Reminded me somewhat of Archibald MacLeish's famous line that a poem "should not mean but be." That's the reality of The Apostle: It does not mean, it simply is.

A provocative, but extremely profane work, it is surely Allen's bawdiest since "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex."

[Craven's] stroke of genius is to offer the horror movie in an ironic mode. He's winking at viewers and inviting them to share a clever conspiracy that we on the cholesterol-clogged side of 30 cannot begin to understand.

Although the movie is moving and even funny in many places, it's also overextended. And composer John Williams's syrupy score practically oozes from your ears on the drive home.

Director Van Sant, who made the lyrical "Mala Noche," "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho," returns to his favorite hunting ground -- the subworlds of grimy, poetic lost boys -- and pulls us right in

So drippy and slippery you'll feel that you're hiding in Kevin Costner's nasal passages during the filming of "Waterworld."

Let's blame it on poor Robin Williams, who tries so desperately to be likable, whimsical, lovable, smart and funny all at once that he just wears you out. Blame it also on the behind-the-scenes engineers at Disney who think that effects are more important than story and character.

But if the modestly budgeted film (loosely based on journalist Michael Nicholson's factual narrative, "Natasha's Story") lopes along a formulaic, often heavy-handed track, its pictures and subtext make a powerful statement. [9Jan1998 Pg. N.41]

The chronological looseness is part of the pleasure of the piece, which magically reassembles in the last reel into something strong, lucid and compellingly powerful.

This movie has all the same elements as other Grisham fare: raw young lawyer trying to make it in the South; helpless client treated badly; sleazy, star-chamber villains. Wake me up when the last-minute surprise witness comes out of her hidey hole to turn the case around.

Like the South, the movie is sumptuous and somnolent.

Impressive, big-scale scenes, such as a train derailment from a snow-covered bridge. And the vocal performances of Ryan and Cusack give us a real sense of romance.

The Jackal is based on a fabrication so absurd that it almost made me laugh out loud.

It's exactly like "Star Wars" -- if you subtract a good story, sympathetic characters, intelligence, wit and moral purpose.

The movie feels stretched out and thin.

First and best, it's got a rip-roaring story. It sweeps you along, borne effortlessly by believable if flawed characters, as it flows toward the inevitable tragedy. But it's also got a heart: It watches as a child harsh of judgment learns that judgment is too easy a posture for the world, and it's best to love with compassion. [07Nov1997 Pg G.01]

Mad City is for those who haven't seen enough movies about hostage situations. It's also for those who haven't seen enough ponderous movies about media exploitation, or Dustin Hoffman's ongoing reliance on muttery method acting.

It's all too silly to bother. Without style and attitude, nothing gets old faster than horror.

Gattaca may be all done up in new-fangled notions, but underneath all the guff about designer babies, it rests on a notion that was a staple of the original "Star Trek" series.

The new film by the phenomenally talented Scots-English trio of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and screenwriter John Hodge -- they did both "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting" -- is a failure so absolute and witless it deserves some kind of mention in the Hall of Lame.

Another Kevin Williamson triumph, a smart, sharply drawn genre film with a moral center and a solid cast of young actors to hold it.

The story (adapted from Andrew Neiderman's novel by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy) is surprisingly well-handled, given its rather crazy premise.

Telling Lies in America may not be terrible. But it flickers inconclusively between ordinary and not-so-good. [24 Oct 1997]

An overextended, episodic disappointment.

Jarmusch documented the group's 1996 tour and includes interviews as well as concert footage from 10 and 20 years ago. An admirer, he lets the songs go on and on into those trademark endless, nearly hallucinatory codas. The music is good. But the film Horse goes a little lame.

Shakur is superb, as I said, but so is Belushi. Initially a kind of glowering Bozo whose very sleaze is seductive and whose efficiency is attractive -- he's very Dirty Harry-like in his solutions to criminal problems -- he drifts off, almost banally, into the most repellent of all evils, the criminal sociopath masquerading under the flag of authority and using the system to hide his tracks. He stops being funny and merely becomes horrifying.

The movie -- adapted from James Patterson's novel by David Klass -- operates on the crime-movie equivalent of automatic pilot. It takes off, flies and lands without much creative intervention.

The film has no discipline, but that's okay because it has no suspense, either.

Unfortunately, the drama operates on a see-through, easily shatterable metaphor: the frigidity of the WASP soul. [17 October 1997, p.N32]

Between them, Clooney and Kidman would still need a third party to work up a personality. In fairness to both, they aren't given much to work with.

