It's not as good as the original - which was fresher, funnier and scarier - but if it were, then by the criteria of the film's resident movie scholar, it wouldn't be a genuine sequel.

Scenes go on and on in endless, witless dialogue, ever accompanied by John Williams' hideously gushing music.

The movie is well made by director Michael Winterbottom ("Jude"), with a minimum of overdramatics.

Lacks the spark of the best recent Disney spectaculars, like "Beauty and the Beast."

This is a movie that is wonderful on the peripherals.

Coppola again shines his intelligence on this bestseller material, rather than just shoving it through the Hollywood mill unsifted.

What keeps coming to mind throughout The Jackal is that for what it cost to make this movie you could probably pay some nice hit man to eliminate everyone at Universal who thought making the movie would be a good idea, and still have enough left over to throw one of those hit man parties and have a really great time.

Jingoistic politics are not proper or prudent in the pluralistic human society of the 1990s. It's much easier to assuage these baser urges by facing a real nonhuman enemy that just wants to kill you. War is gore. You or them. That message is the real strength of "Starship Troopers," although many may find it morally flawed. No matter, this is powerful entertainment that appeals to our most basic instincts.

Softley and Amini say they consciously viewed Kate as a film noir kind of heroine, a beauty leading a good man astray. And that, added to the setting of the second half of the movie in canal-riven Venice, gives the story the kind of moral haziness that verges on Thomas Mann territory.

To enumerate exactly how Bean messes up would be to expose the silliness of this movie, and since Bean's humor is terribly silly, rather, wonderfully silly, there isn't much point in going into detail.

You find yourself absorbed in simply looking at them to the extent that it's hard to hear what they're saying. It's a nice dilemma for a movie to present.

My question is, why has director Costa-Gavras taken it upon himself to dissect American cultural foibles when he has so clearly proven himself unequipped for the job?

Happy Together is Wong's most fully realized work. It is a pleasure to watch an interesting mind feel his way, and the result is something more than just a passing fancy.

Gattaca is a welcome throwback to the days of good, low-tech sci-fi, stressing character and atmosphere over computer-generated effects and juvenile thrills.

The big trouble with the movie is that it's difficult to care whether these two get together. Ultimately I did care - when I realized that their union would presumably represent a chance that the movie might end soon.

Call it "Rosemary's Nephew." Or, simply call The Devil's Advocate a muddled metaphysical thriller that takes a small eternity to engage the observer with its flimsy characters and its tired special effects.

Korine's trying to offer a radical vision of rotten America, but the whole thing feels warmed over.

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.

I'm not sure all of this works out as convincingly as Anderson intends in the movie's somewhat unsatisfying ending, but getting there is a wickedly enjoyable journey.

Becky Johnston ( "The Prince of Tides" ) did creditable work on the screenplay, but there are times when this story about a truly rotten fellow seems to be one big jump cut.

If anything, the film drags a bit because the tour that Jarmusch chose to film, the 1996 effort, was following a Crazy Horse album that was, for them anyway, sub-par. But the interviews with the band members and the behind-the-scenes footage - as well as the vintage material - make for an entertaining and illuminating experience.

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.

The standard noir trappings are here: the femme fatale, double-crossing, fatalism, broken dreams, innocence betrayed and the rest of it. But Stone pushes it all so far and so relentlessly that it becomes absurdist comedy.

Leaves the audience on such a devastatingly dramatic ledge.

The chief terrorist is played nicely with war-weary desperation by Marcel Iures, a Romanian actor with the sucked-in cheeks and ennui of a Jeremy Irons.

It takes more than a few lines of clever dialogue, a hero who reads books, and an actor with British training and lots of dignity to keep a movie from going pretty much by the book.

"The Big Sleep" and "The Maltese Falcon" echo loudly throughout.

Even if the movie is not a work of comic - or philosophical - genius, its existence does foretell of tolerance gaining a foothold in a largely intolerant world.