It offers some excellent performances, crisp direction, and overall professionalism of the entire cast and crew. What keeps it from being a great western (like FORT APACHE or HIGH NOON) is that the audience is seldom involved in the lives of the riders other than in a peripheral sense.

Flashing by like images in a flip book, these protean forms appear to dance a cosmic quadrille set to the music of the spheres.

Throughout, Holstein makes no bones about the fact that Father Mychal was hardly perfect -- he was a recovering alcoholic who found salvation in Alcoholics Anonymous -- nor does he attempt to disguise Father Mychal's homosexuality, something he never made public but which no doubt grounded his gutsy work with gay Catholics and people with AIDS.

Hamburger's earnest effort offers interesting perspectives on Jewish life in South America's most populous city as well as the fate of political dissidents during a particularly dark period of Brazil's recent past.

Though the material is familiar, Sciamma has a light touch and avoids many teen-movie cliches.

An exciting film, and one that proves that even the most exploitative of films can make a relevant statement.

The gritty location shooting, the absence of a soundtrack and the casting of non-professionals in key roles help capture an all-important sense of place with almost documentary precision.

The performances in the film are excellent, and its look is entirely appropriate and mesmerizing--but only for a while. The film's basic flaw is that it's just too painful, too depressing, and too slow to watch.

Bette Midler turns in a magnificent performance as a dissipated, Janis Joplin-like rock singer.

This is a strikingly original story about human feelings.

Despite some excitingly shot concert footage, one scene begins to feel very much like the next, and it's all rather predictable.

Capably directed by Betty Thomas, this freewheeling pseudodocumentary tribute to Stern's juvenile antics paints the anarchic radio idol as Everyschmo made good.

While trying so hard to have such a good time, the movie simply forgets to be funny, and begins to grate before the body even cools.

A loving, dramatic comedy that resembles early Frank Capra in its patriotism and sentiment, this movie just misses on several levels but has enough humor to make you smile and enough corn to warm anyone's heart.

While You Were Sleeping is a mild romantic comedy rooted in class anxiety, but it's nice to see perennial loser-in-love Pullman ("Sleepless in Seattle", "The Last Seduction") get some. Respect, that is.

Katzir's documentary is as much a labor of love as Spaisman's theater, and it's often rough around the edges.

DEEP COVER has a shaky beginning and a hokey ending but, somewhere in between, it becomes a movie of considerable power--largely thanks to the contrasting styles of its two stars.

In fact, it's often genuinely funny--but it's still an establishment picture pretending it's not.

Foster finds the common ground on which his eclectic cast can meet (no small feat when they range from brassy Queen Latifah to "Arrested Development"'s deadpan Tony Hale) and keeps the story's sweetness from devolving into saccharine kitsch.

It may be a seamless tongue-in-cheek thriller, but it lacks the superbly developed psychological tension of its illustrious predecessors. Director Marshall's film is nothing more than a diversion, and if you personally have no fear of spiders, you might wonder what all the fuss is about.

But the film soars when the stunning Jennifer Lopez beams and struts her stuff in a series of exhilarating performance sequences; she's a glitzy, thrilling icon a la the made-over Olivia Newton-John of Grease.

Though not without problems, Desert Hearts is a triumph for director Donna Deitch and an inspiration for any independent filmmaker.

The film's Buck Rogers-style graphics are cool, but the shrilly squabbling brothers -- realistic though they may be -- are insufferable, the story's your-turn/my-turn structure is tedious, and its relentlessly reiterated message about brotherly love and cooperation is really grating.

The trouble with this precious fable isn't that the Whitmans are self-absorbed ninnies: It's that they aren't characters at all.

Frankenheimer pretty much ignores everything that's happened in the action and thriller genres since 1975, and mostly that's a good thing.

A beautifully shot, wonderfully moving film.

It's very funny, and the little woodland critters that make up the cast are a kiddie-pleasing bunch.

A classic among lovers of truly bad movies.