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.

Nicolas Cage gives one of the best performances of his strange, courageous career.

Copycat is as steady and reliable as a pulse and as exhilarating as a surge of adrenalin.

Vampire is hardly a consequential film, nor does it suggest hitherto buried reserves of Murphy's talent. But it's a diverting mixture of horror, romance and comedy.

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.

This movie is charming the way so few movies are anymore.

A complete misfire.

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.

More about having a good time with some interesting people than it is about watching a fine movie.

Strange Days is an ambitious but ultimately disappointing attempt to assemble the latest in fringe-culture byproducts - distortion-laden torch songs, millenarian fantasies and cyberpunk nightmares - into a Hollywood package. Its failures are those of limited imagination; its brands of strangeness, like the clips its characters replay, never stray far from the familiar landscapes of 1995 pop culture.

The hiccupping inelegance of this movie's narrative and direction makes it impossible to empathize with or even really comprehend any of the characters.

Baumbach is obviously a bright man, but this material is too thin for anything more than a slight New Yorker short story about thoughtful screw-ups.

Franklin juggles it all with wit and style, and suddenly you feel fine that this is only Mosley's first Easy Rawlins novel. Several more are just waiting to be adapted.

Half snappy, sardonic and incisive and half slow-moving, goofy and dense.

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

That Berkley cannot act is indisputable. But her dancing looks like a seizure.

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.

Unfortunately, the movie never really goes anywhere. It's all pleasant enough to watch, but you never feel that Danny and Arthur's craziness (eventually Danny is committed), Sid's stoicism, Selma's selflessness and Steven's despair coalesce to mean anything significant or illuminating.

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.

Douglas Carter Beane's script is so wickedly clever (the title refers to an autographed photo the drag queens carry with them), you come away from this film with the impression that you've had a much better time than you've actually had.

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.

During this movie, every few moments the theater fills with the appreciative guffaws of 18-year-old young men. How old are you?

This movie has everything but Humphrey Bogart, and I'm sure he's sorry he was unavailable.

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.

With a distractingly cute Quinn, a cartoonishly stern Giannini and woozily romantic Reeves and Sanchez-Gijon, this movie is overflowing with ditsy good will. But it just won't be everyone's cup of Chardonnay.

A film that can be enjoyed by all ages and that insults no one's intelligence.

Watching movies like this strain to fit new technologies like VR into old genres and plot conventions, you can't help wondering whether the real artificial intelligence experiment these days isn't Hollywood itself. Plug the psychological profiles of 200 hit movies into its hive-mind, and out comes one plastic-bodied, loop-brained clone after another.

As light comedy, Something to Talk About has some effective moments - including Eddie's interview with a hilariously cynical divorce lawyer, and virtually all the scenes with Sedgwick's Emma Rae. But director Lasse Hallstrom glazes the film with too much faux bluegrass music, and the equine fantasy-world of the King Ranch is so enveloping that it suffocates all aspirations to more serious drama.

Sublimely ridiculous.

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.

Constructed as a sequence of deepening, worsening bad dreams, Living in Oblivion sometimes runs the risk of feeling arbitrary, and the film loses some steam in its final section. But mostly it's a smart, funny send-up of the trials and joys of filming on big egos and low budgets - subjects that writer-director Tom DiCillo and his collaborators presumably know first-hand.

Passably entertaining with moments of Grimm fairy tale gruesomeness.

This sequel is much better than the original "Under Siege"...The real coup here is the discovery that when you eliminate dialogue, and thus eliminate Seagal's efforts to act in that rather high voice of his, the movie takes on a surprising gravity. When Seagal doesn't talk, he verges on the dignified. It's kind of scary.

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.

First Knight has all the elements of a crowd-pleaser.

With no frills and no commentary, Howard and company have made the kind of absorbing thriller we have in mind when we wistfully sigh, "They don't make movies like they used to."

This movie is bad on a galactic scale.

With an original score by Alan Menken and Gilbert and Sullivan-ish songs by Menken and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, the movie is the cartoon equivalent of a full-scale, high-quality Broadway musical.

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.

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 delight of the movie is Keitel, who finally gets to play someone who doesn't look like he's about to mug you.

In stupidity, this movie ranks up there among the greats.

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

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

The plot twist is clever, but it's way too little, too late, and too implausible (whence comes this doggie amnesia?) to redeem this maudlin tale.

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.

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

A Little Princess is a delightful film. Bring your children, or just bring yourself.

Director John McTiernan outdoes the previous "Die Hards" (McTiernan directed the first, Renny Harlin the second) with machinery, stunts, noise, bullets and guts. Hand-held camerawork tweaks the audience's sense of anxiety further, and for the most part it works well.

The particulars of the plot don't make a great deal of sense, but Hartley's films have much more to do with style, or rather a philosophical refusal to show emotional involvement.

Gray is more interested in hobnobbing with thespian greats than he is in making a good movie.

