Hal Hinson

If the movie had any pace or energy, or even if the music were something other than tepid covers of songs, most of which were written before anybody in the cast was in rompers, then it might have been fun just to watch the actors strut around sexily onstage, living the rock life. But the thing just lies there. [15 Feb 1988, p.D4]

The problem is that the director, George Roy Hill, tries to construct a real universe around Chase and his costar. And for a time he's able to give the comedy some snap. But after the couple settle in their new home and nightmare piles on nightmare, the picture deteriorates into a shtickfest and the sense of reality drags on the proceedings.

A director with a more sensationalistic temperament might have milked this last section of the picture for melodramatic effect, but Russell's direction becomes, if anything, more brisk and more clipped.

The nearest thing to pandemonium ever seen on film and every minute of it is sublime. [27 Aug 1987, p.D7]

It's a kung-fu Die Hard picture, and, frankly, just plain silly.

A great gangster picture, with all the visceral excitement of a classic mob saga. But that's just its jumping-off point. It's also a salute to old Hollywood glamour, to the genre and the movies in general, and an elegant eulogy for the passing of those glory days. It's darned near perfect: violent, sexy and knowingly smart.

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.

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.

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.

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

A Man of No Importance is as rich and soulful as it is modest. [27 Jan 1995]

I spent a lot of time during the new Corey Haim-Corey Feldman movie, License to Drive, trying to figure out where it is set. Then it hit me. IT IS SET IN HELL! Hell, in this case, is a place where all the actors are named Corey. Where everyone is under the legal drinking age. Where everybody still breathes through his mouth and Oxy-5 flows like champagne.

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

Watching it, you feel as if you're being hammered to death with champagne corks.

In short, it's about as charming as a gob of spit.

Boyle's characters, too, are young and fresh and promisingly rude - especially McGregor's Alex - but they become less and less interesting as the movie progresses.

In making her first film, Campion has done thrillingly atmospheric work, and in the process, established herself as perhaps the most perversely gifted young filmmaker to rise up in years.

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."

The ending is still pat, with lots of reasons for optimism, but "Something" is not as neatly—or falsely—resolved as most Hollywood films. Halstrom may be a cornball and a softy at heart, but he allows real hurt, real betrayal and real healing into his movie.

Leigh has fashioned a limber style of political commentary that is part documentary, part cartoon and wholly novel in the movies.

Demolition Man is a futuristic cop picture with slightly more imagination and wit than the typical example of the slash-and-burn genre.

Disney's new full-length animated feature, Beauty and the Beast, is more than a return to classic form, it's a delightfully satisfying modern fable, a near-masterpiece that draws on the sublime traditions of the past while remaining completely in sync with the sensibility of its time.

It's a tough, intense, wrenching picture about drugs and growing up and surviving, driven by a fierce, skinless performance by its star, Leonardo DiCaprio.

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.

Even with these high-end artists on the team, though, the movie seems thin.

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.

All of the actors acquit themselves admirably, especially Stolz, who has a star's low-key magnetism, and the jazz stylist Harry Connick Jr., who makes his acting debut here as the drawling rear gunner. But the roles are too generic for anything like real depth. The fight scenes are about what you'd expect; they're competently shot, but even when they deliver thrills, every scene, every passage, is familiar. We've seen it all before.

Most astounding, though, is the power of the film's leading actor. While Branagh's direction is forthright and articulate, his acting is brash and flamboyant.

Alan Parker's sexy, hilarious, exuberantly energetic new film, The Commitments, has so much rhythmic juice that it's nearly impossible to stay in your seat.

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 big, sprawling, unshapely thing, insufferably verbose and, at the same time, touched with magnificence.

A leviathan bore, big, clunky and ponderously overplotted.

The movie's sense of humor is brash and shaggy, and Rita does have a couple of fliply delivered comebacks. But on the whole, there's not enough variety or definition to hold your attention. Too much is all on the same pitch.

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.

