Boorman pays a price for his neutrality: The General isn't an emotional grabber. But on its own terms it's nearly perfect. The magic is there but below the surface.

The movie is a passable entertainment -- call it The Half Monty.

I found the movie cheap, muddled, and thoroughly devoid of insight.

Is Brad Pitt the worst actor on earth? The case could be made, and Meet Joe Black could serve as Exhibit A.

The movie's approach makes for juicy melodrama.

Haynes sets out to demonstrate the power of popular music to change people's lives--to tell them it's OK to fashion themselves into anything they please.

Psychologically thin, artistically flabby, and symbolically opaque.

It's a testament to Norton's utter immersion in the role that he can even halfway connect the dots between this fundamentally sweet, brainy kid and the magnetic, white trash monster who'll haunt our minds long after the movie's liberal pieties fade into static.

Living Out Loud becomes an ode to openness, to letting in everything that the world throws at you.

Benigni's movie made me want to throw up.

An aching roundelay, a triumphantly benumbed ensemble farce that mingles condescension and compassion in a manner that's disarmingly--and often upsettingly--original.

Weds an epic, sometimes visionary, depiction of the afterlife to a script and story with fewer psychological layers than the average Hallmark card.

The film, smoothly directed by David Dobkin, has a neat farcical structure but is too in love with its overly tight-lipped protagonist and deadpan pacing.

It has a gritty feel and a tight, methodical, one-thing-after-another tempo.

Pecker is a breezy, agreeable picture--a charmer, thumbs-up, three stars--but there's something disappointing about a John Waters film that's so evenhanded and all-embracing, even if its sunniness is "ironic."

The first real Jackie Chan picture crafted for the American market, is a terrific piece of junk filmmaking.

The movie's themes are enormously resonant, which makes its doddering tastefulness that much more frustrating.

Because I'm a sucker--I was entertained...The script is good at making you think that it has better cards than it really does. And the actors constitute a royal flush--OK, OK, enough with the poker metaphors.

There's something reassuring about the fact that The Avengers is so rotten: proof yet again that people with piles of money can hire wizard production designers but can't fake class.

The Slums of Beverly Hills never gels, but it has a likable spirit, and it's exceedingly easy on the eye, with lots of pretty girls and wry evocations of '70s fashions and decor.

Return to Paradise doesn't boast many surprises. It's straight-on, morally uncomplicated. Emotionally, though, it's dense and twisty -- and smashingly potent.

A thriller of serpentine excitement all the way up to that dud of a climax.

What Steven Spielberg has accomplished in Saving Private Ryan is to make violence terrible again.

Lyne has created, from a screenplay by Stephen Schiff, an earnest movie about a man who, by falling in love with his emotionally immature stepdaughter, ends up destroying himself.

Even when you're able to guess the next calamity, it's still a shock in its ejaculatory intensity. The Farrellys never throw in the towel. Pretentious Sundance independents could learn a lot from such pistols.

This is very much a first feature, with all the hyperbolic, sometimes indiscriminate cinematic energy of a student film. But it's also sensational, a febrile meditation on the mathematics of existence.

Armageddon is awesome, dude, but it's, like, short on awe.

Gallo’s movie is terrific, an original and disarming vision of a life that's all skids.

Soderbergh contrives the perfect voice for Leonard's prose--laid-back and grooving when it needs to be, but also taut, with the eerie foreboding of violence about to erupt.

The X-Files isn't so much a bad movie as it is a crackerjack piece of television. It's crisply made--not sodden like many of the "Star Trek" pictures. But it's as annoyingly open-ended as the rest of the series' episodes.

A sharp-witted, visually layered, gorgeously designed, meticulously directed piece of formula pablum.

It has been sexed up, opened out, and finished off with a disappointing bang-bang climax, but it's still good fun.

This is a rhythmless, stupefying work. A person with no discernible pulse ought not to be directing a movie about disco.

A truly unformulaic comedy of lust and greed, a farce that seems to write itself, slap-happily, as it goes along.

The film has a kamikaze comic spirit that's spectacularly disarming.

