It's not hard to see what attracted director Marshall Herskovitz (TV's thirtysomething) and writer Steve Zaillian (Schindler's List) to this tragicomic story of a widower trying to keep life together for his two young sons. And Danny DeVito gives them a surprisingly sympathetic and low-key performance that capably blends pathos and humor. But the story-about Jack's attempts to get his drinking under control, even while holding down a job as a late-night TV horror-movie host-descends into bathos. Then it gets downright weird and scary when the family's strange neo-Nazi neighbor (a popeyed Gary Sinise) takes an unhealthy interest in one of the children. Jack the Bear sat on the shelf for a couple of years while Herskovitz reworked it, but it was like changing the tires on a car with a broken drive-train. -Marshall Fine.

Scorned by reviewers when it came out, this concentrated dose of commando death-dealing to legions of Nazi machine-gun fodder has acquired a cult over the years. In 1968 Clint Eastwood was just getting used to the notion that he might be a world-class movie star; Richard Burton, whose image had been shaped equally by classical theater training and his headline-making romance with Elizabeth Taylor, was eager to try on the action ethos Eastwood was already nudging toward caricature. Alistair MacLean's novel The Guns of Navarone had inspired the film that started the '60s vogue for World War II military capers, so he was prevailed on to write the screenplay (his first). The central location, an impregnable Alpine stronghold locked in ice and snow, is surpassing cool, but the plot and action are ultra-mechanical, and the switcheroo gamesmanship of just who is the undercover double (triple?) agent on the mission becomes aggressively silly. -Richard T. Jameson.

After seeing Saving Private Ryan, this epic tale about the Normandy invasion will look sanitized. But in its re-creation of events leading to the epochal battle, the film is captivating and grand, and the parade of famous actors who cross the screen naturally give the already charged action even more of a boost. Three directors worked on it: Ken Annakin (Battle of the Bulge), Andrew Marton (Crack in the World), and Bernhard Wicki (this film being his only credit). -Tom Keogh.

An impressively rigorous, unsentimental, and harrowing look at combat during World War II, Band of Brothers follows a company of airborne infantry-Easy Company-from boot camp through the end of the war. The brutality of training takes the audience by increments to the even greater brutality of the war; Easy Company took part in some of the most difficult battles, including the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the failed invasion of Holland, and the Battle of the Bulge, as well as the liberation of a concentration camp and the capture of Hitler's Eagle's Nest. But what makes these episodes work is not their historical sweep but their emphasis on riveting details (such as the rattle of a plane as the paratroopers wait to leap, or a flower in the buttonhole of a German soldier) and procedures (from military tactics to the workings of bureaucratic hierarchies). The scope of this miniseries (10 episodes, plus an actual documentary filled with interviews with surviving veterans) allows not only a thoroughness impossible in a two-hour movie, but also captures the wide range of responses to the stress and trauma of war-fear, cynicism, cruelty, compassion, and all-encompassing confusion. The result is a realism that makes both simplistic judgments and jingoistic enthusiasm impossible; the things these soldiers had to do are both terrible and understandable, and the psychological price they paid is made clear. The writing, directing, and acting are superb throughout. The cast is largely unknown, emphasizing the team of actors as a whole unit, much like the regiment; Damian Lewis and Ron Livingston play the central roles of two officers with grit and intelligence. Band of Brothers turns a vast historical event into a series of potent personal experiences; it's a deeply engrossing and affecting accomplishment. -Bret Fetzer.

The most readily available version of this early Jackie Chan flick has been distractingly dubbed with English accents and lad slang. ("You twit!" snarls a beefy young kung fu master. ) This is a film of some historic interest, however, since Chan was directing himself for the first time, going way too far in his attempt to inject humor into the genre and distance himself from the grim, ferocious example of Bruce Lee. He has only himself to blame, in other words, for the over-the-top slapstick of the martial arts training sequences-like the one that has him standing on his head, balancing a bowl of scalding hot tea in his crotch. The action scenes are all-out gag-fests in which Chan does more mugging than fighting, appearing in drag in one memorable sequence. One hapless thug even gets squashed into the ground, like a steamrollered cartoon character. -David Chute.

