Short on wrenching passion, but never less than competent, Les Misérables is merely passable. It might have been titled Les Compétents. [01 May 1998, p.C4]

Ultimately, Sliding Doors becomes a victim of its own cleverness, shutting down all that early promise.

This isn't a movie so much as a marketing strategy -- a moving poster loosely disguised as a motion picture.

And the climax, where fake tears suddenly become real, doesn't ring true. By then, nothing does, leaving the film's successful deception to double as its eventual failure -- cast adrift in this fog of appearances, we appear not to care.

Judged esthetically -- the only yardstick worth applying -- it can be safely placed in that long line of indistinguishable Hollywood mediocrities, all of them trying in vain to resurrect an awfully weary genre.

For most of its duration, Suicide Kings turns into something like a hoary murder-mystery theatre piece in the Agatha Christie/Clue tradition.

With its glum litany of naked corpses and mutilations, and understated actors looking bluish under the morgue's fluorescent lights, Nightwatch drains the fun out of horror. [17 Apr 1998]

A lovely oddity.

Brain-melting, head-spinning rank toxicity that shows no evidence of intelligence as we know it.

The best parts of Sonatine reach into that space where the fear ends and death begins, and find there the music of life. [01 May 1998, p.C4]

Mamet's stylized dialogue, elaborate plot puzzles and the angry cleverness of his characterization makes for an invigorating, if not exactly likeable, mix.

This good movie could have been great if writer Akiva Goldsman had been able to -- or been permitted to -- dump the boundaries of the TV source altogether.

Willis has a gift for turning formulaic action flicks -- Die Hard, even Hudson Hawk -- into something with an identifiable personality, but much of Mercury Rising challenges even his charms. [3 Apr 1998, p.C5]

As a testimonial to the powers of creativity and the imagination, Barney's Great Adventure is pretty unconvincing. [03 Apr 1998, p.C7]

On the flimsy wings of this familiar fairy tale, Linklater tries to fly himself a movie, dressing up the quartet (and the strapping he-men cast to portray them) in the audience-friendly vestments of picaresque charm.

Sophisticated and unsentimental political film.

This picture breaks through the limits and goes way beyond the pale -- it seems to enjoy irking us for the sheer hell of it.

The result is the kind of picture you can sit through quite contentedly, the cinematic equivalent of an innocuous seatmate on an airplane trip -- it neither bores nor insults you, and, when the ride's over, is promptly gone and forgotten.

It's a pinball arcade of a flick -- the Coens invent a bunch of wonderfully flaky characters, stick them into a Plexiglas narrative, and let them bounce off each other.

It is a slight, charming, filmic oddity, well acted and intelligently written

Who really wants to go to an escape movie and have to work this hard to figure it out?

[Lange] does give the movie the only excitement it possesses -- the frisson of a hideous thrill -- but it's still an excruciating embarrassment.

Like the fakery it satirizes, DiCillo's Real Blonde ends up ringing hollow.

An almost really good movie...risks leaving the viewer feeling like one of the bewildered automatons that move through the plots.

Just how dumb is Senseless? So dumb it even takes the fun out of stupid.

The result, as a colleague once so aptly put it, is less film noir than film beige.

Finally, an Adam Sandler comedy that you can sit through without wanting to throw a mallet through the screen.

Filled with visual potential, yet Levinson can't tap it. He's just a whole lot more comfortable trying to tame the human software than the technical hardware.

A plot so thin you could filter coffee through it.

You may well watch this film and not buy into a single frame. Me, I couldn't help myself.

For about 20 minutes, Phantoms, based on Dean Koontz's bestseller, keeps you guessing. After that, it barely keeps you awake.

And, in a pointless riffing on the title, there are ginger kitties galore -- this flick has enough cats to launch a Broadway musical.

Critic-proof, devoid of plot or acting, and quick to mock anyone who might make something of it.

The characters don't stay still long enough for the audience to worry about them. The high-priced actors (Freeman is especially wasted) are so much flotsam in the big water-tank action scenes.

Live Flesh is an often surprising assemblage of attractive parts that never seems to earn a full emotional response. [06 feb 1998]

In a movie world where every new release promises to be something you've never seen before, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs succeeds in being genuinely different -- even if you can't quite figure out exactly what it's supposed to be. [26 Sep 1997, p.E3]

There is little chance for the movie's talented stars, Day Lewis and Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves) to establish and develop their characters, beyond their set-piece declarations of love.

In a sometimes misguided narrative, their scenes together are right on track -- they add lightness, even a shimmering hint of humour, to a symbol-laden drama. Theirs is a unique romance that has a sparrow's frail beauty -- it beats with a trembling, fluttering heart.

