Hal Hinson

Unfortunately, director Randall Miller can't put an original spin on the familiar material; he just doesn't have the offbeat comic gifts that the Hudlin brothers brought to the rap duo's first film outing in House Party.

Boomerang is the funniest, most sophisticated movie of Eddie Murphy's career; it's a sleek, dexterous satire, with a slew of rich comic performances that remind us of everything we loved about Murphy in the first place.

Tequila Sunrise succeeds in both its larger strokes and its smaller ones-as both a romance and a thriller. It has a sense of comedy audacious enough to stage a bust that is delayed by a seduction and the sophistication to know that, for some people, to be called "slick" is the cruelest of insults. Tequila Sunrise has a deep-down glamor that borrows not from movies, but from life. It's knowing, but the last thing you'd call it is slick. [2 Dec 1988, p.b1]

My 20th Century is like a dream, without a unifying logic -- ravishing fragments without coherence or meaning. Immersed somewhere in all this are Enyedi's meditations on the true nature of women, the shortcomings of 20th-century progress, and the connections between art and science. Yet though her own inventiveness and witty command of the medium are invigorating, her thinking is so scrambled that her originality is undermined. The movie is overintellectualized and yet not fully thought out.

Actually, the film's more serious side is beautifully balanced by the joy we experience as both Jesse and Willy come into their own.

Watching Jean-Luc Godard's very loose adaptation of "King Lear" is like finding yourself in the middle of a poem whose meaning the poet refuses to make clear.

The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese's provocative, punishing, weirdly brilliant adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, has a feverish intensity. And undeniably, there's a prodigious greatness on display here. But just as undeniably, it is failed work.

Here, the comedy breathes, and the illusion that it's not a factory-assembled product (which it most certainly is) is a nifty one. For a major studio blockbuster, the thing is darned chummy, and above all, that rare, modest thing, a good show.

Return to the Blue Lagoon, which doesn't star Brooke Shields or that blond guy, makes the original Blue Lagoon look like Citizen Kane.

An exceedingly loopy satire of the entire American political circus, and could be viewed as offensive to the sensitive-souled in either camp. And time hasn't in the least softened its bite. [Re-release]

If "Top Gun" was a stylish bimbo of a movie, all cleavage, white teeth and aerodynamic flash, then Days of Thunder is its paradoxical twin -- a bimbo with brains.

There are a great many movies about the tragic experience of the Jews during the Second World War, but only a handful as passionate, as subtly intelligent, as universal as this one. In Europa Europa, Agnieszka Holland tackles a great theme and, in the process, has made a great movie.

The latest in an impressive string of first-rate movies for kids.

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]

Savagely funny satire of the world of independent filmmaking.

Unlike “Metropolitan,” which for all its brittle wit seemed clunky and stagebound, Barcelona is sharply paced and alive on the screen.

It's not a new subject, it's not a subject that requires a lot of moral deliberation -- we know who the bad guys are -- and Winkler has nothing new to say about it. Undeniably, his need to share his feelings on this topic is urgent; unfortunately, it is much more urgent than our need to hear them.

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.

It's mindlessly violent, profane and insultingly racist. It's also relentless, repetitious and tiresome, and leaves us feeling that a once-great director has run out of ammunition.

A Perfect World is one of the Academy Award-winning actor-director's most unexpected, most satisfying films. This isn't the first time that Eastwood has turned the tables on our expectations, but he's never been this bold in the past, or this sure of himself.

One of the loopiest, most hysterical family-values movies ever made.

If the first sequel was a photocopy of the original, this second sequel is a tracing of a photocopy. It's the same business twice removed, and twice diminished.

In nearly all the important categories -- story, direction, pacing, acting -- the picture is pretty much negligible. Still, almost by force of sheer winning dopiness, the movie seduces you into dropping your defenses. It's weightlessly, irredeemably enjoyable.

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.

Hoop Dreams is the most powerful movie about sports ever made.

Who would have thought that Super Mario Bros., the movie based on the popular video game, could be such a treat? There are some, I'm sure, who saw the end of civilization here. But relax. This movie, which was directed by music video whiz kids Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, is sweet and funny and full of bright invention. In short, it's a blast.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves has pomp and scale; what it lacks is something essential -- a sense of Once Upon a Time wonder, the exultant, heady thrill of legend.

With Avalon, Levinson reaches into his deepest self, and an artist can't be asked to do much more.

