It's the strangest comic-book superhero movie you're likely to see this year. For anyone looking for something totally different in this most overworked of Hollywood genres, this is it.

Maybe it's fantasy fatigue, but for all the pretty effects and breathless chases and goblin war battles, the sense of wonder and magic is lost in the shuffle.

In this sequel, magic still reigns but suspending disbelief doesn't come as easily.

If you're in the market for a whimsical, incorrigibly weird movie that basically goes nowhere, try "Arizona Dream." But if you have little patience for self-indulgent movies that substitute scatter-gun blasts of surreal black comedy for dramatic structure and realistic characterization, steer clear of this curiosity from noted Yugoslav film-maker Emir Kusturica ("When Father Was Away on Business"). [9 Sept 1994]

It packs surprising punch as a biopic.

Smith has badly overextended his modest filmmaking gifts.

The battery of startling shock cuts can get repetitive and the plot has a few potholes, but the palpable atmosphere of vulnerability keeps the drama knotted in tension and the audience rooted to the teens in peril.

Outside of a smart performance by Shawn Hatosy as Tim Dunphy, there just isn't much that's enlightening or new in this intimate recollection.

Certainly kept the toddlers (including mine) at an advance screening engrossed, but for parents and reviewers, it was more of a struggle.

It makes an unsettling case that America is fast becoming the thing it professes to hate.

This delightful piece of whimsy uses its simple premise effectively to gain and keep our attention and to remind us simply that, while this world appears ordinary, it is still unbounded by reality.

Jacob's Ladder is also undeniably spooky. It creates and maintains a mood of paranoia, its special visual effects are original and nightmarish, and it has at least three sequences as haunting as anything I've seen in some time. [2 Nov 1990, p.9]

But the movie soars as docudrama. Niccol's model seems to have been Scorsese's "GoodFellas" and, like that film, the blitzkrieg of images and rapid-fire narration takes us on a breathtaking inside tour of a scary world. It's an extraordinary expose.

That play has made it to the big screen, but it has come so late in the moribund body-switching comedy cycle that it seems like a tired cliche, and a big-budget production and star cast just can't seem to breathe any life into it. [10 Jul 1992]

Roman Polanski's English-language film released internationally two years ago also lays claim to being a kinky sex comedy, but the sex is predictably darker, and the laughs few and far between. [18 Mar 1994]

Even if you know or care little about the sport, it's a fascinating saga.

Takes itself awfully seriously. It feels a bit like a grudge piece, laboring to grasp at large themes, but it is as trivialized as the capricious world it explores.

Without the saving grace of comedy, Martin's natural abrasiveness is off-putting, and he just doesn't have the stuff of a romantic lead.

The movie is flawed and doesn't completely come off as a convincing biography, but its heart is in the right place, it has moments of poignancy and power, and it makes a pleasant change of pace for a genre that essentially has become a cry of despair.

Never quite rises above its one-joke situation.

A good-faith effort, if not completely successful.

A rousing and gently inspirational story of an underclass kid made good, but it's in those cultural glimpses that the film shines.

A mix of H.P. Lovecraft madness, David Cronenberg biological mutation and David Lynch small-town weirdness, it teasingly dangles explanations never delivered and escapes never sought, while diving into one of the most gonzo horrors to twist onto celluloid in years.

All told, this thing has to be one of the dullest caper movies ever made.

Provided you don't take it seriously, it makes for an addictively entertaining diversion that's as hard to stop watching as the books are to stop reading.

Deepened by the socioeconomic undercurrent that suggests the lengths to which workers are forced to prostitute themselves to survive corporate downsizing.

The real joy here is the performance of Jean Dujardin, who, besides being very funny as the Gallic Maxwell Smart, is also enormously charismatic and is made to look uncannily (and I do mean uncannily) like the young Sean Connery of "Dr. No" and "Goldfinger."

A clumsy, heavy-handed and unnecessarily sordid occult thriller that somehow has managed to generate a big pre-release buzz.