Janet Maslin

If Assayas doesn't always transport his film's events beyond the all too commonplace, his understatement can also yield moments of quiet simplicity.

Surf Nazis Must Die isn't funny in the slightest, the title notwithstanding. It's a standard, thoroughly stupid gang-war exploitation film intercut with occasional low-energy surfing footage, featuring characters named Adolf, Eva and so on who chant slogans, wear swastikas on their wetsuits and burn surfboards from time to time. Not even the actors' relatives will find this interesting.

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.

Shows colorful style and a wisdom beyond precocity about its setting and its people.

A B movie with a vengeance, one that offers a wickedly feminine (though hardly feminist) view of nominally happy family life and its failings.

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.

Chet Baker's face, and the extraordinary ways in which Bruce Weber has photographed it, encapsulate the story of Baker's life in a succession of ghostly, indelible images that are at once hauntingly beautiful and desperately sad.

By turns funny, vulgar and backhandedly clever, never more so than when it aspires to absolute stupidity. And Mr. Martin, who began his career with an arrow stuck through his head, has since developed a real genius for playing dumb.

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.

Based on a novel by Fannie Flagg, the comedian, and directed by Jon Avnet, Fried Green Tomatoes has some good performances and a measure of homespun appeal, some of which can be credited to Elizabeth McBride's gently evocative costumes and Barbara Ling's detailed production design.

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,

The music alone would be enough to make Say Amen, Somebody worth seeing. But it has warmth and friendliness, too, and some of its family scenes are as memorable as its songs.

Mr. Scott's affinity for the visceral and strenuous, from ''Alien'' to ''Blade Runner'' to ''White Squall,'' is much more central here than the renegade feminism of his ''Thelma and Louise.'' With punishing intensity, he plunges his audience into the maelstrom of the training program.

If it was finally the book's whimsical side that endeared it to so many readers, the movie is missing none of that charm. If anything, it's got a little more...A gentle, intelligent film and an interesting one.

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

The film itself works eagerly to emphasize the frankly entertaining aspects of its story.

He (Liman) creates a film that lives up to the momentum of its title and doesn't really need much more.

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

Existential terror, in the case of Robert Harmon's Hitcher, means an unmotivated viciousness that's as cryptic at the story's end as it was at the beginning.

Cool, stark compositions and the occasional audacious visual trick give Buffalo '66 a memorable look even when its narrative enters the occasional uneventful stretch.

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. Day-Lewis, looking wearily rugged and battling his way through several plausible boxing matches, once again breathes fire into the character of a high-minded loner, and his vitality lends real force to the film's moral arguments.

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.

The bourgeois splendor of the Banks house is a major feature of Father of the Bride Part II, a cheerful, harmlessly ingratiating sequel on a par with its 1991 predecessor.

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.

This material marks a gutsy, fascinating departure for Mr. Eastwood, and makes it clear that his directorial ambitions have by now outstripped his goals as an actor.

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.

No less amazing than the material Mr. Annaud has captured on the screen is the fact that he has gone to such crazily elaborate lengths to capture it at all.

There have been few sharper portraits of the film maker as alchemist than Hearts of Darkness: A Film Maker's Apocalypse, in which Francis Ford Coppola is seen struggling with hellish logistical problems, wild-card actors, freak accidents and other unseen demons, then ultimately pulling a miracle out of his hat.

As directed by George Miller, this film has an appealingly brisk, unsentimental style and a rare ability to compress and convey detailed medical data. It also displays tremendous compassion for all three Odones and what they have been through.

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.

Though Star Maps lacks a strong ending or a Ratso Rizzo to play off Spain's ingenuous hustler, it introduces Arteta as a filmmaker with a credible style and a flair for caustic storytelling. And his film takes the interesting tack of sharing Carlos' matter-of-fact outlook.

You can know every glitch that made this such a dangerous mission, and Apollo 13 will still have you by the throat.

[Smith] also has an uncommonly sure sense of deadpan comic timing.

Its thoughts about its characters don't go much deeper than the bottom of a soup bowl, but those thoughts are still expressed with affection, wit and an abundance of fascinating cooking tips.

Elegant and deeply disquieting drama.

Coneheads falls flat about as often as it turns funny, and displays more amiability than style.

Its light classical manner and its happyish ending. Whatever Mr. Allen is doing in constructing this pretty, slight, gently entertaining movie, he isn't doing the thing he does best. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy gives the impression of someone speaking fluently but formally in a language not his own.

What is well worth watching here, much more so than the train itself, is Jon Voight, who gives a fiery performance in an unusually hard-edged role.

Still, watching the plot unfold remains fun, if only for its "Can you top this?" brand of craziness.

To his credit, Mr. Ropelewski comes up with fairly novel forms of mayhem and makes an effort to tie up most of the loose ends when the film is over.

A lot of attention has gone into the film's video games, computer imagery and costumes, to the point where simply watching these artifacts is half the fun...But eventually Hackers turns tedious, perhaps not realizing that an audience can get tired of the same old equations floating in cyberspace.

The movie manages to be painless and pointless in equal measure.

As in Blue Collar and Hardcore, Mr. Schrader shows himself capable of launching the action in a powerhouse style. Once again, that forcefulness deteriorates as the film progresses.

Kevin Reynolds, who wrote and directed Fandango, is for the most part making just another coming-of-age film. But at its best, his debut feature has an appealing boisterousness, and it successfully walks a fine line between sensitivity and swagger.

The War Within succeeds only as a thriller with some wartime overtones, rather than as a character study that thrills.

What elevates these scenes from the usual concert simulations - and what gives the entire film its tremendous immediacy - is the extraordinary way in which Miss Lange has molded herself to fit the music. Although the performance is conspicuously prop-heavy, with brittle wigs and an enormous number of costume changes, Miss Lange makes herself a perfect physical extension of the vibrant, changeable, enormously expressive woman who can be heard on these recordings.

The Stepfather is too often disappointingly thin.

This time, he takes no great risks, nor does he break new ground in the 20-something serial-small-talk genre. (Currently, Nicole Holofcener's sprightly "Walking and Talking" does it better.) But Burns emphatically avoids sophomore slump with an inviting, ruefully funny film that lives up to his initial promise.

Running on Empty works best when it plays upon emotions generated by the Popes' unique predicament, something that it often does rather shamelessly. It helps that Sidney Lumet has directed the film in a crisp, handsome style that diminishes the maudlin or unlikely aspects of its story, even when they threaten to intrude.

A film this intent on authenticity might easily grow dull, but this one doesn't; Mr. Apted is a skillful storyteller. He gives Thunderheart" a brisk, fact-filled exposition and a dramatic structure that builds to a strong finale, one that effectively drives the film's message home.

A scenic and enveloping nature film about a young man and his beloved pet. But it is by no means strictly a children's film, and it certainly isn't Lassie.

Far more memorable for the spectacular wildness of its Arctic and Dresden scenes (as photographed by Eduardo Serra) than for its uneven efforts to bind such images together.

Basketball, bold urban landscapes, larger-than-life characters and red-hot visual pyrotechnics are the strong points of Mr. Lee's biggest three-ring circus, not to mention the central presence of Denzel Washington.

Eraser means to show off the star's standard persona against a backdrop of lavish special effects, which is certainly a formula that's worked before. But this is no "Terminator," since its tricks are so much more arbitrary and over-the-top.

Behind the film's easygoing mood there is firm directorial control. This, together with Mr. Roemer's keen sense of personality and place and his wry humor, accounts for why The Plot Against Harry holds up so well.