Reviews

Enemy of the State seems to have much in common thematically with the twisty thriller No Way Out: a high-ranking government official covering up a murder, pursuing the one who knows the truth. However, where No Way Out features uncertainty and subtlety, Tony Scott relies on the tried-and-true companions of Jerry Bruckheimer-produced flicks, namely black-and-white morality and soapbox preaching about same. Instead of Kevin Costner's twice-compromised double agent, we have Will Smith's pure-as-snow lawyer. Instead of Gene Hackman's venial sin blown into gigantic cover-up by a sycophantic aide, we have Jon Voight's unremorseful political murders. Instead of Sean Young's ditz, we have Regina King yelling at the TV about woefully mistaken legislators and their plans to spy on all of America. One's buttons aren't pushed so much as sledge-hammered.

It seems that the dissatisfying depths sunk to by The Phantom Menace have caused the sci-fi pendulum to swing wildly back into the Star Trek camp. First we're given Galaxy Quest, a fictional spoof on the Star Trek convention sub-culture, and now the Trekkies, a dead-pan documentary that manages to take the spoof further than any fiction could. The premise is simple; former Next Generation cast member Denise Crosby wanders the desolate plains of science fiction conventions with camera in tow. What she uncovers is often fascinating, frequently disturbing, and almost without exception, incredibly sad.

In case you've missed one of the best-documented cultural phenomena of the past two decades, convention attendees notoriously devote their time and energy to emulating what they've seen on the screen, which usually means playing dress-up. Some are obviously out to have fun, but most seem to invest a great deal of their self-worth in the creation of their characters. Even this can provide good entertainment, but it often seems unbearably vacant; many of these folks express admiration for the society of equality and freedom depicted by Trek, but instead of actually doing something in the real world to make the vision come to life, they put on a wig, paint their face blue and go to the con.

Not surprisingly, the pretense clung to by the Trekkies (or Trekkers, as some prefer to be called) rings false much of the time. The Star Fleet officers they strive to mimic are members of a hierarchical, pseudo-military organization, in which people presumably ascend in rank through merit and achievement. The sad sacks running around in Trekkies have the luxury of defining themselves as they wish. Logic would dictate that such a scenario would produce many more Lieutenant Commanders than Yeoman, and Trekkies provides ample proof. What's especially hard to comprehend is the gleam of pride so evident in the eyes of these people. What's to be proud of? They did nothing to earn their store-bought uniforms or pips, except, of course, purchase them. I got the impression that 20 years ago, these same folks would have been nudging me on the school bus, offering to tell me tales of their 20th-level Paladin, his +5 Holy Avenger, and the contents of his Bag of Holding.

Thankfully, we are also offered a few brief interviews with many of the cast members of the original series and its progeny. The descriptions of the "original" Trek convention are intriguing. Most admirable is Brent Spiner (Lt. Cmd. Data from Next Generation), whose dry humor and cynicism seem appropriate.

Knowing just the title and cast, you could probably free-associate the plot of Air Force One, but let me outline it for you anyway: "Russian ultra-nationalists" hijack the eponymous plane, seeking to free an imprisoned colleague in Kazakhstan. The President eludes the hijackers and works against them from within the plane. Air Force One is not just a bad movie (and it certainly is that), it is simultaneously jingoistic and an attack on the very idea of democracy.

This film is utterly steeped in the importance of its message, which seems to be that the man occupying the office of the President of the United States is worth any sacrifice, no matter how great, voluntary or otherwise. At least two people take bullets on behalf of the president, one pilot hurls his aircraft between Air Force One and an approaching missile, and dozens of others fall by the wayside in the process of restoring this one man to power. The necessity of their combined sacrifice is never questioned. It would seem director Wolfgang Peterson became so enamored of the shot of Clint Eastwood blocking John Malkovich's bullet with his body in his far superior In the Line of Fire that he sought out a script that would allow him to replay it endlessly.

The enshrinement is furthered by America's "no-tolerance" terrorism policy. The President clings to the policy, even when a staff member's life hangs in the balance, but chucks it the minute the gun is held to his daughter's head. (This way, he can seem both tough on crime and a sensitive family man - compassionate conservatism, indeed!) Instead of highlighting this inconsistency, Peterson would rather spend his time portraying the Constitutional and democratic efforts by the Cabinet to transfer power away from the President in this rather compromising situation as petty and disloyal.

