Hal Hinson

Director Frank Oz has brought a devilish tang to the machinations here, and the actors bring a sense of a spoiled grandeur to their characters' mingy souls.

Linklater's control seems all but invisible here. But this kind of stylistic lucidity can only be the result of determined calculation and planning. The kind of happy accidents he captures don't come about by accident.

Spielberg and Co. have finally made their Disney movie -- or better yet, their film version of a theme park at Disneyland. It's sort of like "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "It's a Small World" rolled into one. It's a helluva contraption, and certainly one to be marveled at. It gives good ride.

The movie is inventive, hilarious and, in its own sneaky way, moving.

In Roger & Me, Moore's brand of slapstick reportage strikes the perfect balance between irony and sincerity; it's slyly deadpan and committed, democratic and kingly all at once. In the end, though, he winds up giving ironic credence to the swells at the Great Gatsby party who advise the laid-off workers to get out there and do something. He's shown what one man with a camera crew and a vision can do.

And yet, Goldeneye proves the character's viability as a pop icon: It isn't a great movie, but it's great, preposterous fun.

Watching John Woo's The Killer may be like eating popcorn, but it's not just any old brand; it's escape-velocity popcorn, popcorn with a slurp of rocket fuel. Its story is a collision of exuberant pulp, samurai mythology and modern, urban noir.

There's a synergistic overlap here between Cronenberg's own particular brand of weirdness and Burroughs's; they're both twisted in ways that complement each other nicely.

An odd, slightly distanced tone seeps into the movie, almost as if the director were working in a foreign language. Only this keeps Henry & June from being a great movie. But in no way does it hold it back from being a beautiful, captivating and spectacularly uninhibited one.

This brilliantly naive, low-budget shoot-'em-up presents every action as if it were brand spanking new.

As a writer, Baumbach loves smart, glib talk, and he has a sharp ear for fast-paced, overlapping dialogue; as a director, though, he prefers long takes that allow his characters to work out their feelings.

Freeman lays out the father-son dynamics with great skill and very little fuss. There's no hysteria in his approach; instead, he sticks to the facts, relying on his cast to provide the emotion. The result is a surprisingly powerful, insightful film. The dramatic curve of the narrative may not seem entirely fresh, and some of the characters are simplistic, but the movie still gets to you.

Sexy, slap-happy links comedy.

The movie is poppy, clever and more than enjoyable, but Posey is something else altogether. She's a revelation.

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.

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]

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

This is a rare kind of pulp; it's boisterously destructive, funny and, at the same time, almost serene.

The film has a message; it's another picture about finding your humanity. But in this case, it's pedaled so softly that it doesn't impose itself on you. Nothing about this movie does. And that, as much as anything, is what makes it so irresistible.

Schroeder's refusal to choose moral sides gives the psychological confrontation between the women the kind of weird, mutually accepted form of diseased codependency that Claus and Sunny von Bulow shared in his previous film, Reversal of Fortune. In Single White Female, Schroeder leaves the subtext unresolved, but manages to strike a very raw nerve.

Frye keeps the film within itself; he's found just the right scale and he sticks with it. As a result, Amos & Andrew is a very funny little film with big pleasures, and a most promising debut.

An elegantly wrought bit of nastiness.

These are mean streets, but they're sexy and mean. And the evil here is all the more compelling because it has its enticements. So does the film, and though you'd be kidding yourself to accept it as anything other than flirtatious posturing, the allure of the thing is nearly irresistible.

An animated feature with political agenda -- a didactic cartoon. But that doesn't interfere with its being a whopping good time.

Hill evokes the great westerns of the past—in particular "Shane" and "My Darling Clementine"— but his approach is essentially postmodern. Though Hickok is a hero from another century, his plight is thoroughly contemporary.

Rush is a powerhouse movie but not a cheap one. It hits you hard, but never below the belt.

Careful, the hilariously bizarre new film from Canadian director Guy Maddin, is like some lost masterpiece from a time-warped alternative dimension -- a strange artifact that time forgot.

It's an obscure experience, partly alienating, partly enthralling; it weaves a spell that is frightening, irritating and invigorating all at once.

A colorful, buoyant, loving tribute to the notion of girlfriends forever.

