Caryn James

Major Payne takes about an hour and 10 minutes before it wallows in sappiness. That's not a bad record for a formula family comedy in which the ending is clear from the start.

Mr. Greenaway turns this tale of a bullying criminal and his unfaithful wife into something profound and extremely rare: a work so intelligent and powerful that it evokes our best emotions and least civil impulses, so esthetically brilliant that it expands the boundaries of film itself.

In the end, Now and Then doesn't work well enough as nostalgia for adults or as a story that girls today might identify with. Yet its young ensemble makes it vibrant and enjoyable, even when it fails to surprise.

The film is lively and detailed enough so it is never boring, but it never takes off dramatically or realizes its intriguing possibilities either.

It is a quirky, ambitious, praiseworthy project that somehow becomes a victim of all the cliches it was invented to avoid.

Loosely based on the legend that inspired "Swan Lake," and blatantly borrowing the formula of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast," this animated musical turns out to be funny and enchanting on its own. Directed by Richard Rich, who started an animation company after 14 years at Disney, "The Swan Princess" makes first-rate copying seem like a good idea.

Little Odessa might have been a great film. Instead, it is an exceptionally good one, the kind that suggests the start of a powerful career.

Lorraine Gary has some affecting moments as Ellen, but Jaws the Revenge is mild and predictable, the very things an adventure movie should never be.

Mr. Waters, of course, no longer traffics in the truly vulgar, as he did in early films like Pink Flamingos. With Serial Mom he concocts a cute suburban satire, a warmly funny movie that even a mother could love.

This third installment of the silly and often hilarious send-up of cop cliches is slower to start than the earlier Naked Gun movies. As always, it is a scattershot mix of throwaway lines, topical references and sight gags (a newspaper headline that reads: Dyslexia for Cure Found).

The director, Joe Johnston, paces this adventure to suit the film's tone. It is swift and smooth, never wild or raucous.

Ju Dou is an intellectually and artistically brave film. Asking for dramatic power and psychological depth as well may be expecting too much.

Prison has a generic, low-budget name, and for once you can judge a movie by its title. This prison-drama-meets-ghost-story turns out to be an object lesson in how cheaply and badly a film can be made.

A film that assumes it's up to the job of dealing with life and death and love, but is not even up to dealing with lobsters.

Casper is not the kind of smartly written movie that works on children's and adult levels at once. But with its lively pace, smashing visual tricks and one of the cutest heroes on screen, it is an engaging fantasy for very small children.

Martin Short can do anything, it seems, except find the right movies to star in.

It's commercially calculated to have something for everyone - suspense, humor, even a bounty hunter from the krites' planet who poses as a rock star. Unfortunately, the film doesn't have the humor or the budget to match any of these goals.

Elm Street 4' does have an endless onslaught of astonishing, often grotesque special effects .Mr. Harlin only has to keep things moving, which he does with restless camera work, swirling high above Freddy and his victims. Freddy, who says I am eternal, seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, immune to directors and scripts.

[Mr. Gerima's] film is ambitious in its depiction of slavery and accomplished in its visual command.

This paranoid fantasy is so resonant that it makes The Net an enjoyably creepy thriller, even though Irwin Winkler belongs to the nothing-is-too-obvious school of directing.

Both Mr. Danson and Mr. Culkin make the film's predictable ending far more effective than it might have been. They are warm without being sappy. It's too bad that the audience, parents and children, are likely to have grown restless long before then.

The best that can be said for the film is that it leaves Ernest behind now and then to focus on Santa, who is played by Douglas Seale with sweetness, sincerity and an amazing amount of dignity, considering his surroundings.

The other miracle is that the two stars of It Could Happen to You keep it sailing over a script that is often as predictable and flat as the movie's new title.

An uninspired circus film for children.

Deadly Friend is stylish and sardonic enough to offer horror fans some knowing laughs and a pleasant relief from shrieking.

For all its clever updatings, stylish action and witty escapism, Licence to Kill is still a little too much by the book. Mr. Dalton is perfectly at home as an angry Bond, and as a romantic lead and as an action hero, but he never seems to blend any two of those qualities at once.

The script, which he wrote with Alain Le Henry, is as confusing and tiresome as the direction. What is meant to be a touching, comic relationship between Marx and Johnny is simply flat.

Fortunately, Candyman isn't powerful enough to do much harm. The credits are more intriguing than the film.

There are some grotesquely stylish and scary moments in Phantasm II, the sequel to a 1979 film that Don Coscarelli made as a precocious 25-year-old. Unfortunately, these episdoes seem to take as long to arrive as the sequel did.

No one expects realism from a movie called Teen Wolf Too... still, the film makers could pretend to know what college is like, might try to liven up the kindly werewolf formula.

The film features someone who walks like Jackie Mason, talks like Jackie Mason, does everything except make people laugh like Jackie Mason.

Though it is meant to be whimsical and touching, the film's style is leaden, and its story has more danger than excitement.

If Nobody's Fool is often heartbreaking in its sense of loss, it is also hopeful in the strength of its emotions and the sheer beauty of its performances.

While Mr. Destiny is not technically a remake of anything, it's hard to find a glimmer of originality, much less wit or emotion.

