Hal Hinson

Unfortunately, director Randall Miller can't put an original spin on the familiar material; he just doesn't have the offbeat comic gifts that the Hudlin brothers brought to the rap duo's first film outing in House Party.

Boomerang is the funniest, most sophisticated movie of Eddie Murphy's career; it's a sleek, dexterous satire, with a slew of rich comic performances that remind us of everything we loved about Murphy in the first place.

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]

My 20th Century is like a dream, without a unifying logic -- ravishing fragments without coherence or meaning. Immersed somewhere in all this are Enyedi's meditations on the true nature of women, the shortcomings of 20th-century progress, and the connections between art and science. Yet though her own inventiveness and witty command of the medium are invigorating, her thinking is so scrambled that her originality is undermined. The movie is overintellectualized and yet not fully thought out.

Actually, the film's more serious side is beautifully balanced by the joy we experience as both Jesse and Willy come into their own.

Watching Jean-Luc Godard's very loose adaptation of "King Lear" is like finding yourself in the middle of a poem whose meaning the poet refuses to make clear.

The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese's provocative, punishing, weirdly brilliant adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, has a feverish intensity. And undeniably, there's a prodigious greatness on display here. But just as undeniably, it is failed work.

Here, the comedy breathes, and the illusion that it's not a factory-assembled product (which it most certainly is) is a nifty one. For a major studio blockbuster, the thing is darned chummy, and above all, that rare, modest thing, a good show.

Return to the Blue Lagoon, which doesn't star Brooke Shields or that blond guy, makes the original Blue Lagoon look like Citizen Kane.

An exceedingly loopy satire of the entire American political circus, and could be viewed as offensive to the sensitive-souled in either camp. And time hasn't in the least softened its bite. [Re-release]

If "Top Gun" was a stylish bimbo of a movie, all cleavage, white teeth and aerodynamic flash, then Days of Thunder is its paradoxical twin -- a bimbo with brains.

There are a great many movies about the tragic experience of the Jews during the Second World War, but only a handful as passionate, as subtly intelligent, as universal as this one. In Europa Europa, Agnieszka Holland tackles a great theme and, in the process, has made a great movie.

The latest in an impressive string of first-rate movies for kids.

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]

Savagely funny satire of the world of independent filmmaking.

Unlike “Metropolitan,” which for all its brittle wit seemed clunky and stagebound, Barcelona is sharply paced and alive on the screen.

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.

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.

It's mindlessly violent, profane and insultingly racist. It's also relentless, repetitious and tiresome, and leaves us feeling that a once-great director has run out of ammunition.

A Perfect World is one of the Academy Award-winning actor-director's most unexpected, most satisfying films. This isn't the first time that Eastwood has turned the tables on our expectations, but he's never been this bold in the past, or this sure of himself.

One of the loopiest, most hysterical family-values movies ever made.

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.

In nearly all the important categories -- story, direction, pacing, acting -- the picture is pretty much negligible. Still, almost by force of sheer winning dopiness, the movie seduces you into dropping your defenses. It's weightlessly, irredeemably enjoyable.

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.

Hoop Dreams is the most powerful movie about sports ever made.

Who would have thought that Super Mario Bros., the movie based on the popular video game, could be such a treat? There are some, I'm sure, who saw the end of civilization here. But relax. This movie, which was directed by music video whiz kids Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, is sweet and funny and full of bright invention. In short, it's a blast.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves has pomp and scale; what it lacks is something essential -- a sense of Once Upon a Time wonder, the exultant, heady thrill of legend.

With Avalon, Levinson reaches into his deepest self, and an artist can't be asked to do much more.

