Levinson's sure touch keeps audiences smiling and manages to maintain an aura of good nature in a film that, at heart, offers a caustic, almost bitter vision of American institutions and contemporary politics.

Stunning, odd, glorious, calm and sensationally absorbing.

The slow pace kills the sense of urgency, and the length and breadth of the film makes the story seem insignificant. Tarantino is still someone to watch, but Jackie Brown, before it's over, becomes a who-cares proposition.

Only a couple of good gags in its pileup of otherwise lame jokes keep the production from being an unqualified stinker.

The movie often verges on being too much; Brooks' supreme balancing act is to keep it all under control.

If the formula seems a little tired, it still has more sophistication and pizzazz than most action films.

The last hour of Titanic is huge and staggering, but there's no horror in it. No gravity, either. Entrusted with one of the century's monumental stories, Cameron can present it only as a crying shame. And that's a crying shame.

Mouse Hunt is inane, antic cinema in the extreme. But even if half the gags don't quite work, the other half are inspired.

It's rare that we have a screen character as well-rounded, as recognizably human or as brilliantly played as Sonny Dewey.

Woody Allen's strongest and most mordantly funny movie in years, even if it is also his bleakest.

Though Craven satirizes horror cliches, he also knows how to cut through them and do new things. Throughout, the action comes unexpectedly and quickly.

Spielberg uses a more conventional format than he did in the stripped-down black-and-white "Schindler's List,'' and delivers a film that veers between stoic political correctness and mushy pop-Hollywood platitudes.

Intimate, heartfelt and wickedly funny, it's a movie whose impact lingers.

The cluttered, surreal, claustrophobic sets and gooey alien creatures look intriguing, sometimes shocking. But the story tries so hard to be imaginative that it congeals and sinks like lead.

It's a perfect fit for Williams -- a hunk of slapstick, a dose of schmaltz -- and yet he can't save the film, which is overproduced, mechanical and resoundingly unfunny.

The result is startling and repellent -- a challenge to filmgoers accustomed to fake gunfire, fake wounds and cosmeticized death.

Egoyan's voice is so clear and loving, his vision so forgiving and his film so intelligent that you come away refreshed.

The Rainmaker has a mostly plausible story, an engaging young courtroom hero (Matt Damon, Hollywood's new cover boy), a giant insurance company as the perfect adversary and the best supporting cast of any movie this year.

Isn't an awful movie. It's got two charismatic, albeit ill-served leads in John Cusack and Kevin Spacey, and it's got a sizzling, tear-it-up performance by The Lady Chablis, who brings such good-natured sass and suggestiveness that you hunger for more whenever she's offscreen.

A gorgeous piece of work. It pulls every heartstring a good romance should, yet bursts with G-rated fun, wonderfully human characters and several solid and hummable songs.

Its dazzling special effects make its combatants flip and fly, spin and soar, all the while punching and kicking each other like jackhammers, only to leave viewers utterly unmoved.

Amusing performances -- especially from Willis, who takes on a new personality with each new hairstyle -- can't disguise the fact that the film is basically a pastiche of recent movies.

Surprisingly, Potter takes what seemed like a recipe for embarrassment and excess and delivers a film that's sweet and understated and devoid of diva posturing.

The film's special effects are astonishing, but the most notable and unexpected thing is its tone.

The difference is that Iain Softley, who directed Wings of the Dove, and his screenwriter Hossein Amini, who wrote the overlooked "Jude," are keen observers who bring a wealth of ambiguity and mystery to the surface -- and release their characters from the cliches that easily could have swallowed them.

Some of the middle section of Bean sags, but most of the film zips along with a series of comic setups, played like skits, that emphasize Bean's klutziness, his feeble mentality, his childlike, me-too urges.

As a screenwriter, Lemmons is able to keep all the plot elements in place. But as a director, she is unable to keep things moving.

Not for a minute is Mad City anything less than entertaining. Yet it becomes frustrating nonetheless. Its ideas gradually seem to be at cross-purposes -- not complex, not tantalizingly ambiguous, but tangled and undefined.

Sick does a remarkable thing in presenting extreme, sometimes revolting material and simultaneously making us like and admire Flanagan.

Delpy and Scott are able to put it over. She's French and deep and mysterious. He's a fresh-faced American, an open book. Liking them makes it possible to (kinda) like this otherwise routine horror movie.

