Vampire in Brooklyn, a purported "comic tale of horror and seduction" that is neither funny nor frightening, just unpleasant.

For the terminally hip and/or terminally adolescent.

Get Shorty's assortment of lowlifes and high rollers is a familiar one, but it's still deeply satisfying.

Smith brazenly ignores plot conventions and concentrates on an apparently endless stream of crude and occasionally clever one-liners.

Feels less like a movie than a lost episode of the old Steve Allen or Jack Paar late-night chat shows.

It hurts to see this story reach for a tidy ending... STRANGE DAYS hurtles down the track for two hours, frantically trying to warn us en route to the Big Switchback, only to pull up in a hiss of smoke and hot air.

Jade's seamy excesses would be conventional in a direct-to-video erotic thriller; in a major studio production, they're embarrassing.

First-time director Noah Baumbach seems to have learned everything he knows about the world from MTV, and his style suggests that he's taken a lot of notes at Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley pictures.

Director Carl Franklin, who also adapted the screenplay from Walter Mosley's prize-winning novel, isn't particularly concerned with the machinations of mystery plots. Nor is he seduced by the temptations of noir visual style (although Tak Fujimoto's camera work is plenty stylish).

The film is so dark -- literally -- it's often hard to see what's going on.

Nicole Kidman does the best work of her career in a character that seems to fit her tighter than pantyhose. Swathed in camera-friendly pastels, she's dead from the neck up (a scene with uncredited George Segal confirms that) but she's got legs like scissors, ambition like a knife, and a will of pure steel.

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

After an onslaught of prerelease hype promising the erotic experience of a lifetime, Showgirls reveals itself as a 131-minute dose of cinematic saltpeter.

Insubstantial, predictable and often dull, it's a dismaying move from director Allen Moyle, who displayed a real grasp of pulp energy in 1990's "Pump Up the Volume".

Still odder is the movie's sexual worldview, which is simultaneously infantile and fetishistic. Boys wear rubber, lipstick, and spandex, but don't seem to have a sexual bone in their unmuscled bodies.

The result is an imperfect but genuinely moving film.

Spike Lee's adaptation of a solid, if overpraised, crime novel by Richard Price is slickly made and well acted. But with most of the novel's subplots stripped away, it emerges as just another polemic about the scourge of drugs in the African-American community.

Against the odds, this horror series (initially based on a Stephen King short story) has actually improved over time to the point where this third installment is a creditable if far-fetched chiller.

It's hard to dislike so genial a picture about guys in gowns (although only Leguizamo would pass muster at a drag ball: Swayze seems to be doing a third-rate impression of Joan Crawford, while Snipes just comes off as a man in a dress); still, it's basically an elaborate denial of homophobia -- which is no help to anybody in a country where people get killed for cross-dressing.

Filmed in glamourous black and white (with vampire POV sequences shot in arty Pixelvision), it's one of the most mannered horror flicks ever made.

Potentially the most controversial movie of 1995 and arguably a masterpiece, this edgy, downbeat film falls somewhere between social document and peep-show.

Unquestionably formulaic but mercifully free of the flat dialogue and arch one-liners that undermine so many action films. And while it lacks "El Mariachi's" naive charm, it's far funnier.

Solid, old-fashioned narrative moviemaking with just enough no-budget cachet to disguise its essential blandness.

Expect lots of earsplitting music, garish visuals and badly staged martial arts action.

Surprisingly, it's not bad on the whole (in an Afterschool Special kind of way), and the young stars are uniformly appealing, especially Schuyler Fisk (Sissy Spacek's daughter) and CROOKLYN's Zelda Harris.

Screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie's tough-guy dialogue and Bryan Singer's crisp direction give the ensemble cast every opportunity to shine, and they do.

Director John N. Smith, who helmed last year's masterly "The Boys of St. Vincent", is reduced to carrying Michelle Pfeiffer's baggage in this assembly-line star vehicle.

Half as interesting as a rerun of Falcon Crest and twice as long.