I have to wonder how far the pretense would have to go before the audience found it as distasteful as I did. What if the terrorists demanded that the President free Timothy McVeigh? Or that he order the Air Force to bomb some innocent third party? Would the skin pigmentation of the third party matter? This is not a spurious question, for another message very present in this film is that the important white folks should have the privilege of agonizing over abstract dilemmas like appeasing terrorists, while the non-whites (in this case, the Kazakhs) should have to live with the consequences of those decisions. And why does the U.S. President get to say who the Kazakhs keep in jail and who they set free? This perhaps is the most sickening aspect of this film, how naturally it presents this absurd extension of Presidential authority into the matters of other sovereign nations. The President should be able to do anything to anyone because, being the President, he knows what is best. Long live democracy!

The story of Wonder Boys follows potentially washed-up writer/professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) in his attempts to placate his estranged wife, a disturbed student, his book agent, the department chair, a fawning student/housemate, his pregnant lover, and the man his car was stolen from, among others, all this on the weekend of the college's writers conference. It's going to be a tough job, especially considering that Tripp's head seems to be permanently enshrouded in pot smoke. Wonder Boys is the first movie since Flirting with Disaster that kept a smile on my face from beginning to end. In the go-for-broke, anything-for-a-laugh comedic atmosphere bequeathed upon us by the Farrelly brothers, it is rare indeed to find something like this film, which chooses building over exploding, each joke sprung from the last, heading towards the next, the context becoming more and more humorously treacherous.

Director Curtis Hanson fashions an actor's paradise here, and everyone involved seems ready to take up the challenge. Despite more than a decade of promising young actors who seem to evaporate deservedly into obscurity about the time their fifth big picture opens, I am willing to suspend my disbelief in the case of Tobey Maguire, who plays troubled student James, enjoying what space Tripp can spare for him under his wing. There's a delicious scene in which James helps Tripp break into his wife's childhood home. While Tripp sits on a bed upstairs ruminating, James lounges on the couch, drinking borrowed bourbon, smoking a borrowed joint, watching MGM classics on the solid-state television. He stares at the screen, enthralled or horrified, bobbing his head to the Garland-Rooney number, toking, sipping, utterly in the moment. It's complete bliss. Wonder Boys also reminds us that Michael Douglas is an actor with no small amount of talent. When he gets away from the jut-jawed sex addict roles, he is quick to display humanity, intelligence, and other not-so-simple virtues. Hooray for that.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for David Guterson's novel, I found myself enjoying Scott Hicks' adaptation of Snow Falling on Cedars. He's clearly intended his film to be a feast for the eyes, and for the most part, he succeeds. In today's rigidly narrative cinema, it's a genuine pleasure to find the sort of free-form expressionist sequence Hicks uses to embody the dual trauma faced by a character in losing his arm and getting dumped by his girlfriend. However, the film is plagued by the same flaws that kept me from enjoying the book, namely glacial pacing and unnecessary emphasis on the childhood foundations of his characters' motivations.

These flaws are compensated by several fine performances. At the film's center, like an oak among saplings, is Max von Sydow. He does nothing to dispel my long-standing belief that good money is never wasted on one of his performances. I hate to say stuff like this, but Snow Falling on Cedars is worth seeing for him alone -- he's in his 70s now, and you have to wonder how much longer we'll be able to enjoy this giant walking the earth

Snow Falling on Cedars is also commendable for reminding us of the moral abhorrence of the Japanese-American internment camps. At a time when WWII is receiving considerable cinematic attention (The English Patient, Saving Private Ryan, and The Thin Red Line come to mind), this film takes the important measure of reminding us that the "greatest generation" also made some great mistakes.

Could it be that The Green Mile is really three hours long? It only feels like five or six. But seriously, folks. . . I could take cheap shots all day at this film, but I won't. There's plenty of more substantial things to dislike about it.

In The Green Mile, the normal routines of a death row cell block in Depression-era Louisiana are upset when John Coffey, a gigantic, yet meek child-murder convict arrives, bringing supernatural healing and empathic abilities. Coffey is a thinly-veiled religious figure (his initials are J.C., get it?), whose powers cause him to suffer on behalf of humanity. Paul Edgecomb, the morally-centered head guard of the block, is forced to consider issues of guilt, responsibility, and duty.

When asked for a last request, Coffey expresses his desire to see a "flicker movie," something he has only heard about. In the empty prison theater, he gets to see Fred Estaire and Ginger Rogers dance cheek-to-cheek in their 1935 film Top Hat. (Interestingly, it was the same scenes that Mia Farrow gazed at longingly at the close of Purple Rose of Cairo to distract her from the train wreck of her life.) To him, the dancers are "angels," and as he's strapped into the electric chair he intones, "I'm in heaven. . . ," the same line that Estaire sings. The movies, director Frank Darabount suggests somewhat self-importantly, are a spiritual media that can transport us into an afterlife.

