If not cinema magic, The Dinner Game is still a workable screwball comedy.

It is ironic that the core audience for Chop Shop is that very crowd that has recently taken steps to redevelop the Iron Triangle into something more Manhattan-friendly.

The film plays like a Hollywood-influenced Japanese samurai movie, though nothing as subtle as Kurosawa's best, and with white subtitles that often are hard to read against the white of the Gobi.

A sweet-spirited, extremely well-cast little comedy.

As good as it is in many ways, the film is not as emotionally gripping as it should be, and comes off as a rather predictable liberal statement.

As a revenge thriller, the movie is serviceable, but it doesn't really deliver the delicious guilty pleasure of the better film versions.

It's a chillingly cautionary tale. Less an anti-war than a pro-order film, it tells us that the veneer of civilization is paper thin.

A foreign film feel despite its strong American cast.

Undeniably riveting.

This new version has absolutely none of the distinctive tongue-in-cheek black humor that was the keynote of its model and the trademark of its original director, Paul Bartel.

Though he tries hard for bravado, hero Edward Burns is terminally wooden.

Who was Bettie Page? You won't find out in Mary Harron's chirpily cheery chronicle.

The texture of Manic feels honest and the chemistry of the kids is well observed, but even the modest breakthroughs are dramatic conventions that favor the symbolic over the genuine.

Most Bond parodies tend to flatten because they fail to evoke the production design overkill and slick cinematic style of its target. Johnny English is no different. Director Peter Howitt delivers action like a journeyman, but Atkinson saves him time and again.

It's well-plotted, acted with a charismatic flair and right on the zeitgeist.

Offers nothing new. It's actually one of Polanski's more conventional films and, ultimately, it's hard to recommend it with a clear conscience.

The first two-thirds of the movie are a kind of stumbling relationship drama, but the last third segues into a spooky feast of torture, mutilation and murder.

Great fun, but it's just a tad this side of being overproduced.

This "Moreau" is also a pretty creepy affair - at least through its first two acts. Director John Frankenheimer, who is responsible for some of the most chilling thrillers in American film history ("The Manchurian Candidate," "Seconds") certainly knows a thing or two about building a menacing, suspenseful situation. [23 Aug 1996]

The mayhem is presented sparingly enough to be suspenseful, some of the sequences are genuinely terrifying and, compared with Hollywood's last zombie movie, the Robert Rodriguez half of "Grindhouse," it's a masterpiece.

Though an uneven, often confused, mixed bag -- the movie gradually comes together to be a fairly hilarious inside-Hollywood farce.

Has a certain morbid fascination, but it has no real bite, and finally seems so contrived and pointless it borders on being out-and-out exploitation.

Yet for a film so affectingly steeped in loss, resignation and the ghosts of memory, the revelation that pulls it all together, while satisfying and even touching, lacks emotional resonance.

A thoughtful and often evocative drama of identity and assimilation, but she leaves Nazneen so cocooned in her protective shell of disconnection that we can't connect emotionally.

Much of the film is funny and alive.

The film is genuinely good-natured and kids -- particularly the ones who actually do this sort of stuff to worms -- will enjoy it and may even take the movie's loose morals to heart.

[Jarmusch] seems...to introduce gratuitous bloodshed that is out of sync with the engaging, offbeat tempo and dark, comedic moral fable that has come before.

The movie is frequently hilarious, and, for a first feature, Cundieff has done a remarkably accomplished job of directing. Without trying very hard, it also manages to lay out some of the absurdity of the white-hating-paranoid/macho sensibility of rap culture. [17 Jun 1994]