Janet Maslin

Despite its underlying predictability, Courage Under Fire manages warmth, intelligence and a healthy share of surprises.

Mr. Olmos seems to be living and breathing this role rather than merely playing it, and his enthusiasm really catches on.

However endlessly film makers around the world have told that story, Mr. Zhang reimagines it with immense grace and turns it into a deeply felt tragedy.

The actors are best when they avoid exaggeration and remain weirdly sincere. That way, they do nothing to break the vibrant, even hallucinogenic spell of Mr. Waters's nostalgia.

A brutally effective family drama. Rough around the edges and crudely obvious at times, it still presents a raw, disturbing story of domestic strife.

Mr. Ichaso's slow, deliberate direction of Barry Michael Cooper's windy screenplay is painfully slack. If this film doesn't resort to much vicious gunplay until its later sections, that may be because the characters are always in danger of talking one another to death.

A solidly old-fashioned courtroom drama such as The Verdict could have gotten by with a serious, measured performance from its leading man, or it could have worked well with a dazzling movie-star turn. The fact that Paul Newman delivers both makes a clever, suspenseful, entertaining movie even better.

My Brilliant Career doesn't need to trumpet either its or its heroine's originality this loudly. The facts speak for themselves — and so does the radiance with which Miss Armstrong and Miss Davis invest so many memorable moments.

Miss Clarke's methods tend to be as fanciful as Ornette Coleman's are rigorous and abstract, but the collaboration between film maker and subject has its own kind of harmony.

In Children of Heaven, life is sweet despite countless hardships, and no reality beyond the economic intrudes upon a fairy tale atmosphere. Only through heavy-handed emphasis does the quest for new sneakers take on any greater meaning.

Beautiful and heartfelt, an oasis of humanity in a season of furious hyperbole.

While Body Heat involves murder, fraud, a weak hero led astray and a seductive, double-dealing broad, it also incorporates something new: a sexual explicitness that the old films could only hint at.

Parts of French Postcards have considerable charm, even if it is charm with the consistency of bunny-fluff.

Jerry Maguire is loaded with them: bright, funny, tender encounters between characters who seem so winningly warm and real.

Ruby in Paradise is more often pensive than genuinely thoughtful, but it is helped immensely by Ms. Judd's gravity and strength.

Fever beings to flag when, after an initial hour filled with high spirits and jubilant music, it settles down to tell its story; the effect is so deflating that it's almost as though another Monday has rolled around and it's time to get back to work.

On any level, earthly or otherwise, the ingenious new animated Hercules is pretty divine. With inspired intuition, Hercules brings together ancient lore, gospel singing, girl-group choreography and lots of free-floating mischief into a jubilant pastiche of classical references.

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.

Winter Kills isn't exactly a comedy, but it's funny. And it isn't exactly serious, but it takes on the serious business of the Kennedy assassination.

For a time, The Best Intentions captures the elements of a profoundly difficult and credible love story, one plagued by essential differences that cannot be resolved.

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

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.

There is the sense that Mr. Leigh, whose unusual collaborative method with actors is an essential facet of his writing and direction, is too willing to confuse tics with truth. Indeed, this time the actors' solipsism is more apparent.

Though Heavy begins beautifully, it isn't always able to sustain its balance between narrative subtlety and inertia.

The Sure Thing is glowing proof of two things: Traditional romantic comedy can be adapted to suit the teen-age trade, and Mr. Reiner's contribution to ''This Is Spinal Tap'' was more than a matter of humor.

Sid and Nancy doesn't try to win its audience's sympathy in any conventional way, which is just as well, since that would have been a losing battle. But it does succeed in offering bleak, nasty and sometimes hilarious glimpses of life in the punk demimonde.

A deeply felt, deceptively simple film that marks the high point of Mr. Eastwood's directing career thus far.

Enough wild-card energy to keep it bright and surprising.

