Janet Maslin

The frontiersmen are wild and woolly, and most of the Indians remain scalp-collecting savages. [13 Sep 1980, p.C14]

A movie that's barely there. The McKenzies are genial enough, and once in a while they're vaguely funny. But their film is so ephemeral that you may hardly be aware of watching it, even while it's going on.

The theme music, from Neil Young's "Rust Never Sleeps" album, is a haunting accompaniment to Mr. Hopper's sometimes stunning imagery. The best moments of "Out of the Blue" have both the beauty and the banality of found art.

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

As the family film least insulting to its audience's intelligence this season, Mouse Hunt has its share of grown-up appeal along with mouse mischief guaranteed to have children giggling.

An astonishingly lazy and perfunctory effort that does little to realize his (Carrey) comic potential.

Mr. Walken, as Frank, does a memorable job of taking a fanciful projection of corruption, greed and complacency, giving it intelligence, and making it flesh and blood.

As for the actual movie, it's the empty-calorie equivalent of a Happy Meal (another Batman tie-in), so clearly a product that the question of its cinematic merit is strictly an afterthought.

Muriel's Wedding runs into trouble when it looks for poignancy too openly, working better at giddy moments than in its occasional sad ones. Most of the time, Mr. Hogan keeps his story light and surprising.

The Belly of an Architect does have a humanizing element in the form of Mr. Dennehy, who brings a robust physicality to Kracklite without missing the essentially cerebral nature of the role; this is one of the best things he has done.

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.

Summer Rental is a wan but good-natured hot-weather comedy, with a big debt to National Lampoon's Vacation plus a few nice touches of its own.

Makes mincemeat of an excellent novel.

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.

Back to the Future deserved a chance to come back, especially under the cheerful, enterprising, mathematically minded stewardship of Mr. Zemeckis and Mr. Gale. Their new film isn't an ordinary sequel. It's as if the earlier film had been squared.

Mr. Martin and Mr. Candy are an easy twosome to watch even with marginal material, though, and the film is never worse than slow.

Hard to believe that real emotion was involved anywhere in this story.

The film is best watched as a richly sensual stylistic exercise filled with audaciously beautiful imagery, captivating symmetries and brilliantly facile tricks.

Eventually, it becomes clear that neither Wren nor the movie is going anywhere, since the character never becomes any more thoughtful or less selfish than she was to begin with, and since her bouncing between Paul and Eric has become both predictable and strained. But before it runs out of steam, Smithereens is ragged, funny and eccentric. It has as much life as the indefatigable Wren, and that's plenty.

Mr. Coppola has done things this fancily before, but never with so clear and moving a sense of purpose.

A broad, low comedy full of speech defects and pratfalls.

Each beer-guzzling marathon inevitably leads to one of those bathroom scenes that provide the film with just about its only jokes.

A whopping wrong turn throws this lightweight, benign-looking movie terminally off course.

Philip Borsos, who directed ''The Grey Fox,'' builds the suspense of The Mean Season slowly and, for the most part, very effectively.

The story it tells, of 19th-century ghosts and scoundrels in Byelorussia, is potentially of some interest. But the tale is presented in a drab and confusing fashion by film makers with only the faintest command of their craft.

A delectable comic performance by Sharon Stone.

Beyond its grit and nonchalance, this story has a resigned, reflective, hard-earned wisdom that's unusual in an American film about such familiarly lurid subject matter. It's even more unusual in a film by Spike Lee.

Apparently too much eye of newt got into the formula for Hocus Pocus, transforming a potentially wicked Bette Midler vehicle into an unholy mess. That's too bad, since Ms. Midler's appearance in a role like the one she has here could have been pure witchcraft.

[Grand Canyon] eventually pulls its punches, taking an unconvincingly beatific look at the problems and dangers that have been so persuasively outlined in what has come before. But until it hits that false note, Mr. Kasdan's film is at least as fascinating as it is amorphous.

The latest Irwin Allen disaster movie is When Time Ran Out, which is waxen even by Mr. Allen's standards.

Mr. Weir's work has a delicacy, gentleness, even wispiness that would seem not well suited to the subject. And yet his film has an uncommon beauty, warmth and immediacy, and a touch of the mysterious, too.

This one is clumsy, mean spirited and amazingly unmusical.

If you don't share the film's piercing vision of what really matters, someday you will.

Nine Months is slick, phony and uneven, but it's often raucously funny too. And Mr. Grant displays enough intelligence and sportsmanship to emerge from this ordeal as a major Hollywood star.

The don't quite do for "Oklahoma!" what they did for heavy metal, but they come close. [31 Jan 1997, p.C6]

Certainly, this is a gently evocative movie, with its glimpses of a strict and self-contained culture, and its memories of a time gone by.

Everywhere the camera turns in this tense and volatile drama, it finds enough interest for a truckload of conventional Hollywood fare. Whatever its limitations, Cop Land has talent to burn.

And Willow, a pleasant but bland character, doesn't often inspire much sentiment, so the film lacks an emotional center. In place of this, it relies on so much overstatement and repetition that it's possible to grow tired even of the adorable baby.