Unfortunately, this isn't a role that requires an actor with Freeman's gifts -- in effect, his brilliance is irrelevant. The film is more a compilation of well-calculated cues than the presentation of a story, and all that the star is called on to do is hit his marks and prompt our responses. Avildsen, who sharpened his mastery of audience expectations on "Rocky" (which won him an Oscar) and the "Karate Kid" films, has a huckster's talent for keeping his audience on the line. This is not to take away from what Avildsen has done here. The movie is carefully and sometimes impressively laid out -- it's well "told." It's just that the skills he displays are not really those of a filmmaker -- or at least not one whose interest in his story goes beyond how to pitch it.

Though the actor (Walken) does little more than stroll through the film, he creates such an immediate sense of electricity that everyone else seems dim by comparison. Angels, devils or cops, they just aren't in his league.

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.

This is a film that rides on its spiffy cleverness, its swift wit and smart talk. There's an unexpected, not-tightly-screwed-on sense of comedy on display here that's bright and original even when the story falters.

Father of the Bride, Part II is a virtual avalanche of cheap emotion. Short on comedy but long on maudlin sentiment, this sequel stumps so hard for the traditional values of home, hearth and family that any possible entertainment value is canceled out.

The movie turns maudlin in the end, but still, nothing matters except the jokes. And Streep. She skates through the picture, unscathed by its lapses, glorying in her chance to strut her comic stuff. This alone is cause for celebration. Tragedy's loss is comedy's gain.

Dracula, which also stars Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves and Anthony Hopkins, is an evocative visual feast. But the meal is spectral, without the dramatic equivalent of nutritional value.

The film is a sort of prison fantasy, in which all the most popular boys in the cellblock have a high time together, smoking cigarettes, working on cars and spraying each other with paint guns...All the while you're thinking, "What is this, ancient Greece?"

A marvelous breakthrough, a film of incantatory intensity and moment by a prodigiously gifted young filmmaker.

Far and Away is such a doddering, bloated bit of corn, and its characters and situations so obviously hackneyed, that we can't give in to the story and allow ourselves to be swept away.

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.

For all of its old-fashioned discretion, the movie lacks vitality. As a love story it is a complete bust, but beyond that, it is missing a reason to be.

Although the film is little more than a slapstick showcase for the nosey-neighbor character Varney has played in TV commercials, it's not the slapped-together piece of work you might expect. The movie is fairly inoffensive, and younger kids may get a real boost out of its us-against-the-world spirit.

Mellow, harmonious and poignantly funny, the film uses the prism of the old man’s artistry to examine his life and his relationships with his three headstrong daughters.

At the most fundamental level, the real Chet Baker is a kind of nowhere man. He's too insubstantial for Weber to levitate him into greatness. This fact is the source of the film's dramatic tension, and Weber, to his credit, seems to have realized it.

There is a televisiony smallness in its focus -- and while director Karen Arthur treats her story seriously, she has only a rudimentary feel for the medium and fails to bring the suspense elements to a boil.

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.

In his screen version, Schumacher does a flamboyant job of staging the book without showing the slightest interest in what it's about. Granted, Grisham's original is no masterpiece; it's beach reading, but it deserves credit for addressing its subject with some conviction and integrity.

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

It doesn't help matters much that director Thomas Schlamme pays homage to great marital murder mysteries of the past, mostly because the attempts to borrow from the classics are so halfhearted.

Humorless, charmless and flat.

Insanely brilliant.

What's on display here is '30s-style light comic acting at its wittiest and most effervescent. [14 Apr 1988, p.C7]

The current of bereavement never flags even when the dramatic flood becomes stagnant. In every scene, Penn seems to know precisely where the nugget of feeling is hidden, and he doesn't let up until its uncovered.

Actors here perform admirably, though they seem not to know exactly what they're supposed to be playing and so they are reduced to giving us mere moments. But playing these characters would be impossible anyway. They're like composites constructed out of cross-section surveys of baby boomers, and Lumet leaves out any notion of personal psychology or motive. It's as if his characters acted only in response to generational forces.