Roman Polanski's Frantic is taut, intelligent filmmaking, and highly accomplished in a way that doesn't substitute flash for coherence or the pleasures of a well-told story. In other words, it's everything that Lethal Weapon and a half dozen other recent Hollywood thrillers weren't. [26 Feb 1988, p.B1]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fear is pretty much a cheap-thrills fix; the ideas, such as they are, function as window dressing. Still, cheap though these thrills may be, they are genuinely thrilling.

Walter Hill's "Johnny Handsome" feels like a shiv jammed between your ribs in a prison-yard fight. It's clean and brutal and so ruthlessly efficient that it's opened a hole in you almost before you've realized it.

A wildly profane stew of twists and surprises. And for the most part, the ways in which the various elements combine are enormously diverting. It's a clever, intelligent piece of work with an impulse to surprise and entertain. It's also a crock.

In Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., Ariyan Johnson seizes the camera's attention like no other performer since John Travolta strutted into "Saturday Night Fever."

Nixon is an audacious biography rich in imagination and originality, with a provocative, often subversive sense of character and history. Dense and challenging, it is also undermined in places by Stone's obsessions just as dramatically as Richard Nixon was undermined by his.

Though it's not a great film, it is an entertaining and, at times, emotionally rich one.

The movie has a big payoff; it's the setup that's the drag. But Kevin's antics will touch the budding subversive in every kid. My advice? Hide the car keys.

The movie is part rap Spinal Tap, part Loaded Weapon I, part Mad magazine. And, like those forms of parodic tribute, it assumes a very specific knowledge of the performers, the music and videos being parodied, a certain level of hipness. In other words, if you don't know rap, forget about it. You'd do just as well taking an SAT prepared by extraterrestrials. If you know the turf, though, you're in for some fun.

The movie won't come clear, Eastwood has succeeded so thoroughly in communicating his love of his subject, and there's such vitality in the performances, that we walk out elated, juiced on the actors and the music.

Taylor Hackford's film version of the Stephen King novel, has a whopping list of shortcomings -- and yet it still manages to be an engrossing, unsettling and, at times, powerful psychological thriller.

It's not a challenging movie or an original one, but it does have its pleasures -- most notably a radiant, soulful debut performance from Driver, who saves Circle of Friends from being merely an Irish ugly duckling story.

All the actors fire off one another nicely. Goodman and Pacino may be the only cop duo in memory to generate anything like real enthusiasm.

[Leven] keeps the film's tone light and ingratiating. And, though the material is thin, the actors do seem to be getting a kick out of playing off each other.

Ferrara is clearly drawing an equation between the criminals' actions and The Lieutenant's, and as trite (and potentially shameless) as this may sound, it actually works.

Big has a warmhearted sweetness that's invigorating; it makes you want to break out the Legos. It's only near the end of the film, when Hanks has to play the scenes for pathos, that the movie becomes cloying.

It has extravagant, bloody thrills plus something else -- something that comes close to genuine emotion.

[Shelton's] direction here is fluid and energetic; he's got the juice for the straightaways, and the control for tight corners too. But it's the inspired jabber that fuels the film.

Lee elevates herself from the lower echelon of mere international super-babedom to the loftier realm of pulp myth. She is "It" with an exclamation mark.

It is a serious and, at times, moving film, and it deserves serious analysis.

Stylish, intelligent but rather soulless bit of moviemaking.

This screwball comedy starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck isn't as well regarded as others in the genre, but even if it's not exactly top-drawer, it's still jazzy fun. [24 Dec 1987, p.D7]

Better would have been excellent. But, let's face it, better is pretty much irrelevant. Mac takes care of that. Mac takes care of everything. The kid's the biggest child actor since Shirley Temple.

What's lost in momentum is gained back in the unexpectedness of the jokes and the quality of the performances. Mermaids is an infectious, bouncy diversion, like the fruity dance the girls and their mother do around the kitchen table at the film's end.

DiCaprio is daring and unguarded in his performance as Rimbaud, and Thewlis does an astounding job of showing the despair of an artist whose time has passed.

It vaults over rationality and tidy manners, over taste and proportion and, for that matter, the rules of dramatic structure. It's nuts, but nuts to an end.

Given these flaws, If Lucy Fell should be a chore, and yet I kept catching myself having a good time.

The film is never inspired; it's not imaginative enough to be any more than an entertainingly good time. But it's an enormously unassuming, likable comedy, and surprisingly uninsistent for a big summer entertainment.