Size really is about all that this tedious, underpopulated beanbag of an epic has going for it.

Uneven, ludicrous, but--oh man!--fun to watch.

That neither tale is especially interesting doesn't matter -- the contrast alone is enough to make Sliding Doors an irresistible romantic fantasy.

The movie becomes more and more lugubrious, finally ending on a note of high-tragic operatic bathos.

The film that Nicholas Hytner has directed (from a screenplay by the playwright Wendy Wasserstein) is slick, sweet, and disastrously unmoving -- even people who live to cry at the movies will find themselves depressingly dry-eyed.

I found it so oppressively smug that I had to get up and pace the aisles three or four times, and I'd have bolted if I hadn't been duty bound to stick it out.

Thoroughly second-rate -- which is to say that it waddles when it ought to whiz, clanks when it strives for cornball poetry, and transforms its august stars into something akin to a manic dinner-theater troupe.

The great flaw in most of the Coens' work is, surprisingly, an inability to sustain a plot over a two-hour span.

First-time director Richard Kwietniowski has fun with the collision of high and low culture, and he does elegant work.

Hong Kong action fans hoping for spontaneous combustion from the American debut of superstar Chow Yun-Fat might want to turn their weapons on the producers.

Fluid and lyrical and thoroughly transporting.

A fascinatingly strange and chaotic ballet set to familiar noir motifs.

This is ho-hum, straight-to-video material. And yet, even at its most crawlingly linear, Jackie Brown is diverting. If nothing else, I was diverted by the director's gall at stretching out those vacuous scenes.

The music ties together all the pretty pictures, gives the narrative some momentum, and helps to induce a kind of alert detachment, so that you're neither especially interested nor especially bored. Perhaps that's a state of Buddhist enlightenment.

Cameron has never been known for his dialogue, but Titanic carries some stinkers that wouldn't make the final draft of a "Days of Our Lives" script.

The fact that Duvall gives such a glorious performance in The Apostle is likely to distract people from the fact that he has also written and directed a glorious movie--the most vivid and radiantly made of 1997.

The film is smutty-mouthed and jumpy and free-associative, and Allen does everything but hurl his feces at the audience. The result is more rambunctious--and more fun--than any movie he has made in years.

After an electrifyingly feral opening, the movie settles down into a cogent courtroom drama, with no real cinematic highs but no jaw-dropping lows, either.

Even with her stinko lines, Weaver has never been as flabbergastingly gorgeous and charismatic. She's tall and lean and meteor-hard, and you can almost believe there's really acid in her blood, and that no alien in its right mind would mess with her.

Throughout the film Egoyan's affectlessness has been whispering to us that life is a puzzle without a solution. The price for this lesson is that his characters seem like mere pieces in that puzzle.

Michael Caton-Jones' pompous and coarsely stupid inflation of what remains a superior thriller, Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal (1973).

The movie is a modern facsimile of the potboilers James transfigured. A great movie may yet be made of James, but it will have to be done by someone who has read him.

But there are scenery chewers and there are Michelin-gourmet scenery chewers, and Pacino has a three-star feast.

Anderson is young enough to be post-hip and post-ironic, if such terms are possible.

The only surprise about U-Turn is the good reviews it got from people who should know better.

Lee views these mortal fools with a sorrowful detachment. He's a sort of clinical humanist, editorializing only by what he leaves out. The downside of this method is its impersonality, which limits our involvement. The upside is its lack of cheap sentiment, and its clarity.

That rare mainstream cop thriller that refuses to telegraph its outcome in the first 15 minutes or, for much of its running time, to tell you how to feel about its protagonists.

Has spasms of silliness that thaw things out delightfully. Davis plays Vartan's girlfriend as an irrepressible, sexed-up brat, and gives every line a little hop, skip, and jump.

People who dismiss Moore and G.I. Jane out of hand are wrong, because she makes a memorably tough heroine and the movie is solid fun, even, in places, quite intelligent.

It's formulaic, but it sticks to a classic Western formula instead of a cartoonish blockbuster one.

