Seems to go sideways as often as it goes forward. Altman can't help noticing things more interesting than the story.

There was absolutely no reason to make a new version of the 1970 comedy.

It's a celebration of young American women, finding them smarter, tougher, shrewder, more rigorous, more persistent and more honest than any movie in many a moon.

One big, fat, honking comic book of a sci-fi-martial-arts adventure flick.

The movie's too slick and obvious about its intentions.

Here's what I really like about The Mod Squad: Nobody in it gives a damn.

It's just a simple, actorly drama about big, gaping emotional needs and the consequences a woman can face -- particularly during the 1960s -- for simply owning up to them.

Unhappily, the attractive twosome never give into the pull, just as this coquettish variant of "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" never arrives at its promised destination.

The film is one of those accursed self-styled "outrageous" comedies that play the horrific for broad laughs, with a comically inflated style of dialogue that's so hip one doubts it could have been conceived before 1997, much less 1847.

An animated King and I? Now there's torture, especially in this wretched, lurid, absurd concoction which seems to have been conceived to annoy adults and bore children.

The geological equivalent of an albatross around the neck. It's another of those Warner Bros. productions that are heavy on star iconography and production values but AWOL on story.

Cinematic sleeping pill.

The movie's a floating longboat that ought to be ignited and pushed out to sea, Viking style.

Only reason to watch this: the grisly reward Irving receives for being in this picture.

The laughs are few, far between and pretty darn faint in this comedy.

After a sensational beginning, the movie loses its way in the late going and somehow doesn't deliver. [12 Mar 1999]

A pretty woeful affair...a sitcom disguised as a movie.

The original was about social manipulation as blood sport. Amazing how easily it transports, themes intact, to our blighted decade, and to our children.

A considerable kick, though it would have helped if one of the boys had wiped off the lens of the camera once in a while.

A twentysomething comedy with a brain-dead script, unflattering lighting and 16 performers in search of a scriptwriter...[It] feels like one-sixth of an idea stretched to the breaking point.

The Other Sister is sanctimonious, sanitized fare primarily preoccupied with patting its own back and plucking our heartstrings.

It's sickeningly violent!

A knowing, somewhat slight, often hilarious sendup of cubicle culture.

Paint-by-numbers feel-gooder, in which Homer and his friends decide to win a national science fair for their little town and, ultimately, for America.

Why sit through a lesser imitation, when you could just rent "Heathers" and those other movies for a far more enjoyable time? Drop-dead bitchery? Been there, done that.

A mediocre comic romance.

There's only one thing to do with this "Bottle": Put a cork in it.

My Favorite Martian never achieves anything that resembles farcical consistency, let alone farcical bliss, but it has enough playful nonsense scattered around a hit-and-miss scenario to rationalize a kiddie matinee excursion. [12 Feb 1999, p.C16]

The dialogue is fast but bad, the acting is loud but awful and the morality is chaste but unromantic. As for the food, it looks vulgar.

We're supposed to adore Gibson's sang-froid and his toughness, but everything, a few good lines aside, is so witless and monotonous it becomes numbing.

A classic like this deserves to be unearthed! After all, this picture is likely to command a pedestal of its own at the local video store. Just check for shelves marked either "Sharon Stone" or "Staff's Worst Picks of 1999."

An amateurish jumble of romantic and tear-jerking overtures from novice writer-director Willard Carroll. [28 Jan 1999, p.M20]

Everything in it is a cliche including the end.

This flick has modest ambitions, but it delivers the goods in a fresh manner.

It's sheer piffle, a disingenuous romance with Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino that's all sap and no sizzle.

A big, fat, gorgeous, mesmerizing mess.

Like the bitter cold in which it's set, Affliction bites hard and true.

The movie is exquisitely directed by Anand Tucker in an anti-documentary style that sometimes fractures the time sequence, sometimes re-creates moments impressionistically instead of objectively and is vivid in style.

It's not without moments of wit and powerful emotion, but somehow Stepmom never feels either real enough to move us deeply or bubbly enough to make us forget our woes.

A jaundiced view of litigation, however authentic, is not necessarily the stuff of great drama, even of the legal-thriller variety, which by definition is confined to a claustrophobic courtroom.

There should be a special room in Hell where the makers of films like Patch Adams are sent.