In a film willing to shoulder the responsibility of a believable context, these ideas might bear fruit, but The Green Mile willfully avoids the complexities of its main topic, capital punishment. Darabount, acting like the Oscar-crazed filmmaker his critics accuse him of being, uses almost every scene in a mad attempt to jerk at the audience's heartstrings. Such a strategy leaves precious little room for the ambiguity that justifiably clings to the topic. Darabount has no choice but to portray the convicts (and the other characters, for that matter) as either noble or evil. With the exception of Coffey, we are not told what their crimes are; their only indication is the anonymous faces in the crowd observing the execution. These yawning gaps in context, in addition to the George Lucas morality, give the film something of the aura of a fairy tale, a distasteful precedent considering the importance of addressing the issues surrounding capital punishment with a firm grounding in reality.

Did I mention that this movie is long? Not only are we taken through every excruciating detail of each of the three executions, we also get to go through two dry runs. In lieu of subtlety, Darabount figures the way to our hearts is redundancy. Does anyone doubt it will work?

With the possible exception of The Fly, Videodrome best presents director David Cronenberg's main theme: how modern life can churn biology, technology, and identity into an unrecognizable mess. In the near future, Max, CEO of a cable pornography channel, is intrigued by a snuff-film transmission one of his technicians picks up intermittently. His appetite for the perverse is further whetted by his sexual involvement with Nicki, who flirts with self-mutilation, and expresses an interest in auditioning for the snuff show.

So far, the material is pleasantly seedy, but Cronenberg has a grander vision, as we soon find out. The bomb arrives in the form of an anonymous videotape, which, when played by Max, turns his hi-fi into a panting, sex-charged alien. Few scenes I have viewed generate the creepy eroticism of Max running his hands over the heaving, veined surface of the television panel as Nicki beckons breathlessly from the screen. (Probably the only competition is the typewriter sex scene from Cronenberg's Naked Lunch.)

The surreal events are explained away as hallucinations generated by special televised transmissions, but Max finds that it's easier to explain the images than to escape them. His life quickly mutates into a sprawling series of acid trips. The narrative is disjointed in a dream-like fashion, which, on subsequent viewings, seams alternately appropriate and frustrating. As Cronenberg keeps reminding us, once you cross certain boundaries, you can't return.

Although I shun using terms such as "visionary," it certainly seems that Videodrome was ahead of its time in prefiguring a cyberpunk aesthetic. (In 1983, Neuromancer still had a year to go before winning the Nebula Award.) However, Videodrome must be viewed as the negative image of cyberpunk. Instead of human consciousness actively entering a computer-generated environment, media and technology make psychedelic incursions into reality. Max himself actually assumes the role of a VCR, developing a slot for "playing" tapes. He also wears a large device over his head and eyes, not to immerse himself in a virtual world, but to allow a computer to record one of his hallucinations. It's Cronenberg's uncanny ability to turn ideas on their heads, even before we know which way is up.

1999 wasn't a great year for the big-name directors with well-established presences; Lucas, Scorcese, and Kubrick at best disappointed and at worst seemed irrelevant. Oliver Stone fights the same fate like a gut-shot wolf snapping at his hunters. In Any Given Sunday, he dishes out MTV in spades, but it somehow feels so. . . 90s. A quick look at what David Fincher and David O. Russell served up in 1999 gives one the distinct impression that we're beyond all that. The new aesthetic may still involve clicking, but now it's with a mouse and a web browser, not a remote control. Also, the cut-and-paste music video style has been superceded (in the arena of sports, at least) by the omniscience of Sega or Sony gaming systems. Sure, Stone's whiz-bang style provides several hits of adrenaline, but it's all gland and no brain. The technology is there to explore every nuance of a play; why not take us through it like Scorcese took us through each cog and wheel of a casino? Instead, there's a lot of huffing about who gets to call the plays, the coach or the QB. Haven't we seen this before?

Which is all very far from saying that there is nothing to like about Any Given Sunday. Jamie Foxx took me in as the struggling third-string quarterback Beamen and Jim Brown's jaded assistant coach was quietly impressive. Both of them hold their own against the familiar, blustery Al Pacino as head coach D'Amato. Unlike many of Stone's critics, I can't slip easily into a tirade about his obsession with father figures, but I do wish Any Given Sunday had focused more on Beamen and his world instead of D'Amato and his machinations, just as I wish Nixon had been a film about any one of the thousands of Cambodians whose lives were destroyed instead of the man who destroyed them. Still, there are enough moments of brightness here to bring me back for his next film.

What message to draw from a film packed with pseudo-religious metaphors? It's clear to me that the Wachowski brothers are, at least on one level, calling for subversion of the media-industrial complex of which they now find themselves a celebrated component.

