The difficulty with the film starts with the amount of improbability one must swallow. [24 Dec. 1998, p.D10]

This is filmmaking as a minor feat of engineering, the kind where even the gossamer emotions seem like prefab components -- charm, whimsy, serendipity, all so many discs plugged into the hard drive.

Certainly spectacular -- an elaborately designed combination of animation and computer-generated imagery -- but at times it's a spectacular bore.

But the stuff looks like what it is -- trite imagery grafted over the narrative barrens, like a bad weave on a balding pate.

The whole ensemble has a hoot with this material, and their joy is contagious.

One of the most original, good-hearted comedies in a long time, Rushmore is the sort of movie where the strangest sequences of discords somehow keep managing to reach giddily improbable resolutions.

Rather than build on the new momentum, this one's a bit more of a cruise-control effort.

Parents should find the warm-and-fuzzy sentiments of the movie tolerable, mostly thanks to the reliable star, Michael Keaton. [11 Dec 1998, p.C3]

Ultimately, Little Voice comes to us from an indeterminate place that is no longer the theatre but not quite the movies. Let's call it music videoland -- best just to sit back and enjoy golden-oldie tunes belted out by a quicksilver mimic.

In the shock department, the ante has been upped, way up, and a mere kitchen knife through a shower curtain just doesn't cut it any more.

In a movie about an ant colony, perhaps it's futile to complain about a superfluity of characters. Yet this need to cover every permutation of cuteness is one major drawback to the cast of A Bug's Life.

In an era when the words "President" and "penis" can occupy the same sentence and prompt nothing but yawns, this picture actually manages to surprise, to startle, yes, to administer a series of small but genuine shocks.

A twisted, but not particularly clever, black comedy.

There's a lot to like in this film. As in the original, it has more than a few echoes of Animal Farm in its portrayal of humanity as the exploiter species. It respects both its child audience, by permitting Babe and his sunny decency to win out, and its adult audience, by generating more wit than the average dozen Hollywood films.

The wonder is that the cast -- a terrific ensemble with talents honed on such hallowed stages as the Abbey Theatre -- brings it off with far more verve than the slight tale deserves.

Easily among the top 10 films made last year.

It would be easy to dismiss Celebrity as merely a wafer-thin picture about the wafer-thinness of our narcissistic culture. But the truth is shallower and even less engaging -- this flick should have been called “Unpleasantville.”

All this is engrossing. Stylistically and visually, Villeneuve flashes his talent to draw us in. However, narratively and thematically, he seems to be cheating. [18 Dec 1998, p.D10]

Ultimately, the movie is a perfect mirror of its star -- looks great, seems empty.

A lazy, hasty effort that offers little beyond a few jack-in-the-box startles and a high body count, including Hewitt's bouncing about in a shirt half-unbuttoned over a bikini top.

Bad history it may be, but Elizabeth is a movie that makes you want more, as it plays to the myth of history's great actress-monarch, a character who puts today's tinselly political heros and heroines (royal and not), to shame.

This is a dumb action flick that pretends to have a brain, a spot of affectation that plunges the audience into double jeopardy -- forcing us to traipse through not just the standard litter of bloody corpses but (oh, damn) the added trash of bloodless ideas.

The movie is dramatically limp, running out of narrative steam long before the set decorator runs out of colours.

As a satire on the only true religion of the American South -- football -- The Waterboy is a delight.

As a portrait of a deliciously eccentric individual, Gods and Monsters features a vivid performance from Ian McKellen that makes you think not of James Whale but of Ian McKellen.

Excellent in flashes, unintentionally absurd and lead-footed at other moments, the movie stumbles under the weight of its own grandiose intentions.

So why does the thing play like a mediocre sitcom stripped of its laugh-track?

Crude, rude, nasty fun.

Ultimately, Benigni's comic refinery merely transforms the banality of evil into a lesser sin -- the evil of banality.

Delightful as it often is, the picture suffers fom the same structural and thematic tidiness, even smugness, that it nominally opposes.

No matter how you judge it -- as a strict morality play or simply a psychological thriller -- Apt Pupil just doesn't make the grade.

Pretty limp, and works far better in theory than practice.

The Last Days' major flaw, perhaps, is its conventionality: It takes us over the same horrific ground in the usual way. The shock is familiar. [26 Mar 1999, p.C6]

It's not the subject matter itself that's offensive -- pedophilia is as worthy a topic of investigation as any other. Instead, it's the subject's non-treatment -- we don't learn a thing that rings true.