Unfortunately, this isn't a role that requires an actor with Freeman's gifts -- in effect, his brilliance is irrelevant. The film is more a compilation of well-calculated cues than the presentation of a story, and all that the star is called on to do is hit his marks and prompt our responses. Avildsen, who sharpened his mastery of audience expectations on "Rocky" (which won him an Oscar) and the "Karate Kid" films, has a huckster's talent for keeping his audience on the line. This is not to take away from what Avildsen has done here. The movie is carefully and sometimes impressively laid out -- it's well "told." It's just that the skills he displays are not really those of a filmmaker -- or at least not one whose interest in his story goes beyond how to pitch it.

Though the actor (Walken) does little more than stroll through the film, he creates such an immediate sense of electricity that everyone else seems dim by comparison. Angels, devils or cops, they just aren't in his league.

Red Heat is poorly, or even indifferently, made. It's a joyless exercise, and too much angry resignation seeps in for it to be very funny or very entertaining.

La Bamba is a puzzle -- a real mixed bag. Some of it, like the braying, cock-and-bull performance by Esai Morales, is just plain awful. But other bits, like the performances by Rosana De Soto and, as Ritchie's agent, Joe Pantoliano, are unexpectedly vibrant.

This is a spectacularly well-made thriller. It is an odd thing, really -- the movie is sexy and at the same time a warning about the costs of sex.

At first, Father of the Bride is so funny, it's almost sublime. The rest of the movie, alas, is regrets only.

For the most part the actors' work seems incomplete because their characters are cut off before they can fully blossom. It's as if Shea didn't trust her own strengths enough to allow them to carry the movie. In giving in to the cheap thrills of the psycho genre, she's trashed the very qualities that initially made her work so impressive.

Major League is shamelessly formulaic. At the beginning, when it uses Randy Newman's ironic ode to Cleveland ("City of light, city of magic"), the movie has a lovely tone, and briefly, you feel a surge of anticipation, as if the people making it might actually have an original point of view or some feel for the game. All hope is dashed, though, early on, when you realize that they are cannibalizing every other baseball movie. (Newman wrote the music for "The Natural.") This is movie-making by rip-off.

Even with its collapse, Parents is remarkably accomplished for a first outing. It's good enough to make you wish desperately that it had hung together.

The movie is a joyless, inconclusive affair. By not making Orton either a homosexual hero or a working-class hero, avenues that were both open to them and that lesser minds might have traveled down, the filmmakers have shown great intellectual taste. But it's not the kind of taste that's illuminating. Ultimately, they seem not to have known exactly what to make of their subject.

This is a movie that doesn't just make you feel dumb, it makes you feel as if your head has been hollowed out and pumped full of Cheez Whiz.

Where the movie sabotages her, though, is by insisting that all she really wants is to be like everyone else.

Only a fool -- or someone who's never had a boss -- could completely dislike George Huang's Swimming With Sharks. A revenge comedy in which a much-wronged employee ties up his insensitive, abusive boss and gets a little payback -- puny offense by puny offense -- the film is like Death and the Maiden for disgruntled employees. [12 May 1990, p.B07]

Encino Man, the riotously unhilarious new comedy about a misfit couple of California high school nerds who discover a cave man buried in the back yard, is the kind of movie that gives evolution a bad name.

A lot of what Bigelow puts up on the screen bypasses the brain altogether, plugging directly into our viscera, our gut. The surfing scenes in particular are majestically powerful, even awe-inspiring. Bigelow's picture is a feast for the eyes, but we watch movies with more than our eyes. She seduces us, then asks us to be bimbos.

As you might expect, the calculations here are on a much less sophisticated level. And by less sophisticated, I mean like counting on fingers.

Roemer gives this tour of the chopped-liver circuit, with its bar mitzvahs and fashion shows and dog training classes, a bluesy, mordant spirit.

Why ... does it feel so lifeless?

This is a great performance from Pacino, who has the good luck here to work with Goldman's mostly wonderful, edgy script, but it might not become a beloved one because the man he plays is such a bitter pill.

Ultimately, though, the movie never transcends the limitations of its Hemingwayesque, men-with-men attitudes.

You know you're in trouble when the cars in a science fiction movie look like those golf carts with football helmets on them. That's if the presence of Emilio Estevez wasn't already enough of a tip-off...Though the action is nonstop, it's so unengaging that we might as well be watching a blank screen.

Martin's poetic elegance turns to sappy mysticism. And if the material had been presented more insistently, it might have been insufferable, too goopy and new-age. Its modesty, though, is its prime virtue.

