ABOUT THESE REVIEWS

Included here are some extremely brief capsule reviews of the 1995 films I've seen to date. Obviously, these are not intended as proper criticism; rather, I've attempted to sum up, in a few pithy phrases, how I responded to the film in question. If you don't know me personally, or haven't come to know my sensibilites via my posts to the rec.arts.movies groups on Usenet, these reviews probably won't be of much interest to you (though you're welcome to browse through them anyway, of course). There are no plot synopses--that information is readily available elsewhere, and I hate synopsizing things (if that's a word)--and no analysis to speak of...just my own idiosyncratic and often outrageous opinions. I wish I had the time to write a 1400-word essay on each film, but, sadly, I don't. (However, I did write longer reviews of Exotica and Kiss of Death, if you're interested.)

Because I began compiling these reviews in late summer, my memory of the films I saw in the first few months of the year is a bit sketchy, and you'll generally find the reviews of those films to be both shorter and shallower than those of more recent fare. My apologies.

In addition to my brief comments, I have given each film a rating, using the four-star rating system popularized by _Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide_. These ratings are not intended to indicate how "good" or "bad" a particular film is; rather, they indicate how much I personally liked or disliked it. As a general rule, I only see films that are well-received by professional critics, so almost every film reviewed here is admired by a lot of other people, regardless of what I thought. I gave Abbas Kiarostami's film THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES a very poor rating, because it bored me silly, but that doesn't mean that I don't recommend it.

The key to my ratings is as follows: 

4.0	I loved it.  I want to own it on laserdisc and watch it repeatedly.
3.5	I liked it very much, and would happily see it again.
3.0	I liked it, either mildly or with some major reservations.
2.5	I wanted to like it, and liked some aspects of it, but it didn't 
	really work for me overall.
2.0	I didn't really like it, but it wasn't painful to sit through.
1.5	It was painful to sit through.
1.0	I seriously considered walking out before it ended.
zero	I walked out before it ended.

Four-star ratings are pretty rare; in 1994, I allotted four stars to only five films, out of nearly a hundred seen. (For the record, those films were ED WOOD, HEAVENLY CREATURES, PULP FICTION, RED, and THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD.) The vast majority of my ratings are in the two-to-three-star range, with 2.5 being the most common. Because I tend to skip films that are lambasted by the critics, ratings below two stars are also rare; a 1.5 will often mean not that a film is bad, but merely that its narrative is sketchy or nonexistent, as my disdain for non-narrative film remains my major aesthetic blind spot. The "zero" rating has only been given once in my entire moviegoing life, to a 1988 adaptation of Isaac Asimov's short story "Nightfall," called, appropriately, NIGHTFALL. I left after five minutes and snuck into another theater to see MIDNIGHT RUN for the third time. Yes, it was that bad.

New reviews will be added regularly; I generally see one to two new films each week, and I frequently see advance screenings through NYU.