Bettany, previously best known as a supporting player, shoulders the burden of a Hugh Grant-style romantic lead surprisingly well, revealing an offbeat charm.

Rooney and Garland deliver their usual energy-packed performances.

The screenplay is blessedly free of mediocre songs and light on flashy pop-culture in-jokes.

Horse lovers and racing enthusiasts are this likable film's obvious audience, but you don't have to care about the Derby to get caught up in the stories of the people and the horses behind the two minutes of glory.

Cagney is riveting as Chaney (who died in 1930 at the age of 47), enacting the many great roles the silent star made famous in startling cameo performances.

Director Ronald Neame's well-paced film captures the period beautifully, and the acting is superb, with Finney and Alec Guinness, as Marley's ghost, real standouts.

Although this first chapter in a three-part tale is inevitably overburdened with back story, it ends on one hell of a cliff-hanger.

The product of this ingenuity is a slight spin on an obscure motion-picture artifact, but it's surprisingly artfully done.

The minutiae of Carter's book tour isn't always enthralling, but his personality drives the film: pious, stubborn, devoted to his wife, curious, professional, warm and yet slightly removed from the fray, conciliatory, meticulous, self-effacing, funny, decent, intellectually rigorous and firmly committed to his positions.

This is far from Makavejev's finest work (WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM and SWEET MOVIE are much more challenging), but it is the film that has spread the director's political message to the widest audience.

No character development, ridiculous situations, and a miserably written script attempting to indict corrupt legal and judicial systems add up to a tiresome and pointless film where Pacino is wasted as a witness to a parade of lunatics.

It's all surprisingly predictable. As for Sorvino, she can wear the clothes, but they don't necessarily make the man.

Neither Parker nor Donovan is a typical romantic lead, but they bring a fresh, quirky charm to the formula. Nor are their characters typical meet-cute types: David and Toni are imperfect people who are some how perfect for each other.

Makes you wish consumer automobiles were built to NASCAR safety standards.

This testosterone-driven, car-crime picture evokes the testosterone-driven, surf-crime picture "Point Break."

A snapshot rather than a sustained look at Meat Loaf's tumultuous life and career, Klein's film is a revealing glimpse at the late career of a performer who looked a safe bet to die before he got old, then surprised everyone by hanging on long enough to find fans who weren't born when he started out.

Even the excellent supporting cast could not help this exploitative picture, a lame attempt at replicating the classic film noir pieces of the 1930s and 1940s.

Although Oliver & Company is fairly entertaining and better looking than the average Saturday morning cartoon show, the computer-assisted animation is relatively stiff and inexpressive.

This is a wonderfully simple idea that succeeds very well indeed: take a bunch of kids from New York's High School of Performing Arts and let them strut their stuff. Fame shows us how much life there still is in moribund genres like the musical.

But when it's funny, it's truly funny and the featured couples all have an easy and believable chemistry.

Improbable as are all the Dirty Harry films, The Enforcer is crammed with action and spilling over with violence. The photography is fine, but the gore is as repugnant as Daly's overacting.

A little stingy in the action and thrills department, but Moore, in his limited way, seems to be having a good time.

Cronenberg's brand of body horror isn't to everyone's taste, but to call him a reactionary anti-sensualist who metes out grotesque punishment for sins of the flesh -- as detractors have -- is to miss the point.

Perhaps the best Hudson-Day film.

It's a lightweight piece with not much of a plot but plenty of amusing lines in the middle of familiar situations.

Moore and Harrelson are very well cast.

It's a film that deals with natural emotions and commonplace decisions creating uncommon situations. Bud Yorkin's direction is also top-notch.

Nearly strangles in its own stylishness but benefits from smoldering performances.

The face may be vaguely familiar, and if the name "Mimi Weddell" doesn't ring a bell it will after you've seen Jyll Johnstone's affectionate documentary portrait of this unstoppable nonagenarian model and actress.

The movie has a monster problem -- the more you see of them, the less scary they are -- most of the characters are standard-issue types, and Harden seriously overdoes the pious psycho bit.

But for all the sound, fury and spectacle, the film feels vaguely hollow and unsatisfying.

In a film about the ruthless corporate destruction of small businesses, it's hard not to flinch at the prominent placement accorded IBM, Starbucks and AOL logos.

A fascinating rumination on humanity, technology, entertainment, sex, and politics that is virtually incomprehensible on first viewing and needs to be seen several times before one can even begin to unlock its mysteries. (Review of Original Release)

Viewers hoping for a brutal, pitch-black war comedy along the lines of M*A*S*H are in for a major disappointment.

The story is predictable, but Reeder's performance is painfully convincing and the East Village locations so uniformly grimy that they all but weep despair.

