At once a stifling exercise in thwarting emotional dynamics and a heated invitation to engage in the film's discourse on the shortcoming of sexual politics and justice in a media-saturated land.

Delpy and Hawke begin to grow on you and Linklater and his actors achieve a point midway through the film when the characters are so attractive and smart and emotionally daring that you'll be happy to spend the night with them.

While I was watching "Lone Star," I realized that what makes Sayles a good and socially responsible person - his ability to look at one thing a hundred different ways - is exactly what makes him a muddy filmmaker.

With its fine courtroom scenes, excellent performances, great writing and superb direction it reminds me more than anything else of Barbet Schroeder's "Reversal of Fortune."

Like many French movies, in the retelling this one boils down to an unremittingly silly set of characters and situations.

I suppose Kusturica can justify the 167-minute length by the historical breadth of the movie, but it simply doesn't sustain one's interest, significant or not.

Misses some creative opportunities to really drive this story home, but it's a naturally haunting story nonetheless.

This is a nearly miraculous conjunction of director, material and actor.

Yellow Submarine takes a magical mystery tour through the history of art and spends a splendiferous good time splashing in the pop art of it all.

A knock-down, haywire ballad of the adrenalinization of love and despair.

You may have surmised that Americans have held the copyright on turning out awful movies about serious musicians (especially musicians with physical or mental afflictions), but along comes the high-gloss weepie.

The majestic pageant of images - no sylvan landscape has been this indelibly, dimensionally alive - is inextricably welded to the multifold spiritual / ecological questions about the future that Miyazaki is contemplating.

This is filmmaking of high energy and wit. What it adds up to is debatable. You can view it as a bright twist on the being-a-cop-is-lonely sort of police picture, or as a mini-anthology of quirky not-quite-love stories. If it's hard to say where Chungking Express arrives, the trip is still exhilarating.

Powerful war spectacle neglects novel's heart and much of story.

Franklin juggles it all with wit and style, and suddenly you feel fine that this is only Mosley's first Easy Rawlins novel. Several more are just waiting to be adapted.

The welcome hints at emotional excess are compromised by the blunt force of the movie's political point-making.

Gets blue-ribbon results from its thoroughbred cast of improvisational comics.

You find yourself absorbed in simply looking at them to the extent that it's hard to hear what they're saying. It's a nice dilemma for a movie to present.

[Nair's] sure touch with the details of social decorum carries the film through. [14 Feb 1992, p.D3]

Spellbinding.

Segues from the merely quirky into the bizarrely unthinkable.

On the whole, the movie is a success. I still hope that children and their parents will read this wonderful book together, but it's nice that there's a movie they can see, too.

With no frills and no commentary, Howard and company have made the kind of absorbing thriller we have in mind when we wistfully sigh, "They don't make movies like they used to."

Ethereal.

Fly Away Home" is directed by Carroll Ballard, who made "The Black Stallion" and "Never Cry Wolf." In other words, it was directed by a filmmaker with talent, taste and subtlety, working from an understated script by Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin.

The film itself never felt quite so densely plotted as Yimou apparently had hoped.

A grim, well-realized film from New Zealand. It is an impressive first feature for its director, Lee Tamahori, and a splendid dramatic vehicle for its stars, especially Rena Owen, who gives a gritty portrayal of a Maori woman fighting to stand her ground in a violent ghetto household.

Staggering, gorgeously ambiguous.

Nunez's style is quiet, simple and deliberate, but the film never drags.

Now "Rod Tidwell," with Jerry Maguire as a supporting character, would be a movie to pay to see.

Funny enough that it could make buddy pictures respectable again.

Set in a vivid two-dimensional African village, the animated fable is jerky, odd but redolent somehow of Saturday morning and the night's sleep before.

This is grim material, but director Hilary Brougher -- working from her own script that won a Sundance award -- examines the lives of these two suffering women without sensationalism or preaching.