Down in the Delta is as savory as a slowly stirred gumbo, a heartfelt saga of family and forgiveness directed by America's best-loved living poet, Maya Angelou. The spices are plentiful and the taste complex, but there's nothing fancy about this cultural icon's down-home cooking. [25 Dec 1998, p.C01]

The Theory of Flight, an unlikely marriage of malady movie and romantic comedy, never quite soars, but beats its wings with the desperate tenacity of a wounded butterfly. Alas, the proportion of lift to drag isn't quite enough to defy the gravity of its subject.

Made me feel like a Christmas goose being fattened for slaughter. Its force-fed diet of whimsy cloyed long before the eagerly anticipated romantic payoff arrived to put me out of my misery.

As a rule, the drawn and computer-animated imagery is top notch and seamlessly integrated, but the central characters' tawny complexions and the often chiaroscuro lighting sometimes obscure all but the whites of their eyes and their pearl-perfect teeth.

But [Raimi]'s instructed his fabulous Style to take a hike, and, working from Scott Smith's brilliantly reconfigured script from Smith's own (much darker) novel, delivers a piece that is severe and disciplined in its evocation of the cold terrors of fate.

The movie becomes something quite rare and magical: a text about a text that is also full of life. In other words, it's a true first: It's both postmodern and fun!

Weird, warm, monumentally entertaining comedy.

Crass, dumbed down and stickily sentimental, it's a flavorless confection that clearly had too many chefs tugging at the taffy.

Little Voice may be more of a confection than a square meal, but it's proof of how good a dish can be when the ingredients are of the highest order.

This Psycho seems a little nuts.

You'd never know it from the innocuous-looking trailers, but Home Fries is really "When Dorian Met Sally" meets "Psycho."

It never makes you laugh that hard. Not even close. And so the thing becomes a bloody assault on the senses that commingles atrocity with tedium.

It's an infusion of zip that's sorely needed, because the chief deficiency of A Bug's Life so far is its blandness….The film's other weakness is the low-octane vocal performances of its leading cast.

This is hardly your same old trough of slop. Babe nonetheless prevails, demonstrating once again "how a kind and steady heart can heal a sorry world."

Writer-director Kirk Jones III keeps the movie resolutely brisk and light, twisting mildly this way and that but never detouring for long.

It is this sense of real life blurring with make-believe that Allen's film is really playing with, like a kitten toying with a scared mouse. Back and forth he bats the subject, moving between reality, illusion and the imitation of reality with a deft touch that may bruise but never kills.

A touching and unusual road movie-cum-buddy film.

Dizzy, delightful and just a bit deviant, "The Rugrats Movie" blends all the sarcastic sensibility of "The Simpsons" with the old-fashioned silliness of Soupy Sales.

The dazzle doesn't make up, however, for the movie's lack of depth.

Meet Joe Black, with Brad Pitt, is a near-death experience: Time seems to stop as we stiffen in our seats and the actors all whisper as if they're at a wake.

More in the dumb and dumber tradition of "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" sequels.

In trying to compose a poetic love letter to a time of liberation and freedom, Haynes has merely conjured up memories of druggy excess, egotism and tight trousers. The only mementos worth saving from the experience are available on the soundtrack.

Most of the fault rests with the script, which gets to this issue late and feels only perfunctory, more interested in the jolt of the image than the jolt of the idea.

Another film about . . . a cretinous, grating loser.

Where Elizabeth really triumphs over its dusty source material is in transforming all this boring history into a real, rip-roaring adventure tale.

Eminently watchable thanks to strong performances from its three leads (McKellen, Redgrave, Fraser).

What little grace there is in Living Out Loud (and there isn't much) is all in LaGravenese's script, not on the screen.

A mousy little nothing of a picture.

While it celebrates the triumph of humor, invention and the human spirit, Life Is Beautiful is not the transporting experience it might have been. Benigni knows how to make us laugh, but he has not yet figured out how to make us cry.

Lacks the edge and depth of a truly inspired work.

Ultimately the movie disintegrates due to its own clumsiness. It's far too coincidence-driven to be believable.

But for the most part, The Last Days fails to play as a document of the survivors' lives, or even as their memory of that time. Rather, it feels removed, distant, a document of an attempt to re-create a memory.

It lacks Altman's wisdom, but its sense of humor is corrosive, if dispiriting, and its willingness to show the human animal at his most disgusting has a kind of anti-grandeur to it.