All Jimmy wants is for his life to return to normal. But Price and director Barbet Schroeder haven't done a very good job of letting us know who this guy is—or even what normal is to him. Schroeder also shifts back and forth between a tone of earnest homage to the mood and feel of the classic thriller to one that sends up the genre, laughing slyly behind its back.

Eddie Murphy's directorial work is amateurish at best. And as a performer he looks as if he is in agony, as if his mother made him stand in front of the camera for punishment.

Sammy and Rosie has a fierce, scrambled intelligence. In this story about a group of interlocking characters in a London neighborhood on the fringe, Kureishi and Frears rack up all of their views on sex, politics, colonialism, social injustice and rebellion like balls in a game of pool, then send them flying. And they seem less interested in pocketing shots than in watching the balls ricochet and collide.

The romantic fable Untamed Heart is hopelessly syrupy, preposterous and more than a little bit lame, but, still, somehow it got to me.

Ultimately, there's not enough genuine wildness to these dark, passionate and half-crazy people. Miss Firecracker is the South made cute.

The Godfather Part III isn't just a disappointment, it's a failure of heartbreaking proportions... It makes you wish it had never been made.

One of those rare movie history lessons that don't make you feel as if you're facing the chalkboard. It's an impassioned movie, with vehement, soulful performances from Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek, but it's also a work of great restraint and proportion. 

In thriller terms it's close to irresistible and enormously entertaining. And the movie's lack of weight is part of what makes it work, part of its gripping purity. What this movie, which as a political thriller has more in common with "Three Days of the Condor" or "Seven Days in May" than "All the President's Men," has going for it is a great premise: the mainspring of this big clock is built to run.

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.

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.

Earth Girls Are Easy, a frisky extraterrestrial romance starring Geena Davis, is the movie equivalent of cheap champagne -- even though it's lousy, it still gives you tickles up the nose. Even at its most rambunctious, the picture just never seems to get going, and if the performers weren't so consistently charming you'd be tempted to pack it in early.

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.

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.

Murphy has said that he wanted the picture to work both as a comedy and a horror movie, but he has succeeded at neither. Director Craven manages to wedge in some of his signature bits, but can't keep the comic elements in balance with the horror, and as a result there's no tension or dramatic pull.

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

No actor has ever been more contemptuous of his profession -- or the movie business as a whole -- than Brando; to him, acting is nothing, and his performance here shows his self-loathing, his desire to trash himself and his accomplishments. This isn't self-parody, it's self-desecration.

Ultimately, Davies' choices have a powerful cumulative effect. In the latter section, he achieves a transporting poignancy of feeling. What he manages to convey are the debilitating contradictions that exist, side by side, within every family; the ways in which families nurture as they destroy, and love and despair act as equal partners.

If the John Candy-Dan Aykroyd comedy The Great Outdoor had a few more laughs we might be tempted simply to write it off as mediocre and let it go at that. But this woodland farce is just coarse enough, and unfunny enough, to achieve true awfulness.

Fear is pretty much a cheap-thrills fix; the ideas, such as they are, function as window dressing. Still, cheap though these thrills may be, they are genuinely thrilling.

Technically, Bakshi's work is uneven; some of the characters in his Cool universe are hilarious, while others are flat.

If the movie had any pace or energy, or even if the music were something other than tepid covers of songs, most of which were written before anybody in the cast was in rompers, then it might have been fun just to watch the actors strut around sexily onstage, living the rock life. But the thing just lies there. [15 Feb 1988, p.D4]

The problem is that the director, George Roy Hill, tries to construct a real universe around Chase and his costar. And for a time he's able to give the comedy some snap. But after the couple settle in their new home and nightmare piles on nightmare, the picture deteriorates into a shtickfest and the sense of reality drags on the proceedings.

A director with a more sensationalistic temperament might have milked this last section of the picture for melodramatic effect, but Russell's direction becomes, if anything, more brisk and more clipped.

The nearest thing to pandemonium ever seen on film and every minute of it is sublime. [27 Aug 1987, p.D7]

It's a kung-fu Die Hard picture, and, frankly, just plain silly.