I Stand Alone has the ghastly stink of a rotting corpse. You can smell the cess as clearly as you can see the blood vessels striking like lightning around the pupils of its malefactor's eyes.

Less ambitious than the highly successful "Secrets & Lies," Career Girls has its own modest merits - a real sense of wit, much of it expressed in Hannah's sharp verbal sallies, and a melancholy truth that both women realize.

Mangold's vision is bold. There is nothing cutesy or gimmicky about Heavy, which may be why something in its grimness recalls the work of Ingmar Bergman.

A dashing fusion of the literary and the cinematic.

This movie has the jaunty good cheer of another great movie about hit men, "Prizzi's Honor." And that is high praise indeed.

The scenes with Stalin and his frightened underlings, his giddy yes-men tip-toeing around him, are written and directed by Duncan with a grace, agility and comic deftness one rarely is treated to at the movies these days.

It's scant to the point of irrelevance.

Comes on like an "After School Special'' psychodrama that's been taken off its medication.

There isn't much to recommend this movie until Pacino and De Niro finally share the first of their two scenes together.

Nil by Mouth is slow to get going, and meanders before its impact scenes in the second half. Still, its final intensity can leave you exhausted. If you stay with the picture, it's a powerful experience you're unlikely to forget.

Buscemi is after a slice of life with a grown-up slacker. The trouble is that, in the end, this isn't terribly interesting.

This movie has everything but Humphrey Bogart, and I'm sure he's sorry he was unavailable.

With this marvelous premise to launch it, the film fails nevertheless. The trouble is that none of the dialogue is funny enough to fulfill the expectations that Brooks' full-bodied stand-up comedian delivery promises every time he opens his mouth.

Sometimes, when you watch a Stillman movie, you can't help thinking that the guy ought to get out more.

Hung skillfully evokes the oppressive congestion, squalor and heat of Ho Chi Minh City. (Amazingly, given the controlling nature of Vietnam's socialist government, the warts-and-all movie was shot on location.) But he is less successful at developing the character of his characters.

It's that rare movie with a sense of timeliness that is eternal, and a protagonist whose soul-crushed angst, even at its most fatal, speaks to the little boy/girl lost in everyone.

Offers insights from a host of former players.

The Spanish filmmaker goes back to what he does better than any other living director - post-modernizing the melodrama.

An alt-country paean to libidinal mothers and the little girls who clean up the mess.

What remains of the book's psychological underpinnings -- there are enough here to leave a permanent dent in the couch of any Freud-loving shrink

Has a silly, insouciant glamour often employed to sell hair conditioners and perfume.

It's a more intelligent and dimensional epic than, say, "Anna and the King." Emperor is worth every single penny.

Hytner uses 360-degree camera turns and strange angle shots to inject this largely lifeless business with some drama. Ryder tries to do the same by nearly working herself into cardiac arrest in several monologues. Day-Lewis is acting so hard you can see his lower teeth, which, by the way are sometimes horribly decayed and other times white enough to blind a dental hygienist...See this movie at the peril of your soul.

History rendered with enough brains and imagination to more than make up for its few stumbles.

One of the qualities that makes "12 Monkeys" so good is the fact that it is almost too complicated to explain.

After more than an hour of fun, the film turns dark as Solanas' mental state worsens. Not only does the brilliant kook wear out her welcome with Warhol, but the portrayal also grates on the viewer.

Referring to his love of Hollywood musicals and a working-class background that fostered enduring dreams of making movies one day, Varda creates an homage to a filmmaker's imagination. It doesn't hurt that she was also in love with him.

The movie hits the ground running, so Beatty the actor is forced to go all out from the start.

No amount of excellent period costuming and brilliant set decoration can substitute for a good story and decent acting.

Most disappointing is the fact that the movie ends so abruptly that you can't help wondering what the whole story amounts to, moving as it is.

Baumbach is obviously a bright man, but this material is too thin for anything more than a slight New Yorker short story about thoughtful screw-ups.

There isn't a whole lot of fancy subplotting, just a potpourri of funny and engaging characters.

