What we get are quirky characters who are such cartoons that they undermine the effectiveness of the scare scenes (Brad Dourif's turn as the weird doctor is an example) and well-composed camera angles that mean nothing.

City of Angels will probably work better for some people than it did for a crusty fellow like me. I feel guilty that I don't like this movie more. I think the devil got the better of me.

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.

The picture is a relentless blast of color and movement that's based on the old TV show, but boils down to a supercharged version of old-time Saturday-afternoon movie serials.

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.

Linklater has less success telling a story; time passes amiably, but the film has no center.

Underscores everything that was utterly wrong-headed about the original material.

This movie has everything.

A simple, serene and occasionally humorous film about a subject that is complex, emotional and usually treated with solemnity.

A sweet but overly sober look at a child's coming to spiritual grips with the death of his grandfather, Wide Awake occasionally packs an emotional punch. But a meandering script, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, and the candy coating it's wrapped in, undermine its effectiveness.

A work at once detached and thrillingly intense, an experience where intellectualizing turns to a raw emotion so overwhelming, unexpected in its power, that you sit in your seat as the end credits roll, unable to move.

Leonardo DiCaprio? Excuse me, Leonardo DiCaprio? I know he makes teenaged girls cry, but, I mean, Leonardo DiCaprio?

It is a visual tour de force, but as a whole the movie slowly deflates into a cross between "Arizona" and "The Hudsucker Proxy".

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

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.

Hush, which is an absurdly bad mixture of "Rosemary's Baby" and any Bette Davis movie from the 1960s, seems to be a classic case of a grasping mother trying to possess her beloved son.

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.

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.

The script, based on British pulp writer James Hadley Chase's novel "Just Another Sucker," is a muddle, and no actors, no matter how compelling or talented, could make its silly dialogue work.

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?

The considerable appeal of this movie has to do with its roots in those nice, comforting love stories of the 1930s.

A counterfeit of a Woo movie, even though Woo himself co-produced it.

Nil by Mouth is slow to get going, and meanders before its impact scenes in the second half. Still, its final intensity can leave you exhausted. If you stay with the picture, it's a powerful experience you're unlikely to forget.

The best way to characterize "The Blues Brothers 2000" is as a fabulous concert film with incredibly bad patter between the songs. If you ignore the silly plot that links the extravaganzas together, you'll have a great time.

Handsome, well-acted, well-written and beautifully directed movie.

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.

Godawful.

Without much of a plot to speak of and relying almost entirely on the girls' star power and charisma - which they have in spades - turns out to be a truly entertaining movie for anyone with even a bare knowledge of the Spice Girls' history, which in this age of absolute over-saturation, is hard to avoid.

It's fast-moving, it's got fine special effects, the hero and heroine are pure and quick-thinking, the bad people die badly, and the script draws its fair share of laughs.

The real trouble with this movie is that it represents the continuing departure of Almodovar from the chaotic, riotous and anti-social roots that gave his best movies their zest.

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.

Most disappointing is the fact that the movie ends so abruptly that you can't help wondering what the whole story amounts to, moving as it is.

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 comedy-drama is worth seeing for Christie's performance as a former B-actress married to a philandering handyman. She radiates a mature sexuality that's a rare treat on screen these days, and when the camera strays from her, you want to reach over and turn it back.

It's a testament to what happens when all the right ingredients come together. Wag the Dog is the best political satire in years.

Martin Scorsese is certainly one of the great living movie directors. Sadly, this does not mean he can't make a mistake. Kundun is a mistake.

No amount of excellent period costuming and brilliant set decoration can substitute for a good story and decent acting.

What's pleasing about this movie is its enduring adherence to the Bondian ideal.

Lane, with his extensive stage experience, is acerbic, profoundly cynical and endlessly disgruntled. As the foil, Evans strike the right comic nice-guy note; he has fun with the character's sweetness and refuses to degrade him.

One of the most self-in-dulgent, muddled, badly written, vague and pointless exercises in filmmaking I have ever had to sit through.

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.

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

The movie is well made by director Michael Winterbottom ("Jude"), with a minimum of overdramatics.

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

This is a movie that is wonderful on the peripherals.

Coppola again shines his intelligence on this bestseller material, rather than just shoving it through the Hollywood mill unsifted.

What keeps coming to mind throughout The Jackal is that for what it cost to make this movie you could probably pay some nice hit man to eliminate everyone at Universal who thought making the movie would be a good idea, and still have enough left over to throw one of those hit man parties and have a really great time.

Jingoistic politics are not proper or prudent in the pluralistic human society of the 1990s. It's much easier to assuage these baser urges by facing a real nonhuman enemy that just wants to kill you. War is gore. You or them. That message is the real strength of "Starship Troopers," although many may find it morally flawed. No matter, this is powerful entertainment that appeals to our most basic instincts.

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.

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.

You find yourself absorbed in simply looking at them to the extent that it's hard to hear what they're saying. It's a nice dilemma for a movie to present.

My question is, why has director Costa-Gavras taken it upon himself to dissect American cultural foibles when he has so clearly proven himself unequipped for the job?

