There's as much to draw us in, but far less to put us off. [13 Jun 1997]

As well-meaning elegies go, especially ones to working stiffs prematurely ripped from their subterranean roots, Brassed Off is the pits: It's a miner opus in a minor key.

Most of the cast (along with director Joe Mantello) have been recruited from the stage play, and they all do a fine job of trimming their performances for the screen.

So the promise of a proud director comes to nothing, and all my rooting goes for naught. Maybe, sadly, the metaphoric night that falls on Manhattan has finally begun to descend on Lumet -- and he's going gentle into it.

The theme could be trite or maudlin in lesser hands. Here, through the Dardennes' judiciously stylized way of telling the story, there is a real exhilaration in the film's ability to capture Igor's emotional dilemma. [6 Mar. 1998, p.C8]

The movie unreels like a depressive in a manic phase, a frenzy of lightning-fast cuts, cuts, cuts.

Hollywood's big-screen answer to France's 1983 charming film Les Comperes is a wacky star vehicle wildly out of control. [9 May 1997, p.D1]

The truth is you can find more entertaining absurdities and thrilling nihilism from watching the average episode of Melrose Place or Beverly Hills, 90210 and, at least on those shows, they don't confuse dumb with doomed. [13 June 1997, p.C6]

The result is less a screenplay than a manic quote machine.

Breakdown is a taut little thriller, the kind of well-crafted yarn that sets itself attainable goals and then meets them.

Okay, some of this is mildly diverting.

In a few sound bites, we get the picture and the picture's motto: the smug and selfish coast is an order of disaster-flick toast waiting to burn.

Fewer heads in the film and more evidence of one on the director's shoulders might have squeezed a legitimate laugh or two out of this contrived juvenile carnage.

This latest entry in the White House genre is polished, but formulaic suspense.

Not funny, suspenseful, moving or even offensive enough to want to torpedo. Just devoid of any conceivable value. [19 Apr 1997, p.C13]

An entertaining oddity, an amiably black comedy whose bared teeth double as an engaging smile: It takes a satiric bite and leaves you laughing through the pain.

In what is surely a tribute to the dazzling mediocrity of director Luis Llosa, the real jungle looks as bland as the fake jungle.

Given the predictable scenario, this picture needs passion, and all it gets is his workmanlike precision. What he's constructed is worthy enough, and certainly navigable, but you need more than the bricks of craft to build a road to paradise.

This thing can take pride of place in a long tradition of Hollywood howlers.

More entertaining than Mission: Impossible or the last Bond film, Goldeneye, it brings back the humour and sang-froid that makes the genre work.

Instead of story or suspense, Double Team offers a busy sampling of eye candy. [4 Apr 1997, p.C6]

This is a movie that was made not because the director had anything to say, but because she wanted to get a movie made. Even at that, the script is slapdash. Only one character has any dimension (Frances O'Connor's Mia), the plotting is the usual sub-screwball comedy with obligatory pranks and misunderstandings, and the overall tone is bland, smug and connivingly cute. [11 Apr 1997, p.C6]

Certainly, whatever surgery the script doctors performed, it didn't take. The limp result is a picture that is epic in intention and Lilliputian everywhere else.

A laugh a minute? Liar Liar Jim Carrey's forced truthfulness means a lot of mildly funny facial gyrations.

You may well hate Crash, but if intensity is what you seek in a darkened theatre, you'll hate missing it even more.

Here, Soderbergh's visual additions -- gimmicky lighting, surreal backdrops, all cued to the monologue's changing rhythms -- are more distracting than enhancing. Or maybe not. In a way, the camera's empty gimmickry points to the same tendency in Gray's verbal canters -- diverting enough but, ultimately, isn't it just sleight-of-mouth? [18 April 1997, p.C5]

Consequently, your reaction to the film will pretty much hinge on your opinion of the play. Ho-hum is my humble verdict.

