Hal Hinson

Madonna, the real Madonna, is precisely what "Truth or Dare" promises to deliver, raw, kissing-close and uncensored. But what we get in this sometimes engrossing, sometimes appalling, always entertaining film is something other than "real," something that may in fact be just as revealing as the real thing itself.

Ultimately, La Scorta is a tight, competent but rather inconsequential thriller. It's diverting, but thin. (Review of Original Release)

Coming to America isn't as aggressively awful as the "Cop" films or "The Golden Child," but at least in those films there was something to react to. In making Coming to America, Murphy seems to have set his sights on the lowest prize imaginable. He aspires to blandness.

As the movie progresses, it becomes less interesting. There are some striking performances from the supporting cast, particularly Steven Berkoff's rabid portrayal of a rival gang lord. The rest of the film, in fact, could have benefited from a little of his mad-dog ferocity. As heroes, the Krays are more shadow than substance; they're stuck in metaphor.

Too routinely formulaic to be anything more than modestly diverting. But as modest diversions go it cruises along at a reasonably brisk pace and, in the smaller details -- the off-in-the-margins doodling -- it has its rewards. [20 July 1988]

It's respectful but not particularly vigorous or enlightening.

Roger Spottiswoode's Air America is partly glorious, partly junk, but unfortunately not in equal parts.

The real root of the movie's problems may lie in the fact that Mamet has identified with the men of principle and De Palma with the scoundrels -- in other words, with Capone instead of the eagle-scout Ness.

The movie isn't a disaster, and if you responded to the first one, its memory may carry you over the roughness, the excessive, ugly violence and lack of conviction here. Hill and his stars are merely going through the motions, but the motions are immensely familiar. If you've been there before, then you've been there.

Polanski stages some lovely moments, particularly Paulina's candlelit dinner in her closet. But he also undercuts the high-minded ideals of Dorfman's original by exposing its radical chic pretentions.

If it weren't for the good will that the stars have built up over the years, See No Evil would pass without notice; even with the stars, that's what it deserves. But these are ingratiating performers, even when working far below their peak. Watching them, you find yourself wanting to laugh even when the laughs are undeserved.

As noisy and ludicrous as all this sounds, the movie does have its share of guilty pleasures. Like the kid on steroids, it's revved so high that it's out of control. And just as his coach does, it is possible -- though not easy -- for us to make the best of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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

In his new thriller, Raising Cain, director Brian De Palma addresses his most vivid personal issues -- his obsession with Hitchcock and twins, and the loss of innocence -- but he runs through them impersonally, as if the luster of his own obsessions has worn off.

Ernest keeps up his filibuster of inane chatter, shifting from one comic voice, one accent, to another with impressive dexterity. That voice of his is a real gift. Too bad we have to look at him too. [12 Nov 1993, p.C6]

By the end, the film deteriorates into a combination sensitivity session and pep rally.

There's nothing embarrassing about Zeffirelli's brisk new version, nor anything particularly remarkable; it's an entirely credible, middle-of-the-road production.

Undeniably, the picture now and again supplies that edge-of-the-seat sensation; yet, by action-adventure standards, Speed is leaden and strangely poky. It never seems to shift into overdrive and let fly.

With its widely acclaimed source material and a cast of distinguished actors, A Good Man in Africa held the possibility of being a welcome departure from the ordinary. Instead, ordinary is what it rises to at its best.

Watching it, you feel as if you were being forced at gunpoint to flip through hundreds and hundreds of back issues of National Geographic.

Edel gives us the grungy details of the atrocities without providing a context to give them relevance. In the end, the film's ugliness becomes ugliness for its own sake.

The premise has been updated as a passable bit of family entertainment with essentially the same modus operandi but with a gentle pro-environmental message: Don't mess with Mother Nature.

What you end up with in Good Morning, Vietnam is a peculiar hybrid -- a Robin Williams concert movie welded clumsily onto the plot from an old Danny Kaye picture. And neither half works.

Douglas again takes on the symbolic mantle of the Zeitgeist. But in Falling Down, he and Schumacher want to have their cake and eat it too; they want him to be a hero and a villain, and it just won't work.

On the one hand, it's a diverting entertainment for children and young adults; on the other, it's a ludicrous fantasy about a war whose complexities cannot be contained by facile metaphors.

For all its tough-guy posturing, Killing Zoe seems like a boy's plaything, the cinematic equivalent of pulling the wings off flies.

The slick, Hollywood repaint that director John Badham gives it is actually an improvement, even if a heartless one.

Nothing in Dad moves below the surface. When the inevitable tragedies come, they take their expected forms. And because we have at least some susceptibility and human feeling, we give the expected response. What we are responding to, though, is not so much the film as the issues it raises.

Though the film has its moments and Goldberg is a riot, Sister Act is far from inspired.

The movie's ending is overly sentimental -- something I never thought I'd see in a Toback movie. What it delivers is a message about commitment -- and it's pretty much of a crock. You don't feel that Toback's heart is in it either, especially as an explanation for Jack's behavior. It's too pat a resolution.

Most of what's included in this unapologetically scrambled mixture of Goonies, Hardy Boys adventures, Ghostbusters and Abbott and Costello monster films is bad actors wandering around in bad makeup and rubber masks and two kinds of kids -- cute, intolerably noisy, smart-alecky kids and not-so-cute, noisy, smart-alecky kids. I don't know which kind I liked least.

To director Scott and screenwriter Roselyne Bosch, the atrocities against the natives came about not as a product of evil but through Columbus's ineptitude as a political leader. Still, this failure -- and his frustration over never actually reaching mainland America -- renders him a tragic figure. Though he was the dreamer and pioneer who first set foot in the New World and brought treasures and territory to Spain, he died all but forgotten. The movie, alas, for all its wondrous beauty, is destined to suffer a similar fate.

As a celebration of ephemera, the movie is a mixed bag, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tiresome.

At its worst, River's Edge is crackpot sociology. Jimenez and Hunter use the characters' lack of affect as an indictment. The film has a hectoring, hysterical tone. It wants to find out why these kids, who have grown up in splintered, lower-middle-class homes, are like they are. They want to blame somebody.

A jazz piece may be improvised, sketched out in the process of creation, but a movie resists that kind of spontaneity -- or requires skills that are beyond Lee's talents at the moment.

Rourke is, in fact, exceedingly creepy. There's an unpredictable, resonant menace in his eccentricity. But Cimino can't connect the movie's thriller elements to its themes. We end up spending way too much time indoors while this thug waves a gun at these poor innocents.

By the end, the film’s early promise has pretty much degenerated into routine pyrotechnics.

The mere presence of the adorable baby star, in fact, seems to throw the whole film out of whack, making the picture play more like an inadvertent comedy than a thriller.

Based on the novel by Nicholas Proffitt, it's been written for the screen (by Ronald Bass, who also wrote "Black Widow") in a flatfooted comic-book style, and about halfway through the whole thing collapses in a heap. But, for a while at least, it's eminently watchable.

Dickerson's point in this passable but rather routine picture is that no one is exempt from the spidery grip of frustrations brought on by poverty and a life of depressed opportunities; that, given these circumstances, anyone can pick up a gun as the only answer to his problems.

A feature-length version of the popular Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, it's an elaborate social critique done in cartoon terms -- a combination of Care Bears and "Das Kapital." And for what it's worth, it comes closer to having an actual cultural vision than any other movie of the summer. That doesn't mean it's good, mind you, but for kiddies it's colorful and bouncy at least, and for adults it's weird enough to keep you open-mouthed with disbelief.