Powerful, depressing and very, very long. At close to three hours, it virtually enslaves an audience, which may be part of the point.

Director Griffin Dunne lacks a clear vision, torn between blithe spirits and brimstone, between madcap and macabre. But then what does it matter when there's so little magic on screen anyhow? That is unless you count making audiences disappear.

There just aren't many laughs in this slack dramedy, and what yuks there are are fairly low-wattage.

Director Marc Levin's shaky, hand-held camera lends "Slam" an unvarnished, documentary feel. The script – credited not only to Levin, Bonz Malone and Richard Stratton, but to acclaimed performance poets Sohn and Williams – is dense and difficult.

Directed by Vincent ("A Map of the Human Heart") Ward, who is either a genius or a crackpot, and derived from a long-ago novel by Richard Matheson, the film is overproduced and underpopulated, with either characters or ideas.

I will admit that this TV skit stretched out to a filament-thin 83 minutes is idiotic, but I mean that in a good way.

Sorry, Antz has no show-stopping song and dance numbers, no catchy melodies and no love songs either. The score, made up of old standards, does, however, enhance one of the movie's wittier episodes.

Upon this fine mess shines Janeane Garofalo like a ray of sarcastic sunlight as FBI agent Shelby...With her gift for sweet bile, the sardonic Garofalo makes every second on screen a treasure to be cherished.

Although laced with adrenaline and flavored with noirish seasoning, John Frankenheimer's Ronin is a disappointingly conventional thriller.

It's no worse than any number of other cookie-cutter slasher flicks geared for the slightly post-pubescent market.

It's also sweet, sentimental, rather funny and, as John Waters films go, surprisingly gentle.

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]

Admirably restrained melodrama.

A misbegotten marriage of sweet and sour.

The events of the movie are filament-thin and insubstantial but, like fine silk threads, they weave together a fabric of surpassing warmth and texture. [25 Sep 1998, Pg.N.63]

Screenwriter David Veloz makes his debut behind the camera with this stale and stodgily paced depiction of Stahl's highs and lows. The story, which Veloz also wrote, unfolds via a series of momentum-draining flashbacks. [18 Sep 1998, p.C07]

And while it's intermittently engaging, the drama's flatter than a sucker's wallet.

A magical child movie in which the child is magical, yes, but the movie is not.

The movie is almost completely uninteresting on the story level but fascinating as a work of imagined reconstruction and anthropology and as a study of the theory and practice of Studio 54.

The bad news is that the opening credits, which make sick and darkly comic allusions to suicide, are the best thing about the film.

The performances are so monotonic that you understand depicting authentic humanity is not the writer-director's goal: Each character has been reduced to a single unpleasant primal trait from which deviation is not permitted.

It's the individual characters, so carefully crafted, who count, as opposed to a tidy conclusion.

A vulgar attempt to revamp the undead genre by introducing computer-generated splatter and a casketful of themes from genetic tinkering to conspiracy theories.

Like its Southern California setting, the sunny semi-autobiography is tempered with just the right touch of Jenkins's smoggy cynicism.

Buffed and waxed to within an inch of its life, Stella registers as more of a sequence of slick commercials than an actual drama.

In this movie, the sense of charm has been obliterated.

Unfortunately, the dramatic potential of such a moral quandary is left largely unmined in director Joseph Ruben's monotonous parlor game of will-he-won't-he. [14 Aug 1998, Pg. N.39]

A glittery but dunderheaded murder mystery.

The 20th-anniversary sequel to the groundbreaking horror film-and the sixth in an increasingly awful series about the bulletproof murderer Michael Myers-is a styleless and predictable affair.

The film degenerates into sophomoric name calling and a brand of insult humor that would embarrass Don Rickles.

In this modern retelling of the well-known fable, she is one princess-in-waiting who does not need rescuing by any knight in shining armor. [31 Jul 1998, Pg. N.47]

The slogging melodrama that emerged still more closely resembles the daily musings of an infatuated teenager than a well-crafted, thoughtful story. [14 Aug 1998]

A whodunit so bafflingly constructed that you can't even figure out what it is, so the whodun part is superfluous.

There is still a self-consciousness and a forced quality to much of the humor that this TPT redux just can't shake.

Its relatively minor imperfections seem more glaring when compared to the near flawlessness of the film's lyrical, scorching start.

Fitfully amusing and ultimately kind of heartwarming in a twisted sort of way

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

A stupid and violent delicacy, congealed nachos and Mountain Dew for the Beavis-and-Butt-head set.

