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.