Janet Maslin

The movie is nicely whimsical, and elaborate in a way that no fantasy film this side of outer space has lately been. It's dopey, but it's also lots of fun.

The cast is unknown, the director has a spotty history, and the basic premise falls into this year's most hackneyed category (unknown boxer/ bowler/jogger hopes to become sports hero). Even so, the finished product is wonderful. Here is a movie so fresh and funny it didn't even need a big budget or a pedigree.

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.

The film is played as witchy, all-star vamping with a lethal sting. What makes its premise especially funny is that, at heart, it's no laughing matter.

Within the larger context of the Brooks oeuvre, this pleasantly mortifying arrangement makes perfect sense. [22 Mar 1991, p.C12]

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.

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.

Anyone who has been following the ''Superman'' saga will find this installment enjoyable enough, but some of the magic is missing.

Gentle and moving as it means to be, Always is overloaded. There is barely a scene here that wouldn't have worked better with less fanfare.

Gwyneth Paltrow makes a resplendent Emma, gliding through the film with an elegance and patrician wit that bring the young Katharine Hepburn to mind.

True Stories may well appeal more to those who don't know much about Mr. Byrne's music career than those who do. The soundtrack songs have the catchy simplicity of Talking Heads' most recent and least demanding compositions. And the film's imagery, expertly captured in bold, bright colors by Ed Lachman, will be even more striking to those who find it novel.

Prince, whose ties to soul and jazz are clearer than ever before, whose willingness to embrace different musical forms seems to grow all the time, has never cast a stronger spell.

The film moves along at a serviceable clip, but it seems half an hour too long, thanks to the obligatory shoot-'em-up conclusion, filmed on the largest sound-stage in the world, but nevertheless the dullest sequence here.

Silverado is sufficiently modern to make its landscapes bigger, its people smaller and its moral polarities less powerfully distinct than those of simpler, more starkly beautiful westerns gone by.

This is his sleekest and most engaging film thus far. If you like a good cat-and-mouse game with a keen ear for language, then go.

No film winds up with a name like Feeling Minnesota if it has anything definite in mind.

Though Mr. Williams sometimes seems on the verge of "Aladdin"-caliber improvisation with the ever-morphing green flubber, the film bogs him down with a fiancee (Marcia Gay Harden) hellbent on making him remember a wedding date, and with the full Hughes retinue of thugs and bullies.

The two young principals are serviceable, but not nearly as lively as some of their co-stars — Christian Juttner, as the tallest Earthquake, steals virtually every scene he doesn't share with Miss Davis or Mr. Lee.

There's some variety to the crimes, as there is to the characters, and an audience is likely to do more screaming at suspenseful moments than at scary ones. The gore, while very explicit and gruesome, won't make you feel as if you're watching major surgery. The direction and camera work are quite competent, and the actors don't look like amateurs.

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

The martial arts stunts that are its single strongest selling point.

The Land Before Time isn't heavily plotted; it doesn't do much more than concentrate on the amusingly lifelike dynamics among the dinosaur children as they make their journey. Luckily, it isn't very long either. At a just-right length of 73 minutes, it ought to win audiences' hearts without wearing out their patience.

Mr. Stone's compassion for his subject overwhelms his film's false moves. And the barrage of undramatized, undigested data gives way to a much tighter and more artful vision...the film starts snowballing its way to real dramatic power. [20 Dec 1995, p.C11]

There are seeds of something funny in the film's beginning and in its premise, but they are soon dissipated by so little sustained wit, and so much scenery.

Despite the grumpy, flatulent behavior the script demands of him, Mr. Falk rises above the treacly shenanigans.

This film's reflective, even stately style elevates it from the ranks of ordinary stake-through-the-heart vampire dramaturgy, turning it into something much more exotic.

Food and passion create a sublime alchemy in Like Water for Chocolate, a Mexican film whose characters experience life so intensely that they sometimes literally smolder.

At regular intervals the film stops short for similiarly nifty Chan choreography, letting the star flip, swivel, scamper up walls and hurl large objects with his feet.

As directed by Jerry Schatzberg from a screenplay by Charles Bolt and Terence Mulcahy, the film stays snappy much of the way.

Mr. Zemeckis is able both to keep the story moving and to keep it from going too far. He handles Back to the Future with the kind of inventiveness that indicates he will be spinning funny, whimsical tall tales for a long time to come.

It will surprise no one who saw the first ''Die Hard'' that the heart and soul of the new film is Bruce Willis, who this time is even better.

Directed by Robert Mulligan in an unapologetically sentimental style, Clara's Heart succeeds in tugging the heartstrings only when Clara herself is on screen.