Despite his flair for trenchant dialogue, nicely complemented by Mark Isham's bluesy jazz score, Rudolph whets our appetite but then fails to deliver. The picture limps to its ending and leaves us with nothing to hold onto.

Happily, the climax races to our rescue... Beyond the grasp of most directors, this is tour de force stuff -- definitely meriting the price of admission and almost worth the three-year wait.

WAG the Dog is a cozy political satire, the warm-and-fuzzy kind that is always entertaining yet never disturbing.

A great film about a good man.

Like Mr. Magoo, after 90 minutes the audience still didn't see the point. [26 Dec 1997, p.C3]

The result takes the audience on a screwball odyssey that mixes engaging twists with off-putting turns -- often fun, always watchable, but never quite as good as it could be.

Titanic is awesome even when it's awful -- you can't take your eyes off the extraordinary thing.

If you're a five-year-old, or the mental equivalent thereof, and love Saturday morning cartoons, the more violent the better, then Mouse Hunt may just be the movie for you.

The movie delivers, if you're looking for a big-screen, big-stunt, action blockbuster that happens to have the Bond brand name on it. If you're looking for a movie with narrative coherence that recreates, or develops, the Bond mythology that first came to screen in the early sixties, go back to your video store: The current Bond franchise is a Van Damme movie with a bigger budget and British accents. [19 Dec 1997, p.C6]

A too-perfect mirror of its creator, The Apostle's greatest strength doubles as a singular weakness -- in the end, it feels like an immaculate forgery.

Ultimately, the viewing experience is like watching a snake swallow its own tail -- that once-menacing serpent is now a clown act, all yuks and no venom.

Despite the Spielberg trademarks, a lavish attention to period detail and the occasional flash of visual potency, this is a picture you never get caught up in.

Both smart and shrewd -- it wraps that same comforting message in a thoroughly entertaining package.

Jeunet manages a terrific pass in an extended underwater sequence, but, beyond that, he runs out of ideas as we run out of patience.

Inevitably, all this seems just too diffuse, and a set of uniformly adept performances (even Harrelson puts a leash on his usual histrionics) tends to be wasted in an only intermittently engaging movie.

A sputtering marathon of a movie. It starts, it stops, it sprints, it stumbles, occasionally following a straight narrative line, frequently darting off on colourful if pointless tangents, often commanding our attention yet never sparking our imagination.

The word "arachnid," as it's said so contemptuously in the movie, begins to sound suspiciously like "Iraqi," and indeed, we soon see the elite bugs are hunkered down in their desert fortress, resisting the mighty air assaults of the Federation. The conclusion of our story involves unearthing the chief bug.

Bean falls well short of a work of genius. Indeed, the unbearable slightness of Bean feels like nothing so much as a betrayal of the television series on which it is based.

So what's the problem? Just that the plot seems a bit too schematic, the characters a little too pat, and the imagery altogether too convenient -- for a tale that means to explore the elusiveness of truth, Lemmons sure likes to sew things up neatly.

And veteran director Costa-Gavras, whose early work ("Z", "State Of Siege", "Missing") proves that he's no stranger to sociopolitical complexities, might well have been the man to make it. But not from this script -- it starts off as puerile and then regresses.

Two parts pain, one part pleasure, a masochist's life with cystic fibrosis results in a weirdly tender documentary. [14 Nov 1997, p.D4]

Given Waller's experience and budget, one might expect he could upgrade the B-movie acting and stock situations. He doesn't. The pay-off comes not in the story or acting, but the camera play and movement.

Wong returns once more to what he seems to know best - the visual poetry of the urban Asian night, a world of characters on the move, coming and going, never really getting anywhere. [5 Dec 1997]

Designer babies rule dystopia in stylish SF thriller filled with recycled plot devices.

Here, one begins to suspect that the major impediment is the sensibility of the filmmakers themselves. They don't believe in this stuff, in its unavoidable sentimentality, and that attitude filters down to a perplexed cast.

The Devil's Advocate is a dull morality tale, but a number of bright moments come courtesy of the Prince of Darkness.

Like Jerry Springer, it's loaded with class bias, offering a condescending fantasy that sees the poor as exotically grotesque, promiscuous, violent, and spiritually doomed. [17 Oct. 1997, p.D9]

It's your standard coming-of-age tune set to a top-40 beat. [24 Oct 1997]

But it is bright, smart, sometimes wickedly funny, and crisply performed to the point where the acting seems richer than the script.

Gang Related is a failed attempt at a kind of hip, post-Tarantino, black-comedy, crime drama. [10 Oct 1997, p.C7]

Here's the kind of movie thriller that can make you scream (in annoyance) and bite your nails (to pass the time) and sit on the edge of your seat (ready to bolt the theatre).

