Implausibly dainty.

Shows how Tinseltown sensibilities can be well thought out even on a low budget.

An au natural (read: graphic) tryst-a-thon whose fashion sense is outweighed only by its bulky sexual intellectualism.

A piece of baseball fluff...Costner cinema, pure and simple.

The comedian's thankful willingness to do anything for Blue Streak...is its redeeming grace.

Spirited, madly educational docu-quickie.

No-fat filmmaking aided by Berri's muscular formalism that, here, occasionally assumes the gritty focus of a taut, action thriller.

This is the most-off-the-mark adaptation of a novel since Brian DePalma's what-was-that "Bonfire of the Vanities."

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.

Ineptly written and shot like a fashion mag, rings hollow throughout. It's a long, long way from "Jules and Jim."

A satire whose dead aim stops wounding - and starts making - stereotypes of white middle-classness.

Fancher's placid, eerily subdued first directorial feature.

There's gangsta rap with funnier insights into the opposite sex.

Just another in a long line of blue-collar-kid-at-prep-school movies, and it may be the worst of the lot. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is original in this movie.

In tackling 1000 A.D., (McTiernan)'s suddenly an unwieldy, clunky filmmaker.

Stinks from the Earth to the moon.

The needle on the laugh-o-meter barely budges.

Crime-by numbers-cop drama.

An infuriatingly indulgent piffle of adolescent wish-fulfillment.

As insulting as taking the queen to the Olive Garden.

The art direction is reliably vivid and hyperreal, but director Satoshi Kon and company can't articulate how mentally taxed Mima is without confusing us.

Its finest moments come in sequences such as Alice and Darlene's prison break and the girls' final wrenching plea for freedom.

Priceless enough to flush "Metro," "Dr. Dolittle" and "Holy Man" from memory.

It feels like a trumped up trifle, disinterested in narrative exercises, using instead technique (cinematography, editing and, omigod, a soundtrack!) to swing moods and heighten reality, then send it crashing to earth.

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

Turturro tricks you into thinking there's magic realism streaming through this ode to art and commited love - despite there being little magic and not a trace of reality to speak of.

Ultimately affecting mix 'n' match weeper.

Madhouse satire manages to disarm the second you realize it's laughing with you - and sometimes harder.

A movie drunk on its very existence, one that misses more frequently than it hits and couldn't care less.

Beautiful, wandering little love story that wants to break your heart and probably will.

Unsalvageable B-movie junk.

A downright dumb movie that, with its breathless pace, lack of character development and uninventive gags, might be torture for even the kids to sit through.

It should be renamed "Drop Dead Ghetto" and hauled off to the "Jerry Springer" hall of shame.

De Bont's effects-riddled remake of the '63 spook-out adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel is not nearly as creepy as either its cinematic or its literary precedents. But it's a hokey, hokey entertainment and a $100 million Lili Taylor movie.

Exists as a seldom represented American time capsule, and it's all good.

Works more as an object of pop curiosity than as a work of popular entertainment.

Blair Witch forgoes a literal boogeyman in favor of the unseen, which, in this case, is as scarily bone-chilling as anything they could show you.

It also goes out of its way to give you a schlocky B-movie vibe by wrangling bait in the form of a bunch of Big-Gulp stupid stock characters - that's a whopping 44 oz. more stupid than you probably were bargaining for.

A movie that sports more cameos than a "HeeHaw" marathon but not much else.

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

A limp excuse for a coming-of-age flick, more interested in sexploits than sex, more adept at gross-out than girls.

A demanding, rewarding (if overlong) and - yes - a personally felt experience.

One of Lee's unsung gifts as a filmmaker is his discovery of that place between eye-popping surrealism and wrenching Greek tragedy.

These pictures need a light touch and a lot of attitude, but this time you can hear heavy breathing in the background.

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.

In a sense, Sandler is damned if he develops, damned if he devolves. But he needn't apologize for being who he is by turning a goldmine sitcom into a tame "Baby Boom" for guys.

A slick, supercharged popcorn flick of the erstwhile Bruckheimer-Simpson brigade in which the only thing more shameful than the proceedings is a very well-paid male star assigned to make you less aware of that sucking sound.

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

Leans so heavily on its stars that their performances are marred by their emptiness.