Kika" is actually one of this film maker's more buoyant recent efforts, a sly, rambunctious satire that moves along merrily until it collapses -- as many Almodovar films finally do -- under the weight of its own clutter.

Mr. Stallone displays an unexpected gameness, even a flair, for the kind of broadly durable comedy that is the television sitcom's specialty. It works a lot better than might have been expected. Mr. Stallone may not be a comic genius, but he's definitely a sport.

Warm, affecting and refreshingly shtickless, he (Carrey) occupies center stage here through sheer, beguiling force of personality.

Steven Spielberg's soberly magnificent new war film, the second such pinnacle in a career of magical versatility, has been made in the same spirit of urgent communication. It is the ultimate devastating letter home.

Threadbare as it's beginning to look, the Superman series hasn't lost its raison d'etre. There's life in the old boy yet.

''It's such a fine line between stupid and . . . '' ''And clever,'' muse the band members collectively. It certainly is- and the delightful This Is Spinal Tap stays on the right side of that line.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a slight, good-humored film that's a lot more painless than might have been expected. Ms. Swanson's funny, deadpan delivery holds the story together reasonably well, as does the state-of-the-art Val-speak that constitutes most of Buffy's dialogue.

The movie may have been conceived in a spirit of merriment, but watching it feels like playing shuffleboard at the absolute insistence of a bossy shipboard social director. When whimsy gets to be this overbearing, it simply isn't whimsy any more.

With a too-many-cooks screenplay credited to Ron Osborn, Jeff Reno, Kevin Wade and Bo Goldman, it's so long that every character regrettably wears out his or her welcome.

Aiming at a target as easy as suburban sterility, She's Having a Baby might be expected to hit its mark every now and then. But the film's mood is simply too sour, despite the best efforts of a cast filled with appealing actors, a number of whom have had walk-ons in other Hughes efforts.

It has a breezy, unapologetic manner. And it also happens to be funny, which goes a long way toward making up for any underlying obtuseness or insensitivity.

Ghoulish interest is a prerequisite for watching Mira Sorvino (as a bold and athletic entomologist) act against performers who have mandibles, or for appreciating the care with which nymph, juvenile and adult insect villains have been devised.

Code of Silence, as directed by Andy Davis, has a slick look and adequate pacing, though its action sequences tend to fizzle as they end.

An anarchic, often hilarious adventure in dial-spinning, a collection of brief skits and wacko parodies that are sometimes quite clever, though they're just as often happily sophomoric, too.

While Mr. Howard ably maintains a strong forward momentum, Backdraft often feels directionless beneath its overlay of frantic activity. One clear story line would have been worth more than a series of subplots and tangents.

With a score by Giorgio Moroder, and with ingenious costumes that are utterly au courant, Flashdance contains such dynamic dance scenes that it's a pity there's a story here to bog them down.

The five young stars would have mixed well even without the fraudulent encounter-group candor towardS which The Breakfast Club forces them. Mr. Hughes, having thought up the characters and simply flung them together, should have left well enough alone.

With great looks, a dandy supporting cast, a zinger-filled screenplay by Aaron Sorkin ("A Few Good Men") and Mr. Douglas twinkling merrily in the Oval Office, The American President is sunny enough to make the real Presidency pale by comparison.

Though The King of Comedy seems less substantial than past De Niro-Scorsese collaborations, it's a funny, stinging film in which there's much to enjoy. Miss Abbott, Mr. De Niro, Mr. Lewis and the unforgettably alarming Sandra Bernhard (as a fan even crazier than Rupert, and one who looks like an enraged ostrich) deliver fine performances, and the film's satirical edge can indeed be cutting.

Bewildering at some points and ineffectual at others, but it isn't dull. Its frankly grandiose style is transporting in its way, as is the story itself, even in this watered-down form.

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.

The film, like Nikita herself, becomes more conventionally sleek and less interestingly bizarre as it moves along.

Benny and Joon is a dangerously fanciful story of cute eccentrics, characters whose quirks are the very essence of their appeal. Some of us experience a form of red alert at the very notion of adorable oddballs on screen, but Benny and Joon turns out to be remarkably benign in that regard.

The enjoyment in Vincent and Theo comes more from the director's attention to art history than from his ability to interpret it anew.

Made in the shadow of Wayne's World, CB4 is another Saturday Night Live-related music parody, this time skewering rap instead of heavy metal. Desperately uneven, it works best as a string of sketches about the title band, three guys who were born Albert (Chris Rock), Otis (Deezer D) and Euripides (Allen Payne) until they realized it might be more profitable to rename themselves MC Gusto, Stab Master Arson and Dead Mike.

Mr. Garcia gives one of his sleeker dreamboat performances.

Even more dispiriting than the film's silly moments are its pious ones. Only at rare moments does Life Stinks offer much in the way of surprise or grace.

This film often fumbles, but it finally tugs at the heartstrings all the same.

