And once, just once, I'd love to see a teen flick that doesn't send out a message to young girls that to be acceptable, you have to conform. I liked the artist girl much better before.

Austin is funny, extremely funny, because he is so ridiculous, and because Myers is a brilliant mimic who, like Martin Short, knows how to do ridiculous.

A lazy, torpid piece of animated tourism.

Regardless of how cheated out of a full-bodied motion picture you feel, you're still left with the year's sickest bathroom humor.

This movie has everything.

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

Like "Rocky Horror Picture Show," Heavy Metal makes most sense as a midnight weekend feature, when many of its viewers are likely to be herbally and chemically addled. Without the help of intoxicants, Heavy Metal comes across as what it is - a wildly sophomoric and stupid cartoon celebrating gore, rape and bad music.

Forceful and well-acted. Fear truly lives up to its title.

Most of the time the audience is two steps ahead of the characters.

French Kiss has only a tenuous hold on reality; it is far more fully steeped in the conventions of latter-day movie romance than in the messy actualities of real-life mating.

It's handsome filmmaking that doesn't surface until the final 25 minutes during which Stevo and company's sense of marginalization achieves the palpable, emotional import that's more expressive than anything its characters' have to bitch about.

While the original conception of The Saint gave us a debonair, sophisticated and roguish detective, the new movie, directed stiffly by Phillip Noyce ( "Clear and Present Danger" ), gives us Val Kilmer as a greedy high-tech daredevil thief with the moves of Batman, the clunky disguises of Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible" and the morals of an alley cat.

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.

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.

Dalmatians proves an apt playground for Hughes as one could surmise that his inspiration for treating comic bad guys in his movies so violently comes from a cartoon sensibility.

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.

The movie's primary narrative weakness is that its racism plot points seem ripped from the headlines of a "Geraldo" newsletter and stretched into a string of terribly executed car chases.

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

Flawless is what happens when a filmmaker has no sense of naturalism, no sense of realism and no real natural sense.

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.

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

Spacek and Walken are pure comic energy.

Ludicrously written and appallingly directed by ex-film critic Rod Lurie, seems to pride itself on the fact that it never (ever) leaves the greasy-spoon milieu in which the president and his staff are trapped by heavy snowfall.

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.

As insulting as taking the queen to the Olive Garden.

If you haven't taken your mother to a movie in a while, this is the ticket, with its PG-13 rating, lack of violence and like that.

The whole thing seems awfully familiar, not to say boring.

It's clever but not often original.

Sometimes the movie lacks a quietness, an omission most egregiously felt at the end.

Ryan has an edge that is extremely becoming…This is her best work yet.

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

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.

Not as predictable as the rest of its ilk.

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.

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

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

A misfire.

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

The veteran Baker anchors the proceedings, and you would like to see more of her character.

The ending is a disappointment, a perfunctory upbeat gesture.

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.

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

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

The Quick and the Dead takes on a more serious tone - as if, even in this loonily amoral environment, we're supposed to care about atrocities. The film builds to a satisfyingly catastrophic climax full of biblical flames and fluttering bank notes, but there's far too much dead time along the way.

The sudden cranking of the volume that makes us jump, even if we're just watching a cow chew on its cud.

An au natural (read: graphic) tryst-a-thon whose fashion sense is outweighed only by its bulky sexual intellectualism.

The glory of the picture is the eye-popping, surreal backgrounds that blast the conventional characters off the screen.

A proudly unsophisticated demonstration of racial progress.

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.

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

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.

Shows how Tinseltown sensibilities can be well thought out even on a low budget.

Demon Knight may be a good career move by director Ernest Dickerson ( "Juice" ), proving that he can work with a reasonably large budget on a genre film. But the picture breaks no ground, and in terms of his own development, it's hardly a step forward.

Deadly funny.

Demonstrates that sadomasochistic streak in von Trier that equates the raw with the experimental.

Spiritually it's a John Woo-George Romero-Jim Thompson picture, outrageously bloody and weird.

The plot falls with a thud, but the movie is surprisingly involving owing to performances by Connery, who is always an unfaltering standard of honesty and truth; by Fishburne, who has to flip-flop his meanness for frustrated indignation in the end; and by Harris, who actually seethes so hard the veins stand out on his bald skull.

Even the most vigorous tear-duct manipulation, and a few funny scenes, cannot save Dumbo from its dominant tone of stilted corniness and prefab sentimentality.

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

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.

It's a beautiful movie. Too beautiful for its own good, really.

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.

Ultimately, The Doom Generation succeeds on its old-fashioned virtues - cinematography, acting, script, storytelling, individual vision. Plenty of films have dealt with teen isolation and many more will pile on the shocks, but few have a script this hilarious or a visual sensibility this developed.

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.

The only remarkable feature about this otherwise routine movie is that it vilifies two current icons of American life. One is The Internet and the other is The Mall.

Neither offensive nor inspired.

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.

Now and then the script reaches admirable heights of humor.

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

A crafty, sometimes craven, but hardly worshipful snapshot of an unlikely candidate for biggest rock act on earth.

Besides some fine dogfight sequences, it often feels threadbare, just an exercise in recycling.

It succeeds because of the frenzied, kinetic direction by Mike Newell, one of the most interesting big-hit directors.

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

Spoof both of P.I.s and independent filmmakers is languidly paced and not very funny.

This is the sort of movie that doesn't become irritating even when it's predictable.

If only it wasn't such bloody nonsense.

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.

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.

Ideological disaster!

A slick, supercharged popcorn flick of the erstwhile Bruckheimer-Simpson brigade in which the only thing more shameful than the proceedings is a very well-paid male star assigned to make you less aware of that sucking sound.

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.

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

An arcade game disguised as a love story, nearly comatose with cute.

So it's hard to know who gets the blame for Payback. I say we cut Mel some slack and put the hex on Helgeland.

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

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.

A salacious mess of a film written and directed by rapper Ice Cube.

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.

Needs a gritty intervention.

His good-natured slob routine compensates for a lot of the film's dead spots, and the picture winds up a modest cut above the usual vehicle tailored for a would-be film star.

It's the year's best movie sex.

The one outstanding ingredient in this exercise is Miller, an English actor who is not only irresistibly adorable and a good actor, but also speaks in a perfect American accent.

Grumpier Old Men certainly isn't relying on its mawkish and hokey story to put warm bodies in the seats. There's no reason to see the picture - a sequel to their 1993 hit, “Grumpy Old Men" - other than to relish the talents of these two veterans, plus Sophia Loren, a newcomer to the series.

It's all quite inspiring, but despite the fact that this is based on someone's actual experiences, the whole thing has an unfortunate Hollywood ring to it.

Most of these scenes are long, boring shots of the men aiming their rifles nervously into the mist. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is more artfully arranged.

Imagine if "On the Road" ended with Sal and Dean settling down in the 'burbs. Or if the carnal encounters in Henry Miller's "Sexus" were prefaced with admonitions to the reader not to "objectify" women. The Basketball Diaries is a similar travesty: It turns a celebration of outlaw life into a just-say-no cautionary tale that Nancy Reagan would love.

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

So while at times, Penn's film is moving and insightful about the way the heart survives tragedy, at other times it seems to have been made by a gifted schizophrenic who thinks that weird behavior is perfectly normal.