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.

Ryan has an edge that is extremely becoming…This is her best work yet.

The thrill is most certainly not in the script by David Koepp, written from Michael Crichton's novel....Most of the writing is the blandest sort of twaddle, jokes you can practically recite along with actors.

Writer-director Mark Herman seems genuinely moved by the plight of the mining communities, but his attempt to translate those feelings into a story shows the effects of hard labor.

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.

The seriousness and simplicity with which he approaches his subject in Night Falls on Manhattan are refreshing even if the vivacity of the thing never really has a chance to develop.

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

It's that predictable sweetness that makes any of this more than just bearable.

As bad movies go, Gregg Araki's Nowhere is right up there with the best of them.

Austin is funny, extremely funny, because he is so ridiculous, and because Myers is a brilliant mimic who, like Martin Short, knows how to do ridiculous.

When you really think about Breakdown - and believe me, that would probably require spending more time thinking about the movie than the filmmakers did - it doesn't make much sense.

The scenes with Stalin and his frightened underlings, his giddy yes-men tip-toeing around him, are written and directed by Duncan with a grace, agility and comic deftness one rarely is treated to at the movies these days.

Ultimately, though, the movie's charms are frustrated by meandering direction.

Congratulations to director Mick Jackson and writers Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray for liberating themselves from the tedious demands of believability.

Especially fine are Spade and Louiso, the latter possessing a quality of injured integrity that is priceless here.

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.

Directing his first movie, Jack Green, cinematographer on several Clint Eastwood films, shows an ease with the material (written by Jim McGlynn), but there's something a bit dull about the movie.

This movie has the jaunty good cheer of another great movie about hit men, "Prizzi's Honor." And that is high praise indeed.

If only director Luis Llosa and his cast could see the joke and seize upon it; instead, like its computer-morphed snake, the film doesn't have a clever bone in its body.

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

It's a beautiful movie. Too beautiful for its own good, really.

The intention is there, but the needed emotional maturity isn't.

The veteran Baker anchors the proceedings, and you would like to see more of her character.

While the original conception of The Saint gave us a debonair, sophisticated and roguish detective, the new movie, directed stiffly by Phillip Noyce ( "Clear and Present Danger" ), gives us Val Kilmer as a greedy high-tech daredevil thief with the moves of Batman, the clunky disguises of Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible" and the morals of an alley cat.

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.

You can't help cheering for Selena, but the good feeling is diminished by the sense that her story's been simplified and sanitized.

What's best about this script is the premise: a lawyer who doesn't lie.

Cronenberg has said that he made the film to find out why he was making it. You may watch it for the same reason.