A great gangster picture, with all the visceral excitement of a classic mob saga. But that's just its jumping-off point. It's also a salute to old Hollywood glamour, to the genre and the movies in general, and an elegant eulogy for the passing of those glory days. It's darned near perfect: violent, sexy and knowingly smart.

Walter Hill's "Johnny Handsome" feels like a shiv jammed between your ribs in a prison-yard fight. It's clean and brutal and so ruthlessly efficient that it's opened a hole in you almost before you've realized it.

What it establishes is hard to put your finger on. It's not a sensibility, exactly; it's more of a sense that the filmmaker's heart is in the right place -- that she is a sophisticated, caring, feeling person.

A wildly profane stew of twists and surprises. And for the most part, the ways in which the various elements combine are enormously diverting. It's a clever, intelligent piece of work with an impulse to surprise and entertain. It's also a crock.

Though Empire of the Sun is a profoundly perplexing, frustrating object, there are things in it to marvel at and enjoy.

A Man of No Importance is as rich and soulful as it is modest. [27 Jan 1995]

I spent a lot of time during the new Corey Haim-Corey Feldman movie, License to Drive, trying to figure out where it is set. Then it hit me. IT IS SET IN HELL! Hell, in this case, is a place where all the actors are named Corey. Where everyone is under the legal drinking age. Where everybody still breathes through his mouth and Oxy-5 flows like champagne.

This is a rare kind of pulp; it's boisterously destructive, funny and, at the same time, almost serene.

Watching it, you feel as if you're being hammered to death with champagne corks.

In short, it's about as charming as a gob of spit.

Boyle's characters, too, are young and fresh and promisingly rude - especially McGregor's Alex - but they become less and less interesting as the movie progresses.

In making her first film, Campion has done thrillingly atmospheric work, and in the process, established herself as perhaps the most perversely gifted young filmmaker to rise up in years.

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."

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.

Leigh has fashioned a limber style of political commentary that is part documentary, part cartoon and wholly novel in the movies.

Demolition Man is a futuristic cop picture with slightly more imagination and wit than the typical example of the slash-and-burn genre.

Disney's new full-length animated feature, Beauty and the Beast, is more than a return to classic form, it's a delightfully satisfying modern fable, a near-masterpiece that draws on the sublime traditions of the past while remaining completely in sync with the sensibility of its time.

It's a tough, intense, wrenching picture about drugs and growing up and surviving, driven by a fierce, skinless performance by its star, Leonardo DiCaprio.

The film has a message; it's another picture about finding your humanity. But in this case, it's pedaled so softly that it doesn't impose itself on you. Nothing about this movie does. And that, as much as anything, is what makes it so irresistible.

Even with these high-end artists on the team, though, the movie seems thin.

True Believer is a thriller about moral rejuvenation, and there's not much wrong with it that another actor in the lead wouldn't cure.

All of the actors acquit themselves admirably, especially Stolz, who has a star's low-key magnetism, and the jazz stylist Harry Connick Jr., who makes his acting debut here as the drawling rear gunner. But the roles are too generic for anything like real depth. The fight scenes are about what you'd expect; they're competently shot, but even when they deliver thrills, every scene, every passage, is familiar. We've seen it all before.

Most astounding, though, is the power of the film's leading actor. While Branagh's direction is forthright and articulate, his acting is brash and flamboyant.

Alan Parker's sexy, hilarious, exuberantly energetic new film, The Commitments, has so much rhythmic juice that it's nearly impossible to stay in your seat.

This We're No Angels isn't funny and it isn't smart -- it's a dumb show, almost literally, in fact. So few lines have been written for these actors that you almost believe that the script intentionally parodies their renowned inarticulateness.

A big, sprawling, unshapely thing, insufferably verbose and, at the same time, touched with magnificence.

A leviathan bore, big, clunky and ponderously overplotted.