Alternately grisly and dull, with few surprises.

A confused horror film custom-designed for those who prefer their scares set in a clean, comfortable, architecturally correct atmosphere, rather than the usual Gothic settings.

It's too bad that Mr. Wrye's bungling renders the story sob-proof, because injured-athlete sagas are usually so hard to resist.

If marijuana has a way of heightening the hilarious aspects of things that might not otherwise be funny, then this is very much a marijuana movie. But Nice Dreams also has a more general appeal than that. These are high spirits that don't have to do with being high.

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.

Runaway doesn't stint on the gizmos, and its inventiveness in that respect is its best feature; it comes up with, among other things, foot-long metallic spiders with a deadly sting and heat-seeking bullets that can be programmed to track specific human targets.

Treats its characters seriously and doesn't resort to the obvious very often.

Inherently condescending, and finally awash in warm-bath sentimentality, this setup never goes out of style.

Only the film's resolution has any spirit or novelty, and even that goes all the way back to the Roman Colosseum. Quicker than you can say "Spartacus," two fighters figure out that their real enemy is outside the ring.

Fry's warmly sympathetic performance finds the gentleness beneath the wit. He conveys the sense of a man at the mercy of forces he cannot control, not least of them his own brittle genius.

Mr. Sonnenfeld repeats some of the first film's favorite visual stunts without wearing out their welcome, and he sustains much more exuberance than a sequel might be expected to have. The cast, which now includes Carol Kane playing Granny Addams, remains foolproof and great fun.

Ms. Midler's performance manages to be both involving and wildly inconsistent. The story is so full of holes that both she and Ms. Alvarado sometimes experience full personality changes from scene to scene.

It's a film specializing in smoky, down-at-the-heels glamour, and in the kind of smart, slangy dialogue that sounds right without necessarily having much to say.

A blazing, unlikely triumph about a man who is nobody's idea of a movie hero. Smart, funny, shamelessly entertaining and perfectly serious too.

Rocky V takes him out of his gilded cage and back to the director (John G. Avildsen), the settings and the underdog's outlook that made him famous in the first place. It's a smart move. There's life in the old boy yet.

This escapist comedy is so cheerfully outlandish that it's hard to resist, and so good-hearted that it's genuinely endearing.

What sustains The New Age through these falterings are its edgy stars, its lively unpredictability, and the essential seriousness of Mr. Tolkin's thoughts. Even when working in an atypically upbeat mode, in a film that never dares follow its dark prophecy to the bitter end, he sustains a disturbing frankness. [16 Sept 1994, p.C5]

Cutthroat Island proves too stupidly smutty for children, too cartoonish for sane adults and not racy enough for anyone who regards Ms. Davis in a tight-laced bodice as its main attraction. The only serious incentive for seeing this spectacle is a fascination with extravagance, since Cutthroat Island is indeed scenic, hectic and big.

A hilariously brazen comedy whose heroine is an improbable hoot.

St. Elmo's Fire is most appealing when it simply gives the actors a chance to flirt with the camera, and with one another. When it attempts to take seriously the problems of characters who are spoiled, affluent and unbearably smug, it becomes considerably less attractive.

David's habit of grabbing, berating or otherwise challenging anyone who insults him gives School Ties a muscular quality not usually found in films about this subject.

The classiest of concert movies, even if that sounds as if it ought to be a contradiction in terms. As photographed by Gerald Feil and Caleb Deschanel (of ''The Black Stallion''), it looks glorious, particularly in the opening sequences at an outdoor arena.

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.

Mr. Woo orchestrates his giddy, daring stunts on a newly spectacular level. There's plenty of physical audacity on screen.

There are times when The Shawshank Redemption comes dangerously close to sounding one of those "triumph of the spirit" notes. But most of it is eloquently restrained.

Carlito's Way is best watched as lively, colorful posturing and as a fine demonstration of this director's bravura visual style.

The film has energy even when it hasn't much sense, in a manner that will strike most non-cultists as exhausting.

A film that is especially impressive for the courage, intelligence and restraint with which it tackles an impossible task...What it can do, and does to such a surprising degree, is to bring the characters to life and offer fleeting glimpses into the heart of Mr. Lowry's tragedy.

Hope and Glory has an invitingly nostalgic spirit and a fine eye for the magical details that a little boy might notice.

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.

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.

Pared down to a farfetched plot and paper-thin motives, the story relies on an overload of tangential subplots to keep it looking busy. [3 Apr 1996, p.C15]

The film, which is better written than staged, could have been funnier if its actors weren't playing against type.

Mr. Whaley has to work too hard to be antic in the early, Ferris Bueller-type scenes, but he gets much better in more easygoing moments. The gorgeous Ms. Connelly is more model than actress, but by those standards she is relatively lively.

It exaggerates real, recognizable attitudes in a manner that intends to be disturbing.

THE view of the future offered by Ridley Scott's muddled yet mesmerizing Blade Runner is as intricately detailed as anything a science-fiction film has yet envisioned.

A stunning feat of literary adaptation as well as a purely cinematic triumph.

