An extraordinary entertainment that personalizes the world of insects and other invertebrates and leaves audiences with an itching conviction of the poetry of nature.

It's a complex, satisfying piece of entertainment, a succession of unexpected, outrageous scenes.

The picture... is well- made and entertaining, but it holds a special interest in what it says about Hanks.

The movie keeps a snappy pace and the suspense pot boiling. The snippy interplay between the two cops adds enjoyable twists of comic chemistry. Constant rain and slick streets, though a cliche, set a moody tone. [07 Oct 1996, p.D2]

Leigh goes right to the core of his character's lives and mines the place where we're weakest, most alone and sometimes the cruelest.

2 Days in the Valley is skillfully made. The beginning introduces a handful of disparate characters. It juggles their stories and then deftly starts bringing them together through some surprising and unexpected turns.

Extreme Measures has disturbing moments, and poignant ones, too. It plays a good game of paranoia with its unlikely hero. Once the story gets past Luthan's implausible firing on trumped-up drug charges, it places him alone in a hostile world. Relying only on a determination to solve the medical puzzle, he goes on a desperate expedition into the bowels of the subway system. It's a grim, scary sequence, and Grant seems a million miles away from his stammering comedic style -- an extreme that is surprisingly engaging.

Both a delightful story and a great food movie that ranks with "Like Water for Chocolate'' or "Babette's Feast.''

It's a glamorous revenge romp, a "9 to 5" mixed with "Auntie Mame," and it gives each star the opportunity to do her best work in a long, long time.

An absorbing look at emotional tyranny, with a great screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Hill and his cast, including Christopher Walken as a sadistic hood, struggle to score a victory of style over substance. But substance, or a lack thereof, wins.

A white-trash burlesque that springs from the notion that people chasing each other in cars and doing stupid things in motels are inherently funny.

A solid family movie, "Fly Away Home" is a constant feast for the eyes, with rich photography by Caleb Deschanel.

Bulletproof is a raunchy exercise in macho posturing -- but thanks to a layer of satire, the new action comedy at Bay Area theaters provides a few zingers of lowbrow entertainment.

A sleek, intelligent thriller.

It's not a deep film, but there is a certain poignancy in Luke's situation and in the earnestness with which the burly Sinbad approaches the boy. Simms has a warm style and lets Luke know he's not a nut for feeling the need to explore the world a bit.

It's a shame Arnold is stuck on the loudmouth clod schtick, because there are moments he's downright pleasant on screen. But in Carpool, these moments are kept to a minimum.

Freeway is rude in the way the truth is rude -- only funnier. The movie seduces with its humor, all the while presenting a realized vision of a harsh, absurd world.

At the very least the film can be congratulated for being anarchic enough to explore an attraction between the two oldest Brady kids, Marcia and Greg.

Burns presents two mildly amusing fellows wrestling with romance and expects the audience to see them as embodying universal dilemmas. At the very least, he wants us to take these guys as seriously as they take themselves.

The Island of Dr. Moreau ought to have been a great film in these times of gene splicing and DNA research and all the moral, ethical and practical questions those developments raise. But director John Frankenheimer and screenwriters Richard Stanley and Ron Hutchinson's attempt to update Wells yields only a maddening mess of empty gestures.

This is the movie for anyone who has ever sat around with friends and thought, "Someone should make a movie about this," a film that captures the tenderness and quick humor of hanging out. It's not an easy task. We may find our own friends delightful, but watching other people's friends is a dreary prospect.

Accomplishes the impossible, maybe the unimaginable -- it makes golf entertaining.

Tony Scott's vigorous direction is sometimes too vigorous. Loud rock music underscores many scenes, and Scott's habit of shooting at odd angles begins to seem like a mannerism. But on the whole his ambitious attack helps make The Fan entertaining in the moment, even if it's forgettable immediately afterward.

It starts out with several seemingly separate stories and characters, allows them to tease, overlap and shade one another, and then weaves them into one rich fabric. It's an allegory about American life -- a tough, cynical meditation on race, crime and the futility of human endeavor.

Bordello of Blood easily could have been called "Bore- dello of Blood." This gory vampire spoof is remarkably free of jolts, hardly registering as a fright film, with a series of weak special effects involving many globs of guts...The big themes in this lackluster second feature under the "Tales From the Crypt" banner are sex and religion. Both are presented with painfully sophomoric irreverence.

It's smart and good-hearted and boasts an amazingly good score, but the film is limited by the very private nature of the man it portrays.

Jack is a warm, heartfelt disaster that shows that life is fleeting but movies can be very long indeed.

The movie is so cleverly entrenched in its sardonic style that Russell's toughest act must have been keeping a straight face. Escape From L.A. is surprisingly effective in picturing a former nirvana clenched in the twisted rubble of its own excess.