A plodding, aggressive film that is neither engaging, disturbing nor funny.

The picture is heartfelt and naive in ways that seem totally secondhand. The questions it asks -- This boy or that boy? Should I or shouldn't I? -- have been played out in countless other coming-of-age films, from "Where the Boys Are" to "Dirty Dancing." And though the palpable enthusiasm of its creators carries you further into the film, and further into the lives of the four friends than you might otherwise go, it is eventually replaced with a sense of weariness at the worn-thin material.

The most engrossing, most revealing film about the making of a movie ever produced.

For all its stunning, poetic imagery, it's almost impossible to sit through.

A lot of this stuff is irresistible. In the early going especially, the movie's infantilism is snappy and surprising. But this is a great idea for a sketch, not a feature, and if Heckerling had resisted padding it out, it might have made a brilliant short. A comedy can ride only so far on high concept. It has to deliver the jokes, and this one doesn't.

It's a terrific, disquietingly entertaining little film -- a piece of genuine Gothic Americana.

Narrow Margin feels more tired than classic, even if it manages to provide some thrills. There's just not enough there to grab us.

There's no question that the bigotry and shallowness exist out there in the American night, but there's no proportion in Stone's presentation. Stone strains too hard to make his points and in the process distorts them, undermines them. Still, Stone would probably be proud that he's made a picture that audiences may want to ward off and escape from. In that sense, he seems to see himself as being just like Champlain -- a teller of stern and disquieting truths.

This is a film that rides on its spiffy cleverness, its swift wit and smart talk. There's an unexpected, not-tightly-screwed-on sense of comedy on display here that's bright and original even when the story falters.

Father of the Bride, Part II is a virtual avalanche of cheap emotion. Short on comedy but long on maudlin sentiment, this sequel stumps so hard for the traditional values of home, hearth and family that any possible entertainment value is canceled out.

The movie turns maudlin in the end, but still, nothing matters except the jokes. And Streep. She skates through the picture, unscathed by its lapses, glorying in her chance to strut her comic stuff. This alone is cause for celebration. Tragedy's loss is comedy's gain.

Dracula, which also stars Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves and Anthony Hopkins, is an evocative visual feast. But the meal is spectral, without the dramatic equivalent of nutritional value.

The film is a sort of prison fantasy, in which all the most popular boys in the cellblock have a high time together, smoking cigarettes, working on cars and spraying each other with paint guns...All the while you're thinking, "What is this, ancient Greece?"

A marvelous breakthrough, a film of incantatory intensity and moment by a prodigiously gifted young filmmaker.

Far and Away is such a doddering, bloated bit of corn, and its characters and situations so obviously hackneyed, that we can't give in to the story and allow ourselves to be swept away.

A bizarre, occult thriller about the implications of religious faith. And, though it doesn't expand upon its shock tactics as much as it would like to or make its theological points, the movie's dread atmosphere begins to seep into your head.

For all of its old-fashioned discretion, the movie lacks vitality. As a love story it is a complete bust, but beyond that, it is missing a reason to be.

Although the film is little more than a slapstick showcase for the nosey-neighbor character Varney has played in TV commercials, it's not the slapped-together piece of work you might expect. The movie is fairly inoffensive, and younger kids may get a real boost out of its us-against-the-world spirit.

Mellow, harmonious and poignantly funny, the film uses the prism of the old man’s artistry to examine his life and his relationships with his three headstrong daughters.

At the most fundamental level, the real Chet Baker is a kind of nowhere man. He's too insubstantial for Weber to levitate him into greatness. This fact is the source of the film's dramatic tension, and Weber, to his credit, seems to have realized it.

There is a televisiony smallness in its focus -- and while director Karen Arthur treats her story seriously, she has only a rudimentary feel for the medium and fails to bring the suspense elements to a boil.

Had the filmmakers resisted the temptation to politicize their material they might have made a great war movie. They might also have thought to give us some indication of the strategic significance of the hill. As it is, they've managed to create a deeply affecting, highly accomplished film.

In his screen version, Schumacher does a flamboyant job of staging the book without showing the slightest interest in what it's about. Granted, Grisham's original is no masterpiece; it's beach reading, but it deserves credit for addressing its subject with some conviction and integrity.

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

It doesn't help matters much that director Thomas Schlamme pays homage to great marital murder mysteries of the past, mostly because the attempts to borrow from the classics are so halfhearted.

Humorless, charmless and flat.

