Sarandon is terrific and Penn is in top form, but the film is an achingly earnest message movie with a curiously muddled message.

From its explosive intro to its surprisingly giddy finale (think WHITE HEAT), this glossy adaptation is arch, nasty fun.

The whole point is to reproduce the experience of the first movie (and every other Lemmon-Matthau pairing) with mechanical precision. And so it does.

Renny Harlin's big, chaotic pirate flick is best understood as an attempt to revive the waning career of his wife, Geena Davis, but he's done her no great favor. As Morgan Adams, a sort of distaff Errol Flynn, poor Geena gets lost in a hectic scenario that's littlemore than an excuse for a series of thunderous explosions, clanky sword battles and run-of-the-mill spectacular stunts.

The film represents a retreat from the explicitly political concerns of TO LIVE (which landed the director in serious trouble with P.R.C. authorities), but there's a distinct satirical subtext underlying Zhang's Chinese Gangland, a place of limitless greed, self-destructive ritual and fatal hubris.

A lurching, addlebrained biopic that lacks even the crackpot energy of JFK, Oliver Stone's Nixon struggles to invest its nakedly venal subject with tragic dignity.

It didn't sound like fun to us, either, but we were wrong; Heat scores on many fronts...The plot, though it seems to ramble, builds suspense with deft precision, and the action set pieces are triumphs.

Regrettably, however, the weird elegance of Chris Van Allsburg's much-praised picture book has been all but lost in translation.

Billed as the first film to originate from the newly democratic South Africa, this disappointing prestige production is a ploddingly earnest adaptation of Alan Paton's 1948 novel.

You may end up wishing for a little less show and a lot more substance.

A truly lousy reworking of a Billy Wilder misfire... The story is drearily predictable, the leads are charmless -- Ormond's 15 minutes are probably already behind her -- and the direction, by the usually reliable Sidney Pollack, is strictly by the numbers.

For once, Thompson turns in a gimmick-free performance, and the rest of the actors range from fine to fabulous. But the whole thing feels stolid and uninspired.

Harrowing and heartfelt, with knockout performances by a pair of fine actresses.

In all, it's fairly harmless, tolerably sentimental and mildly entertaining: just the thing for the kind of holiday afternoon when you've had way too much of your relatives.

Largely vapid, borderline homophobic, and surprisingly treacly.

The product is an ambitious but awkward movie that jumps forward and back in time; voice-over narration fails to smooth over the choppiness. Nevertheless, it's studded with haunting, melancholy sequences, and Jeff Bridges is one of a handful of contemporary stars with enough stature and substance to carry off Hickock's mythic resonance.

The film is immensely entertaining and occasionally inspiring, a delirious combination of Slavic solemnity, Latin exoticism, Communist idealism and breathtakingly beautiful images.

An accomplished film that carries with it the unshakable feeling that we've seen it all before.

Clever, fast-moving and unobtrusively self-conscious.

Douglas's Chief Executive is no vote-getter; he's a charmless, irritating boob who can't even order flowers for a woman. With friends like Douglas and Reiner, Clinton doesn't need Rush Limbaugh.

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

This modern-day hybrid of "The Prince and the Pauper" and "The Parent Trap" is a slickly contrived showcase for the professionally cute Olsen Twins, late of TV's Full House.

His emphasis on acting is welcome at a time when shallow, smirkingly self-referential performances threaten to become the Hollywood norm, but the film's slack pacing and narrative indiscipline undermine its intensity.

This sequel to 1994's surprise blockbuster is shamelessly stupid, willfully juvenile and generally just plain gross -- which is, after all, the point.

Is there no one in Allen's circle who dares to tell the master this ain't funny?

From a sharp, jaundiced script by W.D. Richter ("Buckaroo Banzai"), Jodie Foster has directed a poisoned paean to the great American tradition of torturous family gatherings.

Not bad enough to be good.... This vigorous, pinheaded action flick asks us to accept Cindy as a lawyer.

Polish director Agnieska Holland paid no mind to the actors' accents during casting, and the melange of British, French and American speech helps sink a film that's already foundering under the weight of its pretentions.