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

A misfire.

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.

Modestly better than last year's awful "End of Days," though it falls well short of Arnold's "Terminator" peak period.

Nicholson squeezes every wretched drop of buffoonery from this character, and it's distressing to watch him play an easy role for easy laughs.

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.

This is a prodigious something. It's just difficult to say whether that something is good or evil.

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

Oliver & Company comes across as a rather shabby transitional work, one that lacks the sophistication of today's 'toons and doesn't hold up to the Disney classics of yesteryear.

A laughably disconnected hostage drama that rails against the perceived nightmare of inner-city public schools.

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.

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.

By the time you get to the end of the movie and our heroes and Regis' cop buddy Dennis Miller must sprint through a series of tunnels beneath the White House racing against evil to save the presidency, if your credulity hasn't been tested you'll probably find your heart racing pleasantly.

Plays like a lost Rockford file.

Director Lesli Linka Glatter, making her first feature, is another talent to watch. In addition to guiding the young actors to good performances, she sets up scenes knowingly, usually with a punchy comic touch.

What remains is Washington's volcanic and contemplative work at the core of a film packed to the rafters with raging bull.

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

I'm not really sure who would enjoy this movie.

Francis Ford Coppola's Jack has its affecting moments, but in the end illustrates the pitfalls of the "concept" movie, the kind you can boil down to a one-line hook.

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.

There's the world-alteringly scary possibility that (Leder) might be trying to kill us with a star-studded "After School Special."

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.

Tired comedy.

Except for the casting, it would be difficult to find any substantial difference between this movie and the previous ones, or this movie and any number of high-tech adventure movies of the last decade.

Lee seems to think that all his major characters are basically good people who deserve another chance, and so for the sake of an inappropriate happy ending, everyone important gets one.

As always, Duvall is magnificent. Even in this small part, he manages to give one of the most stirring performances in the movie.

Throughout, Croghan knows where she wants to go, but has no fresh ideas for getting there. The characters are reasonably appealing, but the jokes are mostly weak.

As insulting as taking the queen to the Olive Garden.

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.

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

Crime-by numbers-cop drama.

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

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.

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

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

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.

It seems like another misstep - the story just doesn't hold up to Ritchie's treatment.

Frill-less almost to the point of minimalist, teary without being lachrymose, hers is a performance you'd think was great were the movie in a language you didn't understand.

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.

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.

A harmeless concoction.

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

Carrey's style is to keep the jokes moving so quickly and with such force that you can hardly stop to consider how stupid they are.

Now and then the script reaches admirable heights of humor.

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.

It's hard not to like a movie like Men of Honor, but it's entirely possible.

There's more gymnastic yammering in Loving Jezebel than in a season of "Dawson's Creek."

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.

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

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.

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

This movie may not be brilliant, but every now and then it's really funny.

Congratulations to director Mick Jackson and writers Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray for liberating themselves from the tedious demands of believability.

A shameless "Shawshank" redux.

The Frighteners is a gooey pastiche of Casper, Ghost, Poltergeist, Back to the Future (it's produced by Future director Robert Zemeckis), Ghostbusters, and episodes of Columbo.

Tank Girl - a slapdash but lively film based on the underground comic of the same name - takes militant feminism of the "Thelma & Louise" school and weds it to the punk nihilism of the "Mad Max" school. Actually, given Tank Girl's personality - sassy, sexy and gun-savvy - "weds" is probably the wrong verb.

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

Although most of the stars of this movie are real, live actors, Casper is mostly just a big cartoon in which those live actors must interact with some devilishly clever spectral animation.

Here he has Whoopi Goldberg, Mary-Louise Parker, Drew Barrymore and James Remar to distract us from the depths to which Ross habitually stoops in the never-ending quest to reacquaint an audience with its cheapest emotions.

Competent, to be sure, with some good lines.

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

As innocuous as the love songs on its soundtrack.

Latest Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle stalls at on-ramp.

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

Needs a gritty intervention.

Doesn't have what it takes to be truly terrible.

Not as predictable as the rest of its ilk.

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.

Given Midler's comic skills, which haven't been displayed much in her recent films, Hocus Pocus could've been a nice fat slice of goofy fun. But in the hands of director Kenny Ortega, the choreographer/music-video director who created the movie-musical disaster ''Newsies,'' Hocus Pocus is just loud and chaotic -- a good-natured mess that sputters and flares and grounds out before our eyes. [16 July 1993, p.C1]

Right up to its deliberate thud of a closer, Polanski had me.

A workmanlike effort. It's not startling and it's not incompetent.

The picture seems to have been intended as a political satire, but only a Hollywood executive could mistake it for the real thing.

Bilko and his gang are far less concerned with valve jobs and retreads than with greyhound racing, off-track betting, numbers, poker and pool, and most of the movie's gags reflect this limited premise.

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

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.

You can draw a straight line from "Reservoir Dogs" to "Pulp Fiction" to Suicide Kings.

Sublimely ridiculous.

Not the sweaty midnight stroll through the garden of carnal delights that its title wants you to believe.

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.

This is neither a psychological thriller nor an erotic one, so any interest in the story is purely the work of its stars.

Feels like an interminable pilot for a show to fill that deadly 8:30 slot between "Friends" and "Will and Grace."

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).

Earnest and kid-friendly -- also simplistic and dramatically creaky.

What mystifies, too, is the complete absence of information about Salerno-Sonnenberg's private life.

But what McNally, director Joe Mantello and a cast brought straight from the original New York stage production all accomplish is the creation of an honest, clever, poignant work about men who also happen to be gay, rather than a self-conscious polemic about gays who it turns out just happen also to be men.

Too much of nothing and far from the potentially star-making material that Foxx deserves.

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

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

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.

Writer-director Mark Herman seems genuinely moved by the plight of the mining communities, but his attempt to translate those feelings into a story shows the effects of hard labor.

With a few quiet, moving scenes and a lovely ending, the film betrays an artist's touch, no matter how hard Kitano tries to make it look easy.

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

Implausibly dainty.

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.

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

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

The direction by Roger Donaldson is facile and understated, as is, for the most part, the script by Dennis Feldman. Even the actors pitch in to play down the silliness of it all.

The World Is Not Enough, like a 19th version of anything, is inanely self-parodic. So much so that one wonders why Austin Powers need have bothered in the first place.