Their film extrapolates our current state of media suffusion to an unsettling conclusion, in which humans from birth are hooked into a sort of a massively-multiplayer RPG, one so convincingly real that they don't realize it isn't the only reality. The matrix is presided over by an evil robotic intelligence, which uses the oblivious human participants as a biological energy source. The first step in fighting back is to "wake up" and enter the real world, where free humans stage attacks against the matrix and its minions.

In our own increasingly mediated world, the brothers tell us, our consciousness is dominated by corporate media environments, which nourish themselves by enmeshing our lives with theirs - whether it be through Phantom Menace merchandizing, or "synergy", or hopeless schmucks posting movie reviews to IMDb. The media provide our lives with meaning, but deaden us to pain, and separate us from reality. Agent Smith, when explaining to Morpheus that a past matrix, which had depicted an idyllic world, was rejected by its human hosts, sounds suspiciously like a studio executive explaining why his movies are excessively violent - because it's what the people want.

How do you subvert a media monster? Taking lessons from the music industry, you can either go Frank Zappa (and be unlistenable) or Rage Against the Machine (and rock). Neo goes the Rage route, popping up with bigger guns and badder kung fu. And The Matrix does the same thing. It tries to subvert the predominance of the action film by out-doing it with a whole new class of bells and whistles. (As a friend of mine used to say, "You have to get behind the man to stab him in the back.") Will it work? Not a chance. More likely we'll all be drooling over the idea of a sequel.

I'm no great fan of William Gibson, but surely this movie is well below his standards. Instead of fruitfully exploring the sometimes fascinating techno-dystopia that is Gibson's trademark, Johnny Mnemonic spares no time in boiling down to yet another chase-driven plot.

It's tempting to view this film as a conceptual dry run for The Matrix. In both, the increasingly technological context of life is seen as threatening to humanity. Johnny Mnemonic, however, poses the conflict in significantly weaker terms. In it, the people of the future are afflicted by epileptic seizures, which, according to a doctor in a fit of machine slapping, are caused (in some unexplained way) by the inescapable presence of electronics. But the concept falls flat: we're supposed to fear the medical effects of the encroachment of machines on our lives in the future, when the negative psychological and societal effects already seem formidable. I mean, which idea scares you more: catching a disease from your computer or getting your brains blown out by some twitchy Quake addict because you looked at him the wrong way?

The film is full of this sort of symbolism-so-plain-it-really-isn't-symbolism stuff. The protagonist is a human data courier with a hard drive in his head. We discover that he has jettisoned his childhood memories to make room for extra digital memory. (I won't even speculate on how plausible a cognitive scientist might find this.) The message, in case you missed it, is that our hero has been dehumanized by his job. Whatever his flaws, Gibson's best stories seemed to avoid such simplistic characterization. A strong dose of Gibson's moral ambivalence would have made Johnny Mnemonic a better film.

There's no shortage of technically ambitious directors out there, but you have to admit that nobody kicks it old school like Brian De Palma. While the Finchers and Wachowskis of the world toil at inserting seamless CGI shots in their films, De Palma looks positively stone age constructing his absurdly long one-shot sequence for Snake Eyes. Can you not love him for it?

Myself, I was happy just to see him walking away from the tripish material proffered in Mission: Impossible and back to something more thematically akin to Carlito's Way. De Palma gets sniped for having poor conclusions in his films, all build up and no payoff. Friends, the build up is the payoff.

Looking for Richard frames the essential postmodern question in its own terms: Is this a film about Richard III, or is this a film about a film about Richard III? Cameras follow Al Pacino as he wanders New York, sometimes on foot, but more often in the back of a limousine. We're not sure what he's doing, except it has something to do with Shakespeare's play Richard III. There are rehearsals with familiar actors, and actual performances, some seemingly on stage, some on sets, some on location, all of it interspersed with discussion about the play. Is the play actually to be staged, or is it all a show for the film? We don't know, and really, it doesn't matter. For the most part, this is a pleasant meditation on its subject.

Pacino has chosen a treacherous path: on one side stands the dauntingly complex Shakespeare play, and on the other the patronizing attempts to simplify it for the modern audience. There were several times when I felt talked down to by the actors, but just as many where I felt I benefited from the expanded explanation. Also, with Pacino so vibrantly at the center of every scene and little attention given to others, the film unavoidably has the flavor of a vanity project.

What the film does convey effectively is the power of theater to transport people intellectually and emotionally. The contrast between Pacino's stuttering attempts to summarize certain plot points and his magnificent animation as Richard is fascinating. Like the story (possibly apocryphal) about how Picasso, when asked to explain the meaning of one of his paintings, replied that if he could do that, he wouldn't need to paint, even inarticulate actors possess remarkable powers when inhabiting their roles. This insight was the film's central revelation for me.

