The action moves along at a good clip, and Apted, who made "Gorillas in the Mist," "Nell," "Coal Miner's Daughter," and the "7-Up" series of documentaries, doesn't allow the plot to bog down in details. But the so-called moral dilemma that Myrick's work poses - kidnapping the homeless and torturing them to death in the name of medical science - is laughable.

Leaves the audience on such a devastatingly dramatic ledge.

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.

You're smarter than this, but occasionally it tricks you into thinking it might be up to something you haven't considered, like an above-average, extra-bloody episode of "Scooby Doo."

As involved as Crudup and Connelly beseech you to be with this story, their very youthfulness, their nagging lack of adulthood, keeps the film from being anything more credible than a tight grad-school tryst.

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

An unsteady stab at noir.

The cast's control and Dobkin's assured pacing keep most of the funny things funny and make most of the scary things scary - while maintaining the tricky balance between humor and fear.

Overstays its welcome until the jokes curdle and the satire becomes a blunt instrument, but not before Busch throws some priceless one-liners.

It's not as good as the original - which was fresher, funnier and scarier - but if it were, then by the criteria of the film's resident movie scholar, it wouldn't be a genuine sequel.

Woody Allen's questionable toe-tapping faux-documentary.

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

Caruso doesn't leave much of a mark in the movie. On the smaller screen he smoldered. He seems to need the cramped space to seem sexy. The big screen isn't claustrophobic enough to pinch and squeeze the talent out of him.

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

I like that Sheridan's girlfriend works at Starbucks. Snipes plays the part with the kind of high energy that large doses of caffeine would explain.

Smart and unsentimental as it is, Shallow Grave is more than a little forbidding.

It's the year's funniest, most absurd sight gag.

A proudly unsophisticated demonstration of racial progress.

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.

Lacks the spark of the best recent Disney spectaculars, like "Beauty and the Beast."

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

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

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.

All the parts of Return that deal with Luke's faith in his father and his appeals for him to reject the dark side of The Force are very emotional. In fact, the best sections of Return are extensions of the melancholy implications of "The Empire Strikes Back." [Special Edition]

A wicked, light-headed first half dissolves into a bloody, head-bashing second half . The previews make it seem like a comedy. It isn't.

This sure beats "Major League II." In fact, this movie is a lot more entertaining than the Michelle Pfeiffer showcase "Dangerous Minds." That was a big hit. Using Hollywood logic, I have to assume that this one won't be.

A runny intimate portrait that doesn't trust Tammy Faye Messner and her story to enthrall you. So they've all but spelled it out: k-i-t-s-c-h.

Nowhere near as funny as "Spinal Tap," but fans of this kind of deadpan humor are guaranteed to get a few chuckles out of this one. All of the actors are marvelously horrible, and in this movie, bad equals good.

The moment this movie began to go wrong, so wrong, was when the word "angels" started working its way into the script, coming out of the mouths of people we are supposed to respect and look to for hope.

It's not easy to wrench belly laughs out of contract killing, but Nine Yards does just that.

The film is in the key of "Romeo and Juliet," and it's a one-note tune.

Troubling and troubled.

The movie is meant to be uplifting and to the degree that you can ignore its unquestioning treatment of mental illness, I suppose it is.

One of those good video movies that should do decent box office based on the drawing power of the stars. It helps that there's a fair amount of suspense and some decent gunplay, but there's not much reason to see it on the big screen unless you just love that over-used "whup-whup" sound effect of rotating helicopter blades.

Aiming to keep it real, the cast of the new dance casserole Center Stage sweats spunk.

Sandra Goldbacher, writing and directing her first feature, is a sure-handed filmmaker. The movie is a tableau of sensuality.

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

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

Freundlich's problem is that he has made an essentially interesting movie that never seems brave enough to say what it really intends.

The vibe is acoustic-cafe: cute, catchy and ironic given its wimpy point of view.

A tedious, soapy romp about overlapping lives and destiny.

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.

Collapses under its own contempt.

A high-spirited, big-bottomed Polaroid of the comedian in a fat suit.

Directing his first movie, Jack Green, cinematographer on several Clint Eastwood films, shows an ease with the material (written by Jim McGlynn), but there's something a bit dull about the movie.

The director bludgeons us dumb with her genius.

Too smitten with the Eisenhower-era nostalgia.

For all its lazy beauty, the movie is rooted in the personalities of its lead characters and they, unfortunately, are bloodless, affectless, emotionless dopes who turn their considerable lack of scruples on the business of senseless killing, for which they seemingly have no remorse. [13 Feb. 1998]

Any movie that opens with a Goo Goo Dolls song and ends with a line like "I'm going to live -- just not as long as you" is bound to leave somebody reaching for a Kleenex.

