My 20th Century is like a dream, without a unifying logic -- ravishing fragments without coherence or meaning. Immersed somewhere in all this are Enyedi's meditations on the true nature of women, the shortcomings of 20th-century progress, and the connections between art and science. Yet though her own inventiveness and witty command of the medium are invigorating, her thinking is so scrambled that her originality is undermined. The movie is overintellectualized and yet not fully thought out.

While not exactly a cop-out, Virgin may leave some viewers who crave traditional closure with the same hollow ache described by the narrator as follows: "What lingered after them was not life but the most trivial list of mundane facts."

Until betrayed by its essential docility, The Promise promises a fairly stimulating wallow in the tear-jerking depths. [10 Apr 1979, p.B3]

As vivid as many scenes are, there are just as many that seem taken directly out of the Cute Irish Movie notebook.

Two if by Sea, directed by Australian Bill Bennett, suffers from a symptom common to romantic comedies that begin after the couple have visited the haystack: There's simply no more sexual tension. Without it, you'd better be as good as Tracy and Hepburn.

It's clear this sequel (directed by Darren Lynn Bousman) doesn't have the same smartness (I speak relatively) of the original. Nonetheless, "Saw" fans can still look forward to involuntary incineration, wrist and throat slashing, bullets through brains and the bashing of someone's head with a nail-festooned club.

A light inoffensive satire that brings God back to earth as crusty, caring George Burns to tell mankind to stop mucking up the river-fouling the air, killing each other off, preaching exclusive paths to heaven and to get back to the business of loving. [14 Oct 1977, p.11]

Miller is key to the film's success, with his earnest, sweet-faced looks and evident dark side. He plays Obree with just the right understated intensity, a believable competitor who fights back fiercely with his wits and a few tight-lipped words.

It yields surprisingly unspectacular results.

While director Aronofsky pistol-whips your attention with his style, the characters (mostly relegated to human mannequins in Aronofsky's visual schemes) suffer big time.

One doesn't come away from it with any sense of what the victory cost in human terms.

The problem is, Europa is episodic rather than cumulative. Europa is about the highlights in Solly's wartime life. But it's not about Solly.

Might provide a much-needed fix for Mac's most ardent fans, but they'll have to wait for a star vehicle that fully exploits the range of his comic gifts.

In Burton's hands, Washington Irving's spooky classic is reincarnated as an overripe, grisly Goth cartoon.

Intriguing, oddly banal and ultimately deflating.

Isn't much more than another conveyer-belt romantic comedy.

One half of a very funny movie, and half a funny movie is better than none.

Amazingly stilted before accelerating into its exciting finish.

The overplotted but predictable thriller "White Sands." Written by the same guy who tried to scare Harry Homeowner silly with "Pacific Heights," it's got all the ingredients, though none of the gumption, of a good adventure. It's suspiciously trendy.

The pace of the film is also on a low level, with episodic sequences rather than ones that build: more suitable to a television series than a feature film. But the accompanying low-keyed acting, mostly in the police parts of Newman, Ken Wahl and Edward Asner, lends the film a sustaining interest. [13 Feb 1981, p.17]

In the end, what started off as playful becomes tedious.

Innovative, lavish and lacking. [30 Mar 1984, p.D1]

Kermit, who takes to the role of Smollet like a grunion to running, is commanding, but it is Piggy as Smollet's castaway flame who puts much-needed wind into the movie's luffing sails. Clad in a muumuu and clamshells, she sets Kermit's timbers a-shivering as in the old days. Their love for each other—like America's love for Muppets—is simply unsinkable.

All of the supporting characters -- notably tubby Richard Griffiths as Tess's nurse and mousy Austin Pendleton as her chauffeur -- are thinly drawn, but neither MacLaine nor Cage leaves much room for anyone to overact.

Writer-director Stephan Elliott is obviously fond of his characters, and this may account for the upbeat story line, but it blinds him to how very annoying two hours of dishing can be.

Even within what often looks like a self-indulgent exercise in humiliation, pain and gratuitous gore, there is no denying the moments of genuine and powerful feeling in The Passion of the Christ -- some of which, by the way, evoke Jesus's most profound teachings of Jewish principles.

Caine is magnificent, and the film is worth a look for his contribution alone. But Milner is a promising actor, too, and the pairing of young and old is believable and occasionally very moving.

Most egregiously, the filmmakers set up a classic struggle between right and wrong and then, in a coy coda, refuse to take a stand.

Sufficiently attractive and absorbing to sustain the fond delusion that Charles' pursuit of the mystifying Sarah might culminate in a revealing, conclusive confrontation. [02 Oct 1981, p.C1]

The only active ingredient is the dynamic between Smith and Jones. There's just enough of that to get us through.

