Hal Hinson

Nothing in the first Gremlins came close to being as bad as these early segments in the second one, and because the concept is no longer fresh, and the suspense over what's going to happen is lost, we're ready for the filmmakers to get on with it long before they've finished setting the table.

Though Linklater allows the movie to wander, he never allows the pace to slacken, and more often than not he finds some unexpected bit of found poetry or cultural kitsch to make the digressions worthwhile.

It's not a challenging movie or an original one, but it does have its pleasures -- most notably a radiant, soulful debut performance from Driver, who saves Circle of Friends from being merely an Irish ugly duckling story.

What you end up with in Good Morning, Vietnam is a peculiar hybrid -- a Robin Williams concert movie welded clumsily onto the plot from an old Danny Kaye picture. And neither half works.

Madonna, the real Madonna, is precisely what "Truth or Dare" promises to deliver, raw, kissing-close and uncensored. But what we get in this sometimes engrossing, sometimes appalling, always entertaining film is something other than "real," something that may in fact be just as revealing as the real thing itself.

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.

All the actors fire off one another nicely. Goodman and Pacino may be the only cop duo in memory to generate anything like real enthusiasm.

Working from the script by Jeff Maguire, director Wolfgang Petersen ("Das Boot") plods through the narrative as if he were completely unconcerned with giving it even a semblance of credibility.

Douglas again takes on the symbolic mantle of the Zeitgeist. But in Falling Down, he and Schumacher want to have their cake and eat it too; they want him to be a hero and a villain, and it just won't work.

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.

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.

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

Ultimately, [Heckerling's] portrait is affectionate and, in places, even sweet, enabling us to laugh at them and embrace them at the same time.

[Leven] keeps the film's tone light and ingratiating. And, though the material is thin, the actors do seem to be getting a kick out of playing off each other.

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

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.

Trapped in Paradise is a new comedy starring Dana Carvey, Nicolas Cage and Jon Lovitz, but considering that there isn't a single laugh in the whole picture, the term "comedy" must be used loosely.

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

It's time to find a new Bond. This one is tuckered out, spent, his signature tuxedo in sore need of pressing...Dalton plays a straight-faced, humorless, no-nonsense Bond -- all guns and no play -- and it makes for a very dull time.

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.

Most of what's included in this unapologetically scrambled mixture of Goonies, Hardy Boys adventures, Ghostbusters and Abbott and Costello monster films is bad actors wandering around in bad makeup and rubber masks and two kinds of kids -- cute, intolerably noisy, smart-alecky kids and not-so-cute, noisy, smart-alecky kids. I don't know which kind I liked least.

Even at their most disturbing, Brian De Palma's films have always seemed like brilliant abstractions, sinister theorems from a bloody virtuoso. But Casualties of War, the director's rigorous, unflinching, masterly new film, is something else altogether. It is a film of great emotional power and great seriousness in which all of the filmmaker's talents and interests are in balance. It is a breakthrough work, a signal of an artist's blossoming maturity, and one of the most punishing, morally complex movies about men at war ever made.