It's a movie drenched in narcissism and wish-fulfillment, almost a textbook on how to make a formulaic, romantic film.

Half-comedy, half-coming-of-age movie with another half or so of sports film and maybe another quarter of soundtrack that adds up to 175 percent of a bad movie.

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

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

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 Faculty deserves a week of detention, not so much for missing the point as for blunting it.

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

Could have been maudlin from start to finish. Instead, more than half the 154-minute film is riveting - filled with funny, touching bits that don't stoop to cheap sentimentality.

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.

Too many questions are raised with no good answers.

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.

Works a familiar mine and produces more than a few nuggets. It's a good tonic, if one's still needed, for '80s-style cynicism: Greed is not good.

Its brazen mixture of the comic and dramatic, the high and low and the emotional and intellectual is positively Shakespearean.

A weird, wonderful and funny work that stands as a true original. As if that weren't enough, director and co-writer Anderson has given Bill Murray his best role in years.

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.

Director Troy Miller, making his feature debut, does a decent job with schmaltzy material.

The drawbacks to Little Voice might sink a lesser movie, but not this one.

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

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.

Salles' solid narrative is only deceptively simple; there is a lot of dimension and depth to this gentle, sometimes painful portrait of two wanderers.

This is middling Woody, at best: For every funny line or sequence, there's at least one misfire.

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.

You feel the full weight of the movie's three hours, since the filmmakers only had 90 minutes' of plot.

The best that can be said about this film is that it's watchable, and that's not the way it could or should be.

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

At some point, the movie itself crosses the line, from a modestly thoughtful attempt to extrapolate a drama from real and urgent events to a generic action piece with predictable good and bad guys and pat, civics-book morals.

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.

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

Such an ambitious, well-acted film that it's easy to overlook its flaws as relatively minor.

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

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

While amusing and sometimes touching, Pleasantville is far from challenging.

One of those things that probably seems hilarious when a couple of guys are sitting around hashing out the plot over a couple of beers.

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.

The dramatic payoff is a bit disappointing; the movie is often overwrought; and its sense of its own importance finally wears you down.

The cast and crew and screenwriters seem to have had some fun with it, and the audience, coming along for the ride, has some fun with it, too.

A loathsome, quite unterrifying and mercifully brief entry in the ongoing series about that homicidal doll, is the best argument I could cite for planned puppethood.

It's also troublesome that Murphy, a generally charismatic actor, is downright dull here. He and Goldblum are curiously flat in their line readings; they don't seem convinced by the story they're asked to act out, and with good reason.

Despite the occasional uneven patch, the emotional punch of Slam leaves you wrung out as the credits unexpectedly start to roll. You want a happy ending, you realize the deck is stacked against it, but - thanks to the redemptive power of the spoken word - you have reason to hope.

That's not to say the entertaining Antz" was made by Woody, just that it's full of his personality.

A scary example of bad movies happening to good people.

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.

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.

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

It's simply terrible.

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

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.

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

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

Despite its subject - an addict's dark interior life - Permanent Midnight offers little in the way of character development and no jolting insight.

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

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

You would think Towne would identify closely with a big young talent who flames out too early. But when Pre turns to Mary and says, "I can endure more pain than anyone I ever met," it seems forced, empty. Towne just doesn't capture his subject.

An amusement park special, screaming from start to finish with no brakes, no plot and no acting to speak of.

Offers nothing new, and a lot less. It's a hollow shell of a film, rife with plot twists that go nowhere.

If only it wasn't such bloody nonsense.

The acting and writing is a cut above the ordinary.

Dead Man on Campus, a supposed black comedy produced by MTV, is simply awful.

In a way, The Eel is very much like Black Rain, and nearly as great. Both deal with an emotionally shattering aftermath, and both question mankind's ability to overcome its many weaknesses.

The movie is a dismal and misguided special-effects romp featuring two of the deadest performances recorded this year so far.

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

It's a fun movie - full of laughs and touching moments.

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

The movie's coda is completely ridiculous and, worse yet, boring.

Unfortunately, the contemporary horror movie has ceased being an individual work full of surprises and fresh manifestations of the Gothic imagination - it has, instead, been reduced to the level of an inflexible, repetitious, ritualistic event.

Crude, stupid and unfunny.

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.

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

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

When the mystery is unraveled and the frame-up is revealed, I, personally, had no idea what anyone was talking about.

The effect is riveting and frightening. You feel you are under siege with the combatants.

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

A supremely silly movie, which means that it has moments of boring idiocy mixed with moments of inspired hilarity.

Pi will not be for everyone, but for those who are fed up with the mainstream idiocy that gets dumped into theaters each summer, this movie willbe like a great big palate-clearing taste of sorbet.

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

The movie is an ill-advised work of egomania by someone who clearly has some talent, but not as much as he seems to think.

The talented Murphy is appealing here, performing with sincerity and restraint - a wise choice, since his co-stars are a menagerie of wisecracking animals.

Out of Sight needed the energetic and stylish hand of "Get Shorty" director Barry Sonnenfeld. Instead, a sad-sackish Soderbergh ( "sex, lies and videotape") comes at this material looking as if his mind was on something else, something much, much more depressing.

It's hard not to keep thinking that this movie is basically "Yentl" with a nose job.

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.

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).

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.

A crowd pleaser that caters to our horror of totalitarianism, our love of personal freedom, our belief - justified or deluded - that knowledge is a powerful tool and that access to information is a God-given right.

I HATE to whine, but if Michael Douglas is half as tired of playing yuppie scum as I am of watching him do it, then he must be napping on a regular basis by now.

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

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

One long offensive treatise on just how vile two human beings can be.

A movie that has an odd plot, quirky characters and a real edge, but it's not in-your-face, a re-invention of a genre or a smirky independent. It's different because it's flat-out great.

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

When a movie is nothing but relentless action, there's little chance for dramatic tension to develop.

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

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.

It isn't as charming as "Beauty and the Beast" or "The Little Mermaid" (especially musically), but it's an easy-to-swallow entertainment.

This Paramount-DreamWorks collaboration, with Stephen Spielberg credited as executive producer, is competently made, strongly focused on its characters' relationships and surprisingly light on special effects.

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 romantic sitcom that never transcends its gimmicky plot, but offers enough screen time to Gwyneth Paltrow to satisfy even her most rabid fans.

One of the funniest movies to come along in awhile.

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.