Despite its subject - an addict's dark interior life - Permanent Midnight offers little in the way of character development and no jolting insight.

A misfire.

Out of Sight needed the energetic and stylish hand of "Get Shorty" director Barry Sonnenfeld. Instead, a sad-sackish Soderbergh ( "sex, lies and videotape") comes at this material looking as if his mind was on something else, something much, much more depressing.

Modestly better than last year's awful "End of Days," though it falls well short of Arnold's "Terminator" peak period.

Nicholson squeezes every wretched drop of buffoonery from this character, and it's distressing to watch him play an easy role for easy laughs.

The spectacle is huge; the animation, breathtaking. In many ways, it is the epic of biblical proportions the filmmakers hoped for. But, like the Good Book itself, The Prince of Egypt can also be tedious, self-important and at times exhausting.

This is a prodigious something. It's just difficult to say whether that something is good or evil.

The Faculty deserves a week of detention, not so much for missing the point as for blunting it.

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 laughably disconnected hostage drama that rails against the perceived nightmare of inner-city public schools.

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.

Director Gary Fleder seems to be trying for the mood and atmosphere of "Seven," another Freeman film about murder and police work, but this movie isn't as stylish and the script by David Klass, based on the James Patterson novel, doesn't really hang together.

By the time you get to the end of the movie and our heroes and Regis' cop buddy Dennis Miller must sprint through a series of tunnels beneath the White House racing against evil to save the presidency, if your credulity hasn't been tested you'll probably find your heart racing pleasantly.

Plays like a lost Rockford file.

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.

What remains is Washington's volcanic and contemplative work at the core of a film packed to the rafters with raging bull.

It fails to capitalize on its own gifts, coming darn close to greatness but never quite catching the brass ring.

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

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.

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.

There's the world-alteringly scary possibility that (Leder) might be trying to kill us with a star-studded "After School Special."

Lane, with his extensive stage experience, is acerbic, profoundly cynical and endlessly disgruntled. As the foil, Evans strike the right comic nice-guy note; he has fun with the character's sweetness and refuses to degrade him.

Tired comedy.

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.

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.

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

Throughout, Croghan knows where she wants to go, but has no fresh ideas for getting there. The characters are reasonably appealing, but the jokes are mostly weak.

As insulting as taking the queen to the Olive Garden.