Jonathan Demme's potent adaptation of Morrison's novel may be substantial, but it is also engrossing, a movie that plays at times like a combination of “Gone With The Wind” and “The Exorcist.”

With the performers given zilch to perform, the result is a picture that's all chassis and no engine, or, in the parlance of the genre, a bunch of pointy hats in search of a transporting broomstick.

By far the most horrifying moment in the horror film Bride of Chucky comes at the end, when you look at your watch and realize you're 90 minutes older than when the movie began. Beyond that, it's pretty much what you'd expect of a film about two killer dolls on the lam, racing from Niagara Falls to New Jersey with carnage, voodoo and Martha Stewart on their minds. [19 Oct 1998]

Holy Man sure isn't raucous; instead, in the main, it's just quietly unamusing.

Slam is a film about rap poetry, romance and gangster culture that blends melodrama, visceral excitement -- and a lot of preaching. [23 Oct 1998, p.D3]

This witty, star-packed and visually splendid kids' movie provides a small-is-beautiful message served on a parodoxically epic scale.

Too bad. What dreams may come, indeed, when such enticing foreplay ends with a consummation devoutly to be missed.

Where it stumbles is in the script by Matt Healy, which is often clever, but never quite takes hold.

What an impeccably crafted film this is -- slightly impoverished in theme, perhaps, but so rich everywhere else that it seems rude to notice.

Like Frankenstein's monster before the lightning strikes, it's all recycled cold flesh and bolts, without a twitch of originality.

It's a turning-the-tables story a five-year-old could appreciate -- except for the confusing crowd scenes and haphazard camera work. Technically speaking, Waters' skills haven't improved much over the years.

Thrown into exalted company, Zellweger easily holds her own in the film's most difficult role.

If the movie is essentially a study of a loving family, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is hampered by extraneous scenes that are simply self-indulgent on the director's part.

Permanent Midnight is a slick, entertaining, show-biz saga whose worst fault may be that it has a happy ending. Stahl has not only recovered from debauchery, he's making a ton of cash with his book and the movie. In fact, this may be as quintessential a morality tale for the nineties as the Monica Lewinsky story. [25 Sep 1998, p.D9]

Though it's a good-looking flick with some smart acting and a few flashy runs, it barely breaks even dramatically, and feels, overall, like a good chance wasted.

This is a film whose sunny and insipid storytelling style is at odds with its material.

With its confined setting and its existential predicament, the picture owes an ostensible debt to the likes of Pinter and Kafka and Pirandello -- you know, Six Characters in Search of an Author, or, failing that, just getting the hell out of this weird place.

There's a line near the end of Without Limits that's meant to sum up the tragic flaw of the movie's hero: "He insisted on holding himself to a higher standard than victory." The same might be said of the movie itself, which refuses to adhere to the basic success formula of the sports bio-pic -- the familiar arc that moves from early success through character-forming struggle to eventual triumph. [25 Sep 1998, p.D9]

The plot is as incomprehensible as the dubbing and many of the special effects are neither special nor effective.

There are easily 54 reasons to dis 54, but let's start and finish with the obvious: The script plays like a proud offering from the lead hand at the Cliché Factory.

Blade doesn't manage to work up a whole lot of suspense.

The characters in Wonderland show an intelligent complexity and sharpness of contemporary observation that transcends romantic-comedy clichés.

It is superbly executed and, for all its pitilessness, it's an intelligent dramatization of the impact that consumerist values have had on the psyche of the North American middle class at the end of the 20th century.

The product of a first-time director and writers who have no sense of scene structure or shape, or even a discernible sense of humour.

The incomprehensible leads to the inexplicable which ends in the indecipherable.

There's an alchemy that can transform personal experience into a great film, but it was nowhere nearby when Tamara Jenkins wrote and directed this lacklustre first feature.

The movie meanders on and on, like a bad sexual dream, until you finally wake up mumbling: Stella, please: leave that groove thang alone.

As returns go, Return To Paradise falls short of heavenly, but it does get to the stars -- at least three of them.

Great pictures are seamless; in this one, you can not only see the seams but count the stitches.

Steve Miner is no Carpenter. A directing veteran of the Friday the 13th saga (parts II and III, in case you care), he's a plodder who favours long, dull buildups to short, dull climaxes -- it's slaughter by the numbers.

The pop-culture answer to a murder-suicide, the kind of flick that serves itself up as the object of its own satire.