While Soul Food aims to be the kind of hearty, satisfying story that sticks to your ribs, it comes across more like an appetizer or a midnight raid on the fridge. Tasty, but easily forgotten.

Hanson delivers something ever rarer in film culture, not a new film noir but an old-fashioned total movie, somehow of a single piece.

The movie gradually peters out.

The film has a kind of echo-filled emptiness to it that some will take as profundity and others as mere emptiness.

Amalric is low-key and immensely likable, but what makes his Paul a worthwhile companion on a three-hour voyage is his utter sincerity, coupled with self-aware irony. He's not a phony, a user, a Romeo or a slut. His earnestness is his best quality; he tries so hard to do the right thing, sometimes only failing by a little. [10 Oct 1997, p.N48]

Certainly handsome, well made and for most of its running time gripping, the film ultimately turns into a $60-odd-million piffle.

As an example of smash-mouth environmentalism, you'd be hard-pressed to surpass Fire Down Below. As an example of right-thinking American compassion and concern for our precious natural heritage and all the fuzzy fauna and fernyflora of the great outdoors, it's extremely forthright. And as a movie, it's a piece of drivel...Ugh! What a distasteful, silly, egomaniacal movie. [6 Sept 1997, p.D03]

This one's for Silverstone fans only.

If you're in the right frame of mind -- a sort of anything-goes, Elmore Leonard spirit -- this thing's going to be your kind of evening.

You can feel Hoodlum hungering to be bigger than it possibly can be. It wants to be "The Godfather" of African Americans, a vast tale of crime and heroism and nerve and ambition. But it tries too hard and ends up feeling spotty rather than deep. [27Aug1997 Pg D.01]

Guts-and-green-beret saga.

Del Toro, expanding on a short story by Donald A. Wolheim, isn't able to invest his version of a familiar horror convention with either the supple wit or deep humanity he brought to "Cronos."

In filmmaker Mehta's deft hands, the outcome is handled with power and sensitivity. [22 Aug1 997, pg.N40]

Halfhearted and unsure. They want it both ways and in so doing, don't get it either way. Cute just goes so far. [22 Aug 1997, p.N37]

Although the newly paunchy Stallone is credible as a weak, conflicted small-time sheriff, this suburban "Serpico" is a noble, passionless charade.

The movie is very loud. It is pointlessly loud, arbitrarily loud, assaultively loud.

Beaufoy and Cattaneo handle this potentially racy material with an engaging balance of good taste and outright slapstick.

It is one of those soap bubbles of a film, fleeting, ephemeral, seemingly there when it is not. As you leave the theater, it diminishes with each step, collapsing into shards of imagery and sensations of movement. It's the film that never was.

This is a fully realized movie, whose intelligence -- despite its grim findings -- dwarfs any Hollywood production.

The nonsensical screenplay can barely stand-up to the hellzapoppin, Beelzebubbin effects mustered by first-time director Mark Dippe.

In all it wastes time, talent -- not least of all Reynolds's -- and money on an obscure mission. [30 Jul 1997, p.C02]

Takes its absurd premise and keeps itself narrowly focused, pushing its heroic cast through obstacle after obstacle.

Anyone who doesn't smile is probably either too adult to count or too dead to care.

Star Maps has youthful flaws -- all the Anglos, this film’s "others," are impotent or at least twisted -- but it is itself evidence of filmmaking’s power over Arteta, and his future power in the fantasy biz.

Classy fare, with posh settings, gorgeous scenery and lots and lots of polishing from director John Madden ("Ethan Frome") and writer Jeremy Brock.

An unfunny comedy by Tony Vitale that is enacted not by fleshed-out characters but by hackneyed, two-dimensional stereotypes. There’re so many sexual and ethnic caricatures, it’s hard to know which is most offensive.

Brendan Fraser breathes loopy new life into the swinging '60s TV cartoon icon.

In some ways, Contact is just like the universe: big, star-bright and seemingly endless. Not to mention that it begins with a big bang, gradually falls into a lull and finally succumbs to entropy.

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.

Out to Sea is out to brunch: It's got too much on the table, but if you look carefully and show some patience, you can pick out the odd treat. [02 July 1997, p.C10]

As an example of the art of casting, the movie is brilliantly engineered. It allows two major stars to each play the showy villain for a time, and also for each to do an imitation of the other.

The story behind Hercules, Walt Disney’s insipid, lifeless, animated feature, is hardly the stuff of children’s entertainment.