The film's strength is that it sustains an intimate and realistic tone. Mr. Fishburne, who is called upon to deliver several lectures, manages to do so with enormous dignity and grace, and makes Furious a compelling role model, someone on whom the whole film easily pivots.

If the film sometimes gives the impression of too much talent in the service of too little, that talent is evident all the same.

This comedy has less to do with narrative than with sheer chutzpah and a first-rate cast. It manages to be irreverently funny despite a subject that is no laughing matter.

In spite of this sogginess, and despite a self-congratulatory, do-gooder streak that the film discovers within Dave, this comedy remains bright and buoyant much of the way through.

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

The brilliant, mercurial portrayal of Ike Turner by Laurence Fishburne, formerly known as Larry, is what elevates What's Love Got to Do With It beyond the realm of run-of-the-mill biography.

Both Paul and the film would seem maddening if they weren't so passionately sincere, and if Paul did not gaze at the film's many beautiful young actresses with such an amazed, seductive gleam in his eye.

Brilliantly as it begins, Safe eventually succumbs to its own modern malady, as the film maker insists on a chilly ambiguity that breeds more detachment than interest.

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

It will help if, while watching The Naked Gun, viewers can assume a mental age of about 14. The jokes will seem fresher that way, and they will also, much to the writers' credit, seem screamingly funny at times.

The gags, like the plotting, have a giddy edge that can be sharp, but just as often they go nowhere.

To their credit, the actors immerse themselves deeply in the film's self-conscious aura. Ms. Sheedy reinvents herself as a tough, fascinating presence, while Ms. Mitchell's earnest bewilderment also serves the story well.

Though Songwriter is an original, it recalls the director's earlier Roadie in its choppiness, its knowing view of show business, and its humor, which tends to be exuberantly rude.

Goes straight to cult status without quite touching one important base: the audience's emotions. This movie finally isn't anything move than an intricate feat of gamesmanship, but it's still quite something to see.

Brooks brings vast reserves of quarrelsome, hairsplitting hilarity to the story of a man going mano a mano with his sweet little mom.

Humorously and fondly, with an entertaining supply of what he has called "prosaic license," Stillman again displays a pitch-perfect ear for both the cattiness and the camaraderie that bind his characters into collective friendship.

Drawing upon the novel with merciful selectivity, and adding such a contemporary flavor that the film's woodsmen often have a laid-back air, Michael Mann has directed a sultrier and more pointedly responsible version of this story.

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka is a lively but uncertain mixture of nostalgia, silliness and genuinely unpredictable humor.

An oblique narrative and shadowy thoughts, in a film that divides itself abruptly between wordlessness and outright poetry, become too fragile to rise above harsher images that overwhelm the viewer. Cyclo never achieves the balance to make such contrasts work as lucidly as they might.

The film's view of Eddie Dodd is occasionally on the facile side, but Mr. Woods's performance is crackling and passionate enough to give the character depth despite that; it's also laced with snappish, self-mocking humor that Mr. Woods delivers particularly well. This performance is so razor-sharp that Eddie can be seen coming alive with each little triumph, reveling in each little maneuver and taking each little disappointment terribly hard. His enthusiasm is irresistible.

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

This film includes several remarkable episodes illustrating the strange events that shaped Mr. Perel's destiny and the full force of his terror and sorrow.

The screenplay, by W. D. Richter, remains bright and lively throughout, but the plot just isn't full enough to carry a feature film. The characters are vivid, and uniformly well-played, and their pre-pod lives are fairly well established. But an hour into the film, once the menace is identified, the few remaining humans begin fleeing for their lives, and after that it's just run, run, run.

Barry Levinson's richly textured new film also has a rueful nostalgia, a fine-tuned streak of con artistry, and the same hilarious, nit-picking small talk that colored Diner, his first and best film - which is recalled, rivaled and in a few ways even outdone by this one.