La Bamba is a puzzle -- a real mixed bag. Some of it, like the braying, cock-and-bull performance by Esai Morales, is just plain awful. But other bits, like the performances by Rosana De Soto and, as Ritchie's agent, Joe Pantoliano, are unexpectedly vibrant.

Miracle works best when the players are on the ice, shot in a faux-documentary style that uses the now-customary handheld cameras, fast pans and machine-gun edits.

The movie, which is based on the Lowell Cunningham comic book series, throws out some wonderful implications, but they’re frustratingly few and far between.

The most coherent thing about the new action thriller Blue Thunder is its eagerness to succeed and its rabble-rousing spectacle of stunt flying and aerial combat. Blue Thunder, a chase melodrama with police helicopter pilots as the good guys, transposes the salty tone of The French Connection and Dirty Harry to a chopper squadron in Los Angeles. [13 May 1983, p.B1]

Endearing if slight, Superstar at least knows what it's doing the whole way.

A handful of funny brainstorms can be found rattling around the slapdash confines of Ice Pirates. [03 Apr 1984, p.C6]

As love interests go, Shepherd and Downey are about as hot as Ike and Mamie Eisenhower, though the apoplectic Downey does have his comedic moments. Always a standout, Masterson is pensively provocative as Miranda, something of a teen-age Kim Novak.

Stylistically, the film is all in small talk, too -- those television-perfected moments of everyday life that evoke recognition, rather than curiosity, about human behavior. But there's nothing in their lines or behavior that would make any of them irreplaceable in this sort of friendly group. [22 May 1981, p.17]

Essentially, Chuck & Larry is an oafish chance for audiences to laugh at gay-bashing jokes and then feel morally redeemed for doing so -- courtesy of an obligatory wrap-up scene that reminds us that homosexuals are humans, too.

At the movie's thoroughly expected conclusion, a visual joke has a bedraggled cat licking at the icing on a wedding cake, but it's really Melanie who gets to have it and eat it, too.

Director John McTiernan, who redefined the action genre in the original "Die Hard," does devise some smashing explosions, crashes and so on, but nothing really new.

A mediocre production that nevertheless will strike a deep and resonant chord with viewers.

It's not great; it's also not idiotic.

Such a vehicle is not expected to be completely sound dramatically; and like the couple's truck, it's good enough for a short excursion.

As sprightly and determined as its fuzzy, yappy lead, the new Disney animated film Bolt works hard to be all things to all people, with mixed results.

There are a number of surprises in the idiosyncratic film, and one of its pleasures is the oblique and unchronological way in which Ward peels away the layers of the story, flashing backward and forward in time and jumping between Earth and the Beyond, separating his scenes with blindingly blank, white-out screens.

A flawed but funky adventure.

Never was the case for psychotropic medication more acute than in Jovovich's performance.

Feels like a hazy high that takes too long to shake.

Volckman and Miance are undoubtedly superb draftsmen; what they need is a writer of comparable skill.

If amusing, A Room With a View is little more than a lark, a series of skits, a two-hour tribute to the rich British eccentric.

Within this structurally baggy weepie, at least two perfectly good movies fight to break free, one a provocative legal thriller, the other a melodrama.

Douglas plays Gekko with a terrible intensity. He raves and rants, but he has a rascal's humor.

A fitfully witty and reliably spine-tingling horror melodrama...While it works you over effectively, Poltergeist betrays a good deal of rather dubious, uncoordinated manipulation. [4 June 1982, p.D1]

A well-mounted, macabre seriocomedy with passing punchlines. And for about half the movie, it's compelling stuff.

In the end Monsieur N. could use a little less cloak-and-dagger and more of what made "The Emperor's New Clothes" work, i.e., heart.

Despite the unforced humor and honesty in the performances of its young and talented cast, The Wood spends too much time wallowing in arrested adolescence to make you feel you've traveled anywhere.

A well-crafted story with a unique voice. But its literary gifts are outweighed by its pictorial prosaicness. Dimming the screen in every shot is the unmistakable shadow of the page.

Where the movie sabotages her, though, is by insisting that all she really wants is to be like everyone else.

Unfortunately, the story, adapted by Anne Rice from her best-selling novel, sucks at the neck a little too long. A 23-minute snipping from this 123-minute movie would have done wonders.

The film-which at 112 minutes, ends up ramblin' like its subject-does provide compelling rehab for an underrated artist.

Contains about enough laugh-out-loud sight gags and non sequiturs to justify what it demands of a viewer's time and money.

The Return is a pleasant if superfluous invasion of your local theaters. Everyone in front of the Cocoon Uno camera is back, including Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley, Brian Dennehy, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Steve Guttenberg and nine others. It's nice to see the old codgers still alive, kicking and making whoopee. But don't look for more than extra-terrestrial homecoming.