The laughs are fuller when they're rooted in authentic desperation, and the premise is yeasty enough to keep the film from sinking into facile hopelessness.

A dazzling, repellent exercise in which the case against men is closed before it's opened.

There's not a single thing about Air Force One to recommend, except perhaps the controlled performance of Glenn Close, who does remarkably well as the recipient of several phone calls from the sky.

Star Maps reveals its larger (and less interesting) social intentions with a downbeat, slap-in-the-face finale, but along the way it has some good domestic grotesquerie and a layered, ironic attitude toward sex.

When Contact finally comes alive, it leaves you frightened and thrilled and emotionally overwrought, as only a child can be. The rest is pandering.

The smartest, funniest, and best-looking sci-fi comedy since the movies learned to morph.

Face/Off is such a blast that at times I forgot I was watching a John Woo movie.

It has none of the minor virtues of Schumacher's other films. It looks bad: cluttered surfaces, production design reminiscent of overblown Broadway musicals, editing too fast for the eye to catch up, poor staging of fast action.

Nunez's movies go places, but with no acceleration.

Con Air is boring to the marrow.

It would be imprecise to say that the thrill is gone, because The Lost World recovers from its turgid opening and comes to life, or does so in spasms.

It may or may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is one of the most unhinged.

An overpraised yet amusing satire.

Volcano is just another $100 million genre movie, and a pretty lousy one, to boot.

It's alert to its characters' constantly evolving desires in ways that high- and low-culture movies, with their strict aesthetics or their mass-market formulas, tend not to be.

The film is too metronomically paced for Kilmer's routines to develop any rhythm. The direction by Phillip Noyce is fluid but impersonal. Endless studio tinkering seems to have dissolved its spine.

ark delivers an abstract exercise in style, a movie so dissociated from any recognizable human emotion or behavior that its actors come to seem like animatronics... I’m bored writing about it.

The film features plot turns of howling implausibility, leading up to a mechanical climax that resolves the story without forcing either of the principal characters to make the uncommercial decision to blow the other away.

The new movie of Selena's life ponderously carves each element of the myth in stone, as if this 23-year-old were a bust to be included on Mount Rushmore.

For a filmmaker who in Videodrome and Dead Ringers so elegantly broached the unspeakable, Cronenberg has here made a picture that is all surface.

Private Parts is so riotous that you almost don't remember how unfunny Stern can be on his radio show.

It's hard to think of another American film with this range of moods: satirical, sometimes hilarious, yet suffused with a sense of loss and riddled with the kind of violence that makes you recoil and lean forward simultaneously.

Lost Highway, David Lynch's first movie in five years, is a virtuoso symphony of bad vibes.

The talk sounds a little canned – an adult's foggy reconstruction of what it was like to hang out – but, for a while, Linklater is able to extract odd momentary glances and giggles from the actors to freshen it up.

Amounts to a pantheistic love-in: "A Fish Called Wanda" for vegetarians.

In Mother, Brooks has essentially made the missing psychiatrist scene of Modern Romance into a feature. There’s no doctor, mind you, and the character’s string of failed marriages is barely dramatized. But the thrust of the film is frankly therapeutic.

Movie audiences today may want a little more, and the fundamental problem with the movie is that there is nothing in the story, as Rice and Lloyd Webber have designed it, to engage our feelings.

A surprisingly fresh didactic comedy that preaches the hollowness of glamour and status and the American cult of winning.

The acting of this central trio is brilliant, in part because the crisscrossing of these and other stories and the gorgeous backdrops take some of the weight off: The characters are free to be flawed without losing our interest.

Right from the opening shot of Breaking the Waves...von Trier seems to be looking for the first time at life, not just the movies.

It may be the most visually imaginative Shakespeare film since Akira Kurosawa's "Ran", and certainly one of the more operatic Hollywood creations of recent years.

Leigh at his best is a renderer of moments--the wisest and deepest observer, probably, among living directors.

In Last Man Standing, we don’t much care; Hill is too busy crafting a classic to pull us in. Apart from those high-impact action scenes, he leeches the movie of immediacy.