The film does nothing to accommodate Mr. Pryor's singular comic talents...It keeps the crazy premise but does away with such essential ingredients as funny material and antic timing.

Fortunately, most of the film is more appealing than its premise.

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.

Directed with a spare look and exceptional crispness and precision, The Trigger Effect ultimately falls back on the familiar, especially in its banal ideas of how Matt and Annie are changed by their experience. But during the three-day emergency that it describes, this cleverly made film sustains a spooky intensity and an insinuating, utterly confident style.

Still, as the documentary plods past the two-hour mark, much of Mr. McGovern's legend seems dependent on Nixon's faults, and even the Democrat's political supporters, with hindsight's many gifts, can't infuse his persona with any more dynamism.

The series now lacks all of its original stars and much of its earlier determination. It has morphed into something less innocent and more derivative than it used to be, something the noncultist is ever less likely to enjoy.

It has a light touch, a disarming cast, a well-developed sense of humor and a lot of charm. [27 Feb 1987, p.C17]

The pace is so plodding and the dialogue so unwaveringly banal … that the film can't rise to the extraordinary sensations it means to capture.

Lifeforce shows off Mr. Hooper's way with a whirling mass of protoplasm, just as Poltergeist did. But its style is shrill and fragmented enough to turn Lifeforce into hysterical vampire porn.

Streetwalkin' isn't exactly full of surprises. But it certainly moves.

October is early, but not too early to acknowledge Harmony Korine's Gummo as the worst film of the year. No conceivable competition will match the sourness, cynicism and pretension of Mr. Korine's debut feature.

It remains the most structurally elegant and sneakily playful of thrillers. At least some things never change.

As directed by Howard Zieff, My Girl has a bizarrely light tone and an awkward pace, in part because it's hard for the director to keep track of the story's many half-developed subplots.

One more film that could have been helped by excising repetition and focusing performances, but it wanders almost randomly instead. The heart-piercing moments that punctuate its rambling are glimpses of what a tighter film might have been.

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 Nightmare Before Christmas is a major step forward for both stop-motion animation, which is stunningly well used, and for Mr. Burton himself. He now moves from the level of extremely talented eccentric to that of Disney-style household word.

The Pirate Movie stars Kristy McNichol and Christopher Atkins in a cut-rate kiddie version of Gilbert and Sullivan, laced with synthetic pop ballads and leavened with infantile dirty jokes.

The heads may be dead, but at least they have a comical look.

Polyester is not Mr. Waters's ordinary movie. It's a very funny one, with a hip, stylized humor that extends beyond the usual limitations of his outlook.

Working Girl is enjoyable even when it isn't credible, which is most of the time. The film, like its heroine, has a genius for getting by on pure charm.

Not even bags of body parts, a bitten-off tongue or a man forced to cut off a pound of his own flesh keep it from being dull.

In the process of drawing audiences into the twists and turns of a knotty detective tale, Mr. Franklin and his cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto, open up an enticing and languorous lost world.

Kirk Jones, who wrote and directed this blithe comedy, has been a prize-winning director of television commercials. And he has the knack of finding rubbery, expressive faces and letting each villager's quirks emerge on cue.

Little Shop of Horrors isn't uniformly entertaining, nor is its score always entirely audible; the musical dubbing is at times very awkward. But its best moments are delightful enough to make the slow stretches unimportant.

Nobody could shine in the listless atmosphere created by Phillip Noyce's perfunctory direction. And nobody could do much with a line like "Zeke, I want to have a real relationship." Or "Listen, do you work out?"

The process whereby Loretta and Ronny fall in love is a lot less appealing than the large-family drama unfolding around the Castorinis' kitchen table. [16 Dec 1987, p.C22]

Mr. Schepisi's directorial vigor wins out over his film's skittishness. This version may horrify purists, but it winds up working entertainingly on its own broader, flashier terms.

Even those who would never, without the urging of wild horses, dream of attending a film about the seamy world of heavy-metal music are sure to find Penelope Spheeris's The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years of unexpected interest.

Deep inside the vague, unfocused excesses of The Bodyguard, the tale of a buttoned-down security agent hired to protect a glamorous pop star, there lurks the potential for a compelling film noir.

Instead, Mr. Carrey turns up in a sloppy second Ace Ventura film that's little more than an echo of the first. A two-minute trailer wouldn't miss many of its highlights.

The Black Hole is attractively unpretentious and at times quite snappy.

As a film maker who has his own love-hate romance with the sports world, Mr. Shelton is naturally drawn to his writer's uneasy relationship to Cobb. And at its best, this film explores the edgy compromises that link these two, while at worst it dramatizes the relationship broadly and histrionically.

Brilliantly eccentric even when it yields mixed results.

With the warmly engaging presence of Mr. Washington to keep it at least half-credible, and with a brooding and literate noir screenplay by Nicholas Kazan, ''Fallen'' was directed by Gregory Hoblit with the same dark intensity of his earlier feature ''Primal Fear.''

