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

It's too cryptic and unfulfilled to serve as a tool for anything beyond its own obfuscation.

As formulaic, but occasionally outré multiplex-bound behemoths go, Gladiator is a foaming beast.

Several times during this film, you wish you were a bottle rocket so you could explode out of your seat and leave this tedious mess behind.

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

MANNY & LO grows on you, largely because of the charm of its youngest cast member, Scarlett Johansson, who plays 11-years-old Amanda.

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

The "coming out" genre in gay and lesbian films is really getting stale - the plots are as by-the-numbers as a Bruce Willis action flick - and Edge of Seventeen is hampered by not only predictability but by its shoestring budget (a coup, however, was getting Thompson Twins composer Tom Baily to do the score).

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.

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.

Implausibly dainty.

Everything you would want from a Big Brother film: Good-looking, preachy in an Old West kind of way, wobbling between humor and murder, hellbent and periodically brilliant.

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.

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.

In general, the script is just slightly above sitcom level, but a few lines, owing to great delivery by terrific actors, raise this a few notches on the comedy scale.

You can't help cheering for Selena, but the good feeling is diminished by the sense that her story's been simplified and sanitized.

Ronin shows the mark of a veteran hand and is entertaining in fits and starts.

It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.

There's a novel, engaging story trying to transmit through the storm of special effects and convoluted plot twists that mar the movie.

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.

Things stay standard-issue French self-analytical from here.

The film is alt-schmaltz, and it'll do.

I tried to find in Paltrow what all her admirers in numerous magazine articles have reported. I tried to ignore a less than enchanting English accent and a tendency to be wiped off the screen whenever other actors were given much to do.

The least opaque of Antonioni's films, unburdened by stylishness and his imagistic inflammations.

Tennant and company do a fine job of retaining the otherworldliness of a fairy tale while at the same time explaining all the archaisms for a modern audience.

For all the blathering, heavy-handed pathos, we might as well be watching the Lifetime cable channel.

Hoffman proves himself a master of complex scenery, crowd control and graceful direction. He succeeds in making a conspicuously lush and rich movie out of what was reportedly a less than kingly budget.

It's full of visual flash, and can be enjoyed as a giddy ride, but you would waste your time trying to puzzle out the nuances of the story.

Strange Days is an ambitious but ultimately disappointing attempt to assemble the latest in fringe-culture byproducts - distortion-laden torch songs, millenarian fantasies and cyberpunk nightmares - into a Hollywood package. Its failures are those of limited imagination; its brands of strangeness, like the clips its characters replay, never stray far from the familiar landscapes of 1995 pop culture.

It takes more than a few lines of clever dialogue, a hero who reads books, and an actor with British training and lots of dignity to keep a movie from going pretty much by the book.

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

A charming and moving film about a slightly racy subculture in a highly rule-bound society.

An artificial and hypocritical effort to escape the artistic limitations of teenage slasher flicks.

Freed from the demands of adapting an established and complex literary piece, the filmmakers seem to have relaxed - and so can their audience.

At times, the movie, which has tedious stretches that blunt its charm, is more like a really good idea than a successfully realized picture. [17 Nov 1989, p.C2]

If the idea is to teach us something about the 37th president of the United States, then you would think Stone would resolve to stick to what can be proven about the man's life, or at least indicate when he's speculating. But Stone is the Great Explainer, and facts have an annoying habit of mucking up his explanations.

Schnabel can't decide whether he wants to tell a traditional rise-and-fall morality tale or make an art film. His attempt at telling Basquiat's story straightforwardly collapses under its own banality.

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

It doesn't take much imagination to poke fun at the pitiful special effects, goofy '50s he-man behavior and unintentionally hilarious script, but the silliness of the entire concept eventually wears down your defenses - not quite as the evil Dr. Forrester had planned, but effectively nevertheless. You will laugh.

The End of the Affair's masterfully heartbroken final scene is scarier in its nightmarishly wry suggestion of ill fate than anything that ever happened on Elm Street.

On the one hand, you want to praise it for its stylishness and originality in tackling some fascinating subject matter. On the other hand, it's frustrating because it could have been so much better.

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.

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

It starts out well and winds up no worse than most of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood.

A shockingly eloquent, nearly moving feat of Y2K-trendiness.

A poignant and racy movie. The dancing is pretty great, too.

Something in Hutton's wounded puppy look always communicates an untapped intelligence or wasted potential, both of which are perfect for this role.

While Blanchett glows with intelligence, passion and a quirky kind of beauty, the movie she is in fails her in a number of essential ways.

The film finally seems to stagger under the weight of its own significance.

A less confrontational, though positively gushing modernization of "Pierre, or the Ambiguities."

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

Just fascinating in an empty, trendy sort of way

The cliches are all here.... Eszterhas works around these scripting difficulties deftly enough, but the real pleasure here is in watching Bacon and Renfro as idol and adorer.

