Giving especially good performances are Aniston, Mahoney, McGlone and Burns. Not that this movie is bad; it's just not as great as "McMullen."

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.

Shelton has a talent for using the specific to illustrate the universal. Avowed baseball haters loved "Bull Durham." And if watching golf sounds like an excellent insomnia cure, you will probably still enjoy Tin Cup.

My guess is you'll probably have more fun watching a game at the ballpark than you will at The Fan.

Schnabel can't decide whether he wants to tell a traditional rise-and-fall morality tale or make an art film. His attempt at telling Basquiat's story straightforwardly collapses under its own banality.

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.

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.

DeVito directed this wonderful fantasy about a brilliant little girl with strange powers and a sunny disposition. Using special effects DeVito creates a visual delight that seems more British than American partly due to the origin of the material and partly due to the playfulness of DeVito and writers Nicholas Kazan and Robin Swicord.

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.

Hung skillfully evokes the oppressive congestion, squalor and heat of Ho Chi Minh City. (Amazingly, given the controlling nature of Vietnam's socialist government, the warts-and-all movie was shot on location.) But he is less successful at developing the character of his characters.

MANNY & LO grows on you, largely because of the charm of its youngest cast member, Scarlett Johansson, who plays 11-years-old Amanda.

Director Joel Schumacher and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman seem incapable of emphasizing what's important and relegating the rest to secondary status.

Extraordinary, entertaining cinema.

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.

Multiplicity satisfies the need for a dumb summer comedy while remaining fairly smart.

Fans of sci-fi, special effects, big explosions, panicky crowd scenes and theater sound systems cranked up way beyond the capacity of the human ear to hear comfortably will love this movie. I am not among you.

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

Be that as it may, the movie offers the uplifting news bulletin that life is not about being happy with how much you weigh but with what kind of person you are. This is where the movie starts getting sloppy.

In order to like Striptease, you have to be a pretty serious Moore fan because although director Andrew Bergman's script (based on the book by Carl Hiaasen) has a few funny lines, this is otherwise one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen.

While I was watching "Lone Star," I realized that what makes Sayles a good and socially responsible person - his ability to look at one thing a hundred different ways - is exactly what makes him a muddy filmmaker.

What director Charles Russell ("The Mask") and co-writers Walon Green ("RoboCop 2") and Tony Puryear do right is supply the kind of non-stop action and laconic one-liners we live for in Arnold movies.

This is the old beauty and the beast tale, one that Disney has already done well enough. I guess they had so much fun the first time that they just had to do it again.

Tyler is a find for a director like Bertolucci. She is a blank slate of prettiness with her unadulterated, thoroughbred, long-limbed looks.

Lou Holtz Jr.'s script is a clever, half-serious indictment of television.

Bay has two great assets in Connery and Cage. The special effects give The Rock a James Bondian feel so Connery's wry, world-weary devil-may-careishness looks right at home here.

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

Mangold's vision is bold. There is nothing cutesy or gimmicky about Heavy, which may be why something in its grimness recalls the work of Ingmar Bergman.

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.

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

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

Particularly because unlike so many other boring movies one sees, Jarmusch films require many more words to explain the boringness than less certifiably artistic films would.

In the attempt to rein in a cast playing a great assortment of exaggerated types, Schlesinger (who directed "Midnight Cowboy" and "Marathon Man" ) and Bradbury sometimes lose the tone of the movie.

Muddled futuristic thriller.

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.

After more than an hour of fun, the film turns dark as Solanas' mental state worsens. Not only does the brilliant kook wear out her welcome with Warhol, but the portrayal also grates on the viewer.

The movie itself simply misses the mark.

The entire film rings totally fake and the resulting dishonest sentimentality makes you fidget in your seat and count the seconds until the sweet but completely predictable ending.

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.

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

Of course, turning a novel by Woolrich into a light romantic froth is a little like turning King Lear into a musical comedy. But Benjamin has the right comic touch to pull this off.

It doesn't take much imagination to poke fun at the pitiful special effects, goofy '50s he-man behavior and unintentionally hilarious script, but the silliness of the entire concept eventually wears down your defenses - not quite as the evil Dr. Forrester had planned, but effectively nevertheless. You will laugh.

This sure beats "Major League II." In fact, this movie is a lot more entertaining than the Michelle Pfeiffer showcase "Dangerous Minds." That was a big hit. Using Hollywood logic, I have to assume that this one won't be.

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

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

On the whole, the movie is a success. I still hope that children and their parents will read this wonderful book together, but it's nice that there's a movie they can see, too.

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

The film's premise is totally implausible yet great performances, directing and script allow us to transcend the concept of believability and enjoy nevertheless.

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.

Todd Solondz's grand prize winner at this year's Sundance Film Festival lapses into satire, but its parodistic slant only exaggerates what is truthful, making the unpleasantness of that awkward age all the more disturbing and hilarious. It's a horror film starring reality in the monster role.