Well, I didn't exactly leave the theatre barefoot, but there's a lot to like here -- the result is pretty darn cute and hardly ever cloying.

Once again, then, impeccable visual detail and uniformly strong performances combine to create a polished, if slightly airless, result. [14 Aug 1998]

It's an enjoyable film, carried along by the perennial strength of the story... But it won't have the staying power of the original.

From the film's bravura opening scene to its cute but bloody conclusion, The Negotiator plays out as tautly as any crowd-pleasing action flick since Die Hard,which it emulates with shameless glee.

A horror movie based on history, offering some of the most spectacularly brutal, viscerally intense battle scenes ever brought to a Hollywood movie.

The return to an Errol Flynn-style hero, who can swing from chandeliers, fight with two swords at once and ride a horse backward, recalls a movie era both sexier and more innocent.

There are several scenes in There's Something About Mary that are so absurdly original and outrageous they will leave audiences talking about them for weeks.

Audacious and bursting with ideas, the paranoid little sci-fi independent film Pi marks an auspicious debut for New York writer Darren Aronofsky.

This movie is exceptionally brutal, cruel, savage and without conscience -- and that's just the comic parts. In contrast, the violent action sequences are quite entertaining.

Trying to pick faults with a sound-and-spectacle juggernaut like Armageddon is like taking an ant gun to an elephant: All the movie's staggering conventional weaknesses -- ludicrous plot, weak characterization, incomprehensible staging and ambient racket -- are irrelevant.

By turns raw, naturalistic and indebted to John Cassavetes, both stylistically and thematically.

Undoubtedly, [the lead actors] both benefit hugely from the sharpness of Leonard's stock-in-trade dialogue: Put smart words in any actor's yap, and their performance will rise accordingly.

I Went Down is also a showcase for the directorial talents of Breadnach, who frames the actors and the action with polish and assurance against an unpretty Irish landscape rarely seen in the movies. If you liked Trainspotting and are looking for a quick and dirty cinematic romp, this is just the ticket. [24 July 1998, p.C5]

Mulan is another competent effort, but it's a disappointment for anyone hoping the studio would raise the standard of the animated feature to a new level.

What we have here is a pretty good TV show huffed and puffed into a rather mediocre film.

Hal Hartley's latest film, an odd and mentally stimulating black comedy that may or may not have a point. In any case, the ride is delectably weird and entertaining. [17 Jul 1998]

Edge of Seventeen is a gentle American coming-out and coming-of-age story set in 1984 in Sadusky, Ohio, and suffers slightly from a sugary after-school-special approach to its subject matter. [02 Jul 1999, p.C5]

[The soundtrack] manages to serve up new rock, eighties dance music, rap and Barry Manilow -- a combination custom-made to annoy audiences of all ages.

Has a subtle magnetism, and a real human pulse, especially as it concentrates on its two main characters.

This fluffy escape flick, directed by Ivan Reitman, is a TV sitcom plot grafted onto a travel brochure.

There's an audience for this sort of rude and rough comedy, though it might consist mostly of guys who wear raincoats a lot and prefer their women on glossy paper with staples. [13 Jun 1998, p.C3]

The result is a rarity on any screen: intelligent fun.

By the head-scratching dénouement, the "perfect" in the title seems particularly misplaced. How about Dial M for Muddle.

A deceptively light and impeccably structured comedy that owes a clear cinematic debt to others -- Ernst Lubitsch, Woody Allen and Whit Stillman among them -- yet still manages to speak with a fresh and distinctive voice. [21 Aug. 1998, p.D4]

The score (a nifty collection of vintage but never clichéd period tunes) complements the mood perfectly, and the ensemble cast members hit their own notes to perfection.

This is a frustrating film that takes its cutesy title way too literally.

The one source of relief comes from the score -- a sampling of period ditties by the likes of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Neil Young.

You'll laugh, though you might hate yourself in the morning.

To his credit, Beatty has designed Bulworth along the classic lines of Shakespeare's Fool -- the antic truth-speaker who has the ear of the court.

Watching inept American actors and wishing they were badly dubbed into Japanese isn't any fun at all.

Quite consciously, Sprecher has dramatized that wry riff from Frank Zappa: "Life is high school with money." [12 Jun 1988, p.C3]

Deep Impact, a triple-strand ensemble disaster flick, has a few good opening minutes, the biggest tidal wave you've ever seen in the closing minutes, and a cluster of little meandering melodramas in between.

Coming from a major director like Spike Lee, this is a colossal disappointment. And a surprising one.