Janet Maslin

The colorfully written Con Air is a solid chip off "The Rock," pumped up and very well cast, with the prettiness and polish of advertising art.

If the film doesn't add up to a cogent legal argument, neither does it have trouble delivering 2 hours and 20 minutes' worth of sturdy, highly charged drama.

The shrill, melodramatic quality of the film's final sections, so unlike its calmly controlled beginning, suggests that no one connected with Split Image really knew which way this story was heading.

The film's bright look and visual energy are much more liberating than the machinations of its teen queens.

An inviting but evanescent film that does have casualness, curiosity value and a lot of talent on its side.

Gratifyingly complex and beautifully told, this tale explores a huge array of cultural, racial, economic and familial tensions. In the process, it also sustains strong characters, deep emotions and clear dramatic force.

After his triumphant Beverly Hills Cop, Eddie Murphy could have done anything. Why, then, did he choose to head for the mysterious Orient to make a film as rich in mumbo jumbo as The Golden Child? Mr. Murphy's comic skepticism in the face of all this is the film's greatest asset. But it is worn thin by the awareness that not even he seems able to take the adventure seriously, and by the preposterousness and inconsistency of what surrounds him.

Would-be Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse games...are more memorable for their settings...than for their sense.

The director, B. W. L. Norton, and the writers, Richard Martini, Tim Metcalfe and Miguel Tejada-Flores, display no idea whatsoever of how to keep a film moving or how to hold an audience's interest. Listlessness and sloppiness on this scale are truly depressing.

National Lampoon's Animal House is by no means one long howl, but it's often very funny, with gags that are effective in a dependable, all-purpose way.

Nicolas Gessner's direction has a correspondingly comfortable feel, but this type of story is as old as the hills—no, older—and Mr. Gessner doesn't do much to make it plausible.

Mr. Hanks's debut feature, written and directed with delightful good cheer, is rock-and-roll nostalgia presented as pure fizz.

National Lampoon's Vacation, which is more controlled than other Lampoon movies have been, is careful not to stray too far from its target. The result is a confident humor and throwaway style that helps sustain the laughs - of which there are quite a few.

Not unfunny, and not really an offense to the memory of Inspector Clouseau, it's merely a movie with very little reason to exist.

But Mr. Penn mostly keeps a tight, impassioned grip on this material, preventing it from wandering too far afield. The influence of John Cassavetes is again clear in the characters' emotional sparring, which has energy and heart.

The film is as handsome to watch as it is preposterous to listen to, full of gorgeous nocturnal city images that splash blaring neon colors against filthy, rain-slicked gray. Mr. Hill uses subways, jukeboxes, spectacularly eerie costumes and deserted streets to create a stark yet extravagant visual style, and a grimy little world in which everything looks curiously brand-new. Thanks to a lot of wipes and slow-motion shots, you are never in danger of forgetting that somebody clever is at the helm.

This isn't a particularly well-made film, or even a truthful one - as a matter of fact, its fraudulence is its one uncompromising aspect. And yet it is mesmerizing, if not as a drama or documentary, then as an artifact.

This is a halfway funny movie, one that's got loads of good gags in its first half and nothing but trouble in its second.

While this is no quick-witted treat on a par with Mr. Levinson's ''Wag the Dog,'' it's a solid thriller with showy scientific overtones.

Mr. Luhrmann's frenetic hodgepodge actually amounts to a witty and sometimes successful experiment, an attempt to reinvent "Romeo and Juliet" in the hyperkinetic vocabulary of post-modern kitsch. This is headache Shakespeare, but there's method to its madness.

Thornton is sadly affecting in the film's central role.

It comes as a welcome surprise that "So I Married an Axe Murderer," which might have been nothing more than a by-the-numbers star vehicle, surrounds Mr. Myers with amusing cameos and gives him a chance to do more than just coast.

The Ghost and the Darkness, a lion-hunting story set in 19th-century Africa, is the rare Hollywood action-adventure that becomes more surprising and exotic as it moves along. While it begins on an unpromisingly starchy note, the film soon picks up speed, color and nicely nonchalant humor as it tells a true story about near-mythic beasts.