For the most part, it's simply a pleasure to watch a smoothly made and underplayed film about attractive, nice people without a hint of violence on their minds. [25 Apr 1997, p.D8]

For his part, Allen spends much of his time falling -- out of hammocks, off of logs, down from balconies, a geometric progression of comic ingenuity guaranteed to delight the child in all of us. Occasionally, he's joined by fellow tumbler Martin Short, who appears to be making a lucrative career of playing in the very movies he once so wickedly parodied. [07 Mar 1997, p.D6]

What better casting than Al Pacino, whose own career, of course, has reflected all the seasonal changes in the gangster saga. Pacino takes the part and runs with it so boldly that he ends up in Arthur Miller land.

The plot is bare-bones stuff, weak in story line and bereft of motivation.

Regresses into a lame action-thriller.

At 70 minutes, this groin and groan comedy seems almost dismissively short, but don't believe the myths you've been told: longer is not always better.

David Lynch's eye-popping imagery is buried under an avalanche of self-indulgence.

Watching this, we should feel an immense amount, but don't, and somehow, decades after this horrible event, that void only seems to compound the tragedy.

The content is eminently forgettable but the thing has definitely got style.

Mediocre movie.

Simply put, Touch dies, with nary a resurrective hand in sight. [14 Feb 1997, p.C5]

There is little here for parents, and not much for the kids. [17 Feb 1997, p.C3]

Director Roger Donaldson ("Smash Palace," "No Way Out," "Species"), working from a script by Leslie Bohem ("Daylight"),does a serviceable job, wrapping his narrative around the big kabooms, but the real interest comes from the extraordinary barrage of sound and spectacle.

A very funny, very unusual ensemble comedy that falls somewhere between slapdash and brilliant, an improvised comedy with more hits than misses. It's also an oddly touching tribute to the joys of show biz.

At least by Hollywood's conservative standards, Mother proves that the wayward son is alive and well -- softer in manner but still a subversive at heart. [10 Jan 1997, p.C1]

With its jazzy saxophone noodlings during the opening credits and its bruised black-and-blue look, it's so quaintly and conventionally pulp that you feel like filing a report with the cliché police.

Although it always moves and rarely labours, the film truly comes alive only in those fleeting moments when it departs from the safe formula -- that is, only when Murphy draws on his personal talents to kick this baby into something resembling a higher gear. The rest of the time, well, here's the key to your Metro -- a renter with some mileage on it.

The result is good dirty fun, flecked with enough wit to help you overlook the relatively barren characterization.

But wouldn't it be heavenly if a like proportion of Tinseltown producers believed in an existing need for a good script. Because this one ain't good; in fact, it's hellishly mediocre, the kind that aims for holiday charm and settles for workaday torpor.

Techine has long been a cerebral director (counting Roland Barthes among his admirers), and Thieves certainly steals your complete attention. It's just that, when the picture is over, our involved mind can't resist a concluding thought: Somehow, the theft is more impressive than the compensation. [31 Jan 1997, p.C5]

Jane Campion makes a beeline for the repressed sexuality, and loses the nuance. [17 Jan 1997]

May not be the most scary or the grossest horror film you've ever seen, but it has one distinct feature: it actually talks up to the audience. By the conclusion, you won't be shaking in your seat, but you may enjoy the status of someone who has earned a Master's in Slashology.

Americans is unimpeachable fun. Peter Segal doesn't aim high in this lampoon of U.S. presidents, but hits the target. [20 Dec 1996, p.C8]

Yet, about as often as Marvin's Room strikes a chord of emotional authenticity, it hits a fistful of false notes as well.

Crowe is too much the good employee to spin the yarn properly, to give the picture the very integrity it endorses. He might have made a more convincing movie had he first convinced himself.

A flashy nineties flick with a campy fifties feel -- it's playful, naive, clever, silly, often inventive, occasionally uneven and, compared to studio offerings to date, the best present under this year's cinematic tree.

