Forest Whitaker directed with a slow, sugary touch -- and, one suspects, an eye toward the home-video market.

The movie is of minimum interest; the story of the movie, however -- or, rather, of the way in which it has been engulfed by its own publicity -- is bound to fascinate connoisseurs of cultural meltdown.

The sticking point of the movie is its exorbitant length: two and three-quarter hours does seem like an awful long time to patch up a horse, and a movie that goes straight for your heart should not be allowed to fester.

You may feel safe in your bed, but be warned: even as you sleep, Earth is under threat from a vast, overheated surplus of character actors.

The film is gorgeously shot (slow-motion basketballs spin in the air like Kubrick's spaceships), and the majestic Aaron Copland score helps some of the images to soar, but Lee's screenplay, heavy-handed and didactic, gives the actors little room to convey any real emotions.

The film is paced like a breezy sixties romp and there are some good gags, but the plot's a bit creaky and lacks the clever zing of a good scam.

Paltrow is as radiant as ever, but she keeps picking parts that focus on technical skills like accents -- she has yet to perform the real star's trick of being herself, and inviting the audience to identify.

Angels, according to this movie's nonexistent logic, travel at the speed of thought and are invisible except to other angels, children, and the dying.

This is the fifth movie to be written and directed by David Mamet, and it's his most bizarre one yet; people speak in that dreamy, lockjawed manner we first heard in "House of Games," and their entire lives appear to be lived under the spell of some nameless paranoia.

The characters never take hold, and the result feels eerily hollow, like a series of charming improvisational bloopers.

The clever dialogue, seductive camera work, and beautiful production design (the lavish dream sequences look like Busby Berkeley on Ecstasy) almost make you forget the vacancy at the movie's core, but in the end there's no escaping the feeling that the Coens are speaking a secret language.

Directed with an original touch by Richard Kwietniowski, the movie is less about the nature of homoerotic longing than about the closeted nature of love itself.

Perhaps too much attention to special effects.

The movie is full of inspired touches as well as excessive ones: its appeal lies in the way its humor always treads the line between sendup and campy overkill.

Levinson is terrific at claustrophobia. In fact, this doesn't resemble any of his previous films so much as it does his gripping TV series, "Homicide."

In the more anonymous American setting, and without the mad conviction of a director like John Woo, all the choreographed murder feels dull, poorly paced, and, come to think of it, pretty demented.

This update has to be one of the most ludicrously dumbed-down versions of a classic to date. But it does have a hip, hybrid soundtrack, and, as directed by Alfonso Cuarón ("A Little Princess"), it's so visually stunning that it's almost gripping in its incoherence.

The director is Bob Spiers, though it's hard to judge whether he actually turned up on the set.

Duvall's performance is so passionate, so energized, that it's almost eerie: is Sonny acting him or is he acting Sonny?

Niccol's work is artful but self-important and thin.

The picture's attempt to satisfy the aggressive fantasies of a graying white-male audience is weirdly fascinating. It's something you don't see every day: a geriatric comic book.

A desperately misbegotten screwball comedy.

Although it's refreshing to see an action movie that doesn't pretend to be something it isn't, this frankness has a downside, because what the picture so unapologetically is isn't, in fact, much.

The first half of this 1997 movie suffers from abstraction. Still, it's a compelling erotic nightmare.

A sombre, boring little thriller based on David Baldacci's ridiculous right-wing best-seller.

There are moments when music and lyrics bear only the faintest relation to each other, a tricky state of affairs in a work that is almost bereft of spoken dialogue.

Their monumentally stupid and childish observations burst like water balloons over the heads of everyone they encounter; the movie plays like a dumbed-down "Animal House," and its idiocy is irresistible.

But by the end, the charm and delicacy of the 1961 cartoon have long been replaced by laborious gross-outs. Is this now official Disney policy?