Linklater has less success telling a story; time passes amiably, but the film has no center.

As innocuous as the love songs on its soundtrack.

Latest Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle stalls at on-ramp.

The movie hits the ground running, so Beatty the actor is forced to go all out from the start.

Needs a gritty intervention.

Doesn't have what it takes to be truly terrible.

Not as predictable as the rest of its ilk.

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.

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]

Right up to its deliberate thud of a closer, Polanski had me.

A workmanlike effort. It's not startling and it's not incompetent.

The picture seems to have been intended as a political satire, but only a Hollywood executive could mistake it for the real thing.

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.

A piece of baseball fluff...Costner cinema, pure and simple.

If it's difficult to find straight laughs in a colorblind prison movie (It's difficult enough to find a colorblind prison movie), finding straight laughs in a black one is almost impossible.

You can draw a straight line from "Reservoir Dogs" to "Pulp Fiction" to Suicide Kings.

Sublimely ridiculous.

Not the sweaty midnight stroll through the garden of carnal delights that its title wants you to believe.

De Bont's effects-riddled remake of the '63 spook-out adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel is not nearly as creepy as either its cinematic or its literary precedents. But it's a hokey, hokey entertainment and a $100 million Lili Taylor movie.

This is neither a psychological thriller nor an erotic one, so any interest in the story is purely the work of its stars.

Feels like an interminable pilot for a show to fill that deadly 8:30 slot between "Friends" and "Will and Grace."

The "coming out" genre in gay and lesbian films is really getting stale - the plots are as by-the-numbers as a Bruce Willis action flick - and Edge of Seventeen is hampered by not only predictability but by its shoestring budget (a coup, however, was getting Thompson Twins composer Tom Baily to do the score).

Earnest and kid-friendly -- also simplistic and dramatically creaky.

What mystifies, too, is the complete absence of information about Salerno-Sonnenberg's private life.

But what McNally, director Joe Mantello and a cast brought straight from the original New York stage production all accomplish is the creation of an honest, clever, poignant work about men who also happen to be gay, rather than a self-conscious polemic about gays who it turns out just happen also to be men.

Too much of nothing and far from the potentially star-making material that Foxx deserves.

The talented Murphy is appealing here, performing with sincerity and restraint - a wise choice, since his co-stars are a menagerie of wisecracking animals.

A romantic sitcom that never transcends its gimmicky plot, but offers enough screen time to Gwyneth Paltrow to satisfy even her most rabid fans.