Hal Hinson

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

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

Suspect doesn't provide even the most basic pleasure that we've come to expect from thrillers -- it's doesn't get our pulse racing. For most of it, we're stuck in what must be the ugliest courtroom in the history of movies, and after a while, it becomes a drag on your spirits.

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

A premise is about all The Cutting Edge has, and what a tired one it is.

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 not surprising that Punchline is mostly banal; it's constructed on a banality -- namely, that clowns suffer.

What "Wild at Heart" feels like is a kind of housecleaning -- a disjointed collection of images and odd snatches of ideas that the director couldn't make room for anyplace else. They have no context, and as a result, no power to thrill or disturb.

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 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?"

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The movie is like a Porsche outfitted with a lawn mower engine; there's not even enough juice to get the machine out of the driveway.

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.

Indian Summer would like to be to the '90s what "The Big Chill" was to the '80s. But something is missing, namely a superior cast, a more engaging group of characters, a far smarter, more focused script, and Lawrence Kasdan's expertly timed direction. This is a wan knockoff.

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

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.

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.

Coarse and haphazardly engineered and never more than intermittently funny.

The movie is showy without having any noticeably coherent style. Indeed, it might have been possible to enjoy Young Guns as a larky spree if the photogenic stars didn't carry themselves with such a smug, self-congratulatory air. But they behave as if our adoration were their birthright.

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

As one-joke movies go, it's fairly inoffensive but also never better than mildly diverting.

Little Nikita would be nothing without River Phoenix's hair. It's the most engaging, the most watchable thing in the film. It has body. It has character. It even has drama. In other words, it has everything that's missing from the rest of the picture.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The longer you stay with it, the more routine and uninspired it seems -- not to mention cowardly.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

Spaceballs is actually a kind of comic black hole. All in all, the movie is about as funny as having coffee spilled in your lap. Except that there's no burn -- just that slightly embarrassing, uncomfortable, all-wet feeling.

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.

What's wrong with The 'Burbs? It's not funny. Why is it not funny? It's just not. Not remotely, momentarily, intermittently or otherwise funny.

A leviathan bore, big, clunky and ponderously overplotted.

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.

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.

Never again was Fellini as successful as he was here in his use of film as a theater for soul-searching. Loaded with self-referential detail, 8 1/2 is the director's self-mocking chronicle of his inability to come up with a worthy subject for his next film.

So what exactly is the point? Does Jefferson's treatment of Sally Hemings establish his racism or his instinctive color-blindness? Unfortunately, the picture is so unfocused and tumbles so rapidly from one event to another that it's difficult to tell.

A movie made by filmmaker working in sync with his times -- an exciting, disturbing, provocative film.

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.

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.

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.

By the time the last out is called, the movie's shamelessness far outweighs its charms. Aimed at the minors, it's in a bush league all its own.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This is a movie you can like a lot if you accept that it's not going to approach things in a conventional manner. [22 Jan 1998, p.B7]

The pleasure we take from Medicine Man comes not only from the actors or the engrossing progress of the narrative, but from every aspect, including Donald McAlpine's ravishing cinematography and Jerry Goldsmith's luscious score.

It's a brisk, colorful, infectiously charming but instantly disposable Hollywood entertainment. It's fun, like watching kids play dress-up in the back yard -- nothing more, nothing less.

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]

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

David Cronenberg's film version of David Henry Hwang's Tony Award-winning play, is no more successful in solving it than any other versions of this fantastic tale have been.... "The Crying Game" it's not. [09 Oct 1993]

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.

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.

Kleiser has no feel for comedy, and there's no affinity between him and his star. He shoots the material as if he didn't quite get it, and the gags dribble out weakly, without any emphasis or piquancy, as if the camera itself were perplexed by the scene unfolding in front of it.

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.

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

It's a package, plain and simple: stars plus a high-concept premise, stripped down, no options. No personality, either.

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

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.

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]