Hal Hinson

Red Heat is poorly, or even indifferently, made. It's a joyless exercise, and too much angry resignation seeps in for it to be very funny or very entertaining.

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.

This is a spectacularly well-made thriller. It is an odd thing, really -- the movie is sexy and at the same time a warning about the costs of sex.

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

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.

Major League is shamelessly formulaic. At the beginning, when it uses Randy Newman's ironic ode to Cleveland ("City of light, city of magic"), the movie has a lovely tone, and briefly, you feel a surge of anticipation, as if the people making it might actually have an original point of view or some feel for the game. All hope is dashed, though, early on, when you realize that they are cannibalizing every other baseball movie. (Newman wrote the music for "The Natural.") This is movie-making by rip-off.

Even with its collapse, Parents is remarkably accomplished for a first outing. It's good enough to make you wish desperately that it had hung together.

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.

This is a movie that doesn't just make you feel dumb, it makes you feel as if your head has been hollowed out and pumped full of Cheez Whiz.

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

Only a fool -- or someone who's never had a boss -- could completely dislike George Huang's Swimming With Sharks. A revenge comedy in which a much-wronged employee ties up his insensitive, abusive boss and gets a little payback -- puny offense by puny offense -- the film is like Death and the Maiden for disgruntled employees. [12 May 1990, p.B07]

Encino Man, the riotously unhilarious new comedy about a misfit couple of California high school nerds who discover a cave man buried in the back yard, is the kind of movie that gives evolution a bad name.

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.

As you might expect, the calculations here are on a much less sophisticated level. And by less sophisticated, I mean like counting on fingers.

Roemer gives this tour of the chopped-liver circuit, with its bar mitzvahs and fashion shows and dog training classes, a bluesy, mordant spirit.

Why ... does it feel so lifeless?

This is a great performance from Pacino, who has the good luck here to work with Goldman's mostly wonderful, edgy script, but it might not become a beloved one because the man he plays is such a bitter pill.

Ultimately, though, the movie never transcends the limitations of its Hemingwayesque, men-with-men attitudes.

You know you're in trouble when the cars in a science fiction movie look like those golf carts with football helmets on them. That's if the presence of Emilio Estevez wasn't already enough of a tip-off...Though the action is nonstop, it's so unengaging that we might as well be watching a blank screen.

Martin's poetic elegance turns to sappy mysticism. And if the material had been presented more insistently, it might have been insufferable, too goopy and new-age. Its modesty, though, is its prime virtue.

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

The picture is heartfelt and naive in ways that seem totally secondhand. The questions it asks -- This boy or that boy? Should I or shouldn't I? -- have been played out in countless other coming-of-age films, from "Where the Boys Are" to "Dirty Dancing." And though the palpable enthusiasm of its creators carries you further into the film, and further into the lives of the four friends than you might otherwise go, it is eventually replaced with a sense of weariness at the worn-thin material.

The most engrossing, most revealing film about the making of a movie ever produced.

For all its stunning, poetic imagery, it's almost impossible to sit through.

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.

It's a terrific, disquietingly entertaining little film -- a piece of genuine Gothic Americana.

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 no question that the bigotry and shallowness exist out there in the American night, but there's no proportion in Stone's presentation. Stone strains too hard to make his points and in the process distorts them, undermines them. Still, Stone would probably be proud that he's made a picture that audiences may want to ward off and escape from. In that sense, he seems to see himself as being just like Champlain -- a teller of stern and disquieting truths.