Janet Maslin

Though Three Amigos is the kind of skin-deep contemporary comedy that assembles its stars and then just coasts, it's friendlier than most. And it contains a few elements that are destined for immortality.

The forcefulness and mystery of Mr. Melville's direction often generate an urgency that keeps the film from feeling vague. [30 Nov. 1979]

In Who's Harry Crumb? Mr. Candy has a varied role, a good supporting cast, a script full of comic setups and every imaginable opportunity to shine. But the result is little more than a weak comedy, one that suggests Mr. Candy is potentially a great deal better than his material.

Ms. Foster and the screenwriter, W. D. Richter, have given this film some peculiar mood swings, so that it starts out zanily and winds down to a wistful note.

Teachers is Arthur Hiller's attempt to do for public education what he did for medicine in The Hospital, and the results are very uneven.

When the movie backfires, which it finally does, it's because too much grisly footage has been used too lightly. Mr. Landis's comic detachment, which has been fascinating throughout much of the movie, is something he holds on to even when a deeper response is needed. Eventually it becomes less comic than callow.

A tight, energetic sleeper in the action-adventure genre, manages to pack a few anti-machismo sentiments into an otherwise brawny tale.

[It] has a gentle approach to its characters and an occasionally striking visual style. What it doesn't have is much momentum or originality.

Thanks to Glenn Close's delicious villainy, it succeeds in breathing archly theatrical life into the irresistibly monstrous Cruella DeVil. Otherwise, this remake goes to the dogs too often.

Married to the Mob works best as a wildly overdecorated screwball farce.

Once Bitten affects a glossy, sophisticated look that does little to upgrade the film's adolescent humor. As directed by Howard Storm, it has a lot more stylishness than wit. Miss Hutton looks great in black, but her predatory vampire grows tiresome very quickly, as do all the Bloody Mary jokes.

It is a great disappointment, halfway into the movie, to find The Star Chamber so far off the track that its credibility almost entirely disappears...The Star Chamber has a well- meaning urgency, and it is an entertaining film even when it becomes so thoroughly misguided.

Mr. Rifkin's direction does display, in addition to an appreciation of Mr. Lynch and perhaps John Waters, a promising eye for design and a taste for the unusual. With less noxious material and a less patronizing manner, those talents would amount to a lot more.

Mr. Diesel could not have succeeded as a genre-switcher without the proven television talents of the film's able ensemble.

Miss Dunaway gives the uncanny, meticulous Crawford imitation that is at the heart of Mommie Dearest. The movie itself has nothing like the brilliance of the impression, which is why it remains an impression and can't altogether rise to the level of a performance. But on its own terms Miss Dunaway's work here amounts to a small miracle, as one movie queen transforms herself passionately and wholeheartedly into another.

For all its pretty glimpses of the desert island, the film never offers a clear, overall sense of what the place looks like; neither the camera nor the boy really goes exploring.

The principal thing that keeps "The Seduction of Joe Tynan" engrossing is the level of acting it sustains throughout.

Manages to have playful comic ingenuity of its own.

More often, the film is like a ride through a car wash: forward motion, familiar phases in the same old order and a sense of being carried along steadily on a well-used track. It works without exactly showing signs of life.

Carl Reiner's hit-or-miss film noir parody, a collection of gags that vary much too wildly in terms of timing and wit. All that hold this comedy together are a playful outlook and a conviction that detective stories are intrinsically funny, especially if the detective is as much of a blockhead as Ned Ravine.

Multiplicity weaves such an uninteresting plot around its bland, generic principals that it rarely reaches the absurdist heights its premise demands.

Eastwood directs a sensible-looking genre film with smooth expertise, but its plot is quietly berserk.

The film is in fine shape as long as it revels in its own craziness, making no claims on the viewer's reason. But when it asks you to believe that what you're watching may really be happening, and to wonder what it means, it is asking far too much.

Mr. Marshall does a much better job with the feistier early scenes than with this subsequent mush, so the film does have a good first hour. But by the end, the film goes on much longer than it should. The physical look of Overboard is also surprisingly dreary. Though the yacht scenes have some visual wit, particularly where Miss Hawn's outrageous costumes are concerned, John A. Alonzo's cinematography is conspicuously poor.