[Hartley] changes the script enough so that the integrity of his experiment goes out the window. But he doesn't change enough so that the narrative can have any suspense.

The subtle ironies of Austen's novel are rendered obvious, and the book's social satire gives way here to more straightforward romantic comedy.

A zingy self-empowerment fantasy for kids.

A conspiracy tale of high-tech chicanery, Chain Reaction has better acting, better writing, more spectacular chase sequences and more genuine drama than all of this summer's blockbusters. It's also got Morgan Freeman, as good an actor as we have today, which easily qualifies it as the one action film you should see this summer if you see no other.

Violent, disjunctive and exhausting, it's a dark fable that illustrates with startling images the strong, seductive pull of evil.

With her first feature, "Manny & Lo," writer-director Lisa Krueger reveals a distinctive style. Though employing no surreal devices and remaining within a realistic convention, Krueger takes the story of two young sisters on their own and somehow makes it seem unreal, strange, outside time.

Joel Schumacher, the director of "Falling Down," "The Client" and "Batman Forever," has a strong feel for this kind of glossy pop entertainment and a way of integrating social issues without sacrificing narrative drive.

Darkly comic tone of heroin-addiction film sets it apart

Smothers whatever merits it may have had in a rush of bells, whistles, bombast and smoke.

I don't want to damn Holofcener's efforts with faint praise, but the best way to describe Walking and Talking is to say that it's pleasant and charming.

The early scenes are amusing and true to life.

The alien attack, taking place in several cities at once, is breathtaking...All the same, Independence Day is consistently funny.

But this soggy, sentimental tour through a rural dreamworld of salt-of- the-earth versus supercharged intelligence never quite gets deep enough to touch the soul -- or to make sense.

Murphy is wonderful -- I wouldn't begrudge him an Oscar nomination -- but The Nutty Professor is a mess.

While Showgirls was funny the whole way through, Striptease has long, dreary stretches, where you're forced to watch Demi Moore undressing.

By the end, it is clear just how much in control Sayles has been all along. The resolution, though typically restrained, forcefully puts over the movie's point, that we're all more connected than we think.

It's the typical elements that make Eraser no more than a solid bit of fluff: This is one of those movies where good guys don't miss, and bad guys can't shoot to save their lives.

Gorgeous but dark -- not the usual Disney experience. Audiences will find much to embrace in this animated drama, yet they may not walk away humming the kind of catchy tunes contained in Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King or Aladdin.

When Bertolucci points his camera out a window, it's like putting on your glasses. Everything is lush, drenched in color and right there for you to touch.

The Cable Guy doesn't know when to pull the plug. Much of the film plays like a personal boob tube with Carrey trapped inside, determined to act his way out in a mugging freak show. He's a disturbing mixture of psychopath and pathetically misguided lonely soul.

A raucous, in-your-face, commando-style action thriller that makes provocative use of Alcatraz as a lunatic's lair and San Francisco as a sitting duck.

Without peril, The Phantom can only get by on dazzle, and there's not quite enough of that to hold interest -- unless you're 8 years old and seeing dazzle for the first time.

Mangold's sympathy is genuine and his refusal to mock or condescend to his characters -- indeed, that may be the point of the film -- is a pleasure.

It's a strong, lean piece of writing that moves quickly. Nothing is wasted, and nothing happens the way you'd expect.

Mythology has rarely been so preachy in a tedious Hollywood style.

The best bits come in the first few minutes -- or maybe the jokes just seem fresher then.

It's the worst kind of convoluted thriller -- it can never unravel satisfactorily because there's nothing simple at its center, just more confusion.

The dolphins are charming, which is at least 50 percent of the concept of the film. The flip side is the film's predictability and shallow characters. Audiences may walk away feeling that they got a pleasant dose of cinematic Dramamine, but that it takes a long time and is a little tedious en route.

It's hard to dislike a picture with flying cows and oil trucks.

Dead Man plays a lot of cards at the same time, and Jarmusch occasionally loses his rhythm when he allows his actors their improvisational riffs.

Cold Comfort Farm may be hysterically funny to regular readers of Hardy, Lawrence, Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, but it won't ring many bells for the rest of us.

A convoluted mess, but there have been worse.

The young actresses are superb, and they make an appealing, believable group of friends.

Typically, films about '60s subculture recycle the same set of media cliches and teach us nothing. Harron approaches the milieu with curiosity, compassion and an anthropologist's eye.

Kingpin has nastiness going for it. There are prosthesis jokes, bad-teeth jokes, ugly-women jokes, sight gags involving vomiting, etc.

You can see the outcome from a distance, but Michael Lehmann ("Heathers") directs with such snap, and the actors play their concert of comic duets and trios with such skill and charm, that The Truth About Cats & Dogs emerges a surprising, first-rate romantic comedy.

Plummer gives her strangest, most uninhibited screen performance to date. Playing Eunice, a wildly psychotic killer with a working-class British accent and a mysterious past, Plummer draws a streak of white-hot rage across the screen.