The finest element in de la Pena's carefully assembled account is how she doesn't simply state the obvious, but lets the meaty facts speak for themselves.

Huston manages to bring the unavoidable brutality of this story to the screen without seeming exploitative. And she gets good performances out of Malone, Leigh and Eldard. Glenne Headly gives a great performance as Leigh's saintly sister.

This is the old beauty and the beast tale, one that Disney has already done well enough. I guess they had so much fun the first time that they just had to do it again.

Tucci and Holm brilliant as magazine writer and artist.

The first more-than-halfway-decent movie of a new millennium.

Martin Scorsese is certainly one of the great living movie directors. Sadly, this does not mean he can't make a mistake. Kundun is a mistake.

Broadway-sized performances.

May be the funniest movie about parental and spousal abuse ever made.

One of the most complex and powerful literary scripts in recent times.

A triptych whirling on a Lazy Susan of revolving character perspectives.

What remains is Washington's volcanic and contemplative work at the core of a film packed to the rafters with raging bull.

An adrenaline-pumping, post-musical musical.

DeVito, whose singing sounds like a cross between coughing and Jimmy Durante on a good day, is a gruff and lovable mentor with a Brooklyn accent and a New Yorker's intolerance for sentimentality. Egan's Meg is a fiery dame with lots of gall. Tate Donovan gives voice to the adult Hercules, and he is just right as an almost Dudley Doright-ish lug who thinks heroics have more to do with physical daring than with big-heartedness. Alan Mencken's original score is boisterous and hummable, and lyrics by David Zippel perfectly suit the story and Disney's recent style for cleverness.

When you really think about Breakdown - and believe me, that would probably require spending more time thinking about the movie than the filmmakers did - it doesn't make much sense.

Delightful but not serious suspense; audience hysteria -- and flame throwers guaranteed to scare the wits out of anyone who ever had a hot foot. [17 Jun 1954, p.37]

Overall a well-played chess match of a movie.

It's a testament to what happens when all the right ingredients come together. Wag the Dog is the best political satire in years.

A sobering documentary.

A warm-hearted valentine to old traditions in China that are being obliterated by modern - and admittedly more efficient - technology.

At its best the film serves as a music appreciation class taught by embattled artists whose cloudy livelihoods grow increasingly uncertain with each bittersweet symphony.

It's a gas, dude!

A featherweight parlor-room French farce in need of an anchor to keep it from being blown away by the summer blockbuster gales.

Makes a term like neo-noir seem like a fatuous catch phrase.

POSITIVE vibes aside, Down in the Delta is fairly simple stuff, with acting that at times sinks to the dialogue-of-agreement level of those after-school specials a network used to run a while back. But it will go down in history as the first film to be directed by Maya Angelou, and it isn't a bad one at that.

Through it all, Ozon supplies a sense of pathos that makes fun of its own soullessness, transforming a self-serious suicide note into an existential love letter.

Quickly degenerates into a grueling piece of unpleasantness.

Softley and Amini say they consciously viewed Kate as a film noir kind of heroine, a beauty leading a good man astray. And that, added to the setting of the second half of the movie in canal-riven Venice, gives the story the kind of moral haziness that verges on Thomas Mann territory.

What begins as unassumingly dull wanders into disarming chaos.

Where most effects-laden extravanganzas aspire to be nothing more than a live-action comic book, The Matrix sees things with the venturesome clarity of a graphic novel.

A document of vexing (and vexed) immediacy.

An excellent human-interest documentary that unlike so many others has a genuine appeal beyond someone already interested in the subject matter.

Cholodenko's strategy of having the actors, in every scene -- whether it involves Lucy, the boyfriend or the Frame editors -- perform with an intonational flatness approaching monotone pretentiously undermines the effectiveness of her subject matter.

There is something nicely matter-of-fact about Greg Mottola's family comedy-trauma, The Daytrippers. This first-time writer-director has a breezy way of persuading us that seemingly unrealistic behavior is the most natural in the world.