What McGrath's Emma does have going for it is a breakthrough performance from Gwyneth Paltrow as the heroine.

This isn't an experience that we encounter much at the movies these days, and that's not meant as a criticism; it's high praise.

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.

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.

Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's brilliantly entertaining documentary look into the New York subculture of drag queens and transsexuals, is a rapturous, desperate ode to self-invention.

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.

And you thought the Mapplethorpe show was shocking....But then incongruity is fundamental to comedy, and at least "Ladybugs" has that, if nothing else, going for it.

Nowhere was American comedy in the '40s more frivolously sophisticated than in the movies of Preston Sturges, and The Lady Eve is his most satisfying romantic film. [05 May 1988, p.C7]

This is a gassy, overbearing, pretentious little bit of art-in-your face, from the director of "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," and it revisits some of the filmmaker's favorite places (the men's room, for example) and favorite themes (life as consumption and elimination). Most of the film's meanings are buried inside the artist's big, intellectually high-rolling metaphors.

IQ, the new romantic comedy with Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins, is disarming piffle—frothy, sweet and nearly irresistible.

The main problem with Patriot Games, though, is that the inevitable confrontation between Ryan and Miller takes forever to materialize. In the interim, Noyce gets bogged down in the mass of technical detail -- the inside-CIA baseball -- that is such an integral aspect of Clancy's books. On the page, Clancy's research is impressively exhaustive, and if by chance you become bored, you can always skip ahead. But a movie doesn't afford us this luxury. Some of what we're shown about the inner working of the intelligence network is fascinating, but sometimes it can become an irritating distraction. You just want to cut to the chase.

People bicker and play word games with each other to hide their true feelings, just like you and me, and yet absolutely nothing is at stake.

John Duigan's Sirens isn't an atrocious movie. After all, the filmmakers have found a way of showcasing Elle MacPherson's full talents without staging a wet T-shirt competition. Sirens -- which also stars Sam Neill, Tara Fitzgerald and Hugh Grant -- is a peculiar, not entirely undesirable sort of art-house hybrid, like a marriage between "Masterpiece Theatre" and "Baywatch." [11 March 1994, p.G1]

It's cagey, funny and vivaciously smart. It may also be one of the worldliest fairy tales ever made, and that rarest of all things, a family film with real meat on its bones.

[Abel Ferrara's] specialty is a kind of hallucinatory tawdriness, and here, he's made a hepped-up film about drugs that plays as if the filmmakers themselves kept a healthy supply of the stuff at hand.

Parillaud is expressive but rather mundane. She's best at playing sullen, but there are so many French actresses who specialize in this particular talent -- the French have mastered the apathetic pout -- that she seems generic.

It feels more like a prosaic knockoff than a classically inspired original.

Technique counts for a lot in directing a picture like this -- more perhaps than in any other genre -- and Foley doesn't have any. His approach here is to toss things up into the air without caring much where they land. And as a result, the noise they make when they land is not a pretty one.

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.

The premise is so surrealistically improbable that if Frankenheimer's approach weren't so straight-faced it might be preposterously entertaining. But the director's shoulders are braced for Atlas duty and he fails to exploit the loony potential in Stephen Peters and Kenneth Ross's script.

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

Sign oath in blood promising stars they will not have to bother creating characters and can just coast on old tricks.

Plain and simple -- this is a racist movie.

A cross-pollination of Home Alone and The Secret of My Success, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead is the kind of movie that makes you wish you could sneak into the projection booth with a pair of pinking shears. To say that it's dead isn't really fair; nothing that's dead could be this obnoxious.

The Substitute is a sour experience—bloody, ugly and exploitative.

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

Hogan seems skittish about going all the way with the darker side of his material...It's a bright, buoyant comedy about a very sad young woman -- and, regrettably, the mix just doesn't work.

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.

In general, if it weren't for the good will we feel toward the actors, the movie would be intolerably feeble. It's nearly intolerable as it is. The only other plus is Stewart Copeland's jaunty, percussive score. It's this sort of thing that's giving maternity a bad name.