What makes Shadow Boxers special is how Bankowsky restores the woman's touch that always seems intentionally excised from coverage of the sport without comprising their participation in the sport.

Offers insights from a host of former players.

Hackman is, as ever, a master performer, an actor at the peak of his powers. However, he can't carry the whole movie.

Simply an endurance contest, one almost worth staying the 82 minutes to see who wins.

The film is obviously a long-form episode of a show better digested in 22-minute segments.

Really just a lurid potboiler.

The Neon Bible is one of those movies that isn't devoid of art or redeeming features, but nevertheless deserves some kind of warning label: Those suffering from depression or a short attention span should proceed with extreme caution.

A mixed bag with the promise of a better sequel.

An enervated adaptation of E.B. White's Stuart Little escapades.

Queasy comedy.

If Restaurant feels like a high-caliber TV drama, it's one that tries to pack an entire season (plus pilot, plus backstory) into one episode.

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.

Fans of sci-fi, special effects, big explosions, panicky crowd scenes and theater sound systems cranked up way beyond the capacity of the human ear to hear comfortably will love this movie. I am not among you.

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.

Poking fun at such hit films as Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society and Poetic Justice, the Wayanses parody the neo-blaxploitation craze so savagely that no filmmaker will ever be able to make another film about the drugs, guns and ho's of South Central L.A. without figuring out how to work around the genre's well-worn conventions.

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.

This is not the addictive, hot-wired movie you want.

If the movie crumbles under its own stiffness at times, at least it has the two old pros' good performances to cheer us along the way.

Sure, it's the same trite teenage fantasy it was 20 years ago when it was first released, but somehow now the energy seems infectiously giddier, the songs zingier, the camp higher.

Somehow, although this film's unevenness tends to take us out of the action now and then, there's something kind of agreeable about it. Aiello is extremely funny and so, in his creepy way, is Spader.

Speaking of bangs, the special effects include one of the better mega-blasts in recent memory: vast fireballs tear through the busy tunnel at dizzying speed and with devastating results. This is the money shot, what the Stallone audience is paying for. It remains to be seen if they'll buy a Stallone who's been downsized and reformulated - about a teaspoon's worth of added complexity.

Woo delivers a vintage breakneck, break-arm, break-face 20-minute finale.

Of course, there's little else of interest about Pokemon beyond the consumption factor. Buy more.

As entertaining, charming and conceited as other Robert Redford joints, but it's also insufferably obvious.

The screenplay - co-written by novelist Terry Southern - is intentionally ludicrous, but the fashions rule.

What begins as unassumingly dull wanders into disarming chaos.

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.

Like a guy who finally gets what he wants, you just want to go home once it's over.

Solondz's greatest success is the pederast, heartbreakingly played by Baker...Had Solondz reached that apex in the other stories, it would have been a masterpiece.

Half snappy, sardonic and incisive and half slow-moving, goofy and dense.

Szabo doesn't bring the film to its senses until just past the halfway point.

One is hesitant to praise a movie that takes about an hour to get itself going, but it's important to report that once Out to Sea does get going, it makes you laugh.

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.

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

The writer-director has come up with a sumptuous, happy piece of fluff.

In another universe - though it is difficult to imagine which one - Garry Shandling might be sexy.

Just fascinating in an empty, trendy sort of way

With a distractingly cute Quinn, a cartoonishly stern Giannini and woozily romantic Reeves and Sanchez-Gijon, this movie is overflowing with ditsy good will. But it just won't be everyone's cup of Chardonnay.

Brady 2 redeems itself with those subplots (and another hilarious RuPaul cameo). But at the center, it feels as hollow as a smile-face cookie jar.

It's that predictable sweetness that makes any of this more than just bearable.

Schlesinger, working from a script by Amanda Silver ( "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle" ) and Rick Jaffa (he produced that film), gives the film a zippy pace and a natural momentum as direct as a hot knife negotiating a butter stick. Schlesinger is also still canny at casting.

With more sophisticated writing, one suspects they could really soar: Even here, slowed by clunky, character-establishing lines and an all-devouring plot, they hit more often than they miss.

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

Leave it to Ron Howard to turn a plaintive Dr. Seuss ditty into a C-grade Tim Burton psychodrama.

You can see Bobby and Peter Farrelly bent over blowing violently into the sails of this toy boat, trying to get it to move.

There's not much mystery here; there's only one outcome that could possibly make dramatic sense. And once you realize that, there's not much to do besides watch some very adept performers chew on their lines.

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.

Roth, though, is like a sociopathic arsonist, one enthralled with his ability to start little blazes and one who would even call the fire department, but wouldn't stick around to see whether anyone put them out.

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