An unpredictable, occasionally amusing, wildly uneven portrait of a neighborhood struggling to hold on to its identity.

The movie is shot as if Bigelow wanted to take her audience to the very edge of sensory overload. Her pulsing, super-psychedelic images are edgy and invasive. They burn as they hit your retina. After a while, however, Bigelow's careening camera, the heavy-metal music and the flash cutting begin to make you feel hammered and abused. Though the movie is jammed with plot, nothing seems to happen. [13 Oct 1995, p.F01]

A flagrantly vicious and broken-down murder melodrama that leaves recognizable fingerprints all over the place while making a chump of director William Friedkin. [13 Oct 1995, p.C16]

As a writer, Baumbach loves smart, glib talk, and he has a sharp ear for fast-paced, overlapping dialogue; as a director, though, he prefers long takes that allow his characters to work out their feelings.

Few films are more assured in their storytelling or build more forcefully, irrevocably toward their resolution.

And so begins the impale imitation of John Carpenter's once-scary bogyman tale, in which every shadow and reflection is premeditated and all the herrings are red.

Brilliantly written by Buck Henry, "To Die For" works on several levels. As a satire on the American obsession with celebrity and fame, the movie is nuanced and haunting. And for the most part, Van Sant keeps the tone chillingly light and ironic.

This film is just a coarser, dumber, smuttier remake of the 1983 Eszterhas-penned "Flashdance," throbbing music, working-class Cinderella and all.

A decidedly medieval enterprise, darker in text and tone than a Gothic cathedral by the light of the moon.

Separates the tech-savvy boys from the lost-in-cyberspace men. Really--the movie may be too fast and confusingly jargon-choked for everyone but Netsurfers and Webheads.

Diane Keaton's kooky sensibilities as a director are ideally suited to the sweet madness of Unstrung Heroes.

The central story itself is not distinctive, and though Lee certainly churns up a lot of dust, he never captures the mythic quality that made Price's original seem so much bigger than its almost generic cast of players.

Directed by Britain's Beeban Kidron, To Wong Foo has a split personality—it feels like three separate spliced-together movies with the same characters. Part I is the most fun, as we watch Swayze and Snipes undergo their transformation, a la Torch Song Trilogy.

Nadja has some delicious qualities. Most delectable of all is Elina Lowensohn as Nadja, the brooding daughter of Count Dracula, an otherworldly being with ebony lipstick, lusciously dark eyebrows, a dark hood and a great accent to match.

Except for pedophiles, it's hard to imagine who'll be drawn to this irresponsible Little Bo Peep show.

Though the actor (Walken) does little more than stroll through the film, he creates such an immediate sense of electricity that everyone else seems dim by comparison. Angels, devils or cops, they just aren't in his league.

Desperado also has some entertaining twists, some sexy goings-on, but on the whole, watching the film is about as much fun as sitting on a cactus.

This knowing, low-budget comedy will appeal to men, who'll recognize their behavior, but also to women, who'll see it as goosing the gander.

A mix of martial-arts and special-effects magic, the film serves its nonstop confrontations either straight up or with a twist (as when they involve Kombatants with special powers, like Sub-Zero, Reptile and Scorpion).

Though the script is predictable, it's not too clumsy.

Nothing more than an over-designed lobster pot. After following the beckoning twists and turns, you're left trapped and more than a little disappointed for getting in so deep.

The film fleetingly touches on the underfunding of schools and other administrative problems as well as the more compelling personal issues of teen pregnancy and violence. But the characters are so poorly drawn and underdeveloped that they seem to be little more than personifications of these societal ills.

A phenomenally atrocious movie—so bad, in fact, that you might actually manage to squeeze a few laughs out of it.

Because of the square, lackluster way that director Michael Gottleib has staged his material, the whole production seems sort of limp and perfunctory.

A captivating comic allegory about daring to be different in the face of conformity.

Even with its cyberspace connection, the story comes across as flat and tired, merely a pretext for the filmmakers' occasionally dazzling but ultimately numbing special effects. The world of Virtuosity may be spanking new, but the ideas are yesterday's news.

Part comedy of manners, and mostly gender warfare, "Something" is designed to get the partisan juices boiling. Screenwriter Callie Khouri, who wrote the marvelous "Thelma & Louise," has a gift for catching the oppression of women in everyday situations and putting a sanguine comic twist on it. But in her zeal to portray a world full of male scum, she creates a morally mismatched, pandering scenario.

Waterworld isn't "Fishtar," but Kevin Costner's pricey, post-apocalyptic sloshbuckler isn't a seafaring classic either.