The work of Hackman and Mastrantonio keeps the action afloat and more credible than it deserves to be.

Director Milius is wholly unconcerned with portraying the criminals of the 1930s as they really were, mixing up facts and fiction in a tasteless stew of violence, blood, and human gore.

The tone is inconsistent -- sometimes it seems to be straining for black comedy, other times it seems dead serious.

Fingleton turned his own story into a feel-good fable; neither Martin McGrath's gorgeous cinematography nor the hypnotic score by Run Lola Run(1998) composers Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil's can compensate.

The screenplay is a distinct improvement on Crichton's one-dimensional, humorless potboiler. The movie comes closest to thematic coherence in its depiction of something nearly everyone can relate to: the office from hell.

Essentially a big-budget, modern-day version of a 1960s acid-trip film, ALTERED STATES was helmed by flamboyant, talented, but frequently self-indulgent director Ken Russell, who takes a confusing Paddy Chayefsky story and wraps it in a pretty package, but fails to bring any clarity to the silly affair.

Fans of innovative Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg will recognize the emergence of his unique voice in this 1970 project, the director's second feature (following the 1969 Stereo).

The film's tone is a matter of taste -- the more you enjoy the melancholy silent comedies of Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, the more likely you are to embrace its sensibility -- but it's undeniably the product of a singular and beautifully realized vision.

Hits the ground running and never backs off until an ending that is disappointingly diffuse. (Review of Original Release)

Shot on location in the Bahamas, Austria, and on Salisbury Plain, HELP!, the second Beatles film, is nonsensical fun.

Whether the source material or Hare's tinkering is to blame for the fact that the story keeps the viewer at arm's length, the end result is still the same: A film that's technically superb, yet still falls short of true greatness.

Director Michael Cimino turned YEAR OF THE DRAGON, an engrossing novel by Robert Daley, into a confused, overlong, preachy, and at times downright annoying crime epic with a wholly unsympathetic main character played by the totally miscast Mickey Rourke.

A fairly tame, fairly lame blaxploitation footnote, starring drop-dead gorgeous Tamara Dobson and her improbable wardrobe.

White's take on southern life is no more "real" than the stereotypes he's trying to disrupt, just cooler.

A catalogue of slapstick errors, THE FORTUNE works well through the fine performances of the leads and the superb timing of director Nichols.

Benigni wants to tell a poignant fable rooted in the love between a father and son, but everything hinges on whether one finds his gags inspired or tasteless. Humor can only save some of us.

Buoyed by a good cast, strong direction, and excellent effects, Child's Play almost works. Unfortunately, the screenplay is full of plot holes, lapses of logic, and missed opportunities.

This is a professional machine of a movie that compresses huge amounts of information into its two and a half hours of screen time. But it's so weighed down by detail, it fails to generate any real suspense.

Were there more meat on the bones of this fable about hypocrisy and spiritual hollowness, Marsh's pacing might seem deliberate rather then merely slow.

Inspired by accounts of underage vigilante girls in Japan turning the tables on Internet predators, playwright Brian Nelson's schematic tale of the hunter captured by the game, a queasy blend of exploitation-movie nastiness and blunt moral lesson.

Watching this thinly written, intellectualized caper film, one realizes how far downhill we've come since Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise or even Jules Dassin's Topkapi. If Object of Beauty were to have worked as a comedy of manners, it would have needed a director with some champagne in his bloodstream and a cast with some insouciance in their bones.

A Holocaust film that's light on sentimentality but high on human drama, Defiance tells one of those remarkable survival stories that's so incredible it must be true.

During its opening scenes, Under Siege threatens to achieve something like Die Hard's blend of wit, ingenuity and action, with Jones and Busey making highly entertaining, creepy-funny villains. Once the stolid Seagal takes over, however, we settle into a predictable high-tech groove of explosions, gunplay and gore.

Given the film's focus on the importance of hip-hop, its soundtrack -- crammed with current artists though it is -- doesn't make the impression it should.

The film avoids theorizing about why the bridge should exert such a hold over the imaginations of suicides all over the world, but Steel's dramatic cinematography, particularly the distorted telephoto shots that make the bridge loom even larger than it already does in life, provide one answer.

A movie that looks nice and moves along efficiently, but offers little reason for anyone to watch.

A dismal affair that reeks of pretentious self-importance.

It's intelligently conceived (on a visual level, at any rate) and largely good fun. Steven Lisberger, an East Coast animator, directed the visuals, combining the actors and computer graphics with satisfying results.

They've taken material with the power to insinuate itself directly into the realm of the imagination, and made it strangely inert and lifeless.