Happy Together is Wong's most fully realized work. It is a pleasure to watch an interesting mind feel his way, and the result is something more than just a passing fancy.

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 big trouble with the movie is that it's difficult to care whether these two get together. Ultimately I did care - when I realized that their union would presumably represent a chance that the movie might end soon.

Call it "Rosemary's Nephew." Or, simply call The Devil's Advocate a muddled metaphysical thriller that takes a small eternity to engage the observer with its flimsy characters and its tired special effects.

Korine's trying to offer a radical vision of rotten America, but the whole thing feels warmed over.

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.

I'm not sure all of this works out as convincingly as Anderson intends in the movie's somewhat unsatisfying ending, but getting there is a wickedly enjoyable journey.

Becky Johnston ( "The Prince of Tides" ) did creditable work on the screenplay, but there are times when this story about a truly rotten fellow seems to be one big jump cut.

If anything, the film drags a bit because the tour that Jarmusch chose to film, the 1996 effort, was following a Crazy Horse album that was, for them anyway, sub-par. But the interviews with the band members and the behind-the-scenes footage - as well as the vintage material - make for an entertaining and illuminating experience.

Director Gary Fleder seems to be trying for the mood and atmosphere of "Seven," another Freeman film about murder and police work, but this movie isn't as stylish and the script by David Klass, based on the James Patterson novel, doesn't really hang together.

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.

Leaves the audience on such a devastatingly dramatic ledge.

The chief terrorist is played nicely with war-weary desperation by Marcel Iures, a Romanian actor with the sucked-in cheeks and ennui of a Jeremy Irons.

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.

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

Even if the movie is not a work of comic - or philosophical - genius, its existence does foretell of tolerance gaining a foothold in a largely intolerant world.

Director Mark Pellington's spin on the transition from adolescence to manhood as viewed through the eyes of novelist and screenwriter Dan Wakefield makes "Going All the Way" something special.

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

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.

This movie is a pleasure, an entertainment and an admirable artistic achievement.

Excess Baggage aims to broaden her appeal beyond her established, youthful audience. It won't, because it's a messy mixture of so-so comedy and unmoving drama; its inconsistent tone suggests a production where no one was fully in charge.

Director Cassavetes may want to cut back on the slow-motion stuff, but he's unquestionably a talent.

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.

The most refreshing performance is by Mortensen.

If there is a reason anyone would voluntarily agree to make this movie it probably dwells somewhere in a realm only accessible to the thinking of ambitious actors.

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.

I wouldn't say this movie is actually harmful, but skipping it is probably the wisest policy.

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.

But in its own overblown, melodramatic way, complete with hideous and obtrusive music by Michael Kamen, clanging sound effects that will leave your ears ringing and a penchant on the part of director Paul Anderson ( "Mortal Kombat" ) for quick flashes of blood-drenched gore, Event Horizon is kind of a hoot.

There isn't a whole lot of fancy subplotting, just a potpourri of funny and engaging characters.

The good guys metamorphose into bad guys and back into good guys with dazzling efficiency in Brian Helgeland's disturbing, comic script.

Less ambitious than the highly successful "Secrets & Lies," Career Girls has its own modest merits - a real sense of wit, much of it expressed in Hannah's sharp verbal sallies, and a melancholy truth that both women realize.

An independent film so enamored of itself it refuses to have any fun.

Otherwise, the movie, which borrows from a dozen pop sources and improves on none of them, is pretty much a washout.

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

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.

Neither offensive nor inspired.

This bloated, self-important and logically absurd movie, made by the director of the equally historically hysterical "Forrest Gump," pretends to the thrones of Serious Thinking, of Important Messages and of Intellectual Provocation. If there were truly anything serious, important or intellectual about this movie, this planet would be in big trouble.

The movie is strongest when Lee keeps his eye on the prize: the experiences of ordinary people in an extraordinary time.

The script by Ed Solomon is tight, well-paced and lighthearted. If this were a musical, Fred Astaire could have played the Jones role, although somewhat more dashingly.

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.

The trouble comes when Woo's patented - that is, oft-repeated - style overwhelms any hope of discerning story or acting through the haze of burning, crashing, bleeding and exploding.

DeVito, whose singing sounds like a cross between coughing and Jimmy Durante on a good day, is a gruff and lovable mentor with a Brooklyn accent and a New Yorker's intolerance for sentimentality. Egan's Meg is a fiery dame with lots of gall. Tate Donovan gives voice to the adult Hercules, and he is just right as an almost Dudley Doright-ish lug who thinks heroics have more to do with physical daring than with big-heartedness. Alan Mencken's original score is boisterous and hummable, and lyrics by David Zippel perfectly suit the story and Disney's recent style for cleverness.

Clooney's stiff cornball delivery and tendency to smile during the most tragic moments bring this as close to the cartoonish Batman television series of the 1960s as any of the movies have come.

I suppose Kusturica can justify the 167-minute length by the historical breadth of the movie, but it simply doesn't sustain one's interest, significant or not.

This is my idea of a nightmare.