Persuasion stands head and shoulders above the crowd of Jane Austen film adaptations, certainly far superior to Ang Lee's much-cheered Sense and Sensibility. Whereas Lee seemed in love with pristine, well-lit interiors and manicured landscapes, Persuasion director Roger Michell keeps letting his camera stray to the unkempt masses constantly lurking underfoot, and to the lonely corners of the dim rooms the characters inhabit. One of the opening scenes is telling: Admiral Croft walks along the deck of his ship, the crew standing at attention, the camera moving from one face to the next. They're faces we won't see again, but they're given considerable attention, before we've seen any of the main characters. We're urged to recognize that England's affluent society has a hidden subtext. It's a bold vision, one noticeably lacking in Michell's successful comedy Notting Hill, which is equally and oppositely enamored with the "struggles" of super-celebrities.

But this is just the icing on the cake. The performances are superlative, the dramatic tension is translated perfectly. I don't know how many times I've seen this film and I still relish the unfolding of almost every scene

Robocop 2 sure looks good on paper: Irvin Kershner directing, whose Empire Strikes Back gets as many votes as the others for best in the Star Wars series, and Frank Miller writing, the comic book writer/artist whose Batman revisions sparked a renaissance in the genre in the late 1980s. Additionally, both are working from the surprisingly entertaining premise of the original Robocop, in which a deceased cop is resurrected as a law-and-order killing machine with identity problems.

The sequel is all but unrecognizable, with hardly two enjoyable minutes to be found in the entirity of this gritty, spiteful film. The plot is something about drugs, pre-pubescent crime lords, and a brain transplant into a giant killer robot, but none of it is very memorable. The original was full of hammy acting and over-the-top action, but dipped into realism (the threatened police strike, Robocop's ghostly memories of his former life) enough to keep it grounded. The striking police officers in the sequel are little more than cardboard cut-outs, and a scene were Robo confronts his "wife" is executed so lamely as to be downright insulting.

Things look up when PR-minded execs decide to reprogram Robo with more PC directives and he winds up taking potshots at smokers. It's a nice 30 seconds, but the resolution (Robo sticks a high-voltage cable down his chassis) is so simple-minded that he might as well have erased our memory along with his. Movies like this give sequels a bad name.

About the worst thing I've ever found myself saying about John Sayles, the king of independent filmmaking, is that his technique in Limbo is painfully transparent. The strokes he uses to sketch his characters in the opening scenes, though pleasantly chaotic, are entirely familiar. Once again, the protagonist, Joe, is a stoic, principled character whose life centers on finding redemption for some profoundly tragic event in the past. The setting, coastal Alaska, provides Sayles with adequate fodder for his favorite political issues, foremost among them the struggle for economic equality in a free market society.

In fact, the plot twist on which the film's conclusion turns - whether a scornful pilot will save the protagonists or reveal their location to the drug dealers trying to kill them - can be seen as a metaphor for Sayles' capitalist dilemma: stick together with the other laborers or work against them to make a living wage. We're encouraged to mull over the same issue when the fish-cleaning plant closes, or when Joe is ordered by his bosses to take an old comrade's repossessed boat out to fish. And, on this count at least, he works with as much subtlety as he does in the best of his films.

A quantum leap for Edward Zwick, The Siege leaves behind Courage Under Fire's relatively flavorless tale of American "heroism" in the Gulf War for this maddeningly ambiguous story of terrorism in New York City. The Siege puts American society and international Islam at opposite ends of a supercollider, and pursues the most subtle results of their impact.

Hubbard, the FBI's top terrorism fighter, finds evidence that suggests a Hizballah-style terrorist cell has begun operating in New York, not the least of which is a group of American intelligence types interfering with the FBI's investigation. The smug leader of the intelligence group, Elise, reluctantly supplies Hubbard with information on her own investigation of the terrorists, but none of it is very satisfying. Zwick suggests the genuinely American response to crisis is to establish ineffectual spy-chains; military intelligence observes the FBI as it spies on Elise, who plies her Arab informant futilely.

What's fascinating about The Siege is the way it intermingles Islam (identified as alien by most American viewers) with things so utterly familiar. One of the opening scenes features a muezzin calling prayer from a minaret; as the camera pulls back, we find we are not in the Middle East, but the center of New York. Central to this effort (and equally fascinating) is the film's refusal to allow its characters to collapse into stereotypes. A terrorist pursues life as a liberal American intellectual, an arabic-speaking FBI agent struggles with issues of loyalty, and even Hubbard flirts with torturing an immigrant suspected of involvement with the terrorists. Identities are painfully intermingled. Hubbard leads one character through the lord's prayer as she dies, only to find that at her last exhalation, she calls on the name of Allah; few cinematic moments in recent memory have left me feeling so emotionally blindsided.

