Bruce Fretts

Paul Newman won his Best Actor Oscar for its 1986 sequel, The Color of Money, but he executed an equally award-worthy turn in Robert Rossen’s jazzy, boozy pool-hall morality play.

Leguizamo owns Empire, the first film to capture the live-wire crackle of his one-man stage shows -- He's front and center in nearly every scene, and he holds the screen with a simmering self-assurance.

Wild Bill succeeds as a character study of a man whose idiosyncratic code of justice eventually catches up with him. Bridges’ performance is a masterstroke of squinty-eyed bitterness, and he gets colorful support from Ellen Barkin (as kitten with a whip Calamity Jane) and John Hurt (as a dissipated British dandy).

It's got a good beat, you can dance to it.

Sometimes, typecasting works: Holmes and Bratt settle comfortably into their roles, and the movie proves a competently made, mildly diverting collegiate thriller -- at least until its all-too-predictable ''twist'' ending.

Carpenter's brutally efficient exercise in tension and release.

It's usually a good idea to avoid anything billed as ''a fable,'' but The Legend of 1900 offers almost enough merits to warrant an exception

Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Bouncy animation and catchy songs keep the film from tasting too much like spinach.

Mildly amusing, but compared to Pixar's splashy fish story, the rudimentary drawings and childish gags of Nickelodeon's latest feature look, in a word, cartoonish.