The movie's sense of humor is brash and shaggy, and Rita does have a couple of fliply delivered comebacks. But on the whole, there's not enough variety or definition to hold your attention. Too much is all on the same pitch.

For about 15 seconds at the beginning, the new MGM film Once Upon a Crime is a thorough delight. Then that adorable little lion stops roaring.

What McGrath's Emma does have going for it is a breakthrough performance from Gwyneth Paltrow as the heroine.

This isn't an experience that we encounter much at the movies these days, and that's not meant as a criticism; it's high praise.

Todd Haynes's Poison is a vision of unrelenting, febrile darkness. It presents three disparate stories in three greatly varied styles, all inspired by the work of Jean Genet, and its effect, as a whole, is like that of an especially vile infection; it moves diabolically through your system, spreading fever and nausea as it goes.

This is an impassioned movie, made with conviction and evangelical verve. It's also hysterical and overbearing and alienating.

Nixon is an audacious biography rich in imagination and originality, with a provocative, often subversive sense of character and history. Dense and challenging, it is also undermined in places by Stone's obsessions just as dramatically as Richard Nixon was undermined by his.

Though it's not a great film, it is an entertaining and, at times, emotionally rich one.

Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's brilliantly entertaining documentary look into the New York subculture of drag queens and transsexuals, is a rapturous, desperate ode to self-invention.

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.

And you thought the Mapplethorpe show was shocking....But then incongruity is fundamental to comedy, and at least "Ladybugs" has that, if nothing else, going for it.

Nowhere was American comedy in the '40s more frivolously sophisticated than in the movies of Preston Sturges, and The Lady Eve is his most satisfying romantic film. [05 May 1988, p.C7]

This is a gassy, overbearing, pretentious little bit of art-in-your face, from the director of "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," and it revisits some of the filmmaker's favorite places (the men's room, for example) and favorite themes (life as consumption and elimination). Most of the film's meanings are buried inside the artist's big, intellectually high-rolling metaphors.

IQ, the new romantic comedy with Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins, is disarming piffle—frothy, sweet and nearly irresistible.

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.

People bicker and play word games with each other to hide their true feelings, just like you and me, and yet absolutely nothing is at stake.

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]

It's cagey, funny and vivaciously smart. It may also be one of the worldliest fairy tales ever made, and that rarest of all things, a family film with real meat on its bones.

[Abel Ferrara's] specialty is a kind of hallucinatory tawdriness, and here, he's made a hepped-up film about drugs that plays as if the filmmakers themselves kept a healthy supply of the stuff at hand.

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.

It feels more like a prosaic knockoff than a classically inspired original.

Technique counts for a lot in directing a picture like this -- more perhaps than in any other genre -- and Foley doesn't have any. His approach here is to toss things up into the air without caring much where they land. And as a result, the noise they make when they land is not a pretty one.

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.

The premise is so surrealistically improbable that if Frankenheimer's approach weren't so straight-faced it might be preposterously entertaining. But the director's shoulders are braced for Atlas duty and he fails to exploit the loony potential in Stephen Peters and Kenneth Ross's script.

Sometimes thrilling, but rarely inspired, it is thoroughly-almost perfectly-adequate.

Sign oath in blood promising stars they will not have to bother creating characters and can just coast on old tricks.

Plain and simple -- this is a racist movie.

A cross-pollination of Home Alone and The Secret of My Success, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead is the kind of movie that makes you wish you could sneak into the projection booth with a pair of pinking shears. To say that it's dead isn't really fair; nothing that's dead could be this obnoxious.

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

Still, well-intentioned sappiness is something we can deal with; the lack of any genuine dramatic conflict is a more damaging shortcoming.

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.

The movie isn't mindless; it just has a mind that's a bit junky and muddled. And to their credit, Arnold and his collaborators haven't played it safe. Last Action Hero is a stretch. Unfortunately, it's a stretch that proves the star wasn't that elastic to begin with.