There's nothing original in The Scorpion King, but this derivative action franchise gets off to a rousing start by cleverly stealing from a lot of better movies. Capitalizing on his brief cameo in The Mummy Returns, Dwayne Johnson (a. k. a. World Wrestling Federation star the Rock) stars as Mathayus, an Akkadian assassin in the age preceding Egyptian pharaohs, who vows to avenge his brother's murder by an undefeated warlord (Steven Brand) prophesied to become the desert-ruling Scorpion King. Their battle for supremacy comprises most of the film's brisk 95-minute running time, punctuated by comic relief from Mathayus's obligatory sidekick (Grant Heslov), romance with a beautiful sorceress (Kelly Hu), and alliance with a massive Nubian (Michael Clarke Duncan) on the eve of their climactic showdown. There's no rhyme or reason to the film's depiction of ancient civilization (the costuming is particularly ludicrous), but the Rock demonstrates adequate action-star potential, and director Chuck Russell (The Mask) wraps it all in a slick, professional package. -Jeff Shannon.

A butt-kicking quartet of female ninja assassins are hired by a ruthless magistrate to silence his past conquests. Three former courtesans could ruin his chaste reputation and discredit his bid for political glory, so he puts a contract out on them. A hearty hedonist who despises the sanctimonious hypocrite sends his own supernaturally powered thugs to capture the women, and they battle in an erotic series of superhero skirmishes that mix martial arts and magic spells, where the sexy ninja warriors repeatedly sacrifice their clothes for the greater glory of duty. They meet their equal in a feisty blonde Mata Hari who creates Japan's first blue movie when she displays the magistrate's sexual shenanigans across the sky like a heavenly drive-in film. The film straddles the line between spirited spoof and misguided action adventure, which the tongue-in-cheek English dubbing ably undercuts with painful puns and innuendo, but it never loses its outrageous sense of low-budget spectacle. Full of audacious violence and gratuitous nudity and logic-bending twists, it's wacky and weird and nearly incomprehensible, but it's never dull. -Sean Axmaker.

Tom Berenger and Billy Zane head the cast in this silly action film about a tough Marine and an Olympics marksman who team up in the Panamanian jungle to take out a rebel leader and the drug kingpin financing him. Berenger's done this switched-off soul bit before, but Zane doesn't seem quite ready for his part. In any case, the acting doesn't matter as much to director Luis Llosa as fancy camerawork to give viewers the sense of a bullet hurling along its trajectory. -Tom Keogh.

Martial arts matinee idol Jet Li Lin-Kit, who made his U. S. debut as a bad guy in Lethal Weapon 4, portrays a real life turn-of-the-century Cantonese patriot, the dauntless Fong Sai-Yuk. This is a much more blunt and straightforward effort than Tsui Hark's flamboyant Once Upon a Time in China films, but codirectors Ann Hui (Song of the Exile) and Yuen Kwai (Yes, Madam) deliver many lively and funny sequences. For U. S. viewers, the revelation of the film will be Josephine Siao, a Cantonese film star of the '60s, in both comedies and high-flying swordplay films, who plays Fong Sai-Yuk's martial mother. Siao disguises herself as man to enter a martial arts competition and ends up winning both the prize and the heart of a high official's daughter-mostly because the girl has never met a hero with so much poetic sensitivity lurking just beneath the surface. Chu Kong (Sidney in John Woo's The Killer) plays Fong Sai-Yuk's father as an anti-Manchu patriot so unbendingly upright that he's a bit of a prig, and as the action heats up, political stakes emerge more clearly. In the grand finale, Fong Sai-Yuk squares off against a Manchu killer played with great panache by newcomer Chiu Man-cheuk. [+]