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.

When a master dedicates his genius to the production of schmaltz, it's not a pretty sight.

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.

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.

Bird on a Wire lords its star power over us; it thinks the sheer cumulative adorableness of the principals will win us over and make up for its multitude of sins. It should think again. There is nothing to this John Badham movie except the spectacle of determined stars turning the brilliance of their personalities on us. That and chases -- car chases, motorcycle chases, airplane and helicopter chases.

What Fat Man and Little Boy tells us is potent and essential. It tells us if history is dominated by individual action, then individual action has meaning -- in history everything is for keeps.

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

About halfway through, the overwhelming fact that the movie is a complete nothing becomes too much to ignore.

What John Hughes, who wrote, directed and produced the film, has done here is make a weirdly inventive, off kilter comedy out of the horrors of modern travel. And in the process, he's also managed to make the funniest road movie since Lost in America.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps the most pleasing aspect of the film is its fluid, unhurried pace. Rich and his team aren't interested in roller-coaster effects or sledgehammer manipulations. They have a lush, original sense of color, even a flair for the poetic. The score -- by lyricist David Zippel and composer Lex de Azevedo -- isn't terribly distinctive (it's probably the movie's weakest link), but there is a merciful absence of the hard sell in that area as well.

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.

From its opening shots, the film is like an invigorating elixir, a movie pick-me-up that delivers thrills and races your pulse but keeps your head in gear too. It's divinely frivolous, nearly perfect fun.

Davis's sensibility is much more fully developed, more authentic and much less self-consciously referential than the Coens' was at the same stage. She's not just playing around with film noir, or paying homage to it -- she's using it for a new kind of edgy, grunge realism; using it to look at sex and love and murder; using it for real.

Certainly, disgust would be an appropriate response to this provocative but rather academic study of violence in the movies. Yet it's hard to work up much of a response of any kind to these casual terrors.

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.

Once upon a time [Brooks] was hilarious. And can still be, in interview, which is his true art form. But for some time now, his movies have not even cruised near the neighborhood of funny. And this one is the bottom of the barrel.

A movie that celebrates the life of the mind and the uniqueness of the individual but does so in glib slogans and is, itself, a sort of knockoff.

A gigantic achievement, an endowment of riches.

If the director, Stephen Herek, has any talent for comedy, it's not visible here.

The director, Joseph Sargent, doesn't bring out any of the possibilities in the material -- not even the scary ones. And Michael Caine is wasted, though not completely. He manages to provide at least a little suspense, even if it's the extracurricular sort, by raising the question: Will an Oscar winner be allowed to become fish food?

After the film's first few minutes I watched, neither entertained nor illuminated, with something close to total indifference... (Greenaway's) extravagances and attacks on taste seem less like the bravery of the courageous artist than the empty desperation of a charlatan.

It's about learning to be human and, on that level, it's utter schlock -- cloying, manipulative and overcute. You could see it on another level, though -- as a comedy about an obnoxious houseguest -- and feel a little kinder toward it.

While in theory this seems like an altogether valid notion, in practice it falls apart because Fred is such an obnoxious boil of a character. Instead of wanting to release him you want to deposit him in a Davey Tree Grinder. Painful death, that's what this trickster deserves.

The movie is fast, slick and dumb as a post.

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.

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

Perhaps the shrewdest thing the filmmakers have done is call the film The Object of Beauty instead of A Thing of Beauty, which would make much more sense. By doing so they've removed what they must have known was a far-too-tempting opening for reviewers -- of saying A Thing of Beauty is not a joy forever. Even with the change, though, the sentiment fits.

House Party isn't a great movie, but it's heartfelt and enormously winning. In its own modest, ramshackle way, it manages to seem innocent even when it's profane. And maybe a party that demonstrates that those two qualities aren't necessarily opposed is exactly the kind we need.