Director John Dahl and his brother Rick Dahl co-wrote the intelligent and off-handedly witty script; they're like the Coen brothers, but with a sense of fun and a coherent, entertaining story to tell.

An enormously enjoyable gothic yarn from Mexico, transfuses the genre with wry grotesquerie, but retains respect for the old, classic films.

David Zucker and Segal seem to thrive on the formulaic tomfoolery that propels these rapid-fire spoofs. Naked Gun 33 1/3, as pointlessly plotted as ever, manages to be not only still funny but energetically slapped together and occasionally inventive.

It's an exhausting and exhilarating movie about the birth of "the daily miracle." Thanks to a caffeinated cast and hyperactive script, director Ron Howard delivers The Paper with a bang.

With its musty scenario of a dissolute middle-aged man and a clingy, devouring child-woman, 60-year-old co-writer/director/producer Polanski's film smacks of wish-fulfillment and self-justification.

All of the supporting characters -- notably tubby Richard Griffiths as Tess's nurse and mousy Austin Pendleton as her chauffeur -- are thinly drawn, but neither MacLaine nor Cage leaves much room for anyone to overact.

Another ultra-stylized movie-about-movies by the Cannes-winning Coen Brothers, Hudsucker is clever but cold, a heartless mechanical gizmo. The actors rattle around tinnily like shiny marbles inside its cavernous sets and hollow script.

Unfortunately, this loosen-up-Sandy-baby allegory, full of heavyhanded sexual/mythic symbols is more of a poetic nudist's delight than a movie. Its characters (from fussy Grant to voluptuous MacPherson) are only mildly appealing. Writer/director John Duigan, maker of the charming Flirting, took a recent tumble with The Wide Sargasso Sea. He has yet to regain his footing.

As it unreels, The Ref keeps getting dumber, and, unfortunately, it simply wasn't that brilliant to begin with.

A movie to cheer you up and on and help you feel that spring will, in fact, arrive before we are all too desiccated to enjoy it.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a tad too precious. One of those movies that wants to address life's quaint wackinesses, it's full of characters who are quirky, lonely, bizarre or retarded. There's something intensely earnest about the project. But there's something equally manufactured, starting with the casting of Johnny Depp and Juliette Lewis.

Sugar Hill is often more unflinching in its detailing of the death trip drugs provoke -- a pair of overdoses are particularly harrowing and the gun-violence is sufficiently sudden and shocking -- but much of its message feels as if it's being delivered by Western Union.

The picture amounts to little more than an uninspired, almost perfunctory exercise in "big game" manipulations.

Reality Bites principally turns on the romantic tension between Ryder, wonderfully radiant and not all that literate for the class valedictorian her character is purported to be, and Hawke, who does the alienated-poet thing better than anybody since Matt Dillon's greaser in "The Outsiders."

Martial arts maven Seagal has long been on deadly ground with critics, and this, his directorial debut, is likely to keep him there.

An utterly pointless remake of Sam Peckinpah's hair-raising road movie. Updated and dumbed down, this anemic variation on the bloodier 1972 original is primarily an opportunity for those vast legions of Baldwin-Basinger voyeurs. You know who you are.

In the end, family ties are re-strung, but the morals remain annoyingly at loose ends.

Treat this project as you would a safari: It has its slow parts but the wildlife makes it worthwhile.

Most of the humor is sophisticated slapstick, which Depardieu mastered in the hilarious trio of Francis Veber comedies he did with Pierre Richard in the '80s.

Stylishly gruesome and dementedly romantic, "Romeo" has its pervertedly funny moments, but in the end it's a bloody bummer that leaves a depressing aftertaste.

Scent is a captured memory, a living, breathing reverie rather than a narrative. It's also the birth of a great talent.

Car 54, Where Are You? is a stupid movie. Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid. If you pay money to see it, then you're stupid.

Grecian Formula and body corsets notwithstanding, Bronson looks like one of those sculpted potato heads and moves with appropriate grace. This is not the face of death; it's the face of old.

A soulless replica of Don Seigel's 1956 model and Philip Kaufman's 1978 update.

In between its hokey setup and its overwrought climax, Disney's dog-sledding adventure Iron Will is brisk and involving and surprisingly adult, its cinematic strength drawn mainly from the beauty of panting teams of huskies muscling their way across snowy landscapes. Which is a sight you can never grow tired of.

Contains about enough laugh-out-loud sight gags and non sequiturs to justify what it demands of a viewer's time and money.

An entertaining look under the tent flaps of the Clinton campaign, "The War Room" fairly bristles with the frenetic energy, flat-out fun and Southern-fried cunning that won the White House. It's a documentary, though not a hard-hitting one, about presidential politics as reinvented by Bill Clinton's cagey generals, George Stephanopoulos and James Carville.

Based on Gerry Conlon's own account of his arrest and subsequent incarceration, the film takes forever to do what "60 Minutes" does with the same meat in a single segment.