Though the film has its basis in an actual event that took place in St. Louis, it takes on the homogeneous look of many other thrillers in which an emergency escalates into a paramilitary operation.

The new film has at least some of its predecessor's appeal. But it can't match the first film's novelty, or recapture the excitement of watching a great comic character like Axel Foley as he first came to life.

Amusing but sloppy and overcomplicated.

Though Mr. Holland's handling of his stars is successful enough to establish him as a newcomer with promise, his material here is uneven and often flat.

One of the many problems with Gus Van Sant's tortured, worked-over Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is that Sissy Hankshaw talks like a novel, and a dated one at that.

Krull is a gentle, pensive sci-fi adventure film that winds up a little too moody and melancholy for the Star Wars set, though that must be the audience at which it is aimed.

The characters remain funny and likable, and they all live on Earth.

This poisonous, brazenly autobiographical comedy shows off the best of Mr. Allen's misanthropic humor.

It's the kind of story that leaves viewers with a warm glow.

This time Mr. Altman, such a stunningly intuitive portraitist when he truly plumbs the mysteries that guide his characters, works without inventiveness and with glaring nonchalance.

It's a pleasant but fairly standard movie about a subject that's anything but.

However good an idea it may have been to unleash Mr. Murray in an ''Exorcist''-like setting, this film hasn't gotten very far past the idea stage. Its jokes, characters and story line are as wispy as the ghosts themselves, and a good deal less substantial.

A richly detailed tale of passion, perfidy and revenge adapted from a typically tricky Ruth Rendell novel.

Humorous slashings and car accidents constitute similar high points in a film that is glaringly short on ''Scream''-style self-mockery to match its dopey mayhem.

Based on Alice Hoffman's fanciful novel and directed with go-for-broke prettiness by Griffin Dunne, Practical Magic is nothing but a guilty pleasure.

As written by Remi Waterhouse, who draws on real historical detail here, Ridicule satirizes this world of absurd protocol while it proves that skewering fatuousness and snobbery, however obviously, is never out of style.

Since this is thoroughly tongue in cheek, Tank Girl has a likable brashness, even when breathless, pointless plotting threatens to eclipse the movie's charms. Chief among its strong points is Lori Petty, a buzz-cut fashion plate in a Prozac necklace, who brings the necessary gusto to Tank Girl's flippancy.

The enthusiastically nutty Color of Night has the single-mindedness of a bad dream, and about as much reliance on everyday logic.

[The writers/directors] show easygoing humor and the wisdom to borrow well. Their film at various times recalls tenderhearted coming-of-age comedies from "American Graffiti" onward, with strong homage to the works of Cameron Crowe, Amy Heckerling and John Hughes.

Mr. Brooks's vision of ''Star Wars'' and its underlying silliness cannot help but wear thin. But Spaceballs has none of the aggressively unfunny humor that has marred some of Mr. Brooks's other recent efforts, and its spirits remain consistently high.

Benigni effectively creates a situation in which comedy is courage. And he draws from this an unpretentious, enormously likable film that plays with history both seriously and mischievously. Piety has no place here, nor do tears until the final reel. Life is Beautiful plays by its own rules

With warmth, wit and none of the usual overlay of nostalgia, King of the Hill presents the scary yet liberating precariousness of life on the edge.

Risky as it sounds, Raising Cain is enjoyable precisely because it makes the most of its own lunacy and stays so far out on a limb. The fact that Raising Cain is beautifully made is, of course, another attraction.

In Volcano, the thrills are so well wrought that they eventually lose their novelty and become numbing.

The tedium of this antidrinking hoodlum's tale inspires the wrong kind of longing entirely.

Blind Date is farce of a traditional and even old-fashioned sort, but Mr. Edwards's complete enthusiasm for the form creates a comic style so avid that it's slightly surreal. Comic possibilities are everywhere in Blind Date, and the tireless Mr. Edwards leaves none of them unexploited.

All of the performers are upstaged by the film's breathtaking backdrop, and by the fast and furious way Renny Harlin, the director, approaches action sequences.

Mr. Apted has made this a sweet, engaging movie that audiences will very much want to see end well.

An enjoyably half-baked movie, and if it were any less farfetched it would be less fun.

A marvel of skillful animation, witty songwriting and smart planning. It is designed to delight filmgoers of every conceivable stripe.

Though it dedicates itself to avoiding directorial egotism, in accordance with strict rules of the Danish filmmakers' collective known as Dogma 95, Thomas Vinterberg's Celebration is still a virtuoso feat.

The film's many voids are not meaningfully filled by all the monsters and assembly-line workers that crop up.

Miss Rivers's jokes mostly have to do with racial stereotypes and the essential revoltingness of pregnancy, but a few of them are funny just the same. However, as a director, Miss Rivers is forever sandbagging her own scenes, throwing away a good chuckle in a sequence that desperately needs a punch line, or wasting something fairly subtle right after a broad, dopey joke about a urine sample.