So predictable it could have been written by a chimp who's watched too much TV, the huge movie is as dumb as it is loud, and it's way too loud.

Jack is just one of a dozen enormously appealing personalities in Out of Sight.

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.

Personal and private almost to the point of self-absorption, the film is ultimately saved from neurotic narcissism by the director's self-deprecating humor and unapologetic honesty about his own dysfunction.

The Irish independent feature I Went Down is an elusive leprechaun of a film that doggedly resists being pigeonholed. Once caught, however, it yields a small pot of gold in its droll performances and deadpan wit. [3 July 1998, p.N46]

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?"

Mulan may be exotic, but it's hardly a risky enterprise, what with its sentimental show tunes, wholesome morals and plucky teen heroine.

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

Obviously, this movie isn't for everyone. But if anyone can take a crossover audience through the gay terrain, it's Stafford. As Eric, his utter heart-stopping anticipation when he sits alone in a car with Rod, is palpable. Through his eyes, you can feel so much at stake here, not the least of which is his innocence.

When the danger subsides and the sparkless romance returns to the foreground, the vehicle comes sputtering back to earth with a thud, weighed down by the inertia of its leaden leading lady.

True to the film's name, there is one thing I couldn't hardly wait for, and that's the closing credits.

The trouble is, we don't really much care about this philandering billionaire glamour puss, who seems perfectly capable of taking care of herself. We don't care about her husband or lover either.

One of the smartest, most inventive movies in memory, it manages to be as endearing as it is provocative.

Eavesdropping on the glib conversations of witty urbanites can be a pleasant diversion, but after so much volubility, you might find yourself wishing that they would all just shut up and dance.

Despite its hopeful title and a warm inland location, this dawdling family dramedy proves as sodden as a bed-wetter's mattress.

Very much like sex. On second thought, make that bad sex. Actually, sexual assault is more like it. It will leave you feeling used, bruised, violated, mistrustful and unclean.

Watching it is like being forced to listen to bad heavy metal music turned up to 11 while fat guys in Bermuda shorts compete in a puking contest in the john.

This is a great liberal movie, which is to say, it will be loved most passionately by great liberals, and despised by the conservatives it contemptuously fails to notice.

Size vanquishes both substance and subtlety in the overhyped, half-cocked and humorless resurrection of dear old "Godzilla."

The movie is not only a better version of the book, it's a work unto itself.

Quest for Camelot, the first feature-length, fully animated film from the Warner Bros. studio, is a quasi-feminist Arthurian adventure about a young woman who wants to become a knight of the Round Table. It is also, unfortunately, a derivative rip-off.

For a suspense drama, Impact is a slack, oddly enervated and mawkish soup of largely lethargic performances.

The problem, sadly, is that the whole amounts to less than the sum of its parts.

Sliding Doors is frothy stuff, far more complicated in structure than in content.

Though R-rated, its real target audience is under 18 -- either in years or IQ points.

Cerebral, frenetic and funny, this chamber piece from filmmaker James Toback provides a timely if inconclusive comment on monogamy.

Wendy Wasserstein brings a dull pen to this literary adaptation, which shows none of the bite or savvy of Stephen McCauley's novel.

The mixture of tension, yuks and horrific violence at times reminds one of nothing more than a poor man's "Pulp Fiction."

Tasteless and without redeeming social value, and also dank with the stench of decomposition masked by not enough formaldehyde, Nightwatch is the best kind of movie pleasure, a completely guilty one. [17 Apr 1998]

Needless to say, in the age of inferior remakes, this would-be homage -- a sort of Wim Wenders Lite -- is a mawkish debasement of its source material.

The movie's surface of bright, brittle patter, initially off-putting, comes finally to serve as camouflage for the sinister movement of large and powerful forces.

A galactic slump of a movie that stuffs its travel bag with special effects but forgets to pack the charm.

In Mercury Rising, the mercury may rise but pulses never do. A promising thriller with tough guy Bruce Willis wearing an ever-more radiant tapestry of bruises on his face, the film ultimately surrenders to the entropy of stale plotting and familiar formula.

Better than the ubiquitous PBS show in some places, not as good in others. [03 Apr 1998, p.N53]

It trickles and moseys about on its old good time, punctuated by guffaws and thigh-slapping and the occasional eyeball-blasting jolt from the white lightning, but never really manages to achieve the formal status of "story."