Its intentions seem fairly modest, and so are its achievements. It's a modestly enjoyable diversion.

The spirit of the film, though, is snazzier and more playful than Crichton’s rather thin, humorless schematic. The subject is serious; thankfully, the movie is not.

He's made two features, "The Unbelievable Truth" and now Trust, and both are cool, strikingly original case studies of middle-class anomie.

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

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.

What it establishes is hard to put your finger on. It's not a sensibility, exactly; it's more of a sense that the filmmaker's heart is in the right place -- that she is a sophisticated, caring, feeling person.

The movie is pure hound, but you'll want to catch Short's every pixilated move. He almost made me wish that the picture would never end.

A definite improvement. However, whatever gains this adaptation makes are due entirely to the inspired goofiness of its star, Steve Martin, and not to anything that director Jonathan Lynn or screenwriter Andy Breckman may have contributed.

An Innocent Man isn't an inspired piece of filmmaking, but it is tightly focused and efficient, and on its own modest terms it is effective.

All in all, the picture goes down fairly easily, and by any estimate it's an improvement over other Pryor nonconcert films such as The Toy or even Brewster's Millions.

It's a lovely film, but a little inert. It reaches its high point with glorious close-ups of the children. From there, it's all downhill.

Dugan has a brisk, imaginative comic style; he sets up his gags well, so that there's still some surprise in the punch lines when they come.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Though Empire of the Sun is a profoundly perplexing, frustrating object, there are things in it to marvel at and enjoy.

True Believer is a thriller about moral rejuvenation, and there's not much wrong with it that another actor in the lead wouldn't cure.

Todd Haynes's Poison is a vision of unrelenting, febrile darkness. It presents three disparate stories in three greatly varied styles, all inspired by the work of Jean Genet, and its effect, as a whole, is like that of an especially vile infection; it moves diabolically through your system, spreading fever and nausea as it goes.

This is an impassioned movie, made with conviction and evangelical verve. It's also hysterical and overbearing and alienating.

Sometimes thrilling, but rarely inspired, it is thoroughly-almost perfectly-adequate.

The movie isn't mindless; it just has a mind that's a bit junky and muddled. And to their credit, Arnold and his collaborators haven't played it safe. Last Action Hero is a stretch. Unfortunately, it's a stretch that proves the star wasn't that elastic to begin with.

The central story itself is not distinctive, and though Lee certainly churns up a lot of dust, he never captures the mythic quality that made Price's original seem so much bigger than its almost generic cast of players.

The movie has some beautifully observed moments and a generous spirit, but in the end, it's undone by its own sweetness and charm....It's just not distinctive enough to sustain your interest. A lot of the movie is routine coming-of-age stuff.

The movie is a mess from start to finish. But then again, this jerky, haphazard approach is part of the movie's goofy charm.

The movie is modest and winning, and we almost feel guilty for wanting it to be more -- but we do. The spirit of camaraderie and the love of performers performing is infectious, though. It may not be enough, but it's close.

Dern's dirtball performance gives After Dark, My Sweet a desperately needed quality of slugged-out authenticity -- he gives the movie its edge. If anything, though, Foley makes Thompson's killing universe too inviting, too sunny and comfortable. He's missed the essence of Thompson, but all in all, there are worse ways of failing.

It's more a brave movie than it is a good one, but at least Singleton has faced the unknown. And he deserves credit for the attempt.

Despite its mixture of macabre slapstick and broadly stroked caricatures, the film has sleepy-time rhythms; it's easily the pokiest farce I've ever seen.

Watching it, you can't quite figure out what the movie's audience is supposed to be. For parents and kids hoping for a Macaulay Culkin movie, a rude shock awaits. Also, the movie's themes may be too sophisticated for younger audiences; it deals, after all, with death and recovery. And yet, the treatment of these issues may be too pat for adults. It's an entertaining, often winning, movie, but you can't help but feel that the filmmakers never settled on what sort of movie they wanted to make.

The Little Mermaid is only passable. Even at its highest points, it cannot claim a place next to even the least of the great Disney classics.

What's missing in Quigley Down Under is precisely what is missing in its star. Selleck is a skilled light comedian -- he's at his best delivering a wry put-down to a British officer -- and he handles John Hill's bantering dialogue deftly. But for all his burly authority, Selleck lacks dynamism on screen. There's no danger in him, nothing unresolved or mysterious. He's likable, but something of a lug.