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

Van Sant's film feels as dated as Hitchcock's, and Hitchcock's has the better excuse.

That's not to say it isn't entertaining, only that the scenes which rely entirely on the fragile interplay between Jessica and Ryan suggest a more compelling movie that got lost in the welter of high-speed highway recklessness.

The film is talky and much of what is said is didactic, but it is never really preachy. Washington brings tremendous intelligence, dignity, and charisma to his Biko. Kline is also very good as the editor who goes from talking a good liberal game to living it, giving up virtually everything so that he can make the truth known about Biko.

The cast is strong and work together flawlessly, and romantic comedies that take an unabashedly male perspective without being relentlessly vulgar or misogynistic are rare indeed.

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

The message this oddball film propounds is pretty much standard stuff on the Oprah circuit.

An unconvincing and uninvolving psychological thriller.

Green and his regular cinematographer Tim Orr have a feel for the sad, generic landscape of small-town America, but rather than adding to an overarching melancholy it only reinforces an already drab, at times bizarrely comic tone.

Lesser Peckinpah, but fascinating nonetheless.

Gorgeous but seriously unsatisfying.

A predictable amalgam of every military-academy movie you can think of.

Your ability to overlook the film's myriad contrivances will ultimately depend on how you react to little De Roma.

The sky-high sleaze quotient -- lascivious priests, amateur porn movies, teenage hustlers and institutionalized corruption of every kind -- ought to guarantee fun for all, but heavy messages keep poking through and spoiling everything.

Fans of cheesy '70s TV shows will also be pleased by Wonder Woman Lynda Carter's brief cameo appearance as the governor of Vermont.

Another of Cassavetes' puzzling, personal, neurotic, and often brilliant productions that would have benefited from editing with a scythe.

In the end it appears that the problem is less divorce per se than immature and deeply selfish parents who should never have had children in the first place.

A gentle comedy about two misfits--a schizophrenic girl and a boy whom earlier generations would have called an odd duck--who find love, Benny & Joon means well but overdoses on whimsy.

Often annoyingly vulgar and crude, Life Stinks is partly redeemed by Brooks's good intentions. He and his associates have attempted, sometimes with great success, sometimes not, to illustrate the difference between decency and deceit as well as the painfully thin line that separates pleasure and happiness from degradation and despair.

The film's spirit is one of unbridled bawdy slapstick, which misfires as often as it hits its targets, and its attitude towards women probably won't warm many hearts in the feminist community. In short, Penthouse readers will find what they're looking for in abundance wrapped in a typically bright, fast and furious Hong Kong package that is sometimes funny and occasionally even genuinely erotic.

While the cast and songs are top notch, the predictability of the madness makes it pretty clear that this musical shouldn't have left the stage

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.

In time-honored Hollywood fashion, PHENOMENON suggests that smart people are friendless freaks who'd be far better off if only they were just as dumb as the rest of us.

Gimmick or no, the film is really rather silly and not particularly scary.

More shaggy dog story than a contribution to the ever-growing mountain of fact and fiction dealing with the Kennedy assassination, Neil Burger's feature film debut is a cleverly crafted but ultimately hollow mockumentary.

Ice Castles collapses under the weight of sentimental overkill.

Tries to be all things to all people and winds up a tedious muddle.

Made in 1988 but unreleased for several years, BORIS AND NATASHA isn't truly wretched, just undernourished. It tries hard to revive the anarchic spirit of Jay Ward's cartoons, but Boris and Natasha were only supporting characters there and nothing is done to make them interesting over the course of a feature film.