Hardly a movie at all, more like a glossy picture-book supplement to Frank McCourt's best-selling memoir of growing up poor in Ireland. McCourt's prose has accordingly been whittled down to excerpted captions in service to the lavish illustrations. And very arty illustrations they are, too, predominantly in grim parsimonious gray-green …

Uncalled-for and uninspired retelling, without benefit of Yul Brynner or Broadway show tunes, of the clash of wits and wills between the Victorian-era widowed English governess and the progressive Siamese monarch-cum-polygamist. Jodie Foster has a painful-to-watch tenseness in her lips and jaw, perhaps under the strain of the British accent …

The second filmmaking venture of noted still photographer Larry Clark (the first was Kids), or in other words a second license not to hold the camera still. As before, the intended drift of the thing is to convince the comfortable, complacent moviegoer that he had no idea that reality could …

Oliver Stone's blitz of professional football. Long (almost three hours long, almost JFK and Nixon long), loud, hyperbolic, frenetic, chaotic, trite, cynical, sentimental, sanctimonious. And ill-informed. Stone seems to believe that a touchdown counts seven points; that playoff stats are added on to regular-season totals; that both sides in a …

One long string of banalities about the mortification of being a studious quiet high-school girl with a flighty brassy pushy mom. (Natalie Portman, Susan Sarandon, respectively.) The slums-of-Beverly-Hills milieu was better captured in The Slums of Beverly Hills, as was, for that matter, the feeling of adolescent mortification. The periodic …

Topical paranoia thriller about an expert in terrorism on the faculty of George Washington University, who comes to suspect that his smarmy new suburban neighbor with the Stepford wife and the Village-of-the-Damned daughter is himself a terrorist. That would be quite a coincidence if it were just a coincidence, but …

Is it another I Married a Monster from Outer Space, or is it only the paranoia of an expectant mother? The movie is too slow and ponderous for the one, and too hoked-up for the other, but it has a nice big fat role for Charlize Theron, who takes it …

Sappy but carefully crafted romance between the blind masseur of Bear Mountain Inn and Spa and a type-A architect from the Big Apple. Nice scene of experiencing a rainstorm from purely an audio perspective, and the experimental cataract surgery that confers sight on a well-adjusted blind man raises some interesting …

A lonely widower shops for a wife under the guise of a casting call for a fictitious film. Well-made Japanese sickie doesn't tip its hand early, courting boredom. In the end, the unscrupulous shuffle of fantasy and reality is as hard to take as the gruesome scenes of torture and …

Mike Myers's one-joke comedy, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, is stretched into a sequel. And not only has the richest source of material already been pretty well tapped out -- the anachronism of a swinging Bondian superspy in the Nineties -- it is now also pretty well abandoned, with …

With this, the seventy-nine-year-old Eric Rohmer completes a cycle of four films begun a decade before, "Tales of the Four Seasons." What sets it apart from other Rohmers, what gets you to straighten up in your seat, is the greater generational mix in the cast of characters. There are still, …

Remake and update of Buster Keaton's Seven Chances (1925), an extreme example of how the addition of sound can be a subtraction, how more reality can be less believable. Renée Zellweger, who has shown she can hold her own against Meryl Streep (One True Thing) as well as carry a …

Rock-and-roll fantasy, as narcissistic as they come, about a women's-prison pickup band called Bandits ("Band plus tits") who fly the coop at the Policemen's Ball. Made in Germany, but no less commercial for the subtitles. With Katja Riemann, Jasmin Tabatabai, Nicolette Krebitz, Jutta Hoffmann; directed by Katja von Garnier.

And not just any ordinary old bats, but great big Texas-sized omnivorous bats. (Actually, laboratory-enhanced Indonesian imported bats.) Perfectly harmless s-f mutation stuff, apart from the stupefying conformance to convention. (And guess what's playing these days at the main-street bijou in Gallup, Texas? -- Nosferatu.) With Lou Diamond Phillips, Dina …