Alien Resurrection supplies us with the logical extension of the conceptual issues raised in the previous three films; unfortunately, the story doesn't take us through them in a satisfactory way.

Ripley's identity becomes more and more entwined with that of the alien throughout the series. In Alien, it is little more than a lethal opponent; Aliens created a set of parallels between the two, primarily motherhood; In Alien3 the parallels become intersections, portraying Ripley "pregnant" with an alien. Now, Ripley and alien are reborn through cloning, a process that intermingles their genes, and conflates their identities even more. Ripley's blood is acidic, her physical traits are enhanced, and she communicates intuitively with the aliens. The queen alien, for its part, gives birth to a human/alien hybrid, which identifies Ripley as its mother. These are all pleasing developments. Also, Juenet's visuals are at least as striking as those of the previous films, crisp and stylish. Both Brad Dourif and Dan Hedaya provide solidly enjoyable performances, in addition to Sigourney Weaver's serene Ripley.

Instead of unfolding carefully and thoughtfully, however, the movie rockets into confusion in the first 20 minutes, and the rest of the film is a flacid series of chase scenes. It chooses not to focus on the most interesting of the new characters (Dourif's alien-loving scientist, and Hedaya's General Perez), who are dispatched as soon as the aliens get loose. Instead, we get to muck along with the foul-mouthed crew of smugglers as they work their way through the alien-infested ship, which, minus the shocks, is nothing less than boring.

Alien Resurrection also reverses much of the work of Alien3, which attempted to return the alien to its status as a sort of supernatural death-figure. The components of the alien (which were so utterly horrific in the first film) are now gimmicks; one alien presses a button with its extendable jaws; in another scene, a "chestburster" is used to kill one of the bad guys by placing his head right over the point of exit. (This last scene is one of several that are sure to make this film remembered as the most gratuitously gory in the series.)

There are several other moments worth mentioning (such as when Ripley discovers a lab that displays the results of failed attempts to clone her), but they are usually deflated by the lack of dramatic tact (in this case, one of the smugglers says snidely, "Must be a chick thing," after she destroys the lab in rage). This was a film with enormous potential, only a fraction of which was lived up to.

The Race for the Double Helix effectively brings to life James Watson's book (upon which it was based), which tells the story of how he and Francis Crick came to be the first to correctly describe the molecular structure of DNA. Crick and Watson's scrappy, boyish spirit is translated well by Jeff Goldblum and Tim Pigott-Smith. The story follows the highs and lows of the two and their drive to make the discovery, thankfully without enshrining them; their success was as much due to luck and rudeness as it was to genuine scientific integrity. The film is also set well in Europe of the 40s and 50s.

In this "passing of the torch" film, the cinematic Star Trek franchise transfers from the crew of the original Star Trek to the "Next Generation" crew. Enormous effort has already been devoted to bringing characters from the original series into the Next Generation series; Scotty, Spock, and Sarek are among the "crossovers." Although a pleasure for trekkers, this rarely results in compelling screenwriting, and Generations is no exception.

The problem here, as elsewhere, is the dreaded "plot device," a fantastic happening or object that allows a character to skip over decades unchanged. In Generations, the device is an "energy ribbon," which zooms through space, destroying some things, but also snatching some people into a fantasy land where dreams become reality. In the first sequence, Kirk is one of those snatched (although others assume he is destroyed). This allows him to meet Picard, who is snatched 80 years later by the same ribbon.

So far, we're running at about the usual level of belief-suspension for a Star Trek plot, but the unlikely Kirk-Picard summit precludes even more outrageous reasoning. First, the ribbon's fantasy land is so utterly attractive that a scientist named Soran (who had a close encounter with the ribbon years ago) willingly dispatches millions of innocent lives to arrange another, more permanent rendezvous. Despite this, Picard and Kirk have no difficulty seeing through the facade. "It's not real, is it?" Kirk asks, though if it's real enough to include all the other trappings of normal life, it should be able to replicate the feeling of realness, shouldn't it?

Picard (with the help of Guinan) has no problem moving from his fantasy (a sort of Dickensian Christmas with a large family) to Kirk's (a woodsy spot where he chops wood and cooks breakfast for a slumbering lover). Why not pop over to Soran's fantasy and talk some sense into him while he's at it? Nevermind. Instead, they jointly emerge from the ribbon, back into the real world, though not at the point they left it -- in fact, they're nowhere near the ribbon when they come out. How did they manage that? And if they're not constrained by time or space, why not pop out at some point where they can nab Soran without a struggle? The answer, of course, is that it wouldn't make for an exciting movie, though movies with such shaky conceptual frameworks rarely excite on any but the most basic levels.