Poor Roberts, pretty and perky as the day is long, hasn't a hoot in hell of bringing Julianne off. She's simply not actress enough, she doesn't have that suppleness that would enable her to sell the complexity of emotion, the jealousy, the irrationality, the meanness and the intelligence.

Like a wounded yeti, Batman & Robin drags itself through icicle-heavy sets, dry-ice fog and choking jungle vines, before dying in a frozen heap. Unfortunately, that demise occurs about 20 minutes into the movie, which leaves you in the cold for approximately 106 minutes.

The kinetics aren't that good, the twaddle is off the charts and the characters seem written by monkeys on amphetamines with crayons.

The film becomes a modest delight.

Preposterous, predictable, but excessively entertaining, this frenzied thriller draws both story and characters from such action classics as "The Fugitive," "Die Hard," "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Silence of the Lambs."

The story, which includes a prolonged display of McGregor’s no-longer private parts, is simplistic and banal rather than exacting and mannered.

Like a cute version of Jekyll and Hyde.

For the first half-hour, the movie is pretty crummy. Even Spielberg appears bored with the script's lame setup, its quick evocation of the first movie and its wan establishment of human villains and heroes. Like any 50-year-old adolescent, he can't wait for the dinosaurs. And when he gets to them, the movie ceases to bear any relationship to conceits of narrative and becomes a sheer adrenalin spike to the brain stem.

An odd duck of a movie, it's really a British Labor Party television commercial bitterly shoehorned into the cheesy format of an American triumph fantasy, with a horn section.

Love! Valour! Compassion!, an adaptation of Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning play, which has piano music and exclamation points to spare, is excruciatingly predictable, creatively inane and almost offensive in its depiction of gay characters.

That said, what must be added is that, disappointingly, Night Falls on Manhattan doesn't quite add up.

Bleak and post-industrial, this is no easy film to watch. It hasn't a conventional image of beauty anywhere within its grim 93 minutes, being shot in harsh natural light that somehow plays up the grime and chill of back-alley life. But by the end, it's suffused with something utterly rare: moral beauty. [27 June 1997, p.D6]

There’s so much high-voltage fun running throughout this comic sci-fantasy -- engineered gleefully by director Luc Besson -- you’re hard-pressed to be unaffected.

A lamebrained American remake of the classic, bitter French farce "Les Comperes," Fathers' Day offers sporadic laughs of the lowest kind -- the old outhouse-bites-man thing -- but some conspicuous idiocy as well.

Piddling spoof.

The movie's surrender to banality is all the more dispiriting because it gets off to such a good start.

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.

While disaster yarns aren't known for subtlety, there are limits, and Volcano giddily goes beyond them.

Sheer torture, the very definition of unfunniness itself.

The best thing about Murder at 1600? Speed of exposition. Directed by Dwight Little, who made Steven Seagalís "Marked for Death," this thing whizzes from one unbelievable story point to the next. Your suspension of disbelief appreciates the momentum, if nothing else.

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

A hilarious new addition to the wonderfully warped Generation X-Files.

Mr. Whipple squeezing his Charmin is scarier than this phony baloney computer effects-driven anaconda.

But the movie has a great deal of zest and charm, and Yakusho gets so exactly that crest of melancholy that is a man’s early 40s, until he decides to go for another kind of life, that the movie is infinitely touching.

A queasy union of savagery and uplift, the film ought to be unnerving. Instead, it finally becomes routine. [18Apr1997 Pg. C.07]

Too long winded and dull.

Can a script exploring some truly deep questions about human sexuality and emotions be any shoddier and wooden?

Though he is a master thief with a heart of gold, the new Templar has all the charm of one of those ladies behind the counter at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Tough guys snarl at each other or dive out of the way before some explosion reduces their biceps to gymboy tuna. Van Damme still talks like a Belgian choirboy. But he’s physically awesome, of course. He can do things with his body that it hurts to even contemplate. If nature intended for men to do the splits or high kicks, boxer shorts would not have been invented. As for Rourke, I am convinced he’s made entirely of leather. He is essentially a boxing glove with a heartbeat.

At it’s core, it’s just another youth-culture flick about the search for love. It’s also a mediocre bid to join the shoestring pantheon of such filmic self-starters as Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It) and Kevin Smith (Clerks).

A purgatory of low-budget interplanetary adventure.

The Devil's Own, which stars Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt, is so epically awful, it's practically homeric.

The only thing parents need fear is utter boredom.