With its devilish attention to polite little touches, its abundant bitchiness, its decrying of the Handmaids' oppression along with its tacit celebration of their fecundity, The Handmaid's Tale is a shrewd if preposterous cautionary tale that strikes a wide range of resonant chords.

However turbulent its narrative, this Les Miserables unfolds in a comforting style, serious and intelligent in ways that seem much too quaint today. The essence of Hugo's morality tale remains pure, and so does the value of a vigorous, gripping story, straightforwardly told.

The slackest and most harebrained of Mr. Eastwood's recent movies. It is overlong and virtually uneventful, even though there are half a dozen cute characters and woolly subplots competing for the viewer's attentions.

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.

Even after the film's last half-hour descends into a silly season, Mr. Rudolph writes and directs with obvious affection for his characters and with a deep knowledge of whatever makes them tick.

Despite its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time, its superstar cast and its $23 million budget, Mr. Babenco's Ironweed is skeletal, a mere outline of Mr. Kennedy's far more resonant book.

No Mercy is a passionate film noir that depends heavily upon Mr. Gere to give it credence, and Mr. Gere delivers.

Smith's knowing humor and unruffled style make a good antidote to gender chaos. Music by David Pirner contributes to the film's loose, inviting mood.

Renaldo and Clara is so personal it borders on being obscure, yet it remains surprisingly deficient in personality.

A triumphant, cleverly disorienting journey through a demimonde that springs entirely from Mr. Tarantino's ripe imagination, a landscape of danger, shock, hilarity, and vibrant local color. Nothing is predictable or familiar within this irresistably bizarre world. You don't merely enter a theater to see Pulp Fiction; you go down a rabbit hole.

Mr. Pryor is especially successful in presenting Mr. Scott as a man who guards his energy and intelligence carefully, betraying very little to his enemies and saving a great deal for the moments that matter.

The characters and their jargon are occasionally amusing, but there's no action, no conflict, no overwhelming satire and nothing to jolt them out of their lethargy.

A lively, well-constructed film with a large and appealing cast.

The third in a 3-D series, as in Jaws 3-D or now Amityville 3-D, simply isn't a good idea. Once the first two films in a series have exhausted most opportunities for action, the third is liable to average half a dozen exposition scenes for every eventful episode. And 3-D exposition is the stuff of which headaches are made.

This film has showier stunts than its predecessors, and a better sense of humor. It also has Tina Turner, in chain-mail stockings.

By the time it plays out its hand, this film has become genuinely, surprisingly affecting. And unspeakably sad.

It cares far more about herding audiences into theaters than about what they hear or see.

With down-to-earth comic instincts, it simply invests its story with a loud ring of truth.

The narrative manages 30 solid minutes of ingenuity, before breaking into a version of Charlie Kaufman-style absurdity.

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

Mortal Thoughts has a good cast and a lot to recommend it, but what it doesn't have is the kind of dramatic payoff that makes so much extended buildup and explanation seem worthwhile.

Never succeeds in becoming either torrid or scary. It does generate a few chuckles in its depiction of what are supposedly the workings of a chic and hard-hitting magazine...The Crush is for the most part grindingly predictable and mechanically played.

We've seen movies like Nighthawks before, but we haven't seen one in a while. That may be why this police film, with an international cast and a plot about international terrorism, has so much punch. All of it is standard stuff, and yet Nighthawks has been assembled with enough pep to make it feel fresh. It is particularly helped by the performances of Rutger Hauer, a Dutch actor who makes a startling impression as a cold-blooded fiend, and Sylvester Stallone, from whom less is definitely more.

Traveller is just a hot little sleeper with strong characters and a story to tell.

Miami Blues is best appreciated for the performances of its stars and for the kinds of funny, scene-stealing peripheral touches that keep it lively even when it's less than fully convincing.

The Hot Spot, his film noir set in a small, sex-starved Texas backwater, is the closest Mr. Hopper has yet come to working within the bounds of a familiar genre. Nevertheless, The Hot Spot bears the film maker's idiosyncratic stamp all the way.

Joel Schumacher, director and ringmaster, piles on the flashy showmanship and keeps the film as big, bold, noisy and mindlessly overwhelming as possible.

At two hours and 14 minutes, the movie is a lot longer than it needs to be. On the other hand, Elliott (whose beeps and bomps and chomping sounds are supplied by Charlie Callas) is very sweet and emotive, and you don't often see children's musicals as ambitious as this one any more.

Innocent Blood, which could easily have been titled "A French Vampire in Pittsburgh" in homage to one of Mr. Landis's earlier triumphs, is even more dependent on gruesome special effects than "An American Werewolf in London" was, and is a lot less imaginative.

Andrew Bergman has written one of those rare comedy scripts that escalates steadily and hilariously, without faltering or even having to strain for an ending.

Breakin' 2 slights dramatic matters to concentrate exclusively on dancing. The movie contains so much of it that it's exhausting even to watch, but at least the choreography isn't being executed by John Travolta.

If Mr. Linklater is not entirely at ease with action sequences (or with the obligatory having-fun montage once the brothers become successful), he still makes this (after ''Before Sunrise'' and ''Suburbia'') another admirable directorial stretch.

