Both actors are so appealing, you root for the inevitable meeting to happen somewhere in the vicinity of Wonderland.

Big as it is, Blade' is meticulous and subtle, not just in its camera technique but in the way it works its themes and creates a mood.

A viewer may even blink his eyes to be sure the turn of events is actually happening.

Writing and directing her first feature, Jenkins mines her life for nug gets everyone can relate to.

I'm not denying that a 40-year- old woman might be self-conscious about going around with someone this young. But the subject isn't interesting or provocative enough to sustain an entire movie.

It's a completely botched effort -- botched in its direction, its writing and editing.

A potential problem with the movie is that it can be a challenge watching people hand-wringing over moral decisions. But the acting is so good that it makes it worth sticking with during the slow patches.

De Palma seems to be trying too hard to make somebody else's great movie, once again an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Would someone please tell this guy to relax?

Not a routine cut-and-paste horror but a full-fledged revenge fantasy -- and a completely satisfying one.

Not half-bad. It's about three- quarters bad, actually, but what's left offers some goof-off fun.

Obviously, Barrymore is not ideally cast outside modern times, but her presence is so good-natured that she makes an audience want to work with her.

The real wonder becomes how British filmmaker Sandra Goldbacher was able to write and direct such an accomplished, touching and original movie her first time out.

The movie has finesse, and the actors have charm, but there are no surprises.

Ignoring these lapses in logic, The Parent Trap' is hugely enter taining and more relevant than most family entertainment.

An overwhelming experience.

Director Manuel Poirier (Antonio's Girlfriend) is easygoing in the way he uses Paco and Nino to poke through veneers of machismo.

Entertaining, but it's about one notch below being something anybody really needs to see.

In the person of Cameron Diaz, Mary is an island of sanity, good-natured humanity and genuine sweetness in an ocean of anarchy. Without her presence, There's Something About Mary would be merely sophomoric and tasteless.

It proceeds, weirdly enough, from the truly annoying to the absolutely fascinating.

One could argue about which "Lethal Weapon'' is the best, but No. 4 is certainly the funniest, warmest and most idiosyncratic.

It's engaging as a non-drama of people doing nothing, but suffering a lot.

There are barrages of fast cuts to distract us from the fact that the director is showing us no real action.

[Soderbergh] plays with time and narrative to reveal character, mood and longing in ways you just don't find in a mainstream crime picture.

Beautiful in both its brevity and its vision of contemporary Indian culture, the film abounds in easygoing humor.

All bets are off. For my money, Vincent Gallo wins the Triple Crown of indie filmmaking -- for writing, directing and starring in Buffalo '66.

Runs out of ideas long before the projector runs out of film.

Director Breathnach is in no hurry to pump up the action in this easygoing, episodic on-the-road adventure, and the slow pace may wear thin for some viewers. More than anything, I Went Down is a cleverly observed character study of two losers who find they suddenly stand a chance at winning.

Neither true believers nor newcomers to the phenomenon will be disappointed.

The payoff is a consistently rich piece with impressive visual vitality.

Henry Fool is far and away writer-director Hal Hartley's best movie.

Edge of Seventeen is sweet and affectionate, but it also has "first effort" stamped all over it. Director David Moreton never made a feature before this, and has yet to learn how to compose a shot or block his actors.

It is wonderful to see how Sheedy gives shape to this performance -- her eyes, a photographer's eyes, carefully sizing everything up. [18 June 1998, Daily Notebook, p.E1]

Action in an action comedy is supposed to be funny, too, as Jackie Chan well knows. The refitting of the crashed plane is so tedious we feel as if we're doing the work ourselves.

Can't Hardly Wait has freshness, comic invention and an engaging romantic spirit.

Dirty Work was directed by Bob Saget, who always seemed slightly embarrassed by his enormous success as the host of America's Funniest Home Videos. Now he's got something else to be slightly embarrassed about.

There's nothing about this thriller to prevent it from soon becoming enmeshed in the memory with others in which Michael Douglas wears a starched collar and grits his teeth.

An original, inspired piece of work.

Where the movie goes wrong is that it sets itself up as a study of a pathological personality but never delivers.

The most Stillmanesque Stillman movie yet. It's about a mood, part wistful, part sardonic. It's about a time of life, about repartee, about the vivid character saying the unexpected thing.

Floats is corny and false, with a script by Steven Rogers that's almost 100 percent artificial sweetener.

The best scenes are of people talking -- and that's not just because the lines are so good. Roos doesn't seem to know what to do with his characters when they aren't blabbing.

Disappointing, pointless and repetitive.

Beatty has fashioned a hilarious morality tale that delivers a surprisingly potent, angry message beneath the laughs.

An overblown action monstrosity with no surprises, no exhilaration and no thrills.

It says something about this movie that Redford is at his most compelling playing opposite a nag.

On the surface, it's a mystery in which someone is going around stealing personal items, and the women are suspected -- and suspect each other. In a larger sense it's about how corporate culture is not only antithetical to individuality and human kindness but also hostile toward these things.

A spirited adventure with generous romantic and comic charms.

To its credit, the movie eschews cheap dramatics, but at times it eschews dramatics altogether.

Aspires to the breezy esprit of a Richard Lester comedy from the '60s, but it's a deadly, leaden affair.

He Got Game seems to cheer for integrity, honesty and hard work while playing up its own cheap thrills.

While Wilde captures its subject's singular charm, it ultimately doesn't do justice to his complexity.

This latest, from director Bille August, is merely respectful and respectable. It never sinks, but it never really soars either, though here and there it hits a powerful moment.