Meets its main requirements: it adapts a classic novel in gleaming cinematic form, and it ridicules the foibles of ruthless adults.

Not a worm is left unturned in Ken Russell's buoyant, mischievous and predictably overwrought new film.

Mr. Howard brings a real sweetness to his subject, as does the film's fine cast of veteran stars; he has also given Cocoon the bright, expansive look of a hot-weather hit. And even when the film begins to falter, as it does in its latter sections, Mr. Howard's touch remains reasonably steady.

This modest, enormously likable film, about love and temptation and ties that bind, is about brotherhood most of all. [9 August 1995, p.C9]

This is Mr. Martin's movie, and he brings to it the ingeniously dopey presence that's become his trademark; he easily carries even the most dubious moments in the rather jumbled screenplay, which was written by Mr. Martin, Mr. Reiner and George Gipe. [03 Jun 1983]

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

Mischievously entertaining...Dahl's film has character in oversupply even if its actual characters are sometimes thin. Poker fever makes up for whatever the story lacks in everyday emotions.

The trouble with Fade to Black is that it's supposed to be a thriller. It's much more amusing than it is scary, although the killings are gory enough to be borderline vile. [17 Oct 1980, p.C5]

Directed by Eastwood with righteous indignation and increasingly strong momentum.

The film's spooky atmosphere is accentuated by Anthony B. Richmond's cinematography and Philip Glass's score. Ms. Madsen's performance is a lot more enterprising than what the material requires; the same can be said for Mr. Rose's direction.

Although Michael Dinner's direction is noticeably better than the material, the film aims consistently for the lowest common denominator.

This film is quite literally lost in the wilderness, with an intermittent, picturesque prettiness that doesn't suit the action at all. More damagingly, Mr. Dickerson does nothing to keep his cast from chewing up the mountain scenery. [16 Apr 1994, p.11]

The film's outstanding nastiness, which is often diabolically funny until a poorly staged final battle sequence simply takes things too far, has something real and recognizable at its core.

Mr. Parker immerses his audience in a world in which popular art amounts to a communal high, a means of achieving identity and a great escape from the abundant problems of everyday life. As in Fame, he does this with a mixture of annoying glibness and undeniable high-voltage style. [14 Aug 1991, p.C11]

There's a lot to make [Heckerling's] film likeable, but not much to hold it together.

Schumacher almost invariably breathes more life into his material than he has here. It's a lot easier to tick off the forced, farfetched touches in Eight Millimeter than to count the ones that ring true.

Slinky, sexy Love Jones brings new life to an old story: a courtship and all its predictable detours on the road to romance, with a boy-meets-girl inexorability along the way to love.

The filmmaker has borrowed from Chekhov the soul-baring introspection that can be so ineffable on the page or stage yet becomes so damply sensitive and dramatically vague on screen.

The usual elements of scheming and deception are well represented here, but they are made all the knottier by shifting time frames.

It isn't nearly as successful a showcase for this filmmaker's extraordinary talents.

Mr. Fleischer brings absolutely no playfulness to what might, at least, have been enjoyably light. And he brings out the worst in a cast that was ill-chosen to begin with. The most memorable thing about the film is the costume/production design by Danilo Donati, which is genuinely demented. Even the horses wear too much junk jewelry.

Directed by Dwight Little of "Free Willy 2," and written by onetime high school classmates, Wayne Beach and David Hodgin (Mr. Hodgin died in 1995), Murder at 1600 eagerly invokes other films and stock images without showing much style of its own.

If Ed Wood has a major failing, it's the lack of momentum. Wood's career had nowhere to go, and to some extent the film has the same problem.

It's a film to gall fans of the old television series and perplex anyone else.

A supremely elegant and thoughtful parable.

High Heels has no real mirth and not even enough energy to keep it lively.

The results are so disastrous that absolutely no one is shown off to good advantage, with the possible exception of the hairdressers involved.

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

Toy Soldiers is a crisp, suspenseful thriller well tailored to the tastes of teen-age audiences, who will doubtless appreciate such touches as the equivalent microchips found in one student's radio-controlled airplane and the chief terrorist's detonator, which is rigged to blow up the entire school.

All things considered, Benji's ability to hold the viewer's interest is remarkable, as is his sweetness with the cubs and his fearlessness with larger, predatory types. Adults are likely to stay alert, and any child who has so much as petted a poodle will probably find the animal footage irresistible.

Obtuse, prettily decorative comedy. Characters burst gaily into song when, as often happens, they don't have anything better to do.

Mr. Frankenheimer relies on standard touches at times, but he also fills The Fourth War with interesting little asides.