Its detailed fantasy world, including a dark turn-of-the-century mining town and candy-colored futuristic space bikes, is as alluring as any live-action film. Yet this two-hour story about a lost princess, a flying island and space pirates is liable to strain the patience of adults and the attention spans of children.

Anyone looking for a true sense of his importance in the history of rock-and-roll will be let down by Great Balls of Fire. But though the film may skimp on the truth, it is loaded with terrific music and outrageous fun.

Comprised of so many derivative bits and pieces that it's not surprising the movie has too little narrative coherence or momentum to keep us going, and no characters we care about enough to root for.

Style is almost everything here, and it's a tough call whether the star is handsomer than the sets.

Critters 2 piles up every stock movie idea you can remember about small-town heroism, macho sheriffs and alien invaders. But whenever it shows a glimmer of wit about those cliches, it leaps back to its safe, dull, derivative style.

You might call this the scattershot school of film making... The result of being pushed and pulled through the confusing styles of Near Dark is simple exhaustion.

Noisy and meant for children only. A bored grown-up's only consolation is that the Rangers' popularity has probably peaked, and the next kiddie phenomenon must be on the way.

As it turns out, two Jean-Claude Van Dammes are pretty much the same as one. Fans who like their action unadulterated by story, character or acting know where to find it.

Death Wish 4 is as efficient and predictable as Kersey himself, and inoffensive as long as you can root for a sociopathic hero.

The director, Roger Donaldson, best known for the Kevin Costner thriller No Way Out, keeps the film moving. But there is only so much suspense he can generate from this stock story and familiar-looking special effects. Species may work best for viewers who don't like to be too scared by horror movies; it's reassuringly familiar.

Movies don't get more derivative or less comic than this.

From characters to camera angles, this story of a self-absorbed jazz trumpeter is one long cliche, the kind that might make his most loyal admirers wince and wonder, Spike, what happened?

Sluggish and low-energy.

What has been lost is more than Bogart's gritty presence.

Exotica may not be as perfectly formed as some of Mr. Egoyan's earlier work. Because Thomas's subplot is not as intriguing as the scenes in the club, the stories take too long to merge. But the flaws are minor. Mr. Egoyan continues to build an important, uncompromising career.

The Witches resembles a brilliantly told bedtime story, though the teller of this children's tale may well be the slightly cracked relative who can't judge when scary stories become nightmares.

Ernest Goes to Jail so resembles a high-spirited cartoon that it is likely to be more amusing to children and less painfully obnoxious for parents than its predecessors.

Stargate is a clever adventure that should find its audience.

It is impossible to separate Mr. Hartman's writing and direction from Mr. Horton's smooth, sophisticated camera work, which offers a broad view of the cluttered streets and also peers up narrow stairwells to suggest Mac's claustrophobic life. However their collaboration worked, ''No Picnic'' does not look or sound quite like any other film, and that's more than you can say about most movies of any size.

Surrounded by Mr. Barker's visual clutter and lack of narrative energy, Mr. Cronenberg's presence only highlights the difference between a gruesome but first-rate psychological horror story like Dead Ringers and a mediocrity like Nightbreed.

For a film so exhaustively loaded with silliness, Kansas is remarkably dull. [23 Sep 1988, p.C17]

With its sluggish script and unaging characters, The Karate Kid Part III has the rote sense of film makers trying to crank out another moneymaker.

My Best Friend Is a Vampire does manage to come up with a few witty scenes.

Mr. Mamet can be a first-rate film maker, and in works like House of Games and Homicide he trusts language as much as he relies on small, subtle camera movements. Here both the language and Mr. Mamet's film making let him down.

The New Blood only wishes it had something really new to add to the formula...There is a lot less blood, less screaming, less energy in this installment, as if Jason has become rather bored with his job.

Eloquent, understated film.

Throughout, White is filled with exquisite scenes that don't press too hard...and those moments are all the richer for their understatement.

A River Runs Through It, Mr. Redford's beautiful and deeply felt new movie, puts him in an entirely new category as a film maker.

It isn't [Hanks's] fault that the five writers don't come up with five funny lines or one exciting scene.

Though the film hints at psychological intrigue, it never moves beyond the limits of its genre.

Would have been better if it had been sleeker and shorter. After all, this film isn't aiming for high-toned drama, just high-energy entertainment, which is what it delivers.

Banality is precisely the problem with Shirley Valentine, the one-woman stage play that has been turned into a misguided, fully cast film.

It takes a spectacular cast to pull off this kind of meandering romantic comedy, and Reality Bites couldn't have done better.

The longer it gets, the loopier it gets. [19 Jan 1992, p.13]

The predictable surface of Say Anything is constantly being cracked by characters who think and talk like real people and by John Cusack's terrifically natural, appealing Lloyd.

The background is energetic; too bad the foreground is just as chaotic...Mr. Lowenstein - whose work includes many rock videos and ''Strikebound,'' a film about Australian miners - prefers sensory overload to coherence.

But the formula is pretty long in the tooth by now, and all the extra turns of plot can't disguise that.

Here are the bones of an ordinary ghost story. But the writer and director Frank LaLoggia brings them to life with exceptional vitality.