An easy-on-the-sensibilities family film, Eddie Murphy practically assumes the easygoing manner of Mister Rogers, a character he used to wickedly lampoon on "Saturday Night Live."

[An] appealing, if overcooked romantic comedy.

In the end, it's primarily a brain teaser, obtuse and ultimately limited in its emotional impact.

Unlike Hollywood's hygienic undersea dramas, Das Boot graphically depicts the nasty intimacy of a long mission.

Sketchy but often entertaining.

In the end, however, when all Pacino's demons are bared, they don't add up to the poignant punchline you were set up for. The movie seems to have two or three finales too many -- a disturbing trend in all too many films of late.

The movie is content to be a kind of middling expression of human decency: It's never either terribly funny or terribly dramatic, but Latifah's quiet solidity and common sense root it in ways that larger, louder pictures never achieve.

Kids will understand this stuff. If you can remember your younger, goofier roots, so will you. Sandlot isn't well made but it's alive with dopey, summertime spirit.

Ultimately, though, the movie never transcends the limitations of its Hemingwayesque, men-with-men attitudes.

This is not a fantastic movie. But there's more to it than just an MTV-slickified "Midnight Express" starring two young, photogenic stars.

The Perrier of dumb-and-dumber movies, an effervescent idiot's delight that burbles from the wellspring of silliness inside star Adam Sandler's head.

Lawrence's material runs between mediocre and offensive, and then he rescues it with his physical humor. He's at his best when he lets his face or inflection do the talking.

Close kin to Fatal Attraction, but more earnestly told, it is a cautionary treatise on the wages of fooling around in the office (death for her, despair for him). But mostly it is a solid whodunit, driven by subtext and the intensity of Ford, Greta Scacchi as the predatory other woman and Bonnie Bedelia as the wronged wife.

He got too much movie. That's the scoring total on Spike Lee's He Got Game, which ultimately must be judged a mild disappointment.

All the King's Men hasn't been directed so much as over-directed, although the result, when you make an effort to filter out all the film school pyrotechnics, is an honorable run at Robert Penn Warren's classic novel.

Despite this tale's surface sheen and propulsive momentum, it never transports one very far.

Howard's film, like McConaughey's performance, is unassuming, ingratiating and a little rough around the edges.

A superbly heartfelt drama for six diverse actors, it is as colorfully striated as its majestic namesake - and almost as wide. The film's depth is another matter altogether.

Ultimately, the movie's biggest crime is its inability to convey the delicate, damaged texture of Kahlo's life, but also the triumph of her will over intimidating defeat.

Marvels of animation abound in Monsters, Inc. -- when it comes to irreverent humor and real heart, Monsters doesn't quite measure up.

An endearing comic roundelay about the can't-commits.

Andrew Dominik's long and bizarre movie about the American outlaw appears to stick close enough to the facts so that historians won't be able to complain. But it languishes toward torpor.

Well-made, if rather predictable, new-age melodrama.

Well-made, well-acted but ultimately enervating, this is a respectable effort from Freundlich.

For my money, the best thing about Affair is Shandling, whose amusing quips and facial reactions steal what little of the show there is to steal. You almost wish the story would switch to him permanently.

Like "Ghost" and "Pretty Woman," this romance is blissfully dependent on our staying good and starry-eyed, seduced by the charisma of the leads. And we do, despite its lackadaisical pace and disappointing ending.

There's no question that the bigotry and shallowness exist out there in the American night, but there's no proportion in Stone's presentation. Stone strains too hard to make his points and in the process distorts them, undermines them. Still, Stone would probably be proud that he's made a picture that audiences may want to ward off and escape from. In that sense, he seems to see himself as being just like Champlain -- a teller of stern and disquieting truths.

It's very funny in places, even sort of tender. But let's not get out of hand.

Red Dragon is merely the distant echoes of what we liked about "Lambs."

The X-Files movie is really just a two-hour teaser for the series's sixth season. And little else. You will feel exactly like Mulder when he says, "How many times have we been right here before, Scully? So close to the truth?"

Dracula, which also stars Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves and Anthony Hopkins, is an evocative visual feast. But the meal is spectral, without the dramatic equivalent of nutritional value.

Put the whole movie down to cartoonery...This is a drive-in theater battle of wills between the forces of evil and the forces of good.

In Lost Highway, David Lynch dabbles in spooky, chilly implication and a sort of hip incoherence.

No matter how much fun it is to watch -- and for hard-core movie fans, it is often enormous fun -- there's a certain relief when it stops and we're popped back out to our banal, one-track lives.

A bizarre, occult thriller about the implications of religious faith. And, though it doesn't expand upon its shock tactics as much as it would like to or make its theological points, the movie's dread atmosphere begins to seep into your head.