It's a passionate vision thick with eroticism, but the musky atmosphere gets a little thick and murky.

Craig's got the stuff but the ending of this cake is soggy for its protagonist and audience.

Meanders as aimlessly as its drugged-out characters.

Garity, son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, gives the kind of performance rarely seen in today's movies.

It's a methodical, friendly fairy tale in which everyone is good and the outcome is a given.

You've already seen this movie, right? Just a few months ago. It was called "The Score."

There are some nice ideas floating around this ambitious film, as well as attempts to say them in a unique way.

Under the lingerie model façade beats the heart of a celestial Dr. Phil.

The boys and girls are so busy acting out their romantic fantasies or soulfully pining over impossible loves that, however photogenic they may be, they never seem to actually live their lives.

The curiously stylized piece, shot in a muted palette with performances to match (the cast is perhaps too restrained given the theatrical framework), is dramatically colorless, but the moods and moments are crafted with kinky grace.

For genre fans, the horde-of-locust sequence may alone be worth the price of admission.

This is one of those capers doomed to unravel in comic chaos, but it finally plays less like a con gone wrong than a long, lazy, insubstantial shaggy dog story coasting on nothing but charm.

A fairly underwhelming experience for man or child -- not so much bad as just more of the same, with little of the original's novelty or freshness.

For all the clumsy scenes and cloying performances, director Patricia Riggen puts her adults through tough choices and hard consequences.

Sadly, it's still a plodding affair that's low on plausible character motivation and compelling action scenes, and it's still not much of a showcase for its star, Charlton Heston.

The character crossovers between narratives, however, are too contrived to work.

It's a little sloppy and full of convenient coincidences, but at its best roils with edgy character tensions.

Passably entertaining.

For all its f/x pageantry, it is rather tired, as if it's the third sequel of a franchise, not the initial episode.

Disney seems intent upon overdosing audiences with the little guy proving himself against a seemingly superior force.

It's the first film I know of in which we get to see all five of the top-billed actors vomit

Best enjoyed by keeping in mind the latest cinematic proposition that apocalyptic disaster doesn't bring out the worst in people, only the stupidest.

A clumsy and incompetent thriller for nine-tenths of its length, but it has an ending so clever and that goes so wildly against expectations it almost exonerates the film.

Apparently there's a fresh generation ready to take this at face value. That, in its own way, is refreshing.

It's often funny but it flails around like a chicken with its head cut off, flapping and squawking and making a spectacle, but never really going anywhere.

Despite its flaws, Walk on Water is a sometimes engaging story of emotional opposites who become mystifyingly attracted to each other.

The result is an initially hilarious picture that grows perplexingly trite as screenwriter Peter Straughan transforms Young's sly observations into assembly-line pap.

It fails to persuade us that its subject is significant enough to be worth a movie.

Refreshingly old-fashioned.

Ultimately less psychological thriller than polemic about the effects of living in an atmosphere of paranoia fed by daily threat-level assessments and round-the-clock TV news-channel coverage of fear-mongering speeches.

Often unsettlingly funny, though it ultimately recedes into a dark womb of despair.

Grand and imaginatively designed epic that forgets that the spectacle -- and this is nothing if not spectacular -- is just the flourish.

Would be totally unexceptional if not for its visual telling of the Apollo 11 flight and the fact that the movie is impressively shot - the first animated feature film in 3-D.

There are no surprises in this match, but director Fumihiko Sori makes the games visually thrilling.

(Bullock's) performance, and the movie's serious side, soon get lost in an overly slick script.

It was also a miscalculation to make the film so sexually explicit. It doesn't particularly serve the story and, for all his gifts, Macy is just not the kind of actor most people want to see in a whirl of sweaty, naked sex.

The movie's problem is that it's a cartoon, offering no emotional involvement with its characters and no dramatic imperative.

Combining the fairy-tale idealism of "Edward Scissorhands" with "Hairspray's" devilish sarcasm, the directors try for the sincerity of a message movie while affecting the hip facade of satirists.

A fairly hypocritical exercise -- and one that's so flamboyant and overbearing that it comes perilously close to being a classic awful.

The Village goes up in smoke (and mirrors). It wants to find a profoundness that hints at something deep and dimensional, but it hasn't the courage of conviction to stay on course as an unabashed ode to innocence.

Does its job colorfully and entertainingly, as long as you don't lean too hard on such niggling details as logic, legality and the laws of physics.

The script is tight and well-constructed, director Ernest Dickerson has a feel for film-noir aesthetics, DMX exudes a certain brutish charisma and the movie is as morbidly compelling as a good train wreck.

Though it's rarely dull, first-time feature director Yasuo Inoue has a better eye for intriguing and unusual imagery than dramatic staging, and he illustrates his points long before he runs out of un-endings.

No, it's not the big screen version of "24." For one thing, Sutherland is in the wrong role.

After its irresistible first act, Owning Mahowny loses its energy and focus very fast.

There's much to admire in this ambitious indie: top-notch production values, a gallery of evocative period detail (with location work on Scotland's famed St. Andrews' course) and solid performances from a cast .

A collision of medieval fantasy and commando action movie, where you can almost believe in the high-concept mix-and-matching.

Makes a great time capsule, a shot-on-the-streets glimpse into the texture of a bygone time, place and attitude, but a listless, lightweight odyssey.

In place of the dysfunctional family Christmas story we've come to expect for the holidays, The Family Stone gives us a cheerfully uncensored, generic counterculture clan and tosses a tightly wound control freak into the center of their holiday celebration.

Exotic Ninth Gate breaks down into clichés.

