Janet Maslin

Staged as pure fluff without an ounce of ballast, Mixed Nuts succeeds only in getting its cast into Halloween-caliber crazy costumes by the time it's over.

Mr. Brando's performance will be deemed interestingly audacious only by those who found "Apocalypse Now" too sane.

Though the film never becomes actively unfunny, neither does it do much more than tread water. The raccoons have a better time than the audience will.

Not even bags of body parts, a bitten-off tongue or a man forced to cut off a pound of his own flesh keep it from being dull.

Apparently too much eye of newt got into the formula for Hocus Pocus, transforming a potentially wicked Bette Midler vehicle into an unholy mess. That's too bad, since Ms. Midler's appearance in a role like the one she has here could have been pure witchcraft.

The film is a labor of love for Casper Andreas, who wrote, directed and starred in this first feature. For the actors he has chosen, it's a labor of lust, with copious necking and grappling required. For the audience, it's just a labor.

Lacks the sexy elan of "La Femme Nikita" and suffers from infinitely worse culture shock. [18 Nov 1994, p.C18]

The plot sounds like that of a straight porn film, which is what Bolero would have become with anyone other than John Derek directing. Mr. Derek, who also wrote the screenplay, shows off his wife in an oddly self-contradictory way. He's glad to flaunt her tanned torso and her radiant smile, which is fortunate, since these are the movie's only assets.

Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon is a multimedia movie of sorts, designed for those who can't bear the monotony of only one thought or sound or activity at a time.

A costly, awful-looking science-fiction epic with one of the weirdest story lines ever to hit the screen.

For every necessary touch that Valmont has reduced or dispensed with (the climactic duel scene, for instance), there is another, less vital moment that has been expanded.

Mr. Carpenter has directed the film with B-movie bluntness, but with none of the requisite snap. And his screenplay (written under the pseudonym Frank Armitage) makes the principals sound even more tongue-tied than they have to. [4 Nov 1988, p.C8]

The essentially two-character play has been opened up to the point that it includes a variety of settings and subordinate figures, but it never approaches anything lifelike.

Despite Mr. Brosnan's best efforts to be lethally debonair, the Bond franchise has sacrificed most of what made this character unique in the first place, turning the world's suavest spy into one more pitchman and fashion plate. This latest film is such a generic action event that it could be any old summer blockbuster, except that its hero is chronically overdressed.

Just a parade of scattershot gags, more often weird than funny an dmost often just flat.

Less a sequel than a retread...Dizzy and slight, with an even more negligible plot than its predecessor had. This time the story can't even masquerade as an excuse for stringing the songs together.

The fact that Miss Brown and Miss Jones have obviously tried to inject a little satire and innovation into the genre just makes the ultimate vulgarity of their film all the more disappointing.

Twins turns out to be, among other things, sad evidence that witty direction is becoming a dying art.

As directed by Barry Levinson and acted by an incredible collection of male stars, Sleepers settles the authenticity question by allowing not a whiff of real life into its universe.

The screenplay, by Steven E. de Souza (whose credits include the Die Hard movies), contains many glib, obscene wisecracks, plus the misinformation that Anna Karenina was Tolstoy's first book.

103 minutes is an awfully long time to watch people whiz along the boardwalk. The novelty wears off in a hurry.

This time Mr. Altman, such a stunningly intuitive portraitist when he truly plumbs the mysteries that guide his characters, works without inventiveness and with glaring nonchalance.

Alternately grisly and dull, with few surprises.

The movie is so sour that its humor is often undermined, because so many of the jokes are either mean-spirited or scatological, or both. Women are either explicitly predatory or stupidly decorative, and homosexuals are made fun of regularly. Bathroom jokes are everywhere. Flamboyantly bad taste, which Mr. Brooks raised to the level of supreme wit in his ''Springtime for Hitler'' number in ''The Producers,'' is this time just bad.

The film's sole ray of sunshine is Fred Ward, who reveals an unexpected flair for comedy in the role of Deborah Ann's father, a police detective with a very hot temper and a vein in his forehead that visibly throbs.

Newsies is a long, halfhearted romp through what is made to seem a not terribly compelling chapter in New York City's history.

It takes on the overtones not of an awful movie, but of an awful play.

Though this is by no means the grisliest or most witless film made from one of Mr. King's horrific fantasies, it can lay claim to being the most unpleasant. Why? Because when you strip away the suspenseful buildup to a King story, you're often left with mechanical moralizing and crude, sophomoric small talk. Needful Things has more of both than any film could ever need.