Mr. Giraldi, who also directs commercials, takes a fairly ordinary approach to this easygoing teen-age comedy about a stockbroker in his mid-20's who must pretend to be a high-school student. The material is pleasant enough, and Mr. Cryer is a good deal less strained here than he has been in other roles, affecting a natural manner and a good way with wisecracks.

Undeniably, there's an element of corniness to this. But that doesn't keep An Officer and a Gentleman from being a first-rate movie - a beautifully acted, thoroughly involving romance.

Risky Business improves as it goes along.

Handsome and impassioned, vigorously staged by the director of ''The Madness of King George,'' this ''Crucible'' is a reminder of the play's wide reach, which goes well beyond witch trials in any century. As adapted gamely by the playwright into a screenplay that takes advantage of scenic backgrounds and photogenic stars, ''The Crucible'' now speaks to subtler forms of dishonesty and opportunism than it did before.

As fascinating as it is freakish. It confirms Mr. Lynch's stature as an innovator, a superb technician, and someone best not encountered in a dark alley.

A small, personal, independently made film with the sweep of El Norte, with solid, sympathetic performances by unknown actors and a visual style of astonishing vibrancy, must be regarded as a remarkable accomplishment. [11 Jan 1984, p.15]

This Elizabeth is presented as a glamorously stressed-out modern woman who must cope with a super-intense case of having it all.

Born in Flames, while inventive, is also much too diffuse and overcrowded. Only those who already share Miss Borden's ideas are apt to find her film persuasive.

Fierce and disturbing, with a plot that skillfully resists following any familiar course. The film's hero fears that he's half-crazy, and for two hours Mr. Gilliam artfully keeps his audience feeling the same way.

The film's greatest directorial success is in finding a thoroughly entertaining way of inviting the audience to share Valerie's point of view.

Mr. Gray's feature-length monologue brings people, places and things so vibrantly to life that they're very nearly visible on the screen.

Its best moments come from witnessing the Senator's inspired unraveling, not from watching where it will end.

The film's cleverness is aggressive and cool, and so its mysteries, though elaborate, remain largely uninviting.

Mr. Cameron has made a swift, exciting special-effects epic that thoroughly justifies its vast expense and greatly improves upon the first film's potent but rudimentary visual style. He has also broadened his initial idea to encompass better developed characters (after all, the first Terminator was barely verbal), a livelier wit and a more ambitious, if nuttier, message.

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.

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.

The film succeeds in finding something sweetly romantic and visually fresh in Grover's flashback memories of Jane, along with allowing Grover plenty of room for wisecracks.

Moving isn't anything out of the ordinary, but those who have shared at least some of these experiences ought to find it amusing.

For the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway.

Action fans may well find Uncommon Valor enjoyably familiar, but for others it will smack of war movie dej a-vu, despite the new angle provided by its concern for American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam.

Mr. Ivory and Ismail Merchant have long since learned to breathe life into their material without excessive reverence, in a manner that is as decorous as it is dramatic. As might be expected, the costumes, settings and cinematography are once again ravishing.

Natural Born Killers never digs deep enough. Mr. Stone's vision is impassioned, alarming, visually inventive, characteristically overpowering. But it's no match for the awful truth.

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.

A funny, romantic film filled with cozy intimacies and lovely, wide-screen images of the French countryside.

Barcelona, like "Metropolitan," indulges in long, hair-splitting discussions without resorting to broad gags or worrying about wearing out its welcome.

The latest and most uncertain of Disney's animated efforts, with its manic mood swings and cloying, none-too-cuddly hero.

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.

It works because Miss Midler and Miss Long are hilarious, both separately and together. Another thing that works is Leslie Dixon's screenplay, which has energy, wit and a supreme confidence that's just this side of bluster.

Its story is unusual, but it's told in a style that is immediate and understandable, and that never opts for heroism at the expense of authenticity.

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

An exuberant satire, uneven but tirelessly energetic, with the kind of comic bluster that can override any lapse. It's funny, ragged, appealingly mean-spirited and very easy to like, even if it plays as a series of skits rather than a coherent whole.

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