This direction is more ambitious than apt, since it calls attention to the artifice that Mr. Gray otherwise conceals so well. Cuts and scene changes become distractingly blunt, as do the star's efforts to suggest spontaneous enthusiasm.

Beyond its persistent coarseness, Wallace's story often trades yesterday's inspiration (Dumas) for today's (Simpson-Bruckheimer).

Two little words: Jim Carrey. That's all it takes to transform Liar Liar from a formulaic Hollywood comedy into an uproarious one-man free-for-all.

The Long Walk Home offers a careful, dispassionate, finally moving evocation of its setting. In attempting to present segregated Southern society matter-of-factly, it avoids shrillness and keeps its potential for preachiness more or less at bay.

Mr. Zeffirelli and his screenwriter, Judith Rascoe, have bitten off so much more than they can chew that their film is virtually unintelligible at times. A great deal happens in the novel, much more than this two-hour movie can contain. But it tries to touch so many bases that its transitions are jolting, its scenes often undeveloped, and the motives of its characters frequently unclear.

Taken on its own terms, Without a Trace is a reasonably well made film, and it's certainly slick enough to hold an audience's attention. But its own terms are very, very limited.

But Mr. Berenger, grousing steadily, and Mr. McNamara, in a boyish Ricky Nelson mode, are likably matched. Ms. Eleniak, who also made a playful and picturesque Elly May Clampett in "The Beverly Hillbillies," succeeds here in rising above the cheesecake level.

It doesn't help that the mystery plot seems half-baked in the end, or that none of the actors appear entirely comfortable with their roles. Miss Ryan looks edgy and spends a lot of time tossing her hair. Mr. Harmon is easygoing and attractive, but his nice-guy manner belies his character's steely talk.

Troll has a knowing tone that's more smart-alecky than clever. And it hovers uncomfortably between comedy and horror, without ever landing decisively in either camp. The film is as funny as it gets in a sequence that has Sonny Bono pretending to be a great ladies' man.

Feverish, whimsical allegory elevated by moments of brilliant clarity.

While its slender, two-tiered plot links love affairs that happen largely by accident, the film's real interest seems to lie in raffish affectation. Mr. Wong has legitimate visual flair, but his characters spend an awful lot of time playing impish tricks.

FOR all their extravagance, Ken Russell's films have never lacked exuberance or humor, which makes the flat, joyless tone of Crimes of Passion a surprise. Much of this is attributable to a screenplay by Barry Sandler filled with smutty double-entendres and weighty ironies. Only intermittently does Mr. Russell break through with the kind of manic flamboyance that is so singularly and rudely his own.

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.

Set against lovely verdant scenery but structured as a series of rambling vignettes, the stories in Being Human don't entirely mesh.

Renny Harlin, who did a much better job directing ''Die Hard 2,'' displays no sense of humor and takes the film's nonsensical action scenes much too seriously, at one point even blowing up a beach house in the process.

Mr. Hill weaves their gestures together with a portentous elegance that promises a great deal that it never delivers.

The Client, with a fast, no-nonsense pace and three winning performances, is the movie that most clearly echoes the simple, vigorous Grisham style.

As directed by Harry Hook, the new Lord of the Flies offers much spectacle for the eye and almost nothing to keep the mind from wandering.

YOU could live a long time and never see anything as awful as Fever Pitch, Richard Brooks's shrill, hysterical peek at the world of compulsive gambling.

The Fly II is competent but hardly clever. The only respect in which it matches Mr. Cronenberg's Fly is in its sheer repulsiveness, since this film degenerates into a series of slime-ridden, glop-oozing special effects in its final half hour.

A grim, sour Jim Carrey comedy that erases the boundary between anarchic humor and sociopathic malice.

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

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.

A shrewd and engrossing documentary even for audiences who have absolutely no patience for the music it includes.

Bagdad Cafe is too slow-paced to work as a comedy, and its screenplay manages simultaneously to be both shapeless and pat.

Mr. Lee isn't as successful at shaping a story around Girl 6, but enjoying her company is all his slender, sunny film really tries to do.

