Surely there's a middle ground between a Bolshevik-style elevation of history over individual emotion and a Hollywood-style idolization of emotion over impersonal history. Surely it's possible to avoid either deifying or demonizing history, but rather to seek an understanding of it - as a force that shapes private lives even as they shape it. For all its grandeur and beauty, Dr. Zhivago denies the complexity of that exchange.

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

Private Parts is a sparkling, nonstop entertainment written by Len Blum and Michael Kalesniko and directed by Betty Thomas, but sometimes it gives the impression that Stern is nothing short of Nobel Peace Prize material.

The ending is a disappointment, a perfunctory upbeat gesture.

About as warm, pleasing and inviting as a film about divorce, infidelity and terminal cancer can be.

Think of this as "Die Hard" in a suit, with an election coming up.

The script, by director Richard Kwietnioski and adapted from the Gilbert Adair novel, is poignant and well constructed.

A great date movie: engaging enough to grab your attention while it's unfolding, thought-provoking enough to fuel cafe and cocktail lounge chatter long after the closing credits roll.

The ordinariness of the material gives way to the winning personalities of the stars.

The veteran Baker anchors the proceedings, and you would like to see more of her character.

Hamlet finds in Hawke's greatish performance a Great Dane for this, or any other, modern moment.

Ultimately, The Doom Generation succeeds on its old-fashioned virtues - cinematography, acting, script, storytelling, individual vision. Plenty of films have dealt with teen isolation and many more will pile on the shocks, but few have a script this hilarious or a visual sensibility this developed.

An impressively competent "how will male teen star get with female teen star at high school dance?" romance.

The disappointing ending aside, there is much to enjoy in The Game, a creation with a sheen so highly burnished that sometimes you feel you must look away.

It's funnier, and bitchier, than Clare Boothe Luce's "The Women," and, best of all, it showcases three wonderful actresses who have rarely been better.

By its hilarious, grotesquely over-the-top climax, Holy Smoke is ideologically, metaphorically out of control, as if it has risen from the '70s ashes.

Marshall has an astounding instinct for popular entertainment. He's done it again with The Other Sister.

In 80 minutes, the film accumulates a staggering gravity.

Parents should note the PG rating. There's little bloodshed, but several fight scenes, lots of loud roaring and some overwhelming special effects sequences could vex younger viewers.

McTiernan's film mines what substance it has from its two stars, but is admittedly about keeping up its own appearances.

Copycat is as steady and reliable as a pulse and as exhilarating as a surge of adrenalin.

The weird thing about the films David Mamet has directed is that they have about as much emotion as a cyborg in a science fiction movie, yet by the end of the picture it isn't necessary; by then the audience has supplied their own.

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.

This is not a movie for the squeamish, by any means. But for those who like their thrillers dark and their heroes a bit more complicated and flawed than the average shoot-without-a-blink type so prevalent in today's movies, 8MM fills the bill.

There's a sense of genuineness throughout Girlfight.

Groovy.

Get On the Bus might just be Spike Lee's best work yet.

It's a half-life better than Martin Lawrence treading similar, simpler water in "Big Momma's House."

Sad but still bouncy.

There is a point of view here, a rather strong one. It may sound like slight praise, but Love Jones is a movie that is exactly what it wants to be, and that's an achievement in a homogenized, test-marketed vanilla-movie landscape.

Priceless.

Beautiful. Simply, beautiful.

This is a giddy parody of gang pictures, West Side Story without the music and set in the Bronx of the '60s. The music is solid early '60s rock 'n' roll ( My Boyfriend's Back, The Wanderer ) and the acting is broad and often silly.

A collection of arbitrary sketches, bits and improvs jammed into a locker room-style variety show masquerading as some semblance of a narrative.

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.

The emphasis is on comedic interaction, not plot - too bad, "48 HRS" had both - but the pair adds spice to the predictable opposites-detract gags.

William H. Macy is fine as the detective Arbogast, wearing a hat he could have borrowed from Martin Balsam in the original role.

It is familiarly old-fashioned, complete with montages of newspaper clippings fluttering past and calendar days slipping by. The sets, costumes, old cars and general atmosphere all beautifully recall moviemaking of a bygone era. And for that, hats off to Duke.

Add to that a perfect cast and one's only complaint will be that this is, at heart, another tear-jerker about how good it is to love and be alive and all of that.

In spite of how hard everything is to believe, you believe what Damon is doing.

There's not a whole lot to Waking Ned Devine, but it may be enough for those who like their quirky comedies from the British Isles - a burgeoning genre now - both atmospheric and gentle.

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.

Because Wilde was a dandy and a wit, as well as a clever writer of daring plays, any actor who plays him must have charm. Fry has it in abundance.

A dashing fusion of the literary and the cinematic.