Generations isn't devoid of merit. Malcolm McDowell does a pleasantly evil turn as Soran, and Brent Spiner portrays an appropriately jangled Data, who has just installed an emotion chip. It's fun to watch the Next Generation working with a Hollywood budget, but director Berman often falls short of the task. More than once, he does sharp zooms on characters' faces as they are about to die violently, a technique I thought had perished in the 70s. Still, if you're in a tight spot for a Star Trek fix, this will probably do it for you, plot device and all.

I'd like to place the blame for this abominable movie at John Grisham's feet, but in view of Joel Schumacher's history of morally irresponsible filmmaking, he probably deserves it more.

This courtroom drama follows the case of a black man (Jackson) who murders the two white men accused of raping and killing his daughter. An idealistic young lawyer (McConaughey) picks up the case and slogs through opposition from a horde of stereotypical white southern bigots. Schumacher sets up the blocks and knocks them down in the bluntest way imaginable. From the get-go, it's the bad (Klansmen, aristocrats) versus the good (simple black folks, "enlightened" white folks), and not a moment of ambiguity for the whole two and half excruciating hours. Do we ever wonder if the victims were the rapists? Nope, we aren't allowed to. If we were, we might draw different conclusions about how justifiable homicide is and whether or not Jackson's character is innocent.

Worse than that, the courtroom action is sluggish and poorly executed. McConaughey's lawyer shows no qualms about using underhanded technique; but then the message of the film is if you're doing it for the right reason, any means are justified. He gets the prosecution psychologist to admit to an indiscretion (gasp!), wheedles an accusational statement about the victims from the sheriff (wow!), badgers one of the victims' mothers (yikes!), and, best of all, completely abandons the insanity plea during closing statements and basically says, "If the little girl were white, you'd have done the killing yourself." Which side feels more like a lynch mob to you?

If they ever do vote James Cameron "King of the World," it'll probably be for Aliens, not Titanic. It seems the consensus about Cameron's writing ability is mixed at best (the influence of Titanic, no doubt), but Aliens, even after 13 years, seems fresh, well-paced, and utterly engaging the whole length of it.

It's all the more remarkable considering that Cameron was working from Alien. The plotlines flow smoothly into the new film, and several new themes are initiated and pursued, the most fruitful among them motherhood. We meet the alien "mother," and Ripley takes in Newt as if she were her child. (The special edition also includes information about Ripley's real daughter.) It's a line that will be explored more in the next two films; thankfully, Cameron avoided biting off more that he could chew.

Aliens is also special for so successfully transforming a franchise from one genre (horror) to another (action), in the process setting new standards for action films. Of course, the switch to action calls for certain concessions. In order to present a war against aliens, Cameron makes them more corporeal and vulnerable. In the original, the alien almost transcended physicality; as it dispatched some of its final victims, we see it moving slowly, arms outstretched, almost as if it were floating through water, confronting its victim face-to-face. It was like death itself, inevitable, irresistable. Cameron's aliens, though formidable, have just as much to fear from a bullet as any human. The might of the alien is also lessened considerably with the change of location. The nervous energy of Alien drew on the claustrophobia of a small crew on a single ship. Aliens, located on a planet, noticeably lacks this.

Still, Aliens represents a moment when all of James Cameron's strengths came together, a moment that hasn't been repeated since.

You've probably already decided for yourself if this movie is racist, pointless, or true to the series, so I won't pursue those points. Phantom Menace is a truly flawed film; what interests me are the failings of the plot.

Lucas' moral construction in Star Wars was simple and clear. The force is the medium of morality, and it has a light (good) and a dark (evil) side. In Phantom Menace, morality is somewhat less simple and significantly less clear. The Jedi Council exists, from which the great forces of the light jedi descended, so it is assumed they are good. When mention is made of the Sith, presumably the dark jedi, they are dismissed as not having existed for ages. We, of course, know differently, but it is their perception that affects how the plot turns. In this era of uncontested goodness, the Council's understanding of Anakin is certainly mysterious; they can "sense" that he's "dangerous," but what would constitute danger if the Sith are gone, as they believe? And their reaction to him is even more incomprehensible. Instead of trying to steer him to the light side, they prefer leaving him alone; surely not the approach one would expect from the Council, which appears active in supporting galactic order.

It also seems odd that Qui Gonn Jinn chooses to train Anakin, considering his belief that he will "bring balance to the force" as legend has suggested. If the Council is in power and the Sith are in retreat, surely "balance" would equate strengthening evil (as we all know it will later in the series).

Also, Lucas has abandoned the idea of constructing evil with plot elements and has resorted to the equation "evil = evil-looking." Does anyone remember when Vader stormed onto the blockade runner and barked to his troops, "Tear this ship apart!"? Neither Maul nor Sidious do anything a tenth as evil (or interesting, for that matter). Amidala tells us "My people are dying!" but in the absence of any visceral proof, the tragedy feels rather pale and distant, as does the evil that causes it.

