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.