Loose, buoyant and bracingly original.

Clearly, an effort was made to create a serious, thoughtful movie.

Boyle isn't the first British or European filmmaker to make his obligatory zesty American road movie (apparently it's a dream for anyone raised on American cinema), but knowing that doesn't make A Life Less Ordinary any less tiring or its numerous pilferings any less obvious or annoying.

Competent but uninspired thriller.

The Devil's Advocate is a sharp, suspenseful and completely satisfying movie.

It's an interesting technique -- the blurring of reality and "movies" -- but Korine's objective is so narrow and mean, and his viewpoint so colored by smug, adolescent condescension, that Gummo comes off like a mean-spirited prank.

It's a career high mark for Bacon, whose flashy smirk and stifled grimaces flesh out a character both scary and pathetic in this intimate, nostalgic film that delves into the art of the hustle.

With Boogie Nights, we know we're not just watching episodes from disparate lives but a panorama of recent social history, rendered in bold, exuberant colors.

Stylized dialogue tends to play awkwardly onscreen -- we're conditioned to naturalistic conversation in films -- and Waters, who makes his feature directing debut with The House of Yes, fails to create an emotional tone or attitude to match the characters' goofy repartee.

Though some of the acting has a stilted feeling, the emotional charge and unusual look of the film linger.

Pitt isn't a bad actor, but he's way out of his depth and never disappears into the character -- a selfish rogue who gets a jolt of enlightenment at the feet of the Dalai Lama -- the way a superior actor like Daniel Day-Lewis might have.

This is an intimate, lyrical yet incendiary film, and it will please fans of both Young and Jarmusch, a filmmaker drawn to the intersection of American popular culture and a profound sense of loneliness.

A mess of a movie, veering constantly toward the laughable when it isn't being offensive. Its only claim to fame is that it's the last movie featuring the late Tupac Shakur.

For Morgan Freeman ("Seven") fans, it's a chance to see a great actor save a movie from itself.

It demonstrates a filmmaker in complete command of his craft and with little control over his impulses.

Never becomes the thoroughly satisfying psychological drama that it promises to be. There's also a problem with the central metaphor of ice -- a literary device that turns repetitive and obvious.

His (George Clooney) rugged good looks spell movie star, but his body language spells Don Knotts, without the wit.

The result is a lovely wash of humanity, served with affection.

As the photographer, Baldwin tries to keep his chin up, but he's ultimately sunk by the built-in ludicrousness of the character he plays. But Hopkins -- through wit, luck and imagination -- emerges victorious from the barren wilderness of Mamet's script. He has only himself to thank.

One of the best crime dramas to come along in years.

May provide a service by making gay issues innocuous and funny and more acceptable to a broader audience, but Rudnick's play-it-safe script and Frank Oz's antiseptic direction manage instead to trivialize the subject.

Even if it's too self-conscious, "Going All the Way," set in 1950s Indianapolis, nevertheless has a mix of the sweet and the forlorn that somehow works.

When all is fretted and done, there's little dramatic payoff in this moody first feature by Bart Freundlich. But cinematographer Stephen Kazmierski's images are appealing, and the mood is on target -- Thanksgiving as hell.

At times The Game is frustrating to watch, but that's just a measure of how well Fincher succeeds in putting us in his hero's shoes.

Director Jacques Audiard beautifully lays out the story of a charming nobody named Albert who becomes a master of the half- smile and nonchalant gestures of deceit. But the story is also a cogent metaphor for French collaboration with the Nazis.

It's precisely Seagal's incongruity that has made him a great absurdist hero -- and that makes Fire Down Below a kick.

Excess Baggage falls down as a showcase for Silverstone, who made a big splash in "Clueless" and whose production company is releasing this film. She comes across as unappealing and unseasoned in ways that go beyond the role.

Considering that most movies, even today, don't present a woman's romantic or sexual behavior in anything other than a spirit of judgment, She's So Lovely has to be regarded as something unique.

Hoodlum is an overlong gangster movie, a bloated and often laughable attempt at an epic.

With a strongly visual director, Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner," "Alien", the film really shows what's involved at this level of combat training.

In Mimic, director Guillermo Del Toro has created a dark, grotesque world that's hard to look at, and impossible to stop looking at.

The richness of characters make this movie shine. It's just that, somehow, a certain sense of fire is missing.