The movie is as tawdry as someone else's lingerie, yet not without a certain prurient watchability.

Its palette isn't primary at all: It's full of secondary shadings.

The movie is maddeningly plain...I found the movie infuriatingly underdone, but what is clear about it, and perhaps what reaches sensibilities more sublimely tuned than mine, is the utter seriousness of the piece. It cares about eternal issues and faces them head on. [15 May 1998, p.D05]

The Three Musketeers, a rusty trio of middle-aged retirees, have all but changed their motto from "All for one and one for all" to "I have fallen and I can't get up" in this less-than-rollicking adaptation.

By the time it winds down, U.S. Marshals has all but destroyed itself. It's gone pffft! in the night.

The movie is as visually inventive and wildly eccentric as the Coens' earlier movies, but it lacks the emotional maturity and moral clarity of 1996's "Fargo."

Never manages to make its characters anything other than cartoons.

There's more bathroom and slapstick humor than a sixth-grader could stand, and a veritable flood of drool, blood and less mentionable effluvia, most of it courtesy of Mr. Wayans as he tries to be – you know – funny.

Palmetto, directed by the German genius Schlondorff, who memorably brought "The Tin Drum" to the screen, somehow never quite finds the right line through the materials.

Obliged to go from lost soul to demigod, Sewell's performance is as fascinating as Proyas's mystical vision.

Adam Sandler is surprisingly likable as Robbie, a struggling musician who is left at the altar early in this modest romantic comedy.

Sphere, an unfathomable chowder of recycled science fiction and undersea thrillers, briefly bubbles with promise only to plummet into the murky depths. Weighed down by inconsistencies and pretensions, the tale founders like a stinky beluga.

Adolescents are too grown-up for this blasted nonsense.

Hardly a real pip (indeed, it has been rendered Pip-less), but then this loosey-goosey adaptation isn't aimed at those of us with library cards.

The trouble is that the picture is far from over when suddenly we find ourselves watching another movie -- a punishing, overly complex melodrama in which the Gingerbread Man receives his comeuppance.

Sometimes in horror movies, bad acting is effective, its very woodenness contributing to the sense of robotic horror. That ain't happening here. These guys are just bad actors.

About as awful and shamelessly pandering as a fanzine movie could dare to be.

The movie's chief crime against the planet, other than the sheer wastage of time, is the trivializing of the great Freeman. This actor has such dignity and depth and humanity, he almost makes the film watchable.

Someone definitely inhaled too much before making this one.

Where the movie succeeds-and succeeds wonderfully-is when it stays a heartbeat away from politics. For two-thirds of the movie, it's an involving, boxing saga and romance.

Oscar and Lucinda seems like the perfect story for director Gillian Armstrong, that of a free-spirited proto-feminist chafing at the strictures of tight-laced colonial Australia. But in the end, she's created a beautiful but annoying Victorian-era melodrama. [30Jan1998 Pg.D.06]

Afterglow is a lazy river of a movie that chooses beauty over sense and rhythm over reason. It goes nowhere slowly. [16Jan1998 Pg B.06]

Director-star Kevin Costner falls head over heels in love with himself in this nihilistic, post-apocalyptic clunker about a loner who becomes a reluctant sperm donor, role model and inevitably a godsend to what's left of America.

A blithely unfunny, low-budget comedy from director Barry Levinson.

May not be the ultimate word on the Tibetan situation, or even the Dalai Lama, but its heart seems to be in the right place; and it's entertaining enough to give audiences an emotional sense of the story. [16 January 1998, p.N32]

The film occasionally drags -- a money transfer scene set in a department store lasts longer than several geologic epochs -- but it's so funny and the plot twists are so sudden and violent it's great fun.

When it comes to style and sophistication, Walt Disney's live-action "Mr. Magoo" ranks slightly above plastic doggie doo and slightly below rubber chicken. The cartoon Magoo, so memorably voiced by the late Jim Backus, would never have stooped so low for a laugh, yet the visually challenged old gentleman's near mishaps gave you something to smile about. [25 Dec 1997, p.C11]

Gets bogged down in sentimentality, while its wheels spin futilely in life-solving overdrive.

Tomorrow is propelled by relentless action. Chase scenes are interrupted not by witty conversation or sexy conquests but by the rattle of machine gun fire.