The film's many musical scenes can be riveting. But Selena is less concert film than family drama, particularly focusing on Selena's struggles with her father after she falls in love with, and eventually marries, her guitarist Chris Perez (heartthrob Jon Seda).

Carrey is not only under control, but funnier than ever.

Crash doesn't extend beyond its most immediate sensationalism. When the movie does attempt to find a theme, it slams into a brick wall of mumbo-jumbo.

When Gray brings things to a narrative conclusion, the movie feels perfectly structured. If it were any longer, it would tip the overindulgence scale, and lose its effectiveness. But at 80 minutes, the film feels compact and pithily observed. And you're quite prepared to meet Gray on his next flight of self-absorbed fancy. [30 May 1997, p.N41]

The whole thing plays like some dreadful masochistic, self-pity fantasy.

Tate -- whose credits include Menace II Society, The Inkwell and Dead Presidents -- simply hasn’t developed the mature screen sex appeal to carry off this romantic lead.

Private Parts, lifted from Stern's best-selling autobiography, is a choppy amalgam of "Revenge of the Nerds," "Father Knows Best" and "Network."

Disney just doesn't know when to give up on a dead project, which is the only thing that accounts for the studio's scene-for-scene remake of Little Indian, Big City, a French farce the corporation dubbed and released exactly one year ago. (It sank faster than a canoe full of Fantasia hippos.)

When you’re through watching The Daytrippers, you think about its minor imperfections, not because the film’s bad, but because it’s so good.

Unfortunately, the story isn't inventive and Newell's methodical approach to it verges on monotony.

Paul Thomas Anderson shows off the same sort of quirky smarts that Joel and Ethan Coen did in "Blood Simple."

Not only dense, dark and deeply introspective, it's also as remote as it's chilly.

The name is enough to clue you in that this is not highbrow humor. In fact, it will appeal mostly to those who can appreciate basic juvenile humor.

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

Making a film about mob violence while showing restraint and humanism is a difficult procedure. Singleton and screenwriter Poirier search for some gradations within the white ranks, but for the most part, every cracker's a psycho with a short, smoking fuse.

This isn't real life. It isn't even a movie. It's an extended sitcom. And for the first time in your life, you'll actually beg for commercials.

After a somewhat promising opening, the movie falls flat.

Promises to speed up the pacemakers of grumpy old Republicans with its ruthless indictment of the unzipped presidency.

The movie doesn’t hit one out of the park, the way Get Shorty (another Leonard adaptation) did. But it racks up points with stolen bases and singles.

The new Darn Cat moves faster, has a few more laughs, nonviolent villains who are barely seen, a never-ending car chase climax, and gives more than a passing nod to such phenomena as teenage discontent.

While the plot is thin and there's little action till the big blow some 60 minutes into the film, a volcano offers a greater variety of thrills than your basic cyclone ever could.

Linklater, who introduced the blithe, but bemused slacker subculture to America in 1991, gets bogged down not only in Bogosian's for-stage structure, but especially his middle-aged perspective.

This is billed as a romantic comedy, but it's much more boring than funny.

You leave Creatures with the unsettling sensation of being highly tickled yet greatly dissatisfied.

Though Mother has already collected two prizes for its screenplay, it's really rather thin. If it weren't so slow and repetitious, there'd only be enough whining and grousing for a Seinfeld episode. [10 Jan 1997, p.D01]

A character study with underdeveloped characters.

Chris Farley walks into walls, trips over invisible banana peels and otherwise makes a fat ass of himself in this imbecilic, slapstick adventure from the producers of "Dumb and Dumber."

This is not a dreadful movie. Murphy fans may even find some comfort in watching their slim, witty, hot-headed hero safely returned to his familiar movie trappings. But anyone seeking a fresh characterization or clever plot twist ought not to buy a ride on this Murphy vehicle. With Metro, he's going nowhere fast.

As written by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Relic deserved to be taken off the shelf; as adapted by a quartet of screenwriters and directed by Peter Hyams, it should have been left on one.

As an amalgam of drama and history, Reiner and scriptwriter Lewis Colick strike a surprisingly satisfying compromise.

We're really celebrating Hollywood's freedom to create biographies of anyone, no matter how high or low on the social ladder, and still come up with the same banal characteristics, messages and conclusions. In this sense, The People vs. Larry Flynt doesn't champion, so much as squander, freedom of speech.

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.

After the disastrous "Mixed Nuts," her last holiday season folly, Ephron appears to have hunkered down for a career of pandering mediocrity.