Mr. Mom would be funny if it had jokes. That's not so self-evident as it sounds, because it's not a claim that every failed comedy can make. The actors here, Mr. Keaton and Teri Garr, are likable and bright, and the situation has possibilities. Very little is made of them, except for such predictable developments as Jack's going to the supermarket with the kids in tow, and knocking over soup cans and fruit.

The situation that Neighbors starts off with is funnier than anything that grows out of it, at least the version of the tale by Mr. Avildsen's and Larry Gelbart, the screenwriter. While Mr. Berger's novel has an aspect of the mysterious to keep it going, the film is solely devoted to hijinks, and the hijinks have nowhere to go.

Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles was directed by Steve Barron, who has a number of music videos to his credit, and shows off the skills of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, without which there would have been no film at all.

Mr. Seagal's own film is awesomely incoherent, a mixture of poorly executed violence and Dances With Wolves-style astral musings.

This bizarre, special effects-filled movie doesn't have the jaunty hop-and-zap spirit of the Nintendo video game from which it takes -- ahem -- its inspiration. What it has instead are a weird, jokey science-fiction story, "Batman"-caliber violence and enough computer-generated dinosaurs to get the jump on "Jurassic Park."

The early parts of the film are engaging and well acted, creating a believable high school atmosphere. Unfortunately, the later part of the film is slow in developing, and it unfolds in predictable ways. The special effects are good, the performances are nicely deadpan, and the score is clever. But Christine herself is something of a bust.

Hiller makes this warm, friendly and sometimes cute, but he doesn't make it move very quickly.

It's cute and jokey and has no particular edge.

Having introduced the two principals and had some fun with their antagonism, the film has nowhere to go.

Unlike the screenwriters, who often cross the thin line between wit and silliness as they outline Celeste's neo-I Love Lucy-isms, Miss Basinger reveals unfailingly sound instincts for comedy.

This Ninja Turtles tale is less violent and more scenic than its predecessors, since it gets the title characters out of the sewer and transports them back to feudal Japan.

Flattering the daylights out of Rob Reiner and his Spinal Tap crew, Rusty Cundieff turns Fear of a Black Hat into an unapologetic Spinal Tap imitation. And there's no point in faulting Mr. Cundieff for such derivativeness, because Fear of a Black Hat is too savvy and cheerful to warrant complaints.

Helen Hunt is a real scene-stealer as a girl who wears things like toy dinosaurs in her hair, in keeping with the film's relentlessly silly mood. The audience at the National Theater seemed giddy enough in its own right.

Something like a sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The characters are different, but the perspective on teen-age Americana, West Coast-style, is very much the same. This time around, though, the material is less funny.

Mr. Shyer has no idea how to frame this material, let alone make it funny. Most of Irreconcilable Differences is terribly flat; the camerawork is dim and unflattering, the sets are bare even when they're supposed to look lived in and some of the dialogue is simply beyond the actors.

Freddy Krueger is the most talkative of slashers, and also the most creative. In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, he displays a great debt to Dali in concocting surreal visions for his prey. When Freddy enters the dreams of his teen-age victims, ordinary objects become armed and dangerous.

It winds up illustrating the very emptiness it mocks.

Jagged Edge has harsh lighting, blunt performances, and artless, no-nonsense dialogue relieved by the occasional bit of excess color.

Romantic comedies, of which Chances Are is nominally one, are better off making their characters appear glamorous and attractive than making them look like ineffectual, long-suffering nincompoops, which is the case here.

Joseph Ruben, whose other films include The Stepfather and True Believer, has directed Sleeping With the Enemy with full appreciation of his leading lady's disarming beauty but less successful attention to the people and places that surround her.

A clean-cut, affable family film without objectionable elements, beyond the brief and needless violence that complicates its finale.

But even after the documentary affectation gives way to a more conventional narrative, the film has trouble ringing true.

"Generations" is predictably flabby and impenetrable in places, but it has enough pomp, spectacle and high-tech small talk to keep the franchise afloat. And in an age when much fancier futuristic effects can be found elsewhere, even its tackiness is a comfort.

While it's very much a retread, it succeeds in following up the first film's humor with more in a similar vein.

Mr. Englund, playing the Halloween favorite whom audiences love to hate, now delivers lines like this with the broadness of a latter-day Jimmy Durante. But he sustains Freddy's peculiar charm even when appearing without ghastly makeup in scenes of Freddy's early years.

