Out of Sight vs. Snow Falling on Cedars
Out of Sight
Major Flaws: Jennifer Lopez. Otherwise, it's predicated on the kind of suspension of disbelief in relationships and attraction that never fully works (though the joke about Three Days of the Condor addresses this problem). Finally, depending on your point-of-view, the film is very superficial. While that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's rare that pure entertainment is also transcendent.
Major Attributes: As a film that knows it's intentions and desires, it really has everything in hand. The damage caused by Lopez is minimized as best it can be. Everything anyone loves about Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven is present here and in a more complexly entertaining way. It's really wonderfully put together. The look and visual rhythm reinforce the tone in a way that a certain actor often fails to. Most importantly, it was supremely entertaining and almost entirely convincing with almost all the actors doing supreme jobs. I was really surprised just how much I admire the look of the film.
Snow Falling on Cedars
Major Flaws: The single biggest flaw of the film is the Ishmael storyline. It's a B-story at best and at worst it's an unnecessary framing device. For this film to succeed, it should have been a remake of Anatomy of a Murder using this crime/trial storyline. The listlessness of the love story and Ishmael's motivations only serves to reinforce stereotypes about white heroism in service of needy minorities. This isn't even Hawke's fault, as he was fine, though not good. There is nothing additive about the love story and the main story is developed weakly as it is. From the opening shot, it is absolutely clear who was good, who was evil, who had done wrong, who was wrongly treated and how all this racism was going to shake out. There's even palpable misogyny thrown in for no good reason in the guise of greater xenophobic venom coming from women than from the mostly understanding and fair-minding men. But at it's core it's a really basic replaying of the reductive storyline of the bad white people battling the good white people for the souls of disenfranchised minority characters. That's not to say the Japanese characters weren't disenfranchised, just that it could've been handled much better. On top of all this, it dragged through multiple sequences.
Major Attributes: Not surprisingly, it lived up to it's cinematographic legend. It is really shot and lit beautifully with framing that is better than average. Also, Max von Sydow has to work very hard to be so bad as to be mediocre, and he didn't try hard enough here, relegating him to the level of spectacular. He's really unstoppable. It's heart was in the right place and between the editing and the dialogue involved in the court drama, it had a bit of something interesting going on with the development of that storyline. However, as stated earlier, it fell flat and detrimentally predicable. On a separate note, don't construe the relative paucity of praise in comparison to the flaws as a complete condemnation. There really are some good aspects the the film, just not enough. I would be really interested to see a remake, it's too bad Preminger is too dead to do so. If you want to see it, you will see some good things.
Verdict: This was never really close. That's not to say that Snow Falling on Cedars was unworthy, but it just can't stand up against a slate of really good and great films. Out of Sight was one of those really good films and for that it moves on.
Out of Sight > Snow Falling on Cedars