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.

The central story itself is not distinctive, and though Lee certainly churns up a lot of dust, he never captures the mythic quality that made Price's original seem so much bigger than its almost generic cast of players.

When a master dedicates his genius to the production of schmaltz, it's not a pretty sight.

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.

The movie has some beautifully observed moments and a generous spirit, but in the end, it's undone by its own sweetness and charm....It's just not distinctive enough to sustain your interest. A lot of the movie is routine coming-of-age stuff.

Bird on a Wire lords its star power over us; it thinks the sheer cumulative adorableness of the principals will win us over and make up for its multitude of sins. It should think again. There is nothing to this John Badham movie except the spectacle of determined stars turning the brilliance of their personalities on us. That and chases -- car chases, motorcycle chases, airplane and helicopter chases.

What Fat Man and Little Boy tells us is potent and essential. It tells us if history is dominated by individual action, then individual action has meaning -- in history everything is for keeps.

The movie is a mess from start to finish. But then again, this jerky, haphazard approach is part of the movie's goofy charm.

About halfway through, the overwhelming fact that the movie is a complete nothing becomes too much to ignore.

What John Hughes, who wrote, directed and produced the film, has done here is make a weirdly inventive, off kilter comedy out of the horrors of modern travel. And in the process, he's also managed to make the funniest road movie since Lost in America.

The movie is modest and winning, and we almost feel guilty for wanting it to be more -- but we do. The spirit of camaraderie and the love of performers performing is infectious, though. It may not be enough, but it's close.

The movie is part rap Spinal Tap, part Loaded Weapon I, part Mad magazine. And, like those forms of parodic tribute, it assumes a very specific knowledge of the performers, the music and videos being parodied, a certain level of hipness. In other words, if you don't know rap, forget about it. You'd do just as well taking an SAT prepared by extraterrestrials. If you know the turf, though, you're in for some fun.

Dern's dirtball performance gives After Dark, My Sweet a desperately needed quality of slugged-out authenticity -- he gives the movie its edge. If anything, though, Foley makes Thompson's killing universe too inviting, too sunny and comfortable. He's missed the essence of Thompson, but all in all, there are worse ways of failing.

It's more a brave movie than it is a good one, but at least Singleton has faced the unknown. And he deserves credit for the attempt.

Perhaps the most pleasing aspect of the film is its fluid, unhurried pace. Rich and his team aren't interested in roller-coaster effects or sledgehammer manipulations. They have a lush, original sense of color, even a flair for the poetic. The score -- by lyricist David Zippel and composer Lex de Azevedo -- isn't terribly distinctive (it's probably the movie's weakest link), but there is a merciful absence of the hard sell in that area as well.

Woefully short on originality, intelligibility and anything resembling taste. But none of this comes as a surprise. What is surprising is how little invention or energy there is in the movie's action sequences.

From its opening shots, the film is like an invigorating elixir, a movie pick-me-up that delivers thrills and races your pulse but keeps your head in gear too. It's divinely frivolous, nearly perfect fun.

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.

Certainly, disgust would be an appropriate response to this provocative but rather academic study of violence in the movies. Yet it's hard to work up much of a response of any kind to these casual terrors.

An ugly commingling of old Westerns, Zen chic and kung fu movies...Full of gratuitous mayhem, head-bashing, gay-bashing and woman-bashing, Road House has a malicious, almost putrid tone.

Once upon a time [Brooks] was hilarious. And can still be, in interview, which is his true art form. But for some time now, his movies have not even cruised near the neighborhood of funny. And this one is the bottom of the barrel.

A movie that celebrates the life of the mind and the uniqueness of the individual but does so in glib slogans and is, itself, a sort of knockoff.

A gigantic achievement, an endowment of riches.

If the director, Stephen Herek, has any talent for comedy, it's not visible here.

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?