A screwball comedy about the abortion issue? First-time writer-director Alexander Payne gives it a college try.

For those who are looking for a Capracornish sentimental tale about the Christmas spirit lost and re-discovered in the harried modern world, this holiday film is far too acerbic and frantic to play the heart strings. [22 Nov 1996, p.D6]

Ridicule is, finally, a movie that shows it understands the mechanism of wit and hierarchy intimately, and rejects it unequivocally in favour of the more inclusive and gentle world of humour. [11 Dec 1996, p.C1]

The movie seems much, much longer than its 90-minute running time. [15 June 1998]

In the rap-music, slam-dunk, hysterical tumult of visual clutter that makes up most of Space Jam, the traditional Warner Bros. 'toons get scant attention. In this marriage of corporate logos, the manic little characters serve simply as more names to be dropped. What Space Jam really lacks is respect for an irreverent tradition. [15 Nov 1996, p.C4]

Since "To pay or not to pay" is banal, the plot takes the popular path of excess to a brain-boggling twist (to be specific would be to ruin what fun there is), then spirals off in a series of ever more unlikely gyrations, until a heretofore decent picture has gone completely south into fantasy-land.

On screen, the result feels stagey and cramped, as though the film had been "adjusted for your TV set" before going to video. [13 Dec 1996]

Not much happens of comic consequence. [01 Nov 1996, p.D5]

The dramatic justification for all this careless maligning of gypsies and lawyers remains as enigmatic as the film's title. The only sure thing about Stephen King's Thinner,in the end, is that Stephen King's bank account is fatter.

Winterbottom's efficient yet prosaic approach is evident from the first grimy frame. [18 Oct 1996]

Though nothing much happens in the plot, the interplay between characters is always sharply observed, with funny, off-kilter dialogue: Whether it's a clumsy pickup attempt at a bar, a couple fighting about which of them cares more about the other, or the attempt by relatives to console each other at a funeral -- while sharing lines of cocaine -- the scenes feel both spontaneous and deftly constructed. [1 Nov 1996, p.D3]

It may well be the ultimate family picture of this or any year. [22 Nov 1996, p.D2]

It's difficult to say who is more misguided here: the men (director, screenwriter and producer) who made the movie, or the women who signed on to play the parts.

Surviving Picasso is flat-out dull, hanging like a K Mart print in a suburban mall - a testament to Merchant-Ivory's blew-it period. [20 Sep 1996]

Yes, the movie gets off the ground when it gets off the ground, and who better to provide the lift than director Carroll Ballard. [13 Sep 1996, p.C1]

Writer-director David Koepp shows a talent for presenting neat sequences, but they fail to come together in a satisfying whole. [30 Aug 1996, p.C9]

Cynical, stylish and witty. [21 Feb 1997]

Ultimately, She's The One is about less than it seems -- Burns is quite willing to trade off emotional credibility to an easy gag and a neat resolution. Yes, the film's apparent sensitivity comes with a high commercial gloss, but so what -- the lightness is breezy enough to cool our objections. Burns may well be an unabashed entertainer in the guise of an auteur, yet that's an awfully potent combination. Just ask a certain Woody Allen. [23 Aug 1996]

The climax also comes with a nifty little kicker.

Time and again, the story simply stops for another tune from the band. Then again, without the buoyant sounds of Moten Swing, Tickle Toe, Yeah Man and the rest, Kansas City would be an even less appealing film than it already is. [16 Aug 1996, p.D5]

Well, the movie suffers slightly from that tendency -- the portrait shows definite signs of airbrushing. But it's rendered with enough intelligence, and performed with sufficient grace, to offer us an occasionally compelling, curiously upbeat look behind the lacquered image and into the complicated self.