It's too slick to be truly disturbing, but it's that slickness that keeps you on the edge of your chair.

Superbly acted by its young cast, written and directed with great sophistication, Wild Reeds moves with a sad assurance through that domain that most American filmmakers explore only clumsily: the mysteries of the human heart.

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.

A documentary with a keen eye, a playful sense of timing and an inquisitive soul.

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.

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.

Caruso doesn't leave much of a mark in the movie. On the smaller screen he smoldered. He seems to need the cramped space to seem sexy. The big screen isn't claustrophobic enough to pinch and squeeze the talent out of him.

With more sophisticated writing, one suspects they could really soar: Even here, slowed by clunky, character-establishing lines and an all-devouring plot, they hit more often than they miss.

Most of the movie seems stilted and uncomfortably girdled by efforts to work around the cumbersome Brando, who is shot mostly from above the waist, where the full effects of gravity and avoirdupois do not seem so egregious as they do at belt level.

Neeson simply has no spark here. He is good and honest and honorable until your face turns blue. He's just no fun.

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

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.

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.

All the performances are good, the script is subtle and waste-free and Danny Elfman's score is evocative and appropriate, but the direction is what gives the movie its sweep.

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

Exotica is a worthy addition to an increasingly rich body of work by one of our most prolific and accomplished international filmmakers.

Driver, who is padded but not fat, is an actress with self-possession to spare. Her looks defy conventional rules about modern beauty, but the directness of her gaze and the honesty of her smile make it difficult to look anywhere else when she is on screen.

Referring to his love of Hollywood musicals and a working-class background that fostered enduring dreams of making movies one day, Varda creates an homage to a filmmaker's imagination. It doesn't hurt that she was also in love with him.

A grim, well-realized film from New Zealand. It is an impressive first feature for its director, Lee Tamahori, and a splendid dramatic vehicle for its stars, especially Rena Owen, who gives a gritty portrayal of a Maori woman fighting to stand her ground in a violent ghetto household.

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.

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.

Tedious, unfunny.

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.

Smart and unsentimental as it is, Shallow Grave is more than a little forbidding.

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.

The Secret of Roan Inish freely mixes Celtic myth and everyday reality. But "Roan Inish" is a different kind of ride, less intentionally rollicking and more reverential.

Delpy and Hawke begin to grow on you and Linklater and his actors achieve a point midway through the film when the characters are so attractive and smart and emotionally daring that you'll be happy to spend the night with them.

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.

Nobody's Fool belongs to that hoary but no longer frequently seen genre, the slice of life. And for at least some of its duration, Benton - creator of more oleaginous cuts of celluloid, like Places in the Heart - slices keenly and artfully. We get a good sense of the nature of existence in snowbound North Bath, N.Y., where the advantages and shortcomings of small-town life are sometimes hard to tell apart.

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.

Loach's film offers something dearer than any crowd-pleaser can: the bracing consolation of a truth told without dilution.

Still, Singleton's willingness to take risks makes this a worthy, thoughtful film. Especially noteworthy: His sensitive handling of a love triangle between Kristen and her boyfriend and Kristen and another woman.

There's not much mystery here; there's only one outcome that could possibly make dramatic sense. And once you realize that, there's not much to do besides watch some very adept performers chew on their lines.

[Krishnamma] gives the story a dimension of pent-up anguish and melancholy.

It's clever but not often original.

Aside from avuncular Lewis and two-bricks-shy-of-a-load Dunaway, this movie's greatest asset is Depp. With his scooped-out cheeks, flower petal mouth and an innately balletic approach to communicating with the camera, he is as natural a performer as film has seen in many years.

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]

[Nair's] sure touch with the details of social decorum carries the film through. [14 Feb 1992, p.D3]

At times, the movie, which has tedious stretches that blunt its charm, is more like a really good idea than a successfully realized picture. [17 Nov 1989, p.C2]

The animation is dazzling (two-thirds of the movie is set underwater). The love story between mermaid Ariel (the sweet voice of Jodi Benson) and mortal Prince Eric (Christopher Daniel Barnes) is fairy-tale wonderful. And there is a slew of terrific side characters that make the movie as entertaining for adults as it is for children.

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 poignant and racy movie. The dancing is pretty great, too.

Kurosawa pulled out all the stops with Ran, his obsession with loyalty and his love of expressionistic film techniques allowed to roam freely.

It's a glimmering hunk of fractured brilliance riddled with Orwellian paranoia encased in a production design seemingly pieced together from the shared dreams of Franz Kakfa and Salvador Dali, and shot from cruelly low angles.

To Live and Die in L.A. is as urgent and exhilaratingly paced as anything William Friedkin's done.

It's the boys' most immediately gratifying movie: The goods are delivered in a hearse.

Part aerobics workout, part self-styled dreamscape, Sense is a hyperactive piece of performance art that begins as the stripped-down dress rehearsal of a garage band and builds into a mighty, exhausting spectacle that shakes as much ass as it kicks. [Review of re-release]