As a piece of theater, Oleanna's stylized dialogue and strict three-act schematic structure probably worked in the drama's favor; but on film, the techniques are jarring within the naturalistic settings. Mamet, who has written and directed three previous films, should have known better than to preserve the excessively theatrical aspects of his material.

While not as ponderous and overblown as STREET FIGHTER, another video game-based 1994 movie, DOUBLE DRAGON is depressingly lightweight, making constant and unnecessary concessions to youthful audiences at the expense of any real bite or impact.

A dark, expertly contrived display of paranoid nastiness; it's so gleefully mean that only the most tender-hearted viewer could resist going along for the ride.

Beatty hired some superb talents to remake Love Affair, but many of them are dragged down by director Glenn Gordon Caron's velvety kitsch style.

Unlike his models, however, Smith hasn't demonstrated that his sensibility reaches much beyond bathroom humor and meaningless drift.

Without its commitment to an idea of salvation, Pulp Fiction would be little more than a terrific parlor trick; with it, it's something far richer and more haunting.

It should come as no surprise that Wes Craven's return to the horror series he created is the strongest of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequels, but even his fans might not have expected the ironic depth and self-reflexivity he brings to this chapter.

Henkel's directing debut isn't incompetent: It's just derivative, pointless and tediously repetitive.

Charting a life in transit and barely sidestepping a tragic journey's end, CARO DIARIO proves that you never really know people until you travel with them.

Delightful, off-the-wall, and ultimately moving.

The sequel retains only vestiges of the charm and bizarre humor which made the original a surprise cult favorite.

Michael Tolkin's THE NEW AGE is something new, a comedy of horrors that's brittle, hypnotically hip, and so cool it almost freezes the audience out.

It's a blessedly old-fashioned, well-made and well-acted narrative.

Overlong and utterly predictable, The Next Karate Kid offers little excitement, even in its culminating fight sequence.

The film is brought down by stereotypical characters and a curiously dated view of Africa.

Lewis is only slightly awful, and he and Depp have a nice rapport; Dunaway gives a particularly juicy performance; and Taylor is simply amazing, seemingly able to transform herself physically for every role she plays.

Fresh sounds like another slice of low-life, a study of an intelligent but fatally disadvantaged ghetto child's inexorable descent into criminality. But if the situations are (at first) familiar, the characters aren't; they may look like the same old junkies and dealers and whores and gangsters, but first-time director Boaz Yakin invests all of them--particularly Fresh (Sean Nelson)--with a subtle, complex life that's both painful and exhilarating.

A crowd-pleasing story that has little to do with the messy complexities of reality.

Violent, kinetic, and occasionally clever, KILLING ZOE is no match for either RESERVOIR DOGS or PULP FICTION, but it's a zoned-out rollercoaster ride of the first order.

Wildly unconventional, corrosively satirical, savagely violent and vulgar, Natural Born Killers is more self-consciously radical (in form, if not necessarily in content) than any other major studio release in recent memory.

Since all these revisited series have run out of steam, this sorry sequel is only recommended for aging nostalgists.

The opening half-hour, as Pat and former music video director Bernstein conspire to keep the secret while depicting the banal existence of this truly irritating character, is reasonably entertaining. The remainder of the film has some amusing moments, but the story goes nowhere, and if the film ran longer than its 80 minutes, it would have become too tedious to tolerate.

[A] sleazy, generally embarrassing Hitchcock knock-off.

The script is spiked with cheeky, occasionally hilarious encounters, like the trio's stroll through a lazy Outback town in flamboyant space-age drag, or Bernadette's deliciously unprintable riposte to a hostile woman in a bar.

Airheads commits the cardinal sin of satire: it's not sure what it's making fun of.

An unsatisfactory feature treatment of beloved characters from the world of television.

The storytelling is livelier and more engaging than previous adaptations of Clancy's turgid techno-thrillers.

A remarkably assured comedy-drama of domestic life in Taiwan, Ang Lee's EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN explores how families use meals and other rituals to appease their hunger for love in stressful times.