The presence of C3PO and R2-D2, although refreshingly multi-dimensional compared to Jar Jar Binks, is an obvious attempt to procure audience sympathy. Like most things in this movie, they are extraneous to the plot, and draw ovation due only to their familiarity. Phantom Menace's most enjoyable moments were the glimpses of Sand People and Jawas at the pod race: a sad commentary on the film's ability to generate original emotion in its viewers.

Finally, Phantom Menace represents the ultimate extension of a disturbing trend in 1990s cinema: filmmaking driven by special effects. Much of this film is done because Lucas can do it, not because he should. Few people would argue that Jar Jar Binks was worth creating, but let's broaden our scope a little; why does this film need Gungans at all? It seems that the idea to have an entire race of computer-generated characters struck Lucas as neat some time ago, and he was determined to see it happen in Phantom Menace, regardless of its appropriateness to the plot. Kenobi claims they have a symbiotic relationship with Amidala's people on Naboo, when obviously they don't. Their presence is so forced, each appearance on screen is almost painful.

Phantom Menace could have been a better film, and should have.

After watching Independence Day, and the surge of adoration from American youth that followed, I wondered if the previous generation looked on with as much horror when the same happened for Star Wars. I hope not.

Where to begin on how awful this movie is? The drama is propped up by dozens of unlikely situations. We're supposed to cheer as the dog jumps through the door, narrowly missing an early death by fireball. Would the fireball really stop at the door and preserve everyone inside? Would their oxygen not be consumed? Later, not only a stranded fighter pilot, but a horde of RVs stumble on Area 51, just in time for the president's arrival (whose wife has just been rescued by the fighter pilot's girlfriend). This is the worst kind of stop-gap scriptwriting.

The plot tries to make up for the gaping holes with extraneous material. We are told with loving detail what the aliens look like, how their biologically-active protective suits work, of their telepathic abilities. How many aliens to we actually encounter face-to-face in the film? You got it -- one.

The attempt at generating tension in the first half hour is utterly ludicrous; every person on earth has seen the previews of the White House and various other buildings being blown to smithereens by the aliens. Before the opening credits role, we know a war's on. Why pretend we don't?

Independence Day was one of the first in a disturbing trend in cinema in the 1990s, culminating, I think, with The Phantom Menace: filmmaking driven by special effects. The attitude of the film is, "We do this because we can, not because we should." This inevitably leads the plot astray and dictates what course the aliens will take. Wouldn't it be much more efficient for the technologically-advanced aliens to engineer a human-killing super virus? Sure, but then there wouldn't be great shots of L.A. getting vaporized.

Equally offensive is the needless off-target moralizing of the film. It suggests that the war is about "independence" -- come on, guys, isn't really about survival? The theme at the end is one of unity among the different nations, but it's a unity that consists of the U.S. telling the other guys when and where to shoot. And if that's what unity is all about, then we've been getting along great for the last 50 years.

This is a textbook case of a movie attempting futilely to use scientific premises to construct an interesting plot. To cure a plague, a race of genetically-altered cockroaches are released in the sewers of New York City. The plague is cured, and the cockroaches are assumed to have run out their pre-determined lifespan. Naturally, quite the opposite turns out to be true, as the protagonists discover the roaches have evolved into gigantic killing machines. And not only are they efficient killers, they also can fold their carapace to appear more human-like.

How did this happen? Through the miracle of evolution, according to the scientists. Okay, but in just three years? Yes, say the scientists, as insects they can go through millions of generations every year. And this is where things get silly.

First, we are shown multiple scenes of the roaches in action: they are larger than human, wielding scimitar-like claws, and flying circles around their prey. Does such a creature really need to blend in to get its job done? Second, evolution doesn't produce mimicry just because it seems like a good idea. There has to be a well-established advantage, and usually a close relationship between the mimic and the thing mimicked. The roaches wouldn't start looking like humans until there was significant contact between the two, and a significant disadvantage (say, death) to those that didn't look human. And yet, there's no mention of them ever having been seen before, and as was noted earlier, humans aren't much of a match regardless of how the roaches look.

It would be easy to overlook these flaws if there was something else to like in Mimic, but there truly isn't. We are encouraged to sympathize with the main protagonists because they have trouble conceiving a child; then at the end, it is suggested sloppily that they will become guardians of an autistic orphan. This all occurs while we're still trying to figure out how the male protagonist survived the explosion he was just at the center of, which destroyed the extensive roach nest in its entirity. (Apparently, he fell into some water.) Although the scenes in the nest are somewhat interesting, the movie as a whole is not engaging.