Groove offers the most wholesome vision of orgiastic oneness imaginable -- it's a raver's version of "The Love Boat."

Unfathomably awful.

At his best (Woo)'s too promiscuous with the slow motion; and once those doves start fluttering in he enters a new dimension in self-parody.

Sour and mostly feeble, with a depressingly curdled worldview. It bears no resemblance to Allen's surreal, open-ended comedies.

This isn't an objectionable movie, just a mild, obvious, and rather limp one, with plenty of little jolts but no ejaculatory payoff.

A picture that will be hailed without controversy as the worst of its kind ever made.

A marvelous feat of re-imagination.

Gladiator's combination of grim sanctimony and drenching, Dolby-ized dismemberings left me appalled.

A slick, not-too-thoughtful love story.

Nearly perfect for what it is.

Duchovny is rather endearing and Driver's absolutely enchanting.

Gleefully pushes everyone's buttons...and that manages to exploit our own racial discomfort and envy in ways that leave us hungry for more.

It's almost criminal the way the central relationship of High Fidelity has been left such a void.

Roberts has her most galvanic role, and she's sensationally appealing.

He does gorgeous work, but in Mission to Mars he's only going through the motions.

Garry Shandling is poignant and hilarious as an alien stud.

Am I the only one who finds the substance of this movie repulsive?

The script plays goofy games, stopping the action for Tarantino-style small talk; piling on alternate, "Rashomon"-style flashbacks; and divulging its characters' secrets in no particular order.

Material so utterly conventional that you can predict every plot turn after the first half-hour.

Quite pleasant.

The picture is an empty parlor trick, but it's carried out with a master's concentration.

A second-rate but bearable black comedy.

If Boiler Room isn't an especially challenging movie, it's still a damn good melodrama -- a boilermaker.

Monumentally unimaginative. Thumbs down!

A grave screwball comedy. Its gags aren't just hilarious -- they have a weighty, plaintive soul.

A lot more fun than "Blair Witch," and it's more relaxed and goofy than its two predecessors -- a farcical bloodbath.

It used to be that Midler was a life force, but whenever she tries to play one, she looks like she's floating in formaldehyde.

The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice.

Matt Damon can't quite piece together a compelling poseur.

Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?

I bet that what Carrey saw from inside Kaufman's head would be more illuminating than anything in the movie.

A monument to process -- to the minutiae of making art -- Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless.

Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion.

Superficially respectful but ultimately cruel.

A religious conspiracy disguised as a romance.

Occasionally dissonant, but it's remarkably cleareyed.

Unexpectedly delectable.

Tumbleweeds is gorgeously nuanced.

Corny, predictable, and packed with gay stereotypes.

The movie is better than you've heard, although that's not saying a lot.

A ferocious yet lyrical piece of filmmaking--an enchanted bloodbath.

Even though the film is full of laughs, the jokes hover on the edge of the abyss: This is a world in which lurid colors and extravagant gestures are means of filling the void.

I think Levinson missed a chance to get something unique and audacious on screen.

The first truly countercultural apocalypse fantasy.

Apart from a few choice flashbacks, the action is crawlingly linear--and opaque.

Milla Jovovich is not quite up to the task of playing a nuanced and thoughtful Joan.

Singer Usher Raymond earns praise as the leader of the group, but the rest of the cast goes largely unnoticed.

Throughout this terse, entertaining parable (it won the grand prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival), the Belgian-born writer-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne ("La Promesse," 1996) immerse you in the sensations of Rosetta's life.

A piece of exploitive schlock.

A big, overlong, and rather unwieldy piece of storytelling, but the story it has to tell is so vital that it cuts through all the dramaturgical muddiness. It's a terrific muckraking melodrama--it will get people fuming.

As I watched American Movie, a lot of it struck me as untranscendent misery. But in hindsight it seems less hopeless.

The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag.

It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away

Everything I've ever dreamed of in a crazy comedy. It's close to pure farce, yet its laughs are grounded in loneliness, impotence, self-loathing, and that most discomfiting of vices to dramatize: envy. The action is surreal, the emotions are violently real.

The world didn't need a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. We didn't need it, but we got it anyway -- and it's pretty terrific.

One of those half-straight, half-spoof comic-book extravaganzas that don't ever work, and what's neat is that this one does--beautifully.

Ultimately, it has less in common with "Blair Witch" than with such quivering lumps of sentiment as "Ghost" and Field of Dreams."

Once the premise had been established and the leads began to interact, I stopped totting up the inanities and had a good time.

A somnolent load of wank.

No part of us is allowed to relax. Ever.

Spike Lee is a virtuoso filmmaker, a wizard at selling a sequence, but he'll never make an entirely coherent movie until he learns to go deeper into his subjects instead of wider with them.

This isn't just the most riotously inventive movie of the year, it's the raunch anthem of the age.