No doubt this seeming effortlessness was hard-won. Movies this smooth don't happen by accident.

Score it big-time inane but a load of fun.

Object to the picture on ideological grounds, if you like, but that's no way to watch movies. Better to appreciate the rare spectacle of a filmmaker leading from his gut.

Much of that appeal comes from compelling performances by the two main actors.

It's an amazing actor who can carry a movie by simply sitting calmly in a chair. That's what Christopher Walken does in the comedy-thriller Suicide Kings. He's so good, one hardly blinks.

It's rough when it works and rough when it doesn't. Much of the first hour is made up of slow patches, while the last 20 minutes are ugly and terrifying.

A feeble excuse for a movie.

An odd hybrid but a successful one. It marries the lyricism and heavy atmosphere of a European art film with the soaring spirit of a Hollywood love story.

Pathetic yet stupidly entertaining for several minutes of its interminable running time, 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain makes half its cast look like retreads and half like fresh ponies desperately karate-kicking a dud script to see if it has any signs of life.

Sonatine eliminates the one virtue American action films can legitimately claim -- vitality -- and replaces it with fake- existential claptrap wrapped in an inept narrative.

The story of an elaborate con game and the wholesale betrayal of an innocent man, it's also an unusually cold film that ends with a feeling of hollow soullessness.

A wild ride through nonstop visual effects yet a warm wallow in the cinema of the dumbed-down.

Mercury Rising is a Bruce Willis action movie, which means that most of us know what it will be like going in, and the only question is whether it's a good one or a lousy one. Answer: This is a good one.

The film is a fairly happy excuse to give the beloved dinosaur some room to do what he likes best -- sing kid-friendly songs and peddle a twinkly message that imagination and kindness are good things.

Director Richard Linklater ("Dazed and Confused") should have taken a cue from the music -- the film needs a lot more snap.

It's amusing in a trashy sort of way.

An intelligent movie that portrays the mighty without reverence.

A warning: The pace is very slow in Taste of Cherry, with long takes and leisurely, repetitious shots of Mr. Badii's car twisting through a hilly countryside. Kiarostami is in no rush, but the respect and love he shows for his characters, and the confidence and simplicity of his technique, make Taste of Cherry a satisfying experience.

Shyamalan's story is clearly autobiographical, and he imbued the tender tale with a wistful atmosphere as well as a kindly regard for parochial school, hitting some of the details just right.

It's a film with impressive elements, though taken as a whole it's pop entertainment that doesn't fully deliver on the entertainment end.

Viewers expecting rip-roaring, chandelier- swinging swordplay adventure are likely to be disappointed by the measured tone and portentous verbal interplay.

Going after one innocent man was bad enough. Going after another constitutes a pattern. This marshal isn't a hero. He's a menace.

Directed with style and wit by London filmmaker Richard Kwietniowski, who makes his feature debut here, Love and Death is an off-kilter romantic comedy.

Although some of its parts are brilliantly executed and played by a terrific cast, the result is scattered, overamplified and unsatisfying.

Lange seems at a loss to know how to convey Martha's malevolence -- and writer-director Jonathan Darby offers almost no guidance.

A sharp, engaging look at what it's like to be hungry and not-so-young in New York.

It's made by a director who knows comedy, working from a script founded on a surefire slapstick premise.

There's no buildup and little shape. Scenes are strong, but the movie as a whole flags.

Dark City grabs your eyeballs and squeezes.

McCormack at first seems too light of spirit for the role, but she grows into it, and it turns out she's exactly what the movie calls for: Someone too wholesome-looking to be anything but a fine young lady.

A sweet-natured if formulaic romantic comedy.

If the writing and direction carry Sphere most of the way, the actors manage to bring it home.

It's beautifully shot by first-time feature director Antoine Fuqua, whose eye for sensual surfaces, deft camera moves and elegant framing was refined with commercials and music videos

A semi-autobiographical tale of addiction, anger and domestic violence, Nil by Mouth is as blunt and unsparing as a fist to the gut.

There are chase scenes and car pileups. This wasn't fresh in 1980. It hasn't gotten any fresher.

From watching this meandering, stilted movie, anyone unfamiliar with Charles Dickens' novel would be not only disinclined to pick it up but also clueless as to why it's considered great.

It's hard to follow, the characters are ill-defined, and the wide-angle shots used by Wong's perennial cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, are deliberately unflattering.

There's great pleasure in watching a movie in which the director has thought out everything beforehand.

A horror movie that has the distinction of not even being scary... Although Koontz wrote the screenplay, the suspense for which he is supposed to be famous doesn't translate to the screen.

A joyous, hilarious send-up of rock star pretensions and an enchanting celebration of "girl power" in pop culture.

A stupid movie -- but a deliriously stupid movie, which gives it a certain grandeur.

But their comic talents are completely wasted by an inane script whose idea of humor is to make jokes about lung cancer and the notorious Tuskegee experiment on black men with syphilis. [20 Jan 1998]

Live Flesh lacks freshness.

Fallen is not perfect, and eventually it even becomes frustrating. Threads remain loose, and the movie doesn't fully exploit its premise. Still, it would be churlish not to appreciate the ride.

It's a tribute to Day-Lewis that he can play a character like Danny -- cautious, withdrawn, inarticulate -- and endow him an eloquence and grace that aren't dependent on language. Without him, The Boxer might still be a powerful tale of loyalty and love, with a core of moral complexity; with Day-Lewis in the lead, it approaches greatness.

The film version is gorgeous to look at and contains amusing performances from Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in the title roles. But it fails to get inside the minds of gamblers as Peter Carey so admirably did in his Booker Prize-winning novel.