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

A charming and moving film about a slightly racy subculture in a highly rule-bound society.

An artificial and hypocritical effort to escape the artistic limitations of teenage slasher flicks.

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

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]

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.

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.

Shampoo refuses to be coy. There's a deep, soulful confusion here that isn't careless with frivolity.

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.

The End of the Affair's masterfully heartbroken final scene is scarier in its nightmarishly wry suggestion of ill fate than anything that ever happened on Elm Street.

On the one hand, you want to praise it for its stylishness and originality in tackling some fascinating subject matter. On the other hand, it's frustrating because it could have been so much better.

There is a point of view here, a rather strong one. It may sound like slight praise, but Love Jones is a movie that is exactly what it wants to be, and that's an achievement in a homogenized, test-marketed vanilla-movie landscape.

Deceptively keen as both a paranoid political thriller and a caveat against the trustworthiness of your friends and neighbors.

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

A shockingly eloquent, nearly moving feat of Y2K-trendiness.

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

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

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.

The film finally seems to stagger under the weight of its own significance.

A less confrontational, though positively gushing modernization of "Pierre, or the Ambiguities."

Madhouse satire manages to disarm the second you realize it's laughing with you - and sometimes harder.

Just fascinating in an empty, trendy sort of way

The cliches are all here.... Eszterhas works around these scripting difficulties deftly enough, but the real pleasure here is in watching Bacon and Renfro as idol and adorer.

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

There must be nine or 10 thwacks to the neck throughout Sleepy Hollow, and Burton finds a different way to make the resulting severed noggin fall as though you'd forgotten the last one.

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

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.

A finely coiffed, cream-cheese "8 1/2" remix with Gere, a Marcello Mastroianni for Oprah Winfrey times.