The director veers off course and heads straight for mediocrity. It's a disappointing ride.

This remarkable analysis of a decade when American society lost its moral compass is both brutally honest and lyrically compassionate.

A ticket to terminal boredom.

This sort of flick can be fun, and there are moments here when it is, when a suddenly shifting perspective tosses us for a dizzying loop. Then again, there's such a thing as too much fun and too many moments -- at over two hours, this particular game meanders on way past its welcome.

An intermittently watchable movie. Not because the plot is any less silly, or the theme any more mature, but for the simple reason that, on the margins of this marginal picture, there are several wonderful faces -- sometimes belonging to actors who know how to use them, and sometimes attached to folks who merely inhabit them. In either case, however, the visual result is an incongruous slice of vintage Americana pared off the usual slab of Hollywood mediocrity. [9 Sept 1997]

No one is likely to mistake Excess Baggage for a great movie, but it is an intriguing piece of pop sociology.

It definitely seems attractive on paper, what with a sterling cast to gaze upon, a script by none other than the late and legendary John Cassavetes, along with direction courtesy of the legend's son Nick. But up on the screen, under the glare of the lights, the film never really captures our eye or our interest. [29 Aug 1997, p.D3]

Duke rarely operates at more than a TV movie-of-the-week level of originality, but Hoodlum is still an easy movie to enjoy.

Director Scott, flashy, fluid and at his best in the steely-blue claustrophic battle-training scenes, immerses the viewer in the process.

The film lacks flow, unfolding in a rat-a-tat series of short, artfully lensed scenes -- individually nice but collectively jerky.

All in all, the new movie version of Leave It To Beaver is faithful to the genial instructive spirit of the TV show, as well as to a recurring theme, Ward's constant adjustments to the Beav's underachieving ways. [22 Aug 1997, p.C5]

A good film prevented from being a great film by an act of well-intentioned but misguided casting.

Contraryto its exciting advertising, Event Horizon is not the most frightening movie ever made. If anything, the conventional pop-up scares and gross-out effects of this British haunted-space-ship story seem less terrifying than quaint.

A laugh and a half, a genial crowd-pleaser.

With a plot that thickens like congealed stew, this movie about a harmless nutbar, an attorney and a cabal can leave you lost in banality.

In the entrancing frames of Career Girls, nothing extraordinary happens and everything is revealed. [26 Sep.1997, p.E8]

In the end, like any satire worth the name, In the Company of Men spins around to fire its biggest salvo at its ultimate target -- the audience.

The film's biggest flaw -- aside from the lapses of credibility, which are almost obligatory in escapist summer movies -- is that it flies on and on until its power to hold us simply peters out.

There may be something to Kenan and Kel,but you see only hints of it in this movie, which is pretty much standard-issue, French-fries-up-the-nose stuff. [26 July 1997, p.C7]

The film -- written as well as directed by Arteta -- has plenty of raw energy, a strikingly fresh Latino viewpoint and successfully contrasting moods of dark humour, high drama and deep despair. What it lacks in finesse, Star Maps more than makes up for in gutsy creativity. [29 Aug 1997, p.D4]

Mrs. Brown will not overturn Queen Victoria's prim reputation, but it reminds us that there was more to the woman than that famous plump cameo that has become the symbol of a more modest era.

They are singing the jingle in the bath, in bed, in the car, ready to send you, like George, smack into a tree.

There's a big budget, big cast and big themes about religion, science and life on other planets. But Contact, which aims for awe, ends up with piffle.

Sonnenfeld moves things along with alacrity and panache, serving up the exotic visuals quietly, blending in the sprightly humour efficiently, and keeping the mix at a rolling boil.

By the time the last jerk on the comic premise has been tugged, you might find yourself muttering an age-ist dismissal: this Grumpy Old Man thing (or, in this case, Soggy Old Men thing) is getting kind of old. [03 July 1997, p.C3]

The result is a genre picture that transcends the genre, that gleefully embraces four qualities alien to the bulk of its noisy brethren: (1) thematic texture; (2) kinetic grace; (3) visuals that toy with the mind even while dazzling the eye; and (3) performers who are permitted to act like something other than human wicks for the pyrotechnical bombast.

Hercules is a lot of fun -- not a masterpiece, but engaging, clever and bright. [27 June 1997, p.C1]

Campy costumes can't disguise the incoherent plot, confused performances and lame script that send this star vehicle spiralling downward.

Although there are definite lags here, those "glittering" set-pieces are funny enough (at least one is hilarious) to stave off any prolonged yawns.