The best movie she ever directed was "This Is My Life," a biting comedy she also wrote that was soundly defeated by both critics and audiences. I think she's lost her nerve and her edge ever since.

It feels like a trumped up trifle, disinterested in narrative exercises, using instead technique (cinematography, editing and, omigod, a soundtrack!) to swing moods and heighten reality, then send it crashing to earth.

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

The film itself never felt quite so densely plotted as Yimou apparently had hoped.

Whatever It Takes is DOA -- dated on arrival.

This is the kind of movie that mistakes heartbreak for being housebroken.

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

When you really think about Breakdown - and believe me, that would probably require spending more time thinking about the movie than the filmmakers did - it doesn't make much sense.

Troisi, who was a star in Italy, hasn't been seen widely in the United States, and from this film it is difficult to be certain how he achieved his fame.

The movie is decidedly old-fashioned, aiming to send kids and their parents out of the theater feeling good about themselves.

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

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

The absence of substance, or its banishment, and the director's reliance on allure (in the film's casting and in its look and sound, which features haunting music by Beethoven and Chopin), leave Innocence with the quasi-profound, giggly overreach of a magazine layout come to shameless, shallow life.

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

This movie would have had a chance of being interesting had it been about Sally Hemmings.

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.

In general, the script is just slightly above sitcom level, but a few lines, owing to great delivery by terrific actors, raise this a few notches on the comedy scale.

Leigh plays the tragic and annoying Sadie as if she loved and hated the character simultaneously. And to the degree that this courageous movie succeeds it will elicit the same feelings in the audience.

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

The seriousness and simplicity with which he approaches his subject in Night Falls on Manhattan are refreshing even if the vivacity of the thing never really has a chance to develop.

Particularly anticlimactic - the film itself seems sprung from molting yuppie catalogs.

In the case of Jon Robin Baitz's script, adapted from his play, in spite of the fact that he made considerable alterations in the text to open it up to cinematic possibilities, the movie disappoints in much the same way the play did.

Cronenberg has said that he made the film to find out why he was making it. You may watch it for the same reason.

Often grating in its presentation.

A big, silly movie about the famed goatish painter that stars the nearly perfect Anthony Hopkins.

Determined to try your patience, asking you to fall in love with it.

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.

More altruistic would be if Williams stopped torturing us with weepy endearments so he could look for that complex clown who used to mug just for laughs.

Passably entertaining with moments of Grimm fairy tale gruesomeness.

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.

An arthritic failure, genuine only when the two outcast lovers' eyes dart toward each other, then retreat.

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.

For all the blathering, heavy-handed pathos, we might as well be watching the Lifetime cable channel.

The adorable overacting of the twins [Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen] make this otherwise dopey movie watchable.

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.

Not entirely persuasive, not entirely schmaltzy, "The Tic Code" is one of those well-meant dramatizations... that mysteriously made it all the way to a theater near you.

The comedian's thankful willingness to do anything for Blue Streak...is its redeeming grace.

Director Eastwood favors naturalism and sometimes the effort to reproduce what it is like to meet someone new bogs the picture down irreparably.

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

A movie that sports more cameos than a "HeeHaw" marathon but not much else.

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.

A lazy, torpid piece of animated tourism.

A somewhat-smarter-than-average science-fiction flick.

A weakly performed rehash of master-slave role-reversal tales.

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.

This splatter film is set in Norway, but rest assured, it sticks with the formula. The young people to be killed off are just as obnoxious as their counterparts in American gorefests.

When Party Girl isn't being silly, it tries to be endearing and socially redeeming, and to a good degree succeeds.

Leans so heavily on its stars that their performances are marred by their emptiness.

It's often a lapsed, under-informed documentary with restagings.

This is a Seagal movie without Seagal and a Jack Ryan movie without Jack Ryan.

The movie is a big fumble.

Sympathizing with Moreau would be difficult in any case. But with Brando in the role, there is the added obstacle of needing to suppress laughter every time he opens his pursed mouth.

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

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.

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.

Here and there, a good idea or scene erupts, as when the antagonists accidentally switch cellular telephones and start taking each other's emergency calls. And Jack keeps his shrink appointment but must speak in code so his daughter won't understand. But these are anomalies and subside just as suddenly as they appear.

Between fights, the film can't even rely on the luxury of Lindo, Isaiah Washington, Russell Wong, Rottweiler rapper DMX or the scary Henry O as Han's father to make it watchable - the dialogue is wreaking more havoc than Li.