Only charm and sentimentality could have brought the requisite magic to Clint Eastwood's Honkytonk Man; unfortunately, this well-intentioned but weak film hasn't nearly enough of either.

Awakenings both sentimentalizes its story and oversimplifies it beyond recognition. At no point does the film express more than one idea at a time. And the idea expressed, more often than not, is as banal as the reality was bizarre.

As for comedy, Mr. Grodin's deadpan manner supplies a fair amount of that until the adventure-mystery aspects become overpowering.

Kristy McNichol and Dennis Quaid, as a mutually devoted sister and brother, are personable but idle in this largely uneventful tale.

Most of For Keeps is entirely predictable, but that should do little to diminish its interest for audiences of high-school age. Here again, Miss Ringwald is the very model of teen-age verisimilitude, and she's most impressive in making even the most hackneyed situations seem real.

The fact that Cannonball Run II isn't much good may not prevent it from becoming this summer's best- loved lowest-common-denominator comedy, if only because of the utter absence of any competition.

One Fine Day makes for sunny, pleasant fluff. Both stars are enjoyably breezy, and there's enough chemistry to deflect attention from the story's endless contrivances. The screenplay by Terrel Seltzer and Ellen Simon is full of energetic wisecracks. But it's jokey rather than actually funny most of the time.

The film roams from the Upper West Side to Coney Island to Atlantic City, maintaining a lighthearted style that doesn't quite match the hints of obsessiveness in Mr. Toback's screenplay.

Neither performer upstages the other, but the admirable film is weakened by timidity or a lack of skill.

Written mostly as ensemble comedy, Striptease grinds to a halt whenever the star goes through her dance paces, most of which prove awkwardly strenuous and are daring only by the standards of A-list movie stars.

Ms. Olin looks great, and she's a lot more fiery in this hit-woman's role than she has been when trying, in tamer films, to be nice. But otherwise, "Romeo Is Bleeding" adds up to much less than the sum of its parts. Mr. Medak fared better in the service of true, wrenching stories than he does under the spell of this material's desperate fancifulness. The joke isn't much of a joke to begin with, and it wears thin.

The movie often seems even more uneventful than material like this need make it, and Mr. Milius's attention to his actors focuses more closely on their pectorals than on their performances.

Mr. Black's screenplay is mean-spirited, but it earns its keep with sharp, sarcastic dialogue and ingenious ways of setting up this story.

The film never gets past the unlikelihood that its characters have much chance of living happily ever after. Or of finding real heat or humor along the way.

Christopher Penn very nearly steals the movie as Ren's hayseed friend, and the two share a musical scene (to Deniece Williams's ''Let's Hear It for the Boy'') that's almost as sensational as the opening credits.

Low humor might count for more here if it weren't constantly overshadowed by the film's maudlin streak.

There are some funny routines here, though Mr. Carpenter doesn't seem to have cared much about integrating or sustaining them. Mr. Carpenter makes his amateurishness unmistakable, especially when it comes to the film's four actors. Only one of them can act even crudely (fortunately, his is the largest role). The other three, neither photogenic nor particularly extroverted, look like well-meaning fraternity brothers helping out a pal with his class project.

A mildly facetious tone limits Anderson's film to the lightweight, but the collective enthusiasm behind this debut effort still comes through. What's best about Bottle Rocket is not the laid-back pranks that inflate its story to feature length but the offbeat elan with which that story is told.

South-Central plays more like an exploitative potboiler than a civics lesson. Only late in the film, thanks to a sobering of tone and Mr. Plummer's credible performance, does the story develop any real impact.

The material is extremely slight, but at least it's benign.

At least slightly more varied than the average fraternity-boy comedy.The nerds' rap number, in which they sing of nerd pride, is probably the high point of this whole endeavor.

Cocoon: The Return is so tired, in fact, that it can barely recapitulate the winning formula of the original hit.

More American Graffiti is grotesquely misconceived, so much so that it nearly eradicates fond memories of the original.

Deep Cover eventually degenerates into so much gratuitous violence that "kill" sounds like the most-used verb in the screenplay's last stages. The screenplay's frequent emphasis on homophobic insults is another unfortunate touch.