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

The material here is slick and entertaining, and Mr. Sandrich settles for comic simplicity without reaching for anything more. He coaxes the film along at a cheerfully breakneck rhythm. Zany, zany but nice.

This film maker's supremely tactile, sensual style and his taste for exoticism are captivatingly on display in Stealing Beauty, even if the film's philosophizing sometimes lacks the intellectual heft of a cotton puff.

Easy Money is strictly for the easy laughers, or at least for those who find Rodney Dangerfield an irresistible card. Mr. Dangerfield has some funny moments here, but he also has a screen presence that's decidedly strange. He won't stand still, being given to constant jerking motions, and neither will he refrain from eye rolling and mugging at the slightest opportunity. Almost never, during the course of a very long 95 minutes, do these tics have anything to do with what is ostensibly going on.

One of Mr. Stallone's more muddled efforts but by no means a flop on the order of F.I.S.T. or Rhinestone.

It's harmless but unsurprising...Without Steven Spielberg's timing or John Williams's music, the shark's periodic visits become feeding scenes rather than ferocious attacks. It's like watching someone make regular raids on a refrigerator in search of midnight snacks.

It tells a finely nuanced tale of right, wrong and the gray area in between.

An enjoyable, second-rate family drama rich in the kind of folk wisdom that can ordinarily be found on daytime television.

It's a modest and sentimental movie, but also one that, on its own terms, accomplishes what it means to.

There are no signs of waning energy here, not even in an Enterprise crew that looks ever more ready for intergalactic rocking chairs. The principals' enthusiasm for their material has never seemed to fade. If anything, that enthusiasm grows more appealingly nutty with time.

As directed by Irvin Kershner, Never Say Never Again has noticeably more humor and character than the Bond films usually provide. It has a marvelous villain in Largo.

It succeeds as a reasonably smart no-brainer. If you've ever had a yen to relive the third grade, this must be the next best thing.

While this film's conception of a terrorist threat is apparent early on, its strength lies in a string of ingenious little surprises.

Style overwhelms substance by default.

The territory where the circus sideshow meets the avant-garde...visually arresting, dramatically blurry.

Medicine Man transports a lot of Hollywood-style hot air to the remote jungle outpost where Dr. Campbell has accidentally stumbled upon a cancer-reversing formula.

It must be said that Berkowitz's shamelessness and persistence aren't inevitably irresistible.

A gentle and affecting film that ought to charm older children while also holding their parents' interest,

A film that not only breaks the cross-dressing barrier but also ratchets up the violence level for children's animation.

Particularly impressive are the sweet, weirdly idyllic tone of Mr. Hallstrom's direction and Johnny Depp's tender, disarming performance as the long-suffering Gilbert Grape.

My Bodyguared is a sweet little movie about characters who really seem to be people, and that sort of verisimilitude is rarer than it ought to be nowadays.

This film's dialogue isn't much more literate than a bus schedule, but its plotting is smart and breathless enough to make up for that.

The Scent of the Green Papaya marks a luxuriant, visually seductive debut for Mr. Hung, whose film is often so wordlessly evocative that it barely needs dialogue. Reaching into the past for its precisely drawn memories, it casts a rich, delicate spell.

The actors can't keep the film's mood from verging on hysteria as the story roams all over the map.

The best that can be said about Mr. Gibson as a director -- and this is no mean achievement -- is that it's often possible to forget he was the man behind the camera. Most of this film has a crisp, picturesque look and a believable manner.

The film is all fast action, noisy stunts and huge, often unflattering close-ups, but it packs an undeniable wallop.

This feisty, disjointed film finds something compelling in its characters even when they're so druggy they can barely stand.

The movie is so sour that its humor is often undermined, because so many of the jokes are either mean-spirited or scatological, or both. Women are either explicitly predatory or stupidly decorative, and homosexuals are made fun of regularly. Bathroom jokes are everywhere. Flamboyantly bad taste, which Mr. Brooks raised to the level of supreme wit in his ''Springtime for Hitler'' number in ''The Producers,'' is this time just bad.

A parade of incongruities, with performances ranging from the sublime to the you-know-what.

As stomach-turning as might be expected, but it has a lot going for it: clever special effects, a good leading performance and a villain so chatty he practically makes this a human-interest story.

It's genial, not too frightening and even rather sweet.

Oh Heavenly Dog is diverting enough for its dog tricks - I like dog tricks, don't get me wrong - but it otherwise shows few signs of life, and many signs of depressing modernism.

As directed by Irwin Winkler, Night and the City is colorfully acted and refreshingly free of all the moody cliches such a story might be expected to thrive on. But it is also saddled with overly busy direction that sometimes interferes with the dialogue, making Mr. Price's long, perversely elegant conversational riffs hard to hear.

What matters more is that Ms. Goldberg, along with her co-stars Mary-Louise Parker and Drew Barrymore, is so sharp, funny and wholehearted that this film creates an unexpected groundswell of real emotion.