Escape from L.A. is too preposterous to be a good film. But in keeping with its title, it does provide a couple of hours of entertaining escapism. [12 Aug 1996, p.C1]

It is a disappointment - just intermittently engaging, and lacking the cohesion of his best efforts, it seems less a fully realized feature than a film-school foible. [30 Aug 1996]

Apart from its star, though, Emma may be the least convincing Austen adaptation so far.

Luckily, none of the inconsistencies in tone and atmosphere can overwhelm Matilda's charm. The power of its narrative and the self-composed presence of Wilson in the title role -- DeVito has persuaded the child to underact the part so that Matilda is precocious, not obnoxious -- carry the movie resolutely to its happy conclusion. [02 Aug 1996, p.D2]

Director Joel Schumacher has pulled no mawkish punches, wringing every drop of emotional potential from the script (adapted by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman from John Grisham's popular novel) down to the last manipulative glance and close-up. Call it A Time to Overkill.

A little like speeding through the digestive tract of some voracious beast. There's bite, acid, digestive churning and an expulsive conclusion. If the metaphor seems unsavoury, well, wait until you see the film.

Cluttered, improbable, brash, silly and over the top, the film is far more fun than it should be. [19 July 1996, p.D1]

In a film that offers itself as a Gump-esque moral fable, Phenomenon could serve as a case study of When Smart Films Fail.

Emmerich succeeds only in making his previous venture, the marginal Stargate, look positively inspired by comparison.

Not that The Nutty Professor should ever be confused with a good movie, but it is a perfect vehicle for the redisplay of Murphy's neglected talents, steering him away from the smug persona of his recent disasters and whisking him back to the cozy locale of his Saturday Night Live roots.

Eraser may lack the chameleon wizardry of the the "Terminator" duo, or the imperious mechanics of "True Lies", but the bang-for-the-buck ratio is high enough to appease even the thinnest wallet.

Though not as instantly charming as The Little Mermaid, nor as cheerfully revisionist as Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback rates as one of the best animated Disney features of the past rich decade. [21 June 1996, p.C1]

In his directorial debut, comedian and Flirting with Disaster star Ben Stiller struggles to filter out a coherent story line around a fibre-optic-thin plot line and the expansive, anarchic comic talents of Jim Carrey. Too often the movie ends up lost in the snow and static between two films fighting for the same bandwidth. [14 June 1996, p.C1]

The Rock is just typical big American dumb fun.

A little less fascination with computer tricks, and a little more application of human intelligence could have done The Arrival a world of good. [31 May 1996]

[Cohen] can't quite decide whether to play the picture for high camp or pure adventure or just plain belly laughs. Predictably, he blasts away in all directions at once and hits precious little. [31 May 1996]

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make heads or tails of this Byzantine thing. [22 May 1996]

The cast is proficient, with Balk especially adroit at giving her demonic gifts a gleeful twist. And director Andrew Fleming keeps the special effects on a low boil, effective yet not ostentatious, while taking allusive advantage of the competing (and sometimes complementing) tension between the school's Catholic imagery and the girl's pagan icons. But as our heroines lose their grip, so does he. [03 May 1996]

Shows promise, but needs more effort, and definitely doesn't play well with others. [7 Jun 1996, p.C2]

Narratively, the film strikes all the sentimental chords that audiences typically find so reassuring, but the music grates here, sounding mechanical and flat, lacking the single ingredient indispensable to any uplifting fable - a charming belief in its own sweet nature. [19 Apr 1996, p. C1]

Makin has a knack for comic jolts, and, apparently, little interest in the longer narrative arc that movies, no matter how unorthodox, require. [13 Apr 1996]

Is Kazaam racist? In effect, yes. But it'sracism linked to bad marketing: You can't really mix a black-pride rap film with a revamped version of "Free Willie" and expect them to magically jibe.

At the end of Courage Under Fire, you feel torn between admiration and annoyance with the filmmakers.

Fear strikes out in slasher flick This movie is laced with enough gratuitous bloodshed and reactionary zeal to warm the heart of a Montana militiaman. [12 Apr 1996]