Shivers exhibits the major characteristics of Cronenberg's canon, his use of architecture as reinforcement of the film's creepy tone and the deliberate reduction of men and women to a single, compulsively sexual aspect of their identities.

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

A finely coiffed, cream-cheese "8 1/2" remix with Gere, a Marcello Mastroianni for Oprah Winfrey times.

Even those unfamiliar with the entire "Star Trek" phenomenon (it's now been 30 years since the original TV show sprang from the fertile mind of creator Gene Roddenberry) will find this a clever action movie, with a well-written screenplay and tight direction of a fine cast.

The author calls the movie "perfect" - reassurance that the director hasn't tried to pull any fast ones.

This is the sort of movie that doesn't become irritating even when it's predictable.

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.

What the story lacks in tension, Waterhouse's writing and Leconte's direction make up for in entertainment.

Especially fine are Spade and Louiso, the latter possessing a quality of injured integrity that is priceless here.

Deceptively keen as both a paranoid political thriller and a caveat against the trustworthiness of your friends and neighbors.

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

Spirited, madly educational docu-quickie.

I think the script by television writer Channing Gibson (no relation) is the funniest of them all.

Certainly it isn't about to give "Das Boot" a run for its money - but nevertheless it is irresistible entertainment.

A smart, funny and endearing movie. It has enough cynicism to satisfy the part of DiCillo that would mock a blue-eyed superstar, yet enough genuine sentiment to make it possible for us to swallow the cynicism.

Revelatory.

It succeeds because of the frenzied, kinetic direction by Mike Newell, one of the most interesting big-hit directors.

Funny enough that it could make buddy pictures respectable again.

The acting and writing is a cut above the ordinary.

Tyler is a find for a director like Bertolucci. She is a blank slate of prettiness with her unadulterated, thoroughbred, long-limbed looks.

Loose and funny with verve.

De Felitta has taken potentially overripe material and given it real heart.

Voight's Wright is one of many examples of how Singleton and Poirier succeed in suggesting the ambivalence and shadings that make movie characters believable.

All the performances are good, the script is subtle and waste-free and Danny Elfman's score is evocative and appropriate, but the direction is what gives the movie its sweep.

A gorgeous sliver of grown-up ambrosia.

It's the most liberated and alive [DeNiro]'s been since his deluded Rupert Pupkin tried to kidnap Jerry Lewis in "King of Comedy."

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.

The deft, hilarious Notting Hill finds Grant's dour-droll-deprecating affliction at its most dead-on.

To enumerate exactly how Bean messes up would be to expose the silliness of this movie, and since Bean's humor is terribly silly, rather, wonderfully silly, there isn't much point in going into detail.

Succeeds better than it ought to, largely because of the personality and prodigious talents of its director and star, the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni.

In the movie, the truth will (and does) out itself. Mulder and Scully have seen the future and it's a giant leap for each of them to comprehend.

There's enough sexual manic depression to justify house calls from Dr. Laura.

A flyweight, humongously entertaining ensemble number.

Fallen Angels is proof that Wong will try anything, and the result is an eclectic mix of images and disjointed editing, sounds and rhythms that are at times as powerful as any piece of filmmaking likely to be seen all year. It can also, every once in awhile, be tedious and trying.

The standard noir trappings are here: the femme fatale, double-crossing, fatalism, broken dreams, innocence betrayed and the rest of it. But Stone pushes it all so far and so relentlessly that it becomes absurdist comedy.

From Juan Ruiz-Anchia's florid, eruptive photography to the pinpoint editing by Howard E. Smith that enhances it, everyone involved with The Corruptor understands that action is the bottom line - except Chow.

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.

"The Big Sleep" and "The Maltese Falcon" echo loudly throughout.

While this movie hasn't many surprises, it does offer strong performances, especially from Gyllenhaal.

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

It's too slick to be truly disturbing, but it's that slickness that keeps you on the edge of your chair.

Driver, who is padded but not fat, is an actress with self-possession to spare. Her looks defy conventional rules about modern beauty, but the directness of her gaze and the honesty of her smile make it difficult to look anywhere else when she is on screen.

This movie has a first-rate script, and director Joseph Ruben ( "True Believer," "The Stepfather" ) knew exactly what to do with it.

Because the movie is otherwise so well made and so full of sweet emotion and "good" values, I was happy to ignore the shortcomings.

Shampoo refuses to be coy. There's a deep, soulful confusion here that isn't careless with frivolity.

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.

The movie is, more than anything else, great fun to watch. The sets and costumes are stunning. The women are beautiful. The men are dashing. What's not to like?

Never has this war been filmed with such ragged glory.

Crassly funny passages.

Her first feature, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy, is a nicely directed, well-written debut.

An exceptionally funny science-fiction comedy.

Save for some sentimental scenes, it's a powerful film, with a powerful performance by Alexander. [04 Nov 1983, p.E]

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 fascinating, sometimes profound curiosity.