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.