After the film's first few minutes I watched, neither entertained nor illuminated, with something close to total indifference... (Greenaway's) extravagances and attacks on taste seem less like the bravery of the courageous artist than the empty desperation of a charlatan.

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.

While in theory this seems like an altogether valid notion, in practice it falls apart because Fred is such an obnoxious boil of a character. Instead of wanting to release him you want to deposit him in a Davey Tree Grinder. Painful death, that's what this trickster deserves.

The movie is fast, slick and dumb as a post.

Despite its mixture of macabre slapstick and broadly stroked caricatures, the film has sleepy-time rhythms; it's easily the pokiest farce I've ever seen.

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

Perhaps the shrewdest thing the filmmakers have done is call the film The Object of Beauty instead of A Thing of Beauty, which would make much more sense. By doing so they've removed what they must have known was a far-too-tempting opening for reviewers -- of saying A Thing of Beauty is not a joy forever. Even with the change, though, the sentiment fits.

House Party isn't a great movie, but it's heartfelt and enormously winning. In its own modest, ramshackle way, it manages to seem innocent even when it's profane. And maybe a party that demonstrates that those two qualities aren't necessarily opposed is exactly the kind we need.

Watching it, you can't quite figure out what the movie's audience is supposed to be. For parents and kids hoping for a Macaulay Culkin movie, a rude shock awaits. Also, the movie's themes may be too sophisticated for younger audiences; it deals, after all, with death and recovery. And yet, the treatment of these issues may be too pat for adults. It's an entertaining, often winning, movie, but you can't help but feel that the filmmakers never settled on what sort of movie they wanted to make.

Leigh hasn't the affect of a poet, but he's a poet nonetheless. This movie captures the smallish details in life that perhaps you've felt before, but have never before seen on screen. He has a genius for the commonplace. It is truly sweet stuff.

Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a wondrous feat of imagination. In terms of sheer inventiveness, it makes the other movies around these days look paltry and underfed. The worlds Gilliam has created here are like the ones he created in his animations for Monty Python -- they have a majestic peculiarity. And you're constantly amazed by the freshness and eccentricity of what is pushed in front of your eyes.

The movie's message is murky and out of whack. Seidelman's style of comedy trashes everyone. The movie's jokes, which cover everything from dead rodents to geriatric incontinence, are cartoony and sour and misanthropic. And the flukiest thing is that they're misogynic too. It's hard to imagine that a man could have been as ruthlessly coldblooded as Seidelman has been about Ruth's unattractiveness. The network of women workers that Ruth establishes to help her nail her husband runs on pettiness and rancor -- it's a coalition of resentment. In "She-Devil," Seidelman divides the world of women between the envied and the envious. She has a message for the Ruths of the world, and it's not a pretty one. She tells them that the best they can hope for is payback.

At first, the movie's restraint is enticing, and even soothing. By the end, though, Tran's strategies have an enervating, numbing effect. The same methods he uses to pull us in finally kill our interest.

There's nothing bogus about this locomotivated follow-up; it's a truly excellent adventure, hilariously inventive, greased-lightning paced and dumb-bunny brilliant.

Few films are more assured in their storytelling or build more forcefully, irrevocably toward their resolution.

Ironweed, the new film by Hector Babenco starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, comes about as close to being an unmitigated waste of talent as any movie in recent memory.

Spaceballs is actually a kind of comic black hole. All in all, the movie is about as funny as having coffee spilled in your lap. Except that there's no burn -- just that slightly embarrassing, uncomfortable, all-wet feeling.

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.

The Little Mermaid is only passable. Even at its highest points, it cannot claim a place next to even the least of the great Disney classics.

It's a lovely idea, and if the individual sections of the film were more substantial, or if we sensed some connection between them, some governing principle, it might have resulted in a delicate, poetically funny movie. Unfortunately, Jarmusch's lackadaisical minimalist aesthetic and his chronic lack of energy are the only unifying elements.