Beautiful. Simply, beautiful.

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

It's a tale of two missused Academy Award winners trying to justify their participation in a moribund, noisome redux of any disposable prison movie you care to remember by lobbing Oscar clips at each other.

A 140-minute film masterpiece.

By aiming for something more ambitiously, ambiguously philosophical, [Sayles] forgot to include a heart and a soul.

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

No-one's-home acting by Bierko and Mol doesn't help, while the talented D'Onofrio ("The End of the World") and Mueller-Stahl (a veteran of European pictures) are better than the material.

The absence of substance, or its banishment, and the director's reliance on allure (in the film's casting and in its look and sound, which features haunting music by Beethoven and Chopin), leave Innocence with the quasi-profound, giggly overreach of a magazine layout come to shameless, shallow life.

Death doesn't knock in Theo Angelopoulos' Eternity and a Day; it raps softly, sitting patiently in the waiting room of its terminally ill poet's life until he's ready to let it in.

A gorgeous sliver of grown-up ambrosia.

Cher is an inspired bit of casting, while the talented Dench is underused. Smith seems to be going through the motions as the fatuous and deluded aristocrat, while Tomlin has a ball as Georgie. But what really stays with you is the work by Plowright - she is a beacon of good sense (both as actor and character) and plucky as you please.

A frantic, epic-sized blowout of campy, "Indiana Jones" -style derring-do mixed with lots of computer-generated gee-whizzes.

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.

Gets diagnosably schizo.

With Election, Payne announces himself as one of the keenest purveyors of the scattered pieces that once was an American morality.

An hour into the picture, Spade offers a pretty funny imitation of belter Neil Diamond, but it's a long 60 minutes for such a pitiful payoff.

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

It's handsome filmmaking that doesn't surface until the final 25 minutes during which Stevo and company's sense of marginalization achieves the palpable, emotional import that's more expressive than anything its characters' have to bitch about.

If it's difficult to find straight laughs in a colorblind prison movie (It's difficult enough to find a colorblind prison movie), finding straight laughs in a black one is almost impossible.

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

Where Never Been Kissed succeeds is in its unabashed refusal to stoop to choosing sides in the high-school hipness war.

Metroland is a provocative rumination on how relationships are warped by two people's inability to be truthful with each other.

Competent, to be sure, with some good lines.

Meanders around Holly Springs, Mississippi, with the fuzzy benevolence of a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation.

The movie's afraid of [Stiles], turning Kat from riot grrrrl to Solid Gold dancer in the time it takes to drop one Notorious B.I.G. song at that house party - which is why it's the Spam of processed teen movies.

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.

Though short on subtlety, A Walk on the Moon does offer the consolation of some decent performances.

The laserdisc of media movies - it plays fine, but it's clunky and cumbersome.

An arcade game disguised as a love story, nearly comatose with cute.

Plays like a lost Rockford file.

Lacks genuine magic.

This is the kind of movie that mistakes heartbreak for being housebroken.

While it may be true that in space no one can hear you scream, groaning should be a perfectly audible way of saying the intergalactic alien-buster Wing Commander sucks.

Maybe there's a real use for Carrie 2 after all. Stand it up against the original, and you have a pretty good lesson in what's happened to the movies in the last couple of decades.

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.

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

It's fun, but the blatant, obvious kind that mistakes allusive cool for mature filmmaking and subtle ideasmanship.

Flawed but scrappy, confusing yet exhilarating, the Brit-made Lock, Stock is far from a perfect movie. And it's not for anyone squeamish about violence. But it is, like Green Day, a rockin' good time.

Not much of a plot, but the trouble is that Shana Larsen's script, as directed by Risa Bramon Garcia, isn't very deep. Worse, none of the self-absorbed characters are that likable nor are they funny.

About a moron - oxy and otherwise.

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.

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

There are plenty of good sight gags here, and anyone who can work the phrase "ass clown" into a script is all right with me.

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

Spacek and Walken are pure comic energy.

A movie that barely lives.

A gooey-sweet, beautifully photographed romantic fantasy…It's also -- at the risk of sounding like a Grinch -- a mess.

So it's hard to know who gets the blame for Payback. I say we cut Mel some slack and put the hex on Helgeland.