New Bond man Brosnan can't be faulted for much. He's always been generically sexy, a sort of programmed cover boy. In this new venture, he's appropriately handsome, British-accented and suave.

But the film, written and directed by fellow artist Julian Schnabel, is so tender in its affections, these omissions and poetic licenses seem like the embellishments of a good friend.

Bound, a diabolically clever caper, isn't nearly so deep as the genre it kids.

The hero's feats are implausible even by action standards, but screenwriters Tony Puryear and Walon Green have concocted one of the summer's most spectacular action sequences.

Evita is a busy movie with an often noisy soundtrack that can get tedious and monotonous (particularly in the second half), but it's just as likely to sweep one away with its musical, emotional and historical momentum.

The excitement comes from Frakes's direction -- his liveliness, and his pleasure in looking at, and showing us, events and images.

What counts is the comic tension between MacLaine and Cage. It's so well done, it doesn't matter how dumb things get.

The personable star of the TV series "Home Improvement" turns this Walt Disney film around. He may not be as effervescent as, say, Robin Williams, but he's full of understated, ticklish charm.

Monument Ave. is a cinematic dead-end street that is not without its gloomy, gritty thrills -- assuming, that is, that you're not in the market for a hero or even the slightest feather of that thing called hope. [09 Oct 1998, Pg.N.49]

In old-fashioned movie terms, it's enjoyable, thanks mostly to Neeson who, not unlike Jeff Bridges, always eclipses your expectations of him. [25 Oct 1996, Pg.N.42]

Like the male-bonding movies upon which it's modeled, it celebrates letting down your hair with your own gender.

It's not a challenging movie or an original one, but it does have its pleasures -- most notably a radiant, soulful debut performance from Driver, who saves Circle of Friends from being merely an Irish ugly duckling story.

Using a cockeyed, surreal style harking back to Monty Python-ism, writer- director Peter Duncan illuminates the tragedy of all true believers whose faith depends upon keeping ears and eyes firmly shut.

The reason for the film's success is simple. Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese and director Eastwood skirt most of novelist Robert James Waller's excesses.

First-time writer/director Tom Hanks stays about a half-beat ahead of the cliches with rim shots of boyish enthusiasm and deft comedy.

For all of its departures, Luhrmann's largely successful reinterpretation is far from irreverent. He takes liberties with the world, but never the words of this achingly beautiful love story.

Jon Amiel, who previously directed "Sommersby," delivers a taut, gripping thriller and, with the help of his accomplished leads, succeeds in camouflaging some of the mammoth holes in Ann Biderman and David Madsen's otherwise intelligent and inventive screenplay.

Taylor Hackford's film version of the Stephen King novel, has a whopping list of shortcomings -- and yet it still manages to be an engrossing, unsettling and, at times, powerful psychological thriller.

[Leven] keeps the film's tone light and ingratiating. And, though the material is thin, the actors do seem to be getting a kick out of playing off each other.

Barkin's succulence and De Niro's showboating lend sizzle and ferocity to the proceedings, but the film draws its poignancy from 18-year-old DiCaprio's performance.

It's less like a film by Demme than the best of Frank Capra. It is not just canny, corny and blatantly patriotic, but compassionate, compelling and emotionally devastating.

Pu Yi's personal tragedy has become Bertolucci's three-hour epic of obsolescence, opulently visualized. It's docudrama that dazzles, but basically Pu Yi was a bore.

In today's mouse-toting, instant-gratification world, this kind of old-fashioned, character-driven slapstick is wonderfully incompatible. It's a grumpy last hurrah.

With this bold stamp [director Jane Campion] lays claim to the story that follows as wholly her own.

Adapted from Valerie Martin's psychosexual novel, this maudlin film transforms the legend of Jekyll and Hyde into a talky romantic love triangle. [23 Feb 1996]

The story is riddled with absurd coincidences and improbabilities. It doesn't have an original bone in its body. And no one's going to leave this film thinking De Niro should stay behind the camera. But none of these problems stops the movie from being enjoyable. If Bronx Tale feels too familiar, it's at least the familiarity of good Italian movies.

The picture seems muted, the flower's petals a little brown at the edges.

In Truly, Madly, Deeply comparisons with "Ghost" are inevitable. But this British production, starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, takes a wide berth around the kind of button-pushing found in "Ghost." It presses with lighter fingers.

Fear is pretty much a cheap-thrills fix; the ideas, such as they are, function as window dressing. Still, cheap though these thrills may be, they are genuinely thrilling.

The graceful and affecting Grand Canyon, with its flock of fortysomethings, is much more than just "The Bigger Chill."

The movie won't come clear, Eastwood has succeeded so thoroughly in communicating his love of his subject, and there's such vitality in the performances, that we walk out elated, juiced on the actors and the music.

The caper isn't as passionate as the title suggests—in fact, it's facile—but Ryan and Kevin Kline, as her attractive opposite, are irresistible together.

As lectures go, this may be the most fun one yet.

It's sexy and bloody and, to my amazement, R-rated, but in a stylized, Grand Kabuki manner that lifts the action (including the sex and violence) from our normal sphere of reality to the realm of timeless, primal tales.

Maurice succeeds because [Merchant/Ivory's] trademark flatness is appropriate for the subject.

