Offers insights from a host of former players.

Hackman is, as ever, a master performer, an actor at the peak of his powers. However, he can't carry the whole movie.

Simply an endurance contest, one almost worth staying the 82 minutes to see who wins.

The film is obviously a long-form episode of a show better digested in 22-minute segments.

Really just a lurid potboiler.

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.

A mixed bag with the promise of a better sequel.

An enervated adaptation of E.B. White's Stuart Little escapades.

Queasy comedy.

If Restaurant feels like a high-caliber TV drama, it's one that tries to pack an entire season (plus pilot, plus backstory) into one episode.

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.

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.

At its best the film serves as a music appreciation class taught by embattled artists whose cloudy livelihoods grow increasingly uncertain with each bittersweet symphony.

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.

You've seen Set It Off several times before featuring male characters: The proven popularity of boy-dominated 'hood movies has made this female variation possible. Just the fact that four worthy African American actresses get decent staring roles gives the story a purpose it wouldn't ordinarily have.

This is not the addictive, hot-wired movie you want.

If the movie crumbles under its own stiffness at times, at least it has the two old pros' good performances to cheer us along the way.

Sure, it's the same trite teenage fantasy it was 20 years ago when it was first released, but somehow now the energy seems infectiously giddier, the songs zingier, the camp higher.

Somehow, although this film's unevenness tends to take us out of the action now and then, there's something kind of agreeable about it. Aiello is extremely funny and so, in his creepy way, is Spader.

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.

Woo delivers a vintage breakneck, break-arm, break-face 20-minute finale.

Of course, there's little else of interest about Pokemon beyond the consumption factor. Buy more.

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

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

What begins as unassumingly dull wanders into disarming chaos.

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.

Like a guy who finally gets what he wants, you just want to go home once it's over.

Solondz's greatest success is the pederast, heartbreakingly played by Baker...Had Solondz reached that apex in the other stories, it would have been a masterpiece.