If not precisely poetic in its elaborate offensiveness, it's certainly imaginative. Unfortunately, that's not the same as interesting or engaging, unless you're a dyed-in-the-wool fan.

Cushioned by money - which frees him from needing to work and allows him to fly around the world looking for his past - Bruce is attractive and well-spoken but not especially interesting, which leaves a yawning void at the story's center.

Not surprisingly, the film is strongest when its characters are simply hanging out, shooting the breeze and venting their feelings, while moments of high drama occasionally fall flat.

The film is dreary and attenuated, the tedium broken only by the occasional golden moment when one of the stellar supporting players - Ron Silver as the principled presiding judge who alternately tolerates and quashes Jackie's antics, Peter Dinklage as the lead defense attorney or Annabella Sciorra as Jackie's ex - manages to cut through the clutter.

A heartfelt sleeper from screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Guy Ferland.

This is one of the best political thrillers of the 1970s.

An accomplished thriller that's nasty, brutish and relatively short.

Fox falters a bit with the narrative, but offers a fascinating treatment of the issues facing the descendents of Jewish victims and their German persecutors, as well as one of the most chilling birthday parties ever filmed.

Medem's stupendously gorgeous puzzle movie features strong performances from its four leads.

A triumph of genre filmmaking.

While Grazia's story is too reminiscent of such films as "Blue Sky" (1994), which also draws an all too easy connection between mental illness and the oppression of high-spirited housewives, the evocation of provincial life in a tiny village that's wholly dependent on the sea is splendid, and recalls a number of classic Italian films.

Though compelling, well crafted, and well acted, SWEET DREAMS will probably be a disappointment for Patsy Cline fans.

Written with all the bite of a distinctly middle-class church social, this musical re-working of The Philadelphia Story feels distant.

Dark, dank and violent, filled with terrifying scenes in which exploited children are beaten, shot or starving to death. In other words, it's just as Dickens wrote.

The actors look like they're having a great time, playing exaggerated versions of their stereotyped neuroses, and the complex plot's fast movement keeps the audience's attention well. But with all this, something is very wrong with SOAPDISH: It isn't all that funny.

Adapted from Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories and his Alice Adams, the Warner Bros. production suffuses its folksy story in nostalgia but never completely warms the hearts it aims for.

Despite Chantel's promise that she's letting us in on the "real deal," JUST ANOTHER GIRL ON THE I.R.T. is just another teenage pregnancy melodrama: remove the swearing and the hip-hop soundtrack and it would make a fine after-school special, complete with a smart yet sexually irresponsible teenager, a remarkably successful premature birth, and an uplifting ending in which the young mother goes to night school to finish her high school diploma.

This is one of the better Norris action films, showcasing his astounding martial-arts skills. But the film loses power toward the end when the action bends reality a little too much.

Who these brave men were and why they fought disappears under the usual clichés, while the astounding acts of courage that occurred at Ia Drang are lost to the dust and din.

The real stars of the film are Francois Emmanuelli's vibrant production design, Klapisch's flair with inventive optical effects and above all Barcelona itself, captured here in all its baroque brilliance.

The film's epic look is undermined by his narrow focus; in the end it feels rather thin and less than the sum of its handsome parts.

A gentle and effective heart-tugger, Cocoon tries to make its audience feel good, but you can't help but feel uneasy about the vision of old age that director Ron Howard depicts--one in which the young cannot accept the notion of getting old. The derivative special effects feel like leftovers from the infinitely superior Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The writers get the mix just about right, and first-time Bond director Martin Campbell moves things along fairly briskly.

Christopher Lee is excellent as the mute monster, but this is Cushing's film all the way.

Buoyed by a distinguished cast of horror veterans, Bloch's well-written script, and Baker's deft direction, Asylum is the most satisfying of the horror anthologies of the 1970s.

Peddle captures a vital and increasingly visible community that's easily misunderstood, and his film will undoubtedly help novices further understand the complex differences separating gays, transsexuals and the transgendered.

Rossier's film leaves the dispiriting impression that democracy simply will not be tolerated in the Southern Hemisphere.

Driven by Edward Norton's and Evan Rachel Wood's riveting performances, writer-director David Jacobson's tense drama samples bits of cinematic Americana from sources as diverse as "Shane," "Badlands" and "Taxi Driver."