never experience, American History X is vivid, and it feels honest. At the very least, it's not typical.

Benigni sets out to do the impossible.

When Ross gets serious and grasps for allegorical import, Pleasantville bogs down in mixed ambitions.

Brought off with such skill and commitment that there isn't any time to snicker at its obviousness.

Cheerfully raunchy and undeserving of its prohibitive NC-17 rating, Orgazmo is a harmless sex farce.

The movie's strength is that it makes us want to know more about Levitch, and we pay attention as the tidbits are dropped -- that he's from a middle-class Jewish family in upstate New York, and that he did time in prison. The movie's flaw is that, having gained our attention, it fails to tell us what we want to know.

It's impossible not to be moved and shocked by The Last Days, the haunting documentary about five Hungarian Jews who survived Hitler's "final solution" to exterminate the Jewish people.

The aftertaste of that father-son scene is so strong, so disturbing, that the riches of Happiness -- its writing, its performances, its trenchant wit -- all seem a bit diminished in the bargain.

Doesn't sanitize its tale of African American loss and survival -- the way Steven Spielberg's “The Color Purple'' did -- but delves deeply, heartbreakingly into an American tragedy.

It's all swell, though after two hours of nonstop yin energy, one does begin to wish that someone like Bruce Willis might show up in a sweaty T-shirt, scratching himself.

This may be hard to believe, but Bride of Chucky is a smart little horror movie. The fourth installment in the "Child's Play" series has a sense of its own silliness -- and a tight plot that provides a clothesline for a string of funny, macabre murders.

What a waste of a great comedian. What demented casting.

Despite the awkward, stomach- churning camera movements and the grainy, flat images that come with insufficient lighting, the actors' work is often riveting and compelling.

Slam, directed by Marc Levin, is schematic but effective as it makes its points about African Americans caught in the Washington, D.C., criminal justice system. It's got a wonderful eye and, for a film, ear.

Astonishing visualizations of the afterlife are coupled with a drawn-out allegory about communication between the living and the dead that becomes something of a trial to sit through.

One could criticize A Night at the Roxbury for being a comedy that provides not a single laugh. That would be too easy.

A humongous animation event that ratchets up the level of the computer art that Hollywood is swooning over these days.

I Stand Alone ("Seul contre tous" in French) is a portrait of a pathetic soul, but it is also a cautionary tale. The butcher cannot be dismissed as a monster, nor is this a creep show. Something like the butcher's story can be found almost every day in newspaper crime reports.

It's got unpredictable plot twists and unexpected laughs coming out of dark corners. The sharp-edged film also looks terrific.

Ronin eventually becomes tiresome, but the pairing of De Niro and Reno never gets old.

A premise so rock-solid, so guaranteed to please, that it almost doesn't matter that the movie is otherwise a routine slasher, and not a particularly scary one.

The film is never truly funny, but it's an amusing novelty, gaining strength from smart characterizations and sly cogency about the way people are exploited under the limelight of celebrity.

Director Ted Demme (with a terse script by Mike Armstrong) keeps it darkly funny while exposing raw nerves in a buildup to unexpected tragedy.

Though Mom is ditzy and, at times, irritating, we come to recognize her as the family's most original creative spirit.

This good-natured comedy is set off by the high spirits of its stars.

By now, fans of the studied loveliness of Merchant Ivory films savor that they aren't pat, slick or especially action-packed. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is a fine example -- themes percolate and evolve into poignancy.

Ben Stiller seems the perfect actor to play Hollywood writer- turned-junkie Jerry Stahl in Permanent Midnight. He's got that bitter humor, the intense eyes betraying an inner life of pain. And he comes off as pathetic. The trouble is that it's hard to care -- even though the film is well-acted, artfully shot and at times haunting in its bleakness.

It should have been the poker equivalent of "The Hustler." But it suffers from iron-poor blood. No energy. It just lies there.

The film, "suggested by" John Irving's novel "A Prayer for Owen Meany," is so unabashedly manipulative -- and implausible -- that even while crying, many viewers may also feel abused.

Cube falls into the dreaded trap of allegory -- aaaaaargh! -- and the clunky dialogue makes a midnight bull session seem brilliant by comparison.

It's not a bad film, but Towne and his star, the charismatic Billy Crudup, never fire the imagination in the way their inspirational, respectful biopic is obviously intended to.

The ridiculous complications might have worked if there had been an awareness of how absurd they are.

Amusing and holds interest largely thanks to its re-creation of a glitzy, flamboyant era, not to mention its soundtrack of disco songs that sound a lot better today than 20 years ago.