Hal Hinson

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]

With its desensitizing blood lust, RoboCop 2 contributes yet another ugly note to this already demoralizing season of sadism. If things continue as they have until now, the body count at the movies may reach into the millions.

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

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.

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.

In The Rookie, Eastwood's new buddy movie about a couple of cops in the auto theft division, Clint teams up with Charlie Sheen, and he couldn't be more naked in his attempts to connect with a younger generation of moviegoers if he laced up a pair of Reebok Pumps.

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

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

Lethal Weapon 3 is pretty much the same as "Lethal Weapon 2," which was pretty much the same as "Lethal Weapon."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The second half of the film -- that is, everything after the dubious wife-swapping -- is as mindless and sloppy as the first half is sharp.

Even with its cyberspace connection, the story comes across as flat and tired, merely a pretext for the filmmakers' occasionally dazzling but ultimately numbing special effects. The world of Virtuosity may be spanking new, but the ideas are yesterday's news.

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.

Irony is the movie's escape hatch. It allows the filmmakers to stage maudlin bits and, at the same time, signal the audience that they're too cool to actually believe in them. Their cool is all-purpose, and it carries with it a note of genuine nastiness. They manipulate us into a sentimental response, then kick us in the teeth for buying it.

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.

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.