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.