Offers plenty to appeal to children and adults, and the clever ending delivers one more treat to pay off the story's tricks.

"The Great British Public" says the darndest things....creature comforts tickles most effectively in its small doses, but its cleverness and craft are undeniable.

Fans of the series will be hooked, if not thoroughly delighted, and others may prove unable to resist the train-wreck spectacle...unabashedly cheesy but 100% mesmerizing.

Fans will be positively enthralled at the well-preserved nuggets, and neophytes will understand the fuss over the musician and the man.

Sometimes resembled a weekly Neil Simon play...but James Brooks' celebrated brilliance with emotional storylines also justified experiments in the absurd and satirical.

Frasier was a series that enjoyed dabbling in farce, and the sixth season includes some relatively simple farcical gestures...as well as full-blown efforts.

A typical season of Cheers, which is to say 'excellent.'

Occasionally hit the heights of Trek feature-film action, and often used the plot to ask the moral questions that have been Trek's raison d'être on TV.

Repetition is what sent longtime Trek fans packing...[but the] season does muster a number of good episodes...while maintaining its high quality of production value.

Many Season One stories flounder through familiar-feeling alien-encounter and spatial-phenomena plots, but just as many episodes stand out for their creative energy.

If Moland is a bit more interested in romantic melodrama than anthropology, the plight of the refugee still makes the intended emotional impact.

A bargain for lovers of splashy, outre entertainment.

A rather exceptionally counter-cultural "teen movie"...raises authentic youth concerns and answers them with convincing integrity.

Light lessons about pain, endurance, and commitment...Likeable to a point, but in the end, Saint Ralph winds up incredible, manipulative, and strictly for the choir.

Profanity does not a creatively satisfying comedy make....slim characterization and an overfamiliar premise...[relegate] Bears to lazy, hazy, summer-daze mediocrity.

Rapturous cinema of the senses...proves once again that nobody does swoony romantic longing, and heartache, like Wong Kar-Wai.

Lemmon turns in showy, theatrical work that's appropriate to the not-terribly subtle film around him, but the whole enterprise is one that's best avoided...

Araki embraces the mysteries of human sexuality with a refreshing lack of hysteria and a brace of empathy.

Diverting and well-acted...There are eight million stories in the naked city, and Heights is five of them.

Like the rest of Johnston's oeuvre, Jumanji puts vivid characters through paces that will quicken any child's pulse.

Though Agrelo blunts the competitive drama by visually excluding the opposition, the kids' talent and infectious spirit carries the day for Mad Hot Ballroom.

Exemplifies the rich, acquired taste of the Roeg film.

Far from perfect, but what it lacks in finesse, it makes up in shaggy-dog charm....the fun is in the journey.

Few filmmakers could be consciously redolent of Moliere, Dylan Thomas, and James Joyce and pull it off, but apparently writer-director Sally Potter is first in that class.

Tinkers around with an intriguing premise but with little creative facility for dialogue or structure...[splits] the difference between fans and neophytes, impressing neither.

Columbia Pictures' Batman is just about as good as the next serial, which spells plenty of two-fisted fun.

Something that's increasingly rare: a stringently subtextual drama....when they finally arrive, the epiphanies are small ones.

Defiantly slow-paced, Schultze gets the blues embraces a neglected subject: the wanderlust of the retiree.

Though rudimentary by ordinary film standards...diverting entertainment for innocent youngsters.

As Hollywood actioners go these days, this one's quite tolerable in its guilty-pleasure way. Feel free to saddle up.

Humanizes the conflict of peace versus the arguable necessity of violence.

Inspiration is inherent in Brown's story, but Sheridan, co-screenwriter Shane Connaughton, and Lewis refuse to sanctify him.

Though Roberto Rossellini's Francesco, giullare di Dio...tells stories of a Roman Catholic saint, it should not be branded merely as a religious film.

Kim Ki-duk's happily unhinged drama comfortably occupies the middle ground between his baroque thriller The Isle and his meditative Spring, Summer....

Bottom line: with Murray on fire and enough clever dialogue to rival its predecessor, Ghostbusters II is good enough to put post-milennial comedy to shame.

Weaves the politics of borders into the comedy of human frailty...seasoned with the everyday absurdities of artificial social boundaries.

A wasted opportunity to tell in filmic terms two important histories: the crimes of apartheid and the love with which they were answered.

The ne plus ultra of comic-book films...an appropriately tough movie, busy but efficient, rich and thoughtful, and ornamented with visual appeal and exciting action.

Radford takes a stylish but decidedly low-key tack, demanding naturalist acting to crawl under the viewer's skin.

The director's Fincher-esque style may finally beat out intellectual substance, but it's a fair fight, grounded in the existential horror of essential emotional truths.

Adheres to the popular tastes of its time; since this is an era of color-corrected, 5.1-surround-sound, pseudo-spiritual action epics, Gibson zealously tells his tale in action-movie language.

Even at the Marxes' nadir, Harpo lends physical energy, Chico gets some funny malapropisms...and Groucho is in fine fettle when he's allowed.

The perfect sort of movie to pay attention to in the back of a minivan.

In the greater Marx canon...a relatively minor effort, but after a slow, expository start, the film slowly, steadily makes a case for itself as a fine comic adventure.

This oft-dismissed exception in the Marx Brothers canon includes no musical numbers and only a few bits specifically tailored to the brothers...underrated.

Though it's ultimately less than the sum of its parts, some of the parts are quite good and, even off their game, the Marx Brothers usually deliver the goods.