This picture is oddly un-charged, indistinct and even long-winded.

Deftly mixes irony, self-reference and wry social commentary with chills and blood spills.

Takes the spirit of their late night TV show and flies with it.

The script is well stocked with snappy put-down humor, including on-target jabs at Dan Quayle, Jerry Ford and George Bush. But director Peter Segal loses his light-comedy touch after the first hour and makes an unfunny mess of the final, crackpot chase sequence.

[An] appealing, if overcooked romantic comedy.

Keaton and DiCaprio manage to bring several levels of emotion to their characters, but everyone else is a cardboard cut-out.

Cruise is at the top of his form, and Gooding makes a brilliant opponent.

It's stingy at heart. Burton, who collaborated with British screenwriter Jonathan Gems, brings nothing of "Edward Scissorhands's" magic or "Beetlejuice's" wacky fun to this sadly empty exercise. Aimlessly plotted and blandly written.

The film degenerates into an overly simplistic satire -- with moon-worshiping, Guatemala-visiting, lesbian aborters on one side, and fetally obsessive, meat-eating, gun-toting Jesus worshipers on the other.

Takes you down paths full of primitive, almost biblical implications, but it also finds comic relief in moments of palpable tension.

In Hollywood, imitation is the most profitable form of flattery. That is the only plausible explanation for 101 Dalmatians, Walt Disney's disappointing live-action remake of its own 1961 classic.

Hytner has filled the cast with good actors, but he's used them in obvious ways. Day-Lewis is not required to be anything but noble. Allen is such a purse-mouthed wife that you see why her husband ran to Ryder's nubile temptress (Hytner keeps turning Allen sideways, as if to emphasize that she has no chest). Ryder might as well have S-L-U-T tattooed on her forehead. None of these performers is bad, but what they're doing is shallow and ultimately uninteresting.

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

The movie does what any great musician should: It lifts an idea to the heights of ecstasy; it sells its song.

A tour de force so haunting that other films can't exorcise the memory of its radiant cast, exquisite craftsmanship or complex system of metaphors. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a movie.

Though Warner Bros. boasts this is their most expensive animated project ever, it's hard to see where all that money went in terms of artistry or technical craftsmanship.

Although it contains many visually compelling passages and some provocative moments, the movie is strangely banal and simplistic.

Though the film gleams with Howard's customary spit polish, there's no denying that the story is pitted with plot holes.

The Secret Agent, with its hemmed-in shots, feels like a TV production; what is said takes precedence over what is done. Even in the writing department, Hampton founders. [06 Dec 1996]

The actresses work hard to give spark to some of the predictable scenes and dialogue in the screenplay by Kate Lanier and Takashi Bufford. Their fine work eclipses the fact that the film gives us very little information about most of them.

The movie, a frenetic, explosive experience full of car crashes and gun battles, is original and exhilarating. But more often, it's so overwhelming, it'll make you want to watch "Die Hard With a Vengeance" for peace and quiet.

The elephant, whose last film was Operation Dumbo Drop, steals the three-ring circus with its charming personality and an amazing 50-command repertoire.

Though the Oscar-nominated documentary captures the fight and the fighters, it also explores Ali's role in reintroducing black Americans to their African culture.

Recalls those corny Warner Bros. movies about Dead End Kids.

Director Michael Winterbottom languidly unspools the story; nothing seems to lead to anything.

Spike Lee's film is about a group of black men traveling from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., for last year's Million Man March. As in the real-life march one year ago today, this convergence of diverse black manhood is what is compelling about the film.

Though it lacks the gloss, twists and star power of earlier Grisham movies, The Chamber does possess Gene Hackman's most cantankerous turn since the lowdown lawman he created in "Unforgiven."

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]

The problem with this movie is the problem with most Renny Harlin movies: There's an excessive amount of excess -- a mind-numbing plurality of firearm battles, vehicular explosions and brutally frank sexual talk.

The movie is bracing, bleak and funny, assuming you can appreciate the comedy in a story full of lowlifes, lushes and losers.

Like so many other rob-the-mob movies, the plan seems pretty far-fetched, and the ending isn't much of a surprise. But if you like your films sprinkled liberally with sex, violence and humor, then you're bound to like Bound.

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

The plot of The Glimmer Man involves not only the Family Man but Our Evil Secret Government, the Russian Mafia and Rich Powerful Politicians -- the three stooges of action cinema in the '90s.

A magnificent melodrama that draws both tears and laughter from the everyday give-and-take of seemingly ordinary souls.