Ernest keeps up his filibuster of inane chatter, shifting from one comic voice, one accent, to another with impressive dexterity. That voice of his is a real gift. Too bad we have to look at him too. [12 Nov 1993, p.C6]

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

There's something scuzzy about the whole exercise.

Van Sant gives his material shape and an invigorating, syncopated style. It keeps coming at you in surprising, dazzling ways.

There's nothing embarrassing about Zeffirelli's brisk new version, nor anything particularly remarkable; it's an entirely credible, middle-of-the-road production.

What's more, Bertolucci's voice is stronger, clearer and more effortlessly confident than it has been in years. He's stolen the beauty of Tuscany and his youthful star and transformed it into an exquisite work of movie art.

The movie is pure hound, but you'll want to catch Short's every pixilated move. He almost made me wish that the picture would never end.

The pleasure we take from Medicine Man comes not only from the actors or the engrossing progress of the narrative, but from every aspect, including Donald McAlpine's ravishing cinematography and Jerry Goldsmith's luscious score.

This is a baseball movie with virtually no actual baseball footage in it -- yet you're so involved with the characters that you don't miss it in the slightest. Cobb is a brilliant film. And with it, Ron Shelton elevates himself to the top shelf of American filmmakers. [06 Jan 1995, p.C1]

Undeniably, the picture now and again supplies that edge-of-the-seat sensation; yet, by action-adventure standards, Speed is leaden and strangely poky. It never seems to shift into overdrive and let fly.

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.

An elegantly wrought bit of nastiness.

With its widely acclaimed source material and a cast of distinguished actors, A Good Man in Africa held the possibility of being a welcome departure from the ordinary. Instead, ordinary is what it rises to at its best.

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.

Written and directed by Richard Brooks, the picture is more style than content, but what style.

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.

The movie won't come clear, Eastwood has succeeded so thoroughly in communicating his love of his subject, and there's such vitality in the performances, that we walk out elated, juiced on the actors and the music.

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.

Taylor Hackford's film version of the Stephen King novel, has a whopping list of shortcomings -- and yet it still manages to be an engrossing, unsettling and, at times, powerful psychological thriller.

As the movie progresses, it deepens emotionally and becomes less of a detective thriller and more of a character study, and it's to Franklin's credit that he never allows his hard-boiled style to soften. Thematically, the movie doesn't make a strong statement, but it is strikingly expressive in its details.

Watching it, you feel as if you were being forced at gunpoint to flip through hundreds and hundreds of back issues of National Geographic.

Edel gives us the grungy details of the atrocities without providing a context to give them relevance. In the end, the film's ugliness becomes ugliness for its own sake.

Overall, what Mr. Destiny turns out to be is mildly sweet and amusing -- not a wonderful life, but merely an okay one.

What's missing in Quigley Down Under is precisely what is missing in its star. Selleck is a skilled light comedian -- he's at his best delivering a wry put-down to a British officer -- and he handles John Hill's bantering dialogue deftly. But for all his burly authority, Selleck lacks dynamism on screen. There's no danger in him, nothing unresolved or mysterious. He's likable, but something of a lug.

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.

Though brilliant, Menace II Society is definitely a film to guard yourself against. There's not a trace of softness or sentimentality. At times, the picture takes on the scary you-are-there verisimilitude of a tabloid-TV show.

For better or for worse the movie belongs to Sheen, who does manage to generate enough intensity to hold writer-director David Twohy's unwieldy story together. [31 May 1996, p.D6]

As it turns out, big secrets aren't revealed in Broadcast News, but the film is so ingratiatingly high-spirited, and the performances so full of sass and vigor, that in the long run it doesn't really matter much.

The premise has been updated as a passable bit of family entertainment with essentially the same modus operandi but with a gentle pro-environmental message: Don't mess with Mother Nature.

It's a brisk, colorful, infectiously charming but instantly disposable Hollywood entertainment. It's fun, like watching kids play dress-up in the back yard -- nothing more, nothing less.

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.