Adding to the excitement of Psycho III is Perkins' willingness to take chances with his style and material.

The film's bizarreness pales next to that of little-known exploitation film "Sonny Boy" (1990), which weaves similar material into something authentically nightmarish.

This rare direct follow-up hopefully will put to rest the leftover emotional baggage of the character and leave Bond open to a bit more familiar interpretation in the future.

While the subject is potentially fascinating, Gosling's unfocused, sluggish film is a case study in missed opportunities.

Attal's characters are one-note position statements, which forces the unsubtle soundtrack - mostly American pop songs that range from the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning" to Radiohead's "Creep" - to bear the brunt of clarifying their thoughts and feelings. Without it, you'd be entirely in the dark.

As subversively clever as it is unsubtle.

The whole enterprise has the sweaty sheen that comes from trying too hard to be cool.

Luis Orjuela's sweet, slight comedy is about a middle-class Colombian family and the huge, cherry-red Chevrolet Bel-Air convertible that conveys them through several years worth of life's little dramas.

The first part of this film is an exceedingly taut little chiller that stands on its own, and in fact was once a short film entitled The Sitter. Director Fred Walton decided to expand the clever premise into a feature and, unfortunately, that is where the film begins to fall apart.

LEAN ON ME's manipulations justify Clark's drastic methods only superficially, by trivializing legitimate questions regarding Clark's actions.

Jack H. Harris, the cheapie producer who went on to make the forgettable Mother Goose A Go-Go, struck it rich with this silly picture that gave McQueen his first starring role after a few supporting jobs in Somebody Up There Likes Me and Never Love A Stranger.

Virgil's naïveté isn't entirely believable, but his essential goodness is, thanks to a solid performance by Jordan, and that's really what makes this modern urban tragedy unusually affecting.

The performances are uniformly excellent.

Extremely difficult but worthy film.

A heavy-duty mediocrity, sluggish, unwieldy, and instantly forgettable.

The truly heartbreaking sacrifice of a few extraordinarily heroic men is lost under the ponderous score and a series of even heavier speeches.

The end is hardly in doubt, since this sweet-natured film treads a path worn smooth and hard by countless other tiny feet. Its message is as unimpeachable as it is familiar, differentiated from countless similar tales only by the Filipino setting.

This is a well-made, observant documentary, with attitude to spare and plenty of justifiable laughs at the expense of its subjects. Focusing in on every aspect of this subculture--from the fascinating, to the absurd, to the downright depressing--this would make the perfect double bill with This Is Spinal Tap.

Much ado about nothing much at all.

While far from the cream of the mockumentary crop, it's still a pleasant diversion.

Davis led an unquestionably inspirational life, but The Express, however heartfelt, is uninspired.

The third Die Hard film is easily the most spectacular, featuring an exploding subway train and a manic car chase through the congested streets of New York that rivals "The French Connection."

Writer-director Robert Hiltzik tries to mask the poorly staged murder scenes and lousy effects with a perverse sense of humor, but it doesn't work. Some scenes, especially one involving a girl and a curling iron, are simply irredeemable.

Hollywood's attempt to capitalize on student rebellion looked trivial in comparison to real events (the shootings at Kent State occured in the same year), but Getting Straight, buoyed by Gould's eccentric screen presence and Kovacs' stylish camerawork, holds up surprisingly well.

Depending on your level of Elvis fandom, you'll either find this a typically fluffy Presley vehicle with mainly forgettable tunes--save the hit I Can't Help Falling in Love--or none of that will matter.

Concise and well-researched documentary does a fine job of presenting a complicated issue clearly while maintaining a fairly objective middle ground.

A powerful anti-war film.

Milos Forman's film is a series of incredible simulations that never quite cohere into a movie.

Troche has bitten off quite a bit here, and it's too much for her to chew properly.

The climactic revelation is a real disappointment, humdrum rather than chilling.

Most of the film's humor derives from smug anachronisms (the Brit-pop soundtrack, Wang and Roy's use of modern slang) and jokes about bad English food, teeth and weather that were old when Victoria was a girl.

Even generally sympathetic adults may eventually find their minds wandering, if only because of the characters' continual, annoying hopping; being vegetables, they have no legs, you see.

The homoerotic twists and gender-shifting turns are fun, but they can't hide the fact that the film is little more than a tedious shaggy-dog story with oblique mythological references.

A thin plot heavily laden with many of Neil Simon's best one-liners makes this a pleasant way to spend 102 minutes. Chase contributes a somewhat frantic turn, and Hawn does her cute thing. Some nice work from the secondary players--including Harold Gould, Robert Guillaume, and Yvonne Wilder--adds to the fun.