Big Night, a scrumptious tale of great food and grand passions, belongs on the menu with such mouth-watering movie fare as "Babette's Feast" and "Like Water for Chocolate."

For all their sass, brass and bewitchery, the starring troika can't breathe life into these characters, much less transform them from women scorned into hellbent furies.

Producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala bring the customary polish, but no pizzazz, to this simplistic portrait of the artist as a dirty old man.

In this banal era of smart-aleck parodies and homages, Last Man Standing amounts to stylistic overkill.

Annoying.

You judge a movie by its own standards, right? Bulletproof, starring Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler, is rambunctious, crude, ridiculous, violent and -- incidentally -- very funny.

The Trigger Effect feels half-cocked, undermined by its apparently very low budget and Koepp's flaccid directing.

Sinbad, one of show business's sunniest souls, brings much-needed buoyancy to this somewhat soggy tale of kindred spirits. [30 Aug 1996, p.F06]

Arthur Hiller, who last directed the sour "The Babe" -- not the one about that sweet pig -- finds even less to work with in TV veteran Don Rhymer's stupid screenplay.

The sequel's plot is laughably thin.

But this unsavory stew is just plain overcooked.

Scrupulously unpreachy, it resists all attempts to distill a moral or message, seeking truth in the honesty of its characters and their process of self-discovery.

Tin Cup works for viewers of any handicap.

This preposterous stalker flick, in fact, has less to do with America's favorite pastime or Gil's psychosis than with Hollywood's own obsession with blood sport. And for all British director Tony Scott knows about baseball, the thing might as well have been set in a cabbage patch.

Kansas City is basically a head-scratcher.

Triple the length of its cable television inspiration, Tales From the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood is triple the gore, triple the naked women, but not, alas, triple the fun. Comic takes on vampires have been done better, less bloodily and with more clothing, but always without the benefit of a wildly popular franchise like this HBO series.

Despite the movie's suffocating sense of chic Soho hipness, it touches on all the square cliches about the tragic life of the misunderstood artist.

When a master dedicates his genius to the production of schmaltz, it's not a pretty sight.

Compared to Escape From New York, the weapons are bigger and the violence is more extensive, although it’s toned down by today’s excessive standards. There are also greater special effects this time, involving holograms and nuclear-powered submarines. But Escape From L.A. is more enjoyable in a playful way.

The stories are markedly different, but the acting seems remote and hollow, as if no one believes in what they're doing. [18 Oct 1996]

Director McGrath retains the novel's highlights, but he slices everything to ribbons.

Matilda, the funny new children's film directed by and starring Danny DeVito, takes that alter-family and creates a real-life fairy tale. Frequent use of vibrant colors like magenta and chartreuse, combined with unflattering camera angles and bizarre characters, give the action an unreal quality, like the land of Oz. [02 Aug 1996, p.B01]

Plodding and predictable, and a big disappointment.

In his screen version, Schumacher does a flamboyant job of staging the book without showing the slightest interest in what it's about. Granted, Grisham's original is no masterpiece; it's beach reading, but it deserves credit for addressing its subject with some conviction and integrity.

The story, such as it is, follows Renton's inconsistent attempts to kick his habit.

Ponderously cliched and predictable. [19 July 1996, p.N33]

Writer-director Nicole Holofcener's earnest first feature is a low-budget comedy drawn from the pages of her own dear diary. Most women have sense enough to burn theirs.

Director Harold Ramis, who managed to stop time in the sunny comic masterpiece "Groundhog Day," tries a different tack in this lesser though nonetheless hilarious caper.

An overgrown hybrid of disaster epic, can-do combat adventure and '50s sci-fi movie, this craft has visited our world many times before. And while she's a beaut, the sticker on her titanium bumper reads: "Been There, Done That, Beam Me Up, Scotty."

Still, well-intentioned sappiness is something we can deal with; the lack of any genuine dramatic conflict is a more damaging shortcoming.

Murphy owes much of his success to the amazing special-effects makeup by Rick Baker ("An American Werewolf in London"), but he brings a tenderness and dignity to the performance that he has never shown before.

A sexless seriocomedy that would be a bust without the support of Burt Reynolds and Ving Rhames. The pair bring a much-needed lift to this tale of a mother at the mercy of the system. Without them, the movie is mostly a showcase for the star's personal trainer.

Why ... does it feel so lifeless?

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.

Disney has created a movie that, like Quasimodo himself, is half formed.