It's hard to know what to make of the thing, though it has a sleazy charm, it's never boring and it goes a certain distance on Samuel L. Jackson's conviction.

And who would have guessed that, in this age of excess and one-upmanship, when bigger is always better, the year's most romantic screen kiss would last a mere two seconds.

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.

This vampire story is as soulless as they get.

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

It would have made for a cool fictional thriller, but The Mothman Prophecies' attempt to stick to true-life roots paralyzes it from being satisfying. It gives you the tingles all right, but they won't follow you out of the theater.

Not simply a coming-out story but a journey into the conflicted androgyny of early adolescence.

Ultimately, the script lacks the ambiguity, irony and heartfelt emotion that would make the conversion of a dozen hardened criminals very credible, and -- despite its obvious good intentions -- the movie seems pat, simplistic and slightly phony.

Bullock has abandoned all her usual cutesy mannerisms, and Reeves is as low-key and convincing as he's been in a role. Whatever else the film is, it's a competent and enjoyable star vehicle.

A heady, impressionistic mixture of biography, fantasy and social history in which it isn't always clear which is which.

Most of its characters come off as being one-dimensional and stereotypical, and the film's sensibility leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.

A low-maintenance crowd-pleaser, but we've seen the entire film, in thematic snippets, before.

It's an extraordinary feat of animation, possibly the most lovingly conceived, uncompromisingly executed and totally successful animated film since "The Lion King."

Another slyly intelligent, extremely funny comedy of character that blazes new thematic trails and provides an irresistible showcase for its stars, Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn. [12 June 1992]

The film half-heartedly paints their actions as rebel-chic heroism even when it has all the integrity of tomcats spraying outside their yards, and it ends up just as confused as the characters.

Almost 30 years later, it's just as primal.

Predictable and surprisingly confusing in its ultimate message.

Ultimately the ballet performances, and notably the work of Stiefel, a star with American Ballet Theatre, are the only moments that deserve center stage.

The film wants to be "The English Patient" but doesn't have the elements that made that film a classic: sensitivity, perfect casting, a unique visual style and, underlying its grand action romance, a stubborn sense of honesty.

An often trying and not wholly successful but highly ambitious and ultimately rewarding mental-institution movie that strongly echoes the 1966 classic of the genre, "King of Hearts."

It all feels false and calculated, an overearnest attempt to find old-fashioned romantic innocence in the modern world by someone too jaded to believe.

A familiar but rewarding little parable.

Salles tends to explain rather than suggest, but he connects with the anguish and abandonment to give this ghost story an emotionally haunting core.

In the end, there's also something distinctly distasteful about a movie in which the central figure casts himself as noble martyr while character-assassinating his parents.

Director Wayne Wang stumbles through the awkward script without finding its shape or its tone, steering it toward maturity while the script falls back into slapstick sports gags and adolescent social politics.

If Laurence Fishburne could only have harnessed his fierce performance to drive his directoral debut, Once in the Life might have made something memorable of the done-to-death tale of small-time crooks on the run after a heist gone wrong.

A rarity: A fun, entertaining 'G' movie.

For the most part the eruption of repressed anger is blindly destructive. There's little healing to be found in the bitter melodrama, but there is a small sense of triumph as the children face up and move on.