What could be a needed and satisfying commercial breakthrough for Coppola.

The Mosquito Coast is the only movie you'll see this season that has too much ambition for its own good - its subject, really, is nothing less than the American experience.

Modulating from heavy to light, from angry to lyrical, and so on, the movie's an enjoyable, emotional symphony.

In his [Ice Cube's] dramatic roles, Cube's raised eyebrows usually unleashed a fearsome glare and a hint of danger; here, his expressions are more quizzical, amused or confused. He plays against type, just as the movie itself plays against hype.

The most nagging impediment to wholehearted acceptance of Tootsie and its little storytelling subterfuges is a failure to recognize the hypocritical aspects of Dorsey's imposture and alleged character improvement. Although Dorsey is supposedly sensitized to the desirability of honesty and consideration in romantic dealings by being forced to seethe on the sidelines while Ron treats Julie badly, the hero never does square things with Sandy, the woman whose trust he betrays in a far more deliberate, systematic fashion. Indeed, it seems downright outrageous for Dorsey to get indignant about Ron's oblivious sort of misbehavior when he's conning Sandy in premeditated ways. [17 Dec 1982, p.F1]

Henry Fool, the fascinating and often infuriating new film from the idiosyncratic Hal Hartley. [24 Jul 1998]

The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese's provocative, punishing, weirdly brilliant adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, has a feverish intensity. And undeniably, there's a prodigious greatness on display here. But just as undeniably, it is failed work.

Nixon is an audacious biography rich in imagination and originality, with a provocative, often subversive sense of character and history. Dense and challenging, it is also undermined in places by Stone's obsessions just as dramatically as Richard Nixon was undermined by his.

A jumble of subplots and suppositions, The Unbelievable Truth ultimately comes together as suburban farce in a door-banging conclusion to all the wild speculation.

If there's one thing going for Last Action Hero, it's the construction of it all. Even if this intermixing of kid fantasy and adult shoot'em-up, Hollywood insider jokes and cheap Arnold puns, doesn't completely bowl you over, it's clever and intriguing.

It's the rapport between the two actors, De Niro and Murray, that saves Mad Dog and Glory from being something less than just another buddy movie. Their real-life friendship spills over into this jittery, very funny look at the male bonding experience.

Douglas's intentionally robotic -- and intense -- performance holds its own. He's scary, normal and funny all at once.

The spirit of the film, though, is snazzier and more playful than Crichton’s rather thin, humorless schematic. The subject is serious; thankfully, the movie is not.

Knee-jerk tears aside, there's nothing tremendously special. It's very watchable, but it doesn't stand out. Which is not to say the film is badly done; it's just decently done.

But for all the jagged, witty chatter -- and Streep and MacLaine do their tragicomic damnedest with it -- Postcard provides the most rudimentary and jury-rigged of outcomes.

Green proves adept at capturing the quiet intensity and peculiar rhythms of Traveller culture.

If you're in the mood for loud, fast-moving action trash, The Corruptor is waiting to meet you in a dark alley.

Everything and everyone you liked in the original are there. But GB II often seems like "Ghostbusters: The Preview Reel, Extended Mix," with its rather see-through buffet of special effects, comic bits and music-video transitions.

Heckerling's central hokum is definitely silly, based on the notion that Mikey (and all babies, in fact) has somewhat adult, slightly cynical thoughts on everything that goes on around him, from conception to end credits -- and that these thoughts and embryonic wisecracks and creative interpretations are heard only by the audience via the aptly cast voice of overgrown kid Willis.

Its intentions seem fairly modest, and so are its achievements. It's a modestly enjoyable diversion.

It's a thoughtfully constructed story, with nuanced performances all around and even a mild surprise thrown in, but the whole thing feels ever so slightly enervated, like a game of chess between codgers in the park.

Big has a warmhearted sweetness that's invigorating; it makes you want to break out the Legos. It's only near the end of the film, when Hanks has to play the scenes for pathos, that the movie becomes cloying.

Hairspray is definitely self-congratulatory, like the message movies it aims to spoof. But there's a sweet morality mixed with the camp clumsiness of this nostalgic goof. Waters couldn't care less about the subtleties of plot or character. He writes and directs the way a kid finger paints. As usual, he's gathered a tantalizing cast from the so-out-they're-in crowd. [26 Feb 1988, p.b1]

The words - taken directly from the book - are beautifully cast, but they encapsulate the emotions too conveniently.

Considering how firmly the image of Popeye is fixed in the minds of all spinach-bred Americans, it's daring of the film to open by showing the character in its familiar cartoon form. But Robin Williams so utterly captures the Popeye idea as to justify this, and Shelley Duvall is such a perfect Olive Oyl that it will always be difficult to imagine her impersonating a human being. [19 Dec 1980, p.20]

It starts slow, but finishes fast with some clever plot twists. In the end, all is not lost with these boys.

The movie has a big payoff; it's the setup that's the drag. But Kevin's antics will touch the budding subversive in every kid. My advice? Hide the car keys.

This is sweet-natured fun for the very young.

But even though Marcos, in this film, provides enough material for a few hundred giggles and head-shakings, she also shows a pathetically human side.

There are some very thought-provoking points, and the movie deserves a balanced listening-to.

A wonderfully unsentimental parable that backs no horses in the movie's secular/religious dualities.