It is to the credit of Mr. Apted, and to a cast including some very believable young actors, that Firstborn moves swiftly and smoothly enough to dispel much nitpicking about plot points, at least for a time.

If all of Virtuosity were as tightly controlled as that, it would exert a greater fascination than it finally does.

The best and funniest Clint Eastwood movie in quite a while.

The Pirates of Penzance has been made into a cheerful movie, but it isn't nearly as deft or distinctive here as it was on stage.

Diner isn't lavish or long, but it's the sort of small, honest, entertaining movie that should never go out of style, even in an age of sequels and extravaganzas.

Works well as family entertainment.

Mr. Tannen's strength is his ability to grab his audience's interest quickly and to hold on to it, even by the most superficial means. Even when the movie doesn't entirely make sense, it manages to be effective.

Suspicious and hilariously self-absorbed, Favreau's every bit as comfortable in California as Charles Grodin's "Heartbreak Kid" was in Miami.

Fortunately, the Webber shelter is a jaunty monument to kitsch, and the Webbers themselves are an appealingly batty crew.

Derivative as it was, ''Romancing the Stone'' did have a certain spunk, thanks to its contrast between the workaday life of Joan Wilder, romance novelist (played so gamely by Kathleen Turner), and the far-flung adventures into which the screenplay propelled her. Sadly for the sequel, the novelty in that contrast was more than used up the first time around. This time, through no fault of his own, the director Lewis Teague (the first film was directed by Robert Zemeckis) has little more to do than construct a retread.

One of this film's greatest accomplishments is its making an audience believe that the Corleones and their various partners in crime have been entirely in character during the intervening decades, but have simply neglected to turn up on screen.

Vicious as Chucky is, it's hard to be scared by anything that kicks its little feet helplessly every time it flings itself upon a full-sized human target.

Dependably well made and not quite like any Allen film that came before. Nimble film making like this isn't necessarily geared to the magnum opus, but Mr. Allen can achieve fine, amusing results even while thinking small. [27 October 1995, P.C1]

Towne especially excels at the smaller touches that bring such connections to life, whether it's an ear for pop music or a clear familiarity with college girls, circa 1970, or the group of bonsai trees that presumably occupy Bowerman when he isn't measuring feet and molding rubber. His proudly unconventional Without Limits is filled with such souvenirs of the real world.

The screenplay, by Harold Nebenzal, leaves one end of this story conspicuously untied, but it does its best to titillate the audience with a mixture of teen-age porn and trademark Bronson spitefulness.

In the Mouth of Madness has enough menace and novelty to please fans of Mr. Carpenter's horror films (among them The Fog, Christine and Halloween) without the wider interest of an enchanting parable like Starman, which he also directed. Still, this is a film with the temerity to think big, if only for the magnitude of the wickedness it invokes.

Last Man Standing comes to life only with rapturous gunfights that add Sam Peckinpah to the film maker's pantheon of heroes, and that are ear-splitting enough to jolt the audience out of its seats. These scenes have their firepower, but they would have larger impact if anyone cared which of the film's gangsters lived or died.

The main trouble is that The Little Rascals is caught in a time warp, lost between the ingenuous ragamuffins of the early talkies and the more willfully streetwise children of today. So even working the title into the screenplay becomes a strain.

Even if you haven't spent as much obsessive time at the video store as these guys have, you might enjoy helping 'Scream 2' laugh all the way to the bank.

Beyond letting its characters talk fast, use jargon and interrupt each other, "The Paper" misses most of the genre's real flavor. Its progress is methodical and sane.

As in each of the other recent 3-D movies, of which this is easily the most professional, there is a lot of time devoted to trying out the gimmick. Titles loom toward you. Yo-yos spin. Popcorn bounces. Snakes dart toward the camera and strike. Eventually, the novelty wears off, and what remains is the now-familiar spectacle of nice, dumb kids being lopped, chopped and perforated.

Despite this lively history, the material seldom rises above the level of upbeat platitudes.

To its credit, the film doesn't sugarcoat its women too monstrously, and it lets real conflicts and opinions occasionally creep in.

Losin' It isn't without its likable moments, but it isn't overloaded with them, either.