The spare, enjoyable Naked Fame, by the documentarian Chris Long, suggests that today's pornography performers enjoy better life options than those revisited in "Inside Deep Throat."

This sequel has no real purpose beyond the obvious one of following up a hit, although the original film was just as casual at times. Both of them rely on Billy Crystal's breezy, dependably funny screen presence to hold the interest, even when not much around him is up to par. Both also count on the irascible Jack Palance, even though Mr. Palance's Curly was dead and buried when the first film was over.

There's a certain ghoulish excitement to all this, but it is quickly dissipated.

Nestor Almendros's cinematography is soothingly gorgeous, and so are Miss Shields and Mr. Atkins. Both are quite adequate to the movie's requirements, and neither has much acting to do--Miss Shields's hardest job, for instance, is to pretend she is giving birth to a baby without ever having wondered why she's put on so much weight. Her second hardest job is to keep the wind from ruffling her hair.

In any case, Love and a .45 is too mean-spirited to be funny, and it winds up nastily derivative rather than clever.

Nothing about his modest coming-of-age comedy demands anything like this awestruck approach.

Unlike ''Le Dernier Combat,'' which had humor and urgency, Subway appears to have been a good deal more exciting to film than it is to see.

When karate is not being treated as the latest excuse for an Impossible Dream success story, and when the film is able to find more in Daniel's martial-arts career than pure Rocky-esque competitiveness, The Karate Kid exhibits warmth and friendly, predictable humor, its greatest assets.

Sometimes overly silly, with the kinds of sight gags and brief pastiches that might make for a middling ''Airplane'' imitation; in one unforgivable moment, it shows what happens when a spaceman sneezes. Much of it is better than that, however.

The film is shot by Bill Pope with such enterprising flair that it never looks claustrophobic, but the action inevitably stalls in such close quarters.

The film borrows themes and cast members from HBO's "Sopranos," but the script lacks the nuance and wit of that series's creator, David Chase.

The mice themselves are enjoyably dowdy, comfortable throwbacks to a time before earth-shattering conquests were the sine qua non of children's entertainment. The film's action sequences, on the other hand, provide the dizzying heights and spectacular exploits to which live-action audiences are by now well accustomed, and they seem derivative despite the ingenuity of the animators.

Lost Highway, an elaborate hallucination that could never be mistaken for the work of anyone else, finds Mr. Lynch echoing the perversity of "Blue Velvet," the earlier film of his that this most closely resembles.

False and condescending films in this genre are nothing new, but Dangerous Minds steamrollers its way over some real talent.

Brain Donors is a short, reasonably snappy attempt at nothing less than a present-day Marx Brothers comedy,

Enough visual bravado to overpower the peculiarities of its class pretensions.

The appeal of character and story line here is thoroughly overshadowed by the various technical feats involved in bringing the film to the screen.

Trouble is, while not trading quips, the characters actually go through the motions of being scared of the croc, menaced by the croc and so on. And since even the gator horror satire is old hat (remember ''Alligator?''), there's no remaining way to make this interesting.

Mr. Cooper's abrupt, stylized direction can't tease much delicacy or meaning out of the material, though delicacy is all that might recommend it. John Alcott's handsome cinematography is most effective, but the beauty it imparts is skin-deep.

Cary Grant's shoes aren't fillable, but Mr. Beatty could have come closer if Love Affair had given him half a chance.

Its strongest assets, aside from a performance by Ms. Watson that pierces through the nonsense, are Mark Knopfler's fine, expressive score and the attractiveness of its star.

Its sensational looks pale beside storytelling weaknesses that expose the more soulless aspects of this cat-and-mouse crime tale.

But for all its enthusiasm, this film isn't sharp enough to afford all the time it wastes on small talk, long drives, trips to the mall and favorite songs played on car radios.

I wanted to show how the underlying racism of society can transform a banal love story into a tragedy, Mr. Dumont has said. His film, for all its characters' uncommunicativeness, is too flat and unswerving to convey that idea surprisingly. But it does bring haunting power to the bitter, tongue-tied helplessness that sets its tragedy in motion.

Predicated on two ideas -- that human nature is rife with perfidy and that it's important to get the cast into hot cars or bathing suits whenever possible -- Mr. McNaughton and the cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball (''Top Gun,'' ''True Romance'') give a decadent gloss to this far-fetched, quintuple-crossing tale.