Visnjic is charismatic, sympathetic and believable in the role, and the first part of the film -- in which he's being drawn into the case against his will and then use his hypnotic skills to get inside the mind of the little girl -- is quite riveting.

Under Schnabel's direction, it becomes stilted and static, if not simplistic.

The Last Sin Eater has a specific audience in its sights, one that doesn't mind the film's characters having their problems solved by the healing power of truth and faith.

The movie is so surreal it's just not very involving. As an action extravaganza, it's busy but dull.

Amounts to little more than high-class soap opera.

The minor pleasures of P2 lie in the simple effectiveness of the sleekly unshowy direction and the clean, unadorned script, which pares away extraneous distractions like motivation and complicated back stories to get on with the mechanics of tension and the obligatory jumps and startles (which stand in for genuine scares).

Despite some moments, the movie stubbornly fails to be the kind of sparkling ensemble piece one would expect from its credits -- and the fault seems to lie squarely with Fry's unfocused script, lackadaisical direction and conceptual sleight of hand.

For all its improbable characters, wretched dialogue and stock situations, the movie has an earnest dumbness that sneaks up on you to be surprisingly entertaining.

Most of the film, however, goes down easily enough. The Queer Strokes, an all-gay rowing team, provide a humorous contrast to the less sexually confidant characters.

Despite laughs, the movie only sporadically works. Its satire is too broad and silly to have much sting.

The movie is not exciting, original or instructive enough to justify the unpleasant experience.

The new new new Jason Vorhees, played by Derek Mears in this Michael Bay-produced homage/update of the '80s slasher franchise, is a bit of a fox.

Cranks up the hysteria to screechy sitcom levels.

Treu's sweet-spirited vision of life, and the winning performances of his ensemble of kid actors, gradually broke down most of my resistance.

While their stories are well worth telling, first-time director Ruskin fails to shape his material into the dynamic film it might have been.

Forget "The Revenge of the Nerds." This is the real thing.

Barely substantial enough for a feature but just light and tasty enough to satisfy.

This is standard fare on the subject of father and son relations.

The result is a film with an identity crisis, a fluffy romantic farce that gets progressively darker, more destructive and finally so downright demented that the featherweight story line is crushed under the weight of brutal, unpleasant truth.

(Arteta's) yanked an eerily accomplished performance out of his lead actor.

No doubt about it, the movie is morbidly fascinating. Moreover, Cusack gives a delicate and agreeably world-weary performance.

Taking on the sneeringly blase Alig may be a cagey career move for Culkin, but it's a disappointingly thin performance.

It comes out less like a spoof than a smart-aleck remake of "Meatballs," minus the energy of Bill Murray.

Quickly assumes the characteristics of a bad slasher movie.

A lively and lightweight comedy, the film finally connects with the real-life rush of playing music for a live audience.

There are a handful of funny moments, and the top end of the cast comes off rather well. Duchovny has some of that same easygoing likability that made Glenn Ford one of the biggest stars of the '50s.

A forgettable, patched-together clone of other ghostly romances.

Directed with a Scorsese-ish flair by actor John Shea (who also plays a small part), the film is loaded with gritty atmosphere and touches of authenticity. [12 Jun 1998]

An inspiring story of pluck, but its politics fall flat.

It offers a handful of funny and touching moments and maintains a level of cuteness. But it's far from original, and its star chemistry doesn't exactly light up the screen.

It's a pretense of even-handedness. The true story has been reduced to a case for faith. It merely sacrifices all reason to get there.

So grim and humorless that the first half almost sinks into silliness.

Wenham and Porter make the film better than it should be.

The film is inherently calculated and cold, so smugly satisfied with itself and its surprise final trick that it seems to be running its own con to convince us the script's house of cards is actually substantial, original and slick.

Too hip to play it straight and too cool to resort to an actual story, Hartley turns the whole rambling spy game into a puzzle box where every certainty is thrown into doubt, every character has a hidden motive, and every clue is contradicted.

A perfectly competent, if undistinguished, action film that smoothes over all the most interesting bumps in the drama.

Favors pageantry over substance.

The casting is hit-and-miss. OutKast's Benjamin and "Troy's" Hedlund are weak, but Gibson is very appealing and the movie powers along on a strong lead performance by Wahlberg, who has never seemed more confident, commanding or scruffily charismatic.

It's flashy, it's often funny ...,and it resembles a movie so much that soon it demands something resembling motivation, character, a plot, anything to explain the seemingly arbitrary connections between the stunts and the skits.

The movie smacks of old-fashioned Hollywood phoniness. [22 Jan 1999]

For all the tough-minded talk and frank portraits of inner-city life, however, the film is not altogether convincing.

Rich with emotional turmoil and searing beauty, but it could have used a little more time in the editing room to make sense of it all.

It probably cost less than the catering budget of average Adam Sandler comedy and, in its own hit-and-miss scattershot fashion, it's about as funny. At least when it hits.

It's the chemistry between the women and the droll scene-stealing wit and wolfish pessimism of Anna Chancellor that makes this "Two Weddings and a Funeral" fun.

There's something flat and obscure about this well-acted stalker movie.

Doom may be by the numbers, with a roll call of colorful types systematically exterminated while The Rock entertains with cartoonish expressions and reactions (the closest the film comes to personality).

Though it's a star vehicle, Carrey seems only marginally interested in rehashing the role of sweet spaz, and so he almost feels miscast.

It's not the direction that feels flaccid in this film. Surprisingly, it's the stories themselves, which provide a bit of a giggle but little else.