Instead of defining and spoofing its period, its attitude and its social barometer, Leave It to Beaver just stumbles about in a bland, irony-deprived suburbia that denies the movie any juice or bite and renders the Cleaver family even duller than it was.

Cop Land isn't a perfect piece, but it's sober, wise and adult.

It's not a great film, but Event Horizon produces an intense sense of visual involvement. The hallucinatory, almost 3-D-like scenes stick in the mind.

This moody film, set in muggy Memphis, exudes a dangerous veracity that's both exciting and poisonous.

"Steel" plays like a Saturday morning cartoon -- overdone stunts and hokey chase sequences with the hero on a motorcycle, dodging heavily armed gangsters as well as cops who think he's a bad guy.

Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy has created full characters as vulnerable in their personal lives as in their work.

It's just a simple thriller whose goal is little more than to keep moving.

A film that, despite its slight intentions, offers several lovely moments.

Tersely written and compellingly acted. But its controversial subject matter may make a lot of viewers so angry that the film's strong points will be disregarded.

Another romantic comedy about a career woman who has everything except a man, is Jennifer Aniston's attempt to break out of her TV role. But she doesn't have the magic on the big screen to make us forget where she came from.

Almost every moment has flashes and explosions and a pulsing, relentless soundtrack. It's like being trapped inside a video game.

The movie was written by Scott Yagemann, who taught seven years in the Los Angeles public- school system, and you can feel the rancor and bitterness he still carries.

Dares to present a flat-out heroic president, without the safety net of irony. It succeeds.

Movies don't get worse than Good Burger, a wretched little comedy. It's a movie that inspires wonder -- at how it got made and released.

The first measure of Arteta's shrewdness as a storyteller is in the no-fuss way he reveals the nature of the father's business.

A first-rate historical drama.

It's a bouncy, occasionally awkward diversion with sharply written characters and good actors.

One of the most witty, entertaining family films to come out in some time.

Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis, may be too long, too self-important and too "Gump"-like to be completely satisfying. But it contains elements that are so striking they pretty much redeem the film.

4 Little Girls brilliantly captures a moment in American history and tells an achingly painful story of injustice and family loss.

Summer fluff that admits to being summer fluff, but it's no better off for admitting it...Intended as lightweight comedy, but if you think about it too much, it's not so funny.

Out to Sea has an emotional pull that is much stronger because it is so unexpected. You come for the laughs and find yourself wiping away tears.

It's the picture that proves action films don't have to be silly, that a few thrill sequences don't mean every other value has to be shot to pieces.

They fractured Greek myth but slapped mountains of comic muscle on the hunky hero in Hercules. What fun! The great old Greek is turned into a '90s-style athlete who gets endorsements, sandals named after him and a chance to stand tall among nymphs and muses after whipping the villainous lord of the underworld, Hades, personified as a Hollywood movie mogul type.

The real casting disaster is Mulroney. His blandness in the role makes it impossible to believe two beautiful women would fight over him.

It's the lightest of the Batman movies, the most cartoony, the dumbest and the least ambitious. But it holds the audience's attention, brings on a few laughs and never really gets boring.

This may be hard to believe, but there's not a single moment of drama or tension in any of the action sequences. And the film is made up almost entirely of action.

Worthy but dull.

From scene to scene, the tone shifts from supposed sincerity to arch and amused, until the picture begins to seem like some mad, desperate, scattershot attempt to hold an audience's attention from moment to moment, by any means.

The Pillow Book sometimes seems like three different movies, each one an eyeful but together too much of a good thing.

Karyo -- a big star in France but little known in this country -- has Steve Martin's knack for keeping his dignity while doing outrageous slapstick.

The biggest sequel of the summer has more dinosaurs, better special effects and more action than the original... But the inspiration is gone, and with it most of the fun.

The characters are beautifully drawn in this bittersweet melodrama written and directed by Mark Herman.

McNally adapted his Tony-award winning play for the screen, and for once a movie is an improvement on the stage version.

Director Sidney Lumet takes another shot at New York City police corruption in his new film, but despite some solid performances, Night Falls on Manhattan fails to deliver the passion of such Lumet classics as "Serpico" and "Prince of the City."

The world of this film is like nothing most Americans have seen. But we know what it's about. It's about greed and guilt and how inconvenient it can be to have a soul.