Mulholland Falls is a provocative crime drama with a limp script and a forced feeling. But star Nick Nolte is a ticking time bomb as a brutal Los Angeles police detective with a hulking, gasping sense of pain and meanness. He gives the film an odd, askew tone that keeps it tough and alive.

With Lake at the center, something that could have been innocuous becomes painful, and a sure shot at mediocrity is transformed into one of the worst films of the year.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie is a tough call to recommend for everyone. But for a goofy time laughing at stupid comedy with otherwise intelligent people, it might be just the ticket.

The only way to enjoy Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy is to savor the performances and behavior quirks, and release the notion that plot is essential.

The Substitute is a guilty pleasure, but it's not garbage. Berenger brings to the role an appealing ruggedness and world-weariness, and Ernie Hudson, as the corrupt principal, is sleazy and elegant. The script isn't bad, either.

Original enough to come up with new ways to go wrong. For one, the film is a blatant showcase to promote O'Neal as a rap artist.

Denzel Washington is riveting.

It's a maddening, satisfying, junky, enjoyable picture.

It's a stunning, delightful image adventure like nothing done before on the big screen.

Riveting.

It's impossible to dismiss the attraction of such accomplished actors on the big screen, even with a fits-and-starts script.

Mamoru Oshii's direction deftly merges gritty realism with a dreamlike quality. The only problem is that the characters reel off their existential speeches with such harried deadpan that it's hard to tell whether the angst is serious or tongue-in-cheek.

Sgt. Bilko's attempts at loose-cannon nuttiness sometimes go astray, but under Jonathan Lynn's direction, the film manages to keep a lively balance between the dumbed-down antics of Bilko's platoon of young motor- pool hustlers, to whom he is mentor, and the more nuanced satire of dimwit military brass.

A buoyant, picaresque farce that hums with goofy energy and mines enough ideas, jokes and setups for three movies of this description.

Solondz ("Fear, Anxiety and Depression") is almost unrelenting in his quirky fixation with the adolescent outsider and he pursues visions of everyday human injury nearly to the point of caricature. But he stops just short, and this amusingly twisted film mixes humor and heart-tugging sadness with a disturbing vitality.

Girl 6 is glossy, technically proficient and a glib waste of time. Lee and his screenwriter goof around with phone-sex rhetoric ("I wanna service your juicy kielbasa''), but that gets tired quickly.

It's forgettable matinee fodder.

Unfortunately, Stuart Baird's direction is so sluggish and Jim and John Thomas' script so padded that Executive Decision has no build. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of suspense, the film concentrates to a boyish extent on mechanics, period.

A crime gem that is darkly funny even when it's chilling -- and certain to become a classic.

A glossy miscalculation.

It's a witty, intelligent scramble, and it's beautifully mounted.

For all Wong's energy and virtuosity, the relentless stylishness and whimsicality of Chungking Express become irritating. The cast is appealing -- particularly the forlorn young cops. But the velocity of Wong's attack seems out of proportion to the airy, lightweight quality of the stories.

For about half of its running time, Hellraiser: Bloodline is watchable. In fact -- let's throw around the superlatives -- it's mildly entertaining. [9 March 1996, p.B3]

The jump gimmick sounds as if it might make a cute romantic movie. But If Lucy Fell has so little meat that it plays like a television sitcom that somehow grew into a feature-length movie. It's airy, fluffy and ultimately uninteresting.

The Neon Bible is a lovely, rewarding film, but it requires some work and some faith on the part of the viewer. Davies' rhythms and camera moves are as slow and stately as ever -- the antithesis of most Hollywood films -- and the moments of crystallized emotion he achieves are sometimes separated by dull patches and self-conscious artiness.

Down Periscope makes a surprisingly successful launch, with plenty of brisk one-liners and a promising set-up. But after that auspicious opening, it sinks.

An awkward hybrid of Asian and American film techniques. It's also an uninvolving story that casts Chan in the role of a fish out of water and gives him little opportunity to show his exuberant personality.

The film is too mannered, too stuffy. Even Malkovich's interesting performance won't let it break free of a formal style and cloyingly creepy tone that becomes precious while trying to be merely claustrophobic.

The film itself is wretched. A grueling, numbing black hole.

It may smell awful from a distance, especially if you have low tolerance for lowbrow humor, but up close this yarn about an unlikely golf star is fairly painless.

Muppet Treasure Island is an elaborate, juicy eyeful. The film is an impressive maze of visual scale and perspective that lets humans and puppets interact as a single species. The overall effect is a wonderful sense of the fantastical. But simplicity might have helped where the movie often stagnates with gimmicks.

For most of its 110 minutes, City Hal is a strong, hard-boiled drama that gives an insider's look at the wheelings and dealings in and around the mayor's office.