While the premise is intriguing, the movie is gluey, bumbling and singularly un-thrilling.

There must be nine or 10 thwacks to the neck throughout Sleepy Hollow, and Burton finds a different way to make the resulting severed noggin fall as though you'd forgotten the last one.

It is both the best-looking James Bond film and the best-looking James Bond.

At 126 minutes the movie is excruciatingly long, but it is still too short to pack in all the subtle changes in character he means but fails miserably to convey.

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

The spectacle is huge; the animation, breathtaking. In many ways, it is the epic of biblical proportions the filmmakers hoped for. But, like the Good Book itself, The Prince of Egypt can also be tedious, self-important and at times exhausting.

Quiet, moving and beautifully shot.

Not entirely persuasive, not entirely schmaltzy, "The Tic Code" is one of those well-meant dramatizations... that mysteriously made it all the way to a theater near you.

Cop Land presents a fairly involved plot, and Mangold is not equipped to do more than blurt all the information onto the screen and let the nuances settle where they may.

The boredom of the temporary office workers of the title was nothing compared to the boredom I experienced as this movie dribbled on before my eyes.

The entire film rings totally fake and the resulting dishonest sentimentality makes you fidget in your seat and count the seconds until the sweet but completely predictable ending.

Ultimately affecting mix 'n' match weeper.

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.

Most of American Psycho just sits there, looking at trouble, rather than looking for it - complacent, overjoyed in fact to exist at all.

It fails to capitalize on its own gifts, coming darn close to greatness but never quite catching the brass ring.

The Wachowski brothers are to be applauded for a film that is also nearly as stylishly funny as it is sexy and fast-paced.

Plays like a lost Rockford file.

Gray is more interested in hobnobbing with thespian greats than he is in making a good movie.

A fun movie, with moments guaranteed to bring you close to tears. But, like most of Robbins' work, it's a cartoon, an emotional cartoon.

A mixed bag with the promise of a better sequel.

The maturity of the Star Trek saga and its remarkable fan base have combined to produce a polished film that shines like a crown jewel in the Star Trek firmament.

Scenes go on and on in endless, witless dialogue, ever accompanied by John Williams' hideously gushing music.

Gattaca is a welcome throwback to the days of good, low-tech sci-fi, stressing character and atmosphere over computer-generated effects and juvenile thrills.

The title comes from Indian legend in which Lord Rama tests the purity of his wife by a flaming ordeal (which we see enacted in an open-air pageant with comic overtones of Bunuel). This bit of mythology too handily prefigures a major element in the film's conclusion.

Be that as it may, the movie offers the uplifting news bulletin that life is not about being happy with how much you weigh but with what kind of person you are. This is where the movie starts getting sloppy.

A movie too smart and too urgent to be categorically awful. Clinically insane may be another matter altogether.

You may find yourself weeping toward the end, and, later, you may also find yourself wondering why. The revelations are staggeringly obvious.

They have created a strange document about the unmaking of young lives, but it is a movie made without comment. Clark has stepped back into objectivity so far that he has neglected his role as interpreter for us.

Lindsay Lohan, 12-year-old veteran of commercials and television, is a frighteningly poised child who is truly impressive as the long-separated twins.

The Patriot makes the Revolutionary War look like super-produced studio footage of the L.A. riots.

Most of the movie seems stilted and uncomfortably girdled by efforts to work around the cumbersome Brando, who is shot mostly from above the waist, where the full effects of gravity and avoirdupois do not seem so egregious as they do at belt level.

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.

Dern is nothing short of brilliant here.

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.

Then there are times when the humor and the pathos of these losers catch you off-guard. Those moments are nearly profound, and elevate the film above the slacker cliches in which it wallows.

Generates very little heat.

It's soft-edged fun that loses direction (or, given the scattershot plot, directions).

A slew of writers and an enthusiastic cast all do their jobs admirably enough to provide a couple of hours of unembarrassing entertainment.

Aside from avuncular Lewis and two-bricks-shy-of-a-load Dunaway, this movie's greatest asset is Depp. With his scooped-out cheeks, flower petal mouth and an innately balletic approach to communicating with the camera, he is as natural a performer as film has seen in many years.

This is a Seagal movie without Seagal and a Jack Ryan movie without Jack Ryan.

Dogma' is Kevin Smith's fourth film and it looks like his first but I'm not ready to quit him -- there's a landmark in him. I just wish the crafty, raucous Dogma was it.

You've seen Set It Off several times before featuring male characters: The proven popularity of boy-dominated 'hood movies has made this female variation possible. Just the fact that four worthy African American actresses get decent staring roles gives the story a purpose it wouldn't ordinarily have.

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.

Particularly because unlike so many other boring movies one sees, Jarmusch films require many more words to explain the boringness than less certifiably artistic films would.

Determined to be inoffensively tidy and cute above all else.