The movie is a collision between inspiration and tastelessness, between the defiantly quirky and the wholesomely homogenized. I hated it in principle--I hate most modern Disney cartoons--but adored a good deal of it in practice.

It's both fractured and fluid, with a helter-skelter syntax and a ceaselessly infectious backbeat. Beyond that, it's a blast.

The movie is diverting enough -- it's good fun -- but much of the genius is gone with the wind.

Better than anyone dared hope: bigger, more inventive, and more frolicsome than its predecessor, with a grab bag of scatological gags that are almost as riotous when you think back on them.

The more subversive Instinct gets in proclaiming free will an illusion fostered by a rigidly repressive society, the more captive it seems to a rigidly repressive studio marketing department.

A brainy weave of satire and fantasy.

Much of it is risible, yet I loved watching it -not because I thought that the emperor was wearing new clothes but because I thought he looked fine - beautiful, actually - naked. Figgis' camera is probing and alive, so that even when his meanings are laughable, his images remain allusive and mysterious.

George Lucas does it his way in the pallid Phantom Menace. Even cultists will wish he'd hired a director and some writers.

Hoffman has wedged the play into a weirdly inapposite setting, has stupidly cut and even more stupidly embellished it, and has miscast it almost to a player. And yet the damn thing works: Shakespeare staggers through, mutilated but triumphant.

There isn't a mummy at the center of The Mummy, exactly, but a mutating Industrial Light and Magic Special Effect.

With its featherweight premise, casually amoral heroes, and exotic locales, it conjures up an era (the '60s and '70s) when twisty, romantic heist pictures were routinely ground out as tax shelters.

Beat by beat, Mamet turns out an immaculately staged, crisply paced, and elegantly acted movie. It's also a tad bloodless, but you can't have everything.

The performances are so terrible that it's hard to know whether Cronenberg wants to signal that much of what we're seeing isn't "real" or he has just forgotten how to write for hemoglobular flesh vessels--i.e., human beings.

American satire rarely comes more winning than Election, an exuberantly caustic comedy that shows the symbiotic relationship between political go-get-'em-ism and moral backsliding.

It demands to be seen, for Drew Barrymore, who is at once the dizziest and most magically poised comedienne in movies today.

While it's true that you can't pack as much psychological detail into a movie as you can into a novel, director Philip Saville and screenwriter Adrian Hodges bring out the yeasty subtext of even the most brittle encounters.

It's the work of an old master summing up. It sure feels that way. The screenwriter, Anne Rapp, has provided Altman with a blueprint not only for an ensemble comedy but also for a comedy that honors the very idea of an ensemble. It's no wonder Altman fell on it.

One of the more lyrical sci-fi action thrillers ever made, in which space and time become love slaves to the directors' witty visual fancies.

The elements in A Walk on the Moon, which is directed by the actor Tony Goldwyn (the bad guy in "Ghost") and written by Pamela Gray, feel miraculously right.

Howard and his writers are so in love with their own hip self-consciousness that it's a wonder they don't feature film critics discussing their movie.

I'd like to recommend it, but it's too silly. On the plus side, it's ravishingly well directed by Antonia Bird.

Sporadically funny but uneasily revisionist screwball comedy.

True Crime gives you sleaze on toast--a heap of tabloid bathos, a dusting of high-mindedness, a dash of gallows humor. It's a bizarre concoction, but it's riveting.

I'm genuinely of two minds about the picture. I want to say it's subtle, but I also want to say it's heavy-handed. I want to say it's incisive, but I have too many problems with its psychological elisions to let it off the hook.

Its structure is repetitive, but each scene begins with a joyous blast of comic energy...A hoot.

The laborious title of an even more laborious Cockney action movie that some people think is the cat's pajamas crossbred with the bee's knees.

I wouldn't exactly call it entertainment; I found myself wanting to apologize on behalf of obnoxious heterosexual Jewish men the world over.

The moral contortions of 8MM seem especially bogus, a sadomasochistic peep show booth pretending to be a confessional.

It's on the verge of being really good...his narrative peters out without a decent payoff. It's a testament to the rage and anxieties that he has brilliantly tapped into that he can't get away with a subdued conflagration and a lame twist at the end.

At its best, the movie evokes that blend of thrill and terror that comes from mixing two chemicals together without being sure that an instant later you'll still be standing there in one piece.

Plays like an inflated Harlequin romance.

The only moments of conviction come from an Asian-American dominatrix called Pearl (Lucy Liu), who brings far more glee to the task of beating people up than the picture's star or director. If the audience could have half as much fun as Pearl is having, Payback would be a kick.

No movie in the last decade has succeeded in psyching out critics and audiences as fully as the powerful, rambling war epic The Thin Red Line.

An affectless piece of moviemaking.

As drama, Hilary and Jackie is merely sketchy and superficial. As a portrait of the artist, it's puritanical crap.

A sturdy piece of work, an old-fashioned conversion narrative with some high-tech zip.