Hal Hinson

Star Trek VI surprises us only by completely satisfying our expectations, by giving us exactly what we want from a "Star Trek" picture. It's not startling or revelatory, only witty, ebulliently good-natured and close to ideal.

Despite the movie's suffocating sense of chic Soho hipness, it touches on all the square cliches about the tragic life of the misunderstood artist.

[Shelton's] direction here is fluid and energetic; he's got the juice for the straightaways, and the control for tight corners too. But it's the inspired jabber that fuels the film.

Unfortunately, the film rarely slows long enough for the actors to do anything more than sketch in their characters. On the other hand, the showdowns between Sarandon and Jones are choice; it's a meeting of charismatic equals.

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.

La Bamba is a puzzle -- a real mixed bag. Some of it, like the braying, cock-and-bull performance by Esai Morales, is just plain awful. But other bits, like the performances by Rosana De Soto and, as Ritchie's agent, Joe Pantoliano, are unexpectedly vibrant.

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."

And yet, Goldeneye proves the character's viability as a pop icon: It isn't a great movie, but it's great, preposterous fun.

It's not a new subject, it's not a subject that requires a lot of moral deliberation -- we know who the bad guys are -- and Winkler has nothing new to say about it. Undeniably, his need to share his feelings on this topic is urgent; unfortunately, it is much more urgent than our need to hear them.

Insanely brilliant.

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]

Had the filmmakers resisted the temptation to politicize their material they might have made a great war movie. They might also have thought to give us some indication of the strategic significance of the hill. As it is, they've managed to create a deeply affecting, highly accomplished film.

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.

Oldman is the least inhibited actor of his generation, and as this deranged detective, he keeps absolutely nothing in reserve.

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.

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.

These are mean streets, but they're sexy and mean. And the evil here is all the more compelling because it has its enticements. So does the film, and though you'd be kidding yourself to accept it as anything other than flirtatious posturing, the allure of the thing is nearly irresistible.

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.

Wenders weaves all his thematic and narrative threads together into a coherent, philosophical whole. Even with the apocalypse, though, his view isn't despairing. A new direction, a new beginning emerges out of the ashes of the old, image-overloaded world, and with it, a sort of muted optimism.

It vaults over rationality and tidy manners, over taste and proportion and, for that matter, the rules of dramatic structure. It's nuts, but nuts to an end.

An unpredictable, occasionally amusing, wildly uneven portrait of a neighborhood struggling to hold on to its identity.

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?

Tequila Sunrise succeeds in both its larger strokes and its smaller ones-as both a romance and a thriller. It has a sense of comedy audacious enough to stage a bust that is delayed by a seduction and the sophistication to know that, for some people, to be called "slick" is the cruelest of insults. Tequila Sunrise has a deep-down glamor that borrows not from movies, but from life. It's knowing, but the last thing you'd call it is slick. [2 Dec 1988, p.b1]

Here, Lyne indulges more in misdirection than in direction; he's a magician turning a sleazy trick. But even his technical skill breaks down. The picture is garbled and cliched.

Though the movie suggests that Hearst was brainwashed -- or at least coerced through fear to act as she did -- it maintains a safe distance from any definitive position. In the end, we have not come any closer to an understanding of Patty Hearst. But ambiguity, in this case, isn't an indication of complexity; it's a refuge. It's an admission of failure.

An odd, slightly distanced tone seeps into the movie, almost as if the director were working in a foreign language. Only this keeps Henry & June from being a great movie. But in no way does it hold it back from being a beautiful, captivating and spectacularly uninhibited one.

I don't care what Dylan said, everyone must not get Stoned.

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.