Insanely brilliant.

What's on display here is '30s-style light comic acting at its wittiest and most effervescent. [14 Apr 1988, p.C7]

The current of bereavement never flags even when the dramatic flood becomes stagnant. In every scene, Penn seems to know precisely where the nugget of feeling is hidden, and he doesn't let up until its uncovered.

Actors here perform admirably, though they seem not to know exactly what they're supposed to be playing and so they are reduced to giving us mere moments. But playing these characters would be impossible anyway. They're like composites constructed out of cross-section surveys of baby boomers, and Lumet leaves out any notion of personal psychology or motive. It's as if his characters acted only in response to generational forces.

All Jimmy wants is for his life to return to normal. But Price and director Barbet Schroeder haven't done a very good job of letting us know who this guy is—or even what normal is to him. Schroeder also shifts back and forth between a tone of earnest homage to the mood and feel of the classic thriller to one that sends up the genre, laughing slyly behind its back.

Eddie Murphy's directorial work is amateurish at best. And as a performer he looks as if he is in agony, as if his mother made him stand in front of the camera for punishment.

Sammy and Rosie has a fierce, scrambled intelligence. In this story about a group of interlocking characters in a London neighborhood on the fringe, Kureishi and Frears rack up all of their views on sex, politics, colonialism, social injustice and rebellion like balls in a game of pool, then send them flying. And they seem less interested in pocketing shots than in watching the balls ricochet and collide.

The romantic fable Untamed Heart is hopelessly syrupy, preposterous and more than a little bit lame, but, still, somehow it got to me.

Ultimately, there's not enough genuine wildness to these dark, passionate and half-crazy people. Miss Firecracker is the South made cute.

The Godfather Part III isn't just a disappointment, it's a failure of heartbreaking proportions... It makes you wish it had never been made.

One of those rare movie history lessons that don't make you feel as if you're facing the chalkboard. It's an impassioned movie, with vehement, soulful performances from Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek, but it's also a work of great restraint and proportion. 

In thriller terms it's close to irresistible and enormously entertaining. And the movie's lack of weight is part of what makes it work, part of its gripping purity. What this movie, which as a political thriller has more in common with "Three Days of the Condor" or "Seven Days in May" than "All the President's Men," has going for it is a great premise: the mainspring of this big clock is built to run.

Unfortunately, the film rarely slows long enough for the actors to do anything more than sketch in their characters. On the other hand, the showdowns between Sarandon and Jones are choice; it's a meeting of charismatic equals.

The second half of the film -- that is, everything after the dubious wife-swapping -- is as mindless and sloppy as the first half is sharp.

Earth Girls Are Easy, a frisky extraterrestrial romance starring Geena Davis, is the movie equivalent of cheap champagne -- even though it's lousy, it still gives you tickles up the nose. Even at its most rambunctious, the picture just never seems to get going, and if the performers weren't so consistently charming you'd be tempted to pack it in early.

In The Rookie, Eastwood's new buddy movie about a couple of cops in the auto theft division, Clint teams up with Charlie Sheen, and he couldn't be more naked in his attempts to connect with a younger generation of moviegoers if he laced up a pair of Reebok Pumps.

Even with its cyberspace connection, the story comes across as flat and tired, merely a pretext for the filmmakers' occasionally dazzling but ultimately numbing special effects. The world of Virtuosity may be spanking new, but the ideas are yesterday's news.

Murphy has said that he wanted the picture to work both as a comedy and a horror movie, but he has succeeded at neither. Director Craven manages to wedge in some of his signature bits, but can't keep the comic elements in balance with the horror, and as a result there's no tension or dramatic pull.

Lethal Weapon 3 is pretty much the same as "Lethal Weapon 2," which was pretty much the same as "Lethal Weapon."

No actor has ever been more contemptuous of his profession -- or the movie business as a whole -- than Brando; to him, acting is nothing, and his performance here shows his self-loathing, his desire to trash himself and his accomplishments. This isn't self-parody, it's self-desecration.

Ultimately, Davies' choices have a powerful cumulative effect. In the latter section, he achieves a transporting poignancy of feeling. What he manages to convey are the debilitating contradictions that exist, side by side, within every family; the ways in which families nurture as they destroy, and love and despair act as equal partners.

If the John Candy-Dan Aykroyd comedy The Great Outdoor had a few more laughs we might be tempted simply to write it off as mediocre and let it go at that. But this woodland farce is just coarse enough, and unfunny enough, to achieve true awfulness.