Hal Hinson

It would be hard to reduce filmmaking to its basics more than Fire Birds does. It's more video game than motion picture -- the first coin-operated movie.

When they part ways at picture's end, Marlboro's parting words are "Vaya con Dios," which translates as "Go with God." I'd put it differently. Go, the both of you. With God or without, but by all means, go.

This summer Bullock is in the driver's seat of The Net, a sort of chase movie on the information highway from veteran producer-turned-director Irwin Winkler, and not only is the film a comedown, it's a far less flattering showcase for her talents as well.

A case study in how Hollywood can make a complete mess out of what was previously a marvelous film.

As the years flash by, Mr. Holland ultimately discovers that he has given the world something much more valuable than a symphony; he has touched thousands of lives with the gift of music . . . blah, blah, blah. It almost makes you wanna hurl.

All too faithfully adapted by Kenneth Branagh, the film is the last thing that one would expect of a contemporary highbrow version of this ageless horror classic. It is, in a word, dullsville.

Weekend at Bernie's is an unfettered but uninspired one-joke movie.

The first Crocodile picture -- which went on to become the most profitable foreign film ever made -- wasn't great entertainment, but it was light, companionable and essentially inoffensive. Compared with the sequel, though, it looks like a masterpiece.

As it unreels, The Ref keeps getting dumber, and, unfortunately, it simply wasn't that brilliant to begin with.

Gary Sherman, the film's cowriter and director, has set up a showcase for scary effects, and some of them are rather nice, in a grisly sort of way. It's clear that Sherman knows how to engineer this sort of thing. What's also clear is that without some semblance of an actual movie around them, these pyrotechnics really start to get on your nerves.

Feeble....Director Tony Bill tries to give Mitch Markowitz's script a spirit of madcap abandon but instead achieves a kind of forced hilarity that's neither funny nor liberating. [11 Apr 1990, p.D4]

My Stepmother Is an Alien, the new Richard Benjamin film starring Dan Aykroyd and Kim Basinger, is E.T. with hormones, a landlocked Splash. No, that actually sounds like fun. And it would be wrong to suggest that this thing is fun. Very wrong.

A sort of empty hat. Patterned after such noir classics as "The Big Sleep" and "Chinatown," the film is written in an arch, self-consciously hard-boiled style by novelist Pete Dexter that comes close to parody.

Tirelessly modish, hyper-glossy, super-superficial. It's also cacophonous. And, for all of its drum-beating for brain power, dumb.

Humorless, charmless and flat.

This We're No Angels isn't funny and it isn't smart -- it's a dumb show, almost literally, in fact. So few lines have been written for these actors that you almost believe that the script intentionally parodies their renowned inarticulateness.

A leviathan bore, big, clunky and ponderously overplotted.

For about 15 seconds at the beginning, the new MGM film Once Upon a Crime is a thorough delight. Then that adorable little lion stops roaring.

Plain and simple -- this is a racist movie.

Still, well-intentioned sappiness is something we can deal with; the lack of any genuine dramatic conflict is a more damaging shortcoming.

Woefully short on originality, intelligibility and anything resembling taste. But none of this comes as a surprise. What is surprising is how little invention or energy there is in the movie's action sequences.

An ugly commingling of old Westerns, Zen chic and kung fu movies...Full of gratuitous mayhem, head-bashing, gay-bashing and woman-bashing, Road House has a malicious, almost putrid tone.

Jennifer Connelly is very easy to look at. Career Opportunities isn't. Go see the standee.

The movie's message is murky and out of whack. Seidelman's style of comedy trashes everyone. The movie's jokes, which cover everything from dead rodents to geriatric incontinence, are cartoony and sour and misanthropic. And the flukiest thing is that they're misogynic too. It's hard to imagine that a man could have been as ruthlessly coldblooded as Seidelman has been about Ruth's unattractiveness. The network of women workers that Ruth establishes to help her nail her husband runs on pettiness and rancor -- it's a coalition of resentment. In "She-Devil," Seidelman divides the world of women between the envied and the envious. She has a message for the Ruths of the world, and it's not a pretty one. She tells them that the best they can hope for is payback.

There's something scuzzy about the whole exercise.

Nothing in the first Gremlins came close to being as bad as these early segments in the second one, and because the concept is no longer fresh, and the suspense over what's going to happen is lost, we're ready for the filmmakers to get on with it long before they've finished setting the table.

It's time to find a new Bond. This one is tuckered out, spent, his signature tuxedo in sore need of pressing...Dalton plays a straight-faced, humorless, no-nonsense Bond -- all guns and no play -- and it makes for a very dull time.

[A] scatterbrained imitation. [15 Oct 1993, p.D7]