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

The Coens haven't been this sharp, focused and fluid since their first film. This is "Blood Simple's" promise fulfilled.

While Birdcage has many isolated funny moments, long bits of slowness interrupt the energy.

The Spanish filmmaker goes back to what he does better than any other living director - post-modernizing the melodrama.

This is filmmaking of high energy and wit. What it adds up to is debatable. You can view it as a bright twist on the being-a-cop-is-lonely sort of police picture, or as a mini-anthology of quirky not-quite-love stories. If it's hard to say where Chungking Express arrives, the trip is still exhilarating.

While the picture periodically skids into sentimentality and characters lapse into schtick, its good-natured quality and winning cast sustain our sympathy.

The Neon Bible is one of those movies that isn't devoid of art or redeeming features, but nevertheless deserves some kind of warning label: Those suffering from depression or a short attention span should proceed with extreme caution.

The closest this movie comes to delivering any titillation are a few open-shirted shots of Grammer that display major chest fur. You know you're bored when you have to devise a comparative body hair study to amuse yourself.

Rumble in the Bronx has the explosive escapades that Stallone/Schwarzenegger followers crave - hair-raising free falls, hovercrafts out of control, crazed turf wars, collapsing buildings, gun-happy gangsters and other boy-film staples - plus the kind of oddball comedy and independent spirit usually found only outside the current Hollywood empire. Chan is a true artist of a genre that ordinarily does all it can to avoid art.

With the exception of a couple of inspired moments, Mary Reilly is merely a curious variation of an often-told story.

Several times during this film, you wish you were a bottle rocket so you could explode out of your seat and leave this tedious mess behind.

A way-below-par golfing comedy.

The movie is a big fumble.

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

Broken Arrow isn't the ultimate fusion of Hong Kong surrealism and Hollywood realism, but it points the way to nerve-shattering possibilities.

It just doesn't work.

Hoffman proves himself a master of complex scenery, crowd control and graceful direction. He succeeds in making a conspicuously lush and rich movie out of what was reportedly a less than kingly budget.

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."

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

This film may set an all-time record for shortest time between the big screen and your local video store.

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.

Poking fun at such hit films as Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society and Poetic Justice, the Wayanses parody the neo-blaxploitation craze so savagely that no filmmaker will ever be able to make another film about the drugs, guns and ho's of South Central L.A. without figuring out how to work around the genre's well-worn conventions.

Schlesinger, working from a script by Amanda Silver ( "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle" ) and Rick Jaffa (he produced that film), gives the film a zippy pace and a natural momentum as direct as a hot knife negotiating a butter stick. Schlesinger is also still canny at casting.

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.

One of the qualities that makes "12 Monkeys" so good is the fact that it is almost too complicated to explain.

Troubling and troubled.

The light and heavy flow with equal ease and expertise from McKellen's enchanted kitchen.

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.

The movie is a turgid, swollen, wheezing old contraption, a crashing bore of special effects in which the most exciting moment gives us two ships sitting in water sending cannon balls at each other for what seems like hours on end.

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

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.

There isn't much to recommend this movie until Pacino and De Niro finally share the first of their two scenes together.

The result is a thrill ride with enough plunges and turns and loop-the-loops to make it worth a spin. What the picture lacks is the magic and resonance you feel in the best of popular entertainments.

There isn't much to hold onto with this movie. If anything, Cry trivializes the plight of the South Africans in its breezy treatment of apartheid.

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

Resistant as I was to the idea of a remake, I have to admit that Pollack has made a movie that stands on its own, without odious comparison, as an entertaining love story, particularly if you've never seen the original.

Unlike so many other movies of literary provenance, it is clear from the start that this one is going to be entertainment, not homework. Lee serves up this sweetmeat without fuss, without the super-seriousness of filmmakers awed by their literary material.

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.

Things to do in the movie theater until you mercifully die of boredom sums up this witness' response to the ordeal of sitting through this movie.

Opening with a wearying series of nasty and violent episodes attesting to Bill's predilection for solving problems by shooting at them, and his nearly comic indignation at having his hat touched (men have died at his hand for committing that transgression alone), the movie quickly establishes a pattern of bad decision-making on the part of the writer-director.

With all that has happened to the Soviet Union, and to the dreams of the Cuban revolution, in the years since "I Am Cuba" was made, the film can't help feeling like a relic of a discarded era. But it still has power to surprise and, occasionally, to enchant.

The film will intoxicate children and charm the parents in their company.

An old-fashioned movie. It is simplistic, full of stock characters and easy solutions to difficult problems, and I absolutely loved it.

It is both the best-looking James Bond film and the best-looking James Bond.

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

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.

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.

It was only natural that Allen would eventually have to make a Greek drama.