Not even his gap-toothed charm and willingness to make fun of his usual take-no-prisoners persona made it easier to swallow the mess of pottage that is Jingle All the Way.

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.

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.

Once you've embraced a show for its stupidity, you might as well go all the way and applaud its dullness, triviality and bad taste.

SORRY, SALLY. I didn't like it. I really didn't like it.

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

It has the distinctive look of a Walter Hill picture, but in the end boils down to little more than a Bruce Willis action vehicle.

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

Big swirls of computer-generated dirt, a bickering couple and the dead certainty that the fiancee will leave and the bickerers will get back together. An exciting night out, or what?

Two points save "Lousy 2" from the absolute abyss. One is a couple of imaginative touches in the art design: Cori drives an old Citroen, and a couple of Vespa-like motor scooters are briefly glanced. The other is the performance of Frewer, who played the lead in TV's "Max Headroom." He endows the character with more sardonic humor than we have a right to expect from the junky script by TV-oriented director Farhad Mann.

Hytner uses 360-degree camera turns and strange angle shots to inject this largely lifeless business with some drama. Ryder tries to do the same by nearly working herself into cardiac arrest in several monologues. Day-Lewis is acting so hard you can see his lower teeth, which, by the way are sometimes horribly decayed and other times white enough to blind a dental hygienist...See this movie at the peril of your soul.

Unfortunately, it stars Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz, so it has, more than anything else, a sense of ridiculousness.

Brainless thriller.

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.

In tackling 1000 A.D., (McTiernan)'s suddenly an unwieldy, clunky filmmaker.

If the idea is to teach us something about the 37th president of the United States, then you would think Stone would resolve to stick to what can be proven about the man's life, or at least indicate when he's speculating. But Stone is the Great Explainer, and facts have an annoying habit of mucking up his explanations.

Despite heroic efforts of four promising young actresses in the starring roles and a nifty premise, the movie is a mess: so incoherently plotted that dramatic tension doesn't have a chance to build.

The title is exactly the sort of juvenile joke the entire movie leans on.

The intention is there, but the needed emotional maturity isn't.

The jokes run hot, cold and tepid.

A hokey summer entertainment that is full of big machinery, satellite dishes du jour, long embarrassing close-ups and gaps in logic through which large UFOs could hurtle. No need to go into that here. Anyone who might enjoy The Arrival would be impatient with logic.

What a cast! What a waste!

Too dumb to realize that the senselessness is viral.

As titillating novelty turns into tired cliche, the dyke-psycho-killer genre may soon burn itself out, but in the meantime, we have the grim Brit art-film variation on the gruesome genre, Butterfly Kiss.

Something in Hutton's wounded puppy look always communicates an untapped intelligence or wasted potential, both of which are perfect for this role.

Chain Reaction is one explosion after another, none of which seem to advance the . . . uh . . . plot. But, of course, in a movie this lead-footed you spend more time wondering what the filmmakers were thinking, or if they were thinking, than about the few plot-like fragments that do present themselves now and then.

Trouble is, it's too close-up.

Stupid.

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.

Second-banana material.

The Phantom is a spiritless affair likely to vanish quickly from first-run screens.

Miserable as it crawls for two eternal hours toward being "life-affirming."

Just another in a long line of blue-collar-kid-at-prep-school movies, and it may be the worst of the lot. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is original in this movie.

In Total Eclipse, directed by Agnieszka Holland, they fail to persuade us that their versions of the 19th century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine were great artists. They just seem like rattle-brained hedonists with superiority complexes. Genius ought to be as alluring as any other well-developed human attribute, like beauty or sexuality. If this is genius, we are in trouble.

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

If only it wasn't such bloody nonsense.

Legends of the Fall never makes you think too hard; its woes-of-a-proud-family formula takes a back seat to a self-conscious visual style that strains toward the level of myth.

There are some semi-funny bits, but few are worth repeating and none will make much sense on paper. The only time when the film truly clicks is during a staged concert featuring the veteran Seattle grunge band Mudhoney. Suddenly there are wacky camera angles, wild editing, actual ideas. Despite her low-brow comedy rep, Spheeris still excels at capturing the intensity and drama of live rock music, which she did so well in both editions of "The Decline of Western Civilization."

The best-looking bad movie in years.

DENIS LEARY may be a funny guy when he's standing on stage spraying invective at a live audience, but as a movie star he has a lot to learn.

Has no intention of taking a more sophisticated path to make its point.