Hal Hinson

Lane's comic bits are sodden, and as a result, the film is listless and fatiguing.

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

Is it scintillating, nutty, madly inspired or ecstatically preposterous? Ginsberg himself is all these things, but this movie is not. (Review of Original Release)

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

Though Down Periscope is set in the age of the nuclear submarine, the jokes seem to date back to the time of the original battle of the ironclads.

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.

Madsen may not be the most egregiously untalented of the new movie beauties, but she's close to it. As Dolly, she presents a Southern accent as ludicrous as any in captivity; she keeps trying for Blanche DuBois and coming out with Gomer Pyle.

A pretty dry cracker.

If Eastwood had any emotional depth as an actor, the character's anguish might come through.

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

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.

Watching the Care Bears' Adventure in Wonderland, the latest of the teddy superstars' animated movie escapades, is like being pelted mercilessly for 75 minutes with Lucky Charms. It's nonfatal (unless you have a sugar problem, in which case you're likely to lapse into a coma), but it's not exactly my idea of fun either.

The film's premise is hopelessly ludicrous. Plus, though Patrick Dempsey is an agile light comedian, he's hardly plausible as a lady-killer. Patrick Swayze he's not. Alfalfa, maybe.

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.

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.

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.

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

As the years flash by, Mr. Holland ultimately discovers that he has given the world something much more valuable than a symphony; he has touched thousands of lives with the gift of music . . . blah, blah, blah. It almost makes you wanna hurl.

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.

Weekend at Bernie's is an unfettered but uninspired one-joke movie.

The first Crocodile picture -- which went on to become the most profitable foreign film ever made -- wasn't great entertainment, but it was light, companionable and essentially inoffensive. Compared with the sequel, though, it looks like a masterpiece.

As it unreels, The Ref keeps getting dumber, and, unfortunately, it simply wasn't that brilliant to begin with.

Gary Sherman, the film's cowriter and director, has set up a showcase for scary effects, and some of them are rather nice, in a grisly sort of way. It's clear that Sherman knows how to engineer this sort of thing. What's also clear is that without some semblance of an actual movie around them, these pyrotechnics really start to get on your nerves.

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]

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.

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.

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