Among the things that deserve mention in this lightweight but sometimes subversively stylish farce are its ingenious credit sequence, its lively editing by Herve Schneid, its use of code names like Artichoke Heart and Cordon Bleu in the guerrilla war that rages underground and its reference to a couple of odd inventions.

What makes Crossing Delancey so appealing is the warm and leisurely way it arrives at its inevitable conclusion. All the different aspects of Izzy's busy, contradiction-filled life are carefully drawn, giving the film a realistic, well-populated feeling and a nicely wry view of the modern world.

It becomes less crisp on screen than it was on the page, with much of the enjoyable jargon either mumbled confusingly or otherwise thrown away.

An unexpected but certainly major force in movies at the moment, S.E. Hinton (with four of her novels being adapted for the screen), created in Tex an utterly disarming, believable portrait of a small-town adolescent. Tim Hunter's film version captures Miss Hinton's novel perfectly.

Makes jaunty, imaginative use of both extraordinary technology and bold storytelling possibilities within the insect world.

A film whose best moments are so novel, so deliriously funny, and so crazily unexpected that they truly must be seen to be believed.

Dumb, vulgar and mostly humorless.

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.

Young Guns II concentrates principally on the drawing power of the post-adolescent heartthrobs in its cast. This approach has its appeal in limited doses, but it makes for a western that's smaller than life.

Proceeds efficiently but never quite lives up to its own potential as a sight gag.

Mr. Redford has found his own visually eloquent way to turn the potboiler into a panorama, with a deep-seated love for the Montana landscape against which his rapturously beautiful film unfolds.

Like "Agatha" and the rock drama "Stardust," other movies of Mr. Apted's, Coal Miner's Daughter does a better job of setting its scenes than of telling a story. Its characterizations and its atmosphere work better than the action, which becomes shapeless and, in the manner of biographies of living subjects, slightly cramped by its good intentions.

Because Johnny Handsome is a film by Walter Hill (The Warriors, Streets of Fire), it crams the following things into its first five minutes: gunfire, screeching brakes, a drug-popping hoodlum, a moll in black leather, a violent robbery, one murder, sinister masks, shattering glass. But because this is Mr. Hill's work, these ingredients are slapped together with high style.

Mr. Schrader doesn't match the Leonard habit of ending each scene with a lively little jolt. But he succeeds admirably in extracting the novel's best lines and in casting his film with mischievous verve.

Allen Daviau's camera work and Albert Wolsky's costumes help to forge the film's high style, as does Ennio Morricone's score. But much of its elan comes from Mr. Levinson's obvious affection for the time and place that are his film's backdrop, and from the flair with which he stages even minor episodes.

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

As directed by Stephen Herek, The Mighty Ducks moves energetically but lacks the enjoyable quirkiness of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, which Mr. Herek also directed.

Though he and his co-stars tackle their roles with mischievous humor, Beeban Kidron's direction stays flat even when the actors are funny.

Before we go numb from such prefab excitement, here comes a mega-movie that actually delivers what mega-movies promise: strong characters, smart plotting, breathless action and a gimmick that hasn't been seen before.

A visual splendor, a heroic adventurousness and an immense scope that make it unforgettable.

One of the most surprising things about Jennifer 8, a strikingly atmospheric film even when not an entirely convincing one, is a running time that is in excess of two hours. Losing 20 minutes would almost certainly have heightened the film's sense of purpose, which is sometimes in danger of drifting away.

Quest for Fire is more than just a hugely enterprising science lesson, although it certainly is that. It's also a touching, funny and suspenseful drama about prehumans.

Mr. Verhoeven is much better at drumming up this sort of artificial excitement than he is at knowing when to stop.

Youngblood seems chiefly designed as a vehicle for Mr. Lowe, and Mr. Lowe seems well able to handle more demanding material. But once the film descends into the usual platitudes about doing one's best and making the grade, it begins to seem aimless.

The screenplay, by Mr. Tavernier and David Rayfiel, is both rich and relaxed, with a style that perfectly matches the musicians'. Some of the talk may well be improvised, but nothing sounds improvised, but nothing sounds forced, and the film remains effortlessly idiosyncratic all the way through.