Bird is less moving as a character study than it is as a tribute and as a labor of love. The portrait it offers, though hazy at times, is one Charlie Parker's admirers will recognize.

The stunning black-and-white cinematography in Francis Coppola's Rumble Fish functions rather like a cold compress, subduing a film that is otherwise all feverish extremes.

Prince of the City begins with the strength and confidence of a great film, and ends merely as a good one. The achievement isn't what it first promises to be, but it's exciting and impressive all the same.

Has the elements of an emotionally gripping story. Yet is feels less like a romance than like a coffee-table book celebrating the magic of special effect. [6 July 1994, p. C9]

Pushing Hands, which was made before "The Wedding Banquet" and "Eat Drink Man Woman," is a smaller film than its successors, but it has much the same emphasis on everyday kindness and respect, along with discreetly traditional values.

Newell's ensemble timing and breezily sardonic style make it work better than might be expected.

It's a shock to find Neil Simon's name attached to something as resoundingly unfunny as The Slugger's Wife.

P.C.U. turns out to be a surprisingly lame and unfocused campus comedy, one that pays remarkably little attention to its own comic possibilities.

Mr. Clark's vision of these characters is so bleak and legitimately shocking that it makes almost any other portrait of American adolescence look like the picture of Dorian Gray...Kids is far too serious to be tarred as exploitation, and its extremism is both artful and devastatingly effective. Think of this not as cinema verite but as a new strain of post-apocalyptic science fiction, using hyperbole to magnify a kernel of terrible, undeniable truth.

Though both stars are sometimes eclipsed when the film strains for big action episodes, Mr. Duchovny sustains enough cool, deadpan intellect and suppressed passion to give the story a center. Ms. Armstrong has the harsher, more restrictive role, but she plays it with familiar hardboiled glamour.

What redeems the film's surface bitterness are sharp observations, laceratingly funny dialogue and something Dedee claims to find especially loathsome: a secret heart of gold.

Startlingly original at first, Wings of Desire is in the end damagingly overloaded. The excesses of language, the ceaseless camera movement, the unyielding whimsy have the ultimate effect of wearing the audience down. (Review of Original Release)

The film transcends racial divisions by bestowing equally hopeless dialogue on both sides.

Johnny Dangerously winds down as it moves along, eventually descending to a lowest common denominator of dopey adolescent gags that overpower the parody. Still, even at its thinnest, it remains good-humored and intermittently entertaining.

By no means lacking in stylishness; if anything, it's got style to spare. But so many of its sequences are at fever pitch, and the mood varies so drastically from episode to episode, that the pace becomes pointless, even taxing, after a while.

Written as a book-length harangue from its heroine's point of view, and directed efficiently by Taylor Hackford, Dolores Claiborne has become a vivid film that revolves around Ms. Bates's powerhouse of a performance.

An ambitious, energetic thriller that stops short of real excitement for reasons that are hard to pinpoint. It's an entertaining movie, and an extremely well-acted one.

Some routines work a lot better than others, but the whole film sparkles with a boisterous lunacy that's perfectly in keeping with the frenzy of the fans.

The very appealing Mr. Garcia has an intense, studied cool that is nicely offset by bilingual outbursts. And Mr. Gere makes the most of Peck's smiling villainy, giving him a powerful physical presence and a dangerous, unpredictable edge.

Some of the film's best and most comfortable moments find the bus passengers simply singing together in a show of warm, spontaneous unity.

Thanks to exultant wit and so many distinctive voices, Toy Story is both an aural and visual delight.

Abel Ferrera...has a tin ear for dialogue and an evident penchant for ludicrous material. But beyond that, he is clearly a talented fellow. One can only hope he finds something else to make movies about very soon.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is closer to a curiosity than to a triumph, though its conception is certainly ambitious.

Timing does no favors for The Chamber, the John Grisham death row drama that arrives on the heels of a better death row film (''Dead Man Walking'') and a better Grisham adaptation (''A Time to Kill''). But this film's also-ran aspects are partly offset by Gene Hackman's superlative performance.

Based on a novel by Peter Straub, The Haunting of Julia manages to draw on every horror movie cliche imaginable and still make very little sense.

Mr. Boyle's brand of heaven-sent love story comes with a strange and whimsical mean streak. Tender thoughts and ha-ha shootings don't automatically mix.

Turns out to be a smashing success, a juggernaut of an action-adventure saga that owes noithing to the past. To put it simply, thi is a home run.

Once the story settles down to wondering whether Maggie/Claudia can find happiness in romantic love, it becomes noticeably less interesting. Ms. Fonda sometimes verges on the mechanical in mouthing her character's nobler sentiments (the film also relies heavily on Nina Simone records to express its heroine's feelings), but that is to be expected. At heart, this woman is little more than a laboratory specimen with great legs, so it's miraculous to find an actress breathing life into her at all.

The inventiveness that has gone into this, and into turning Oz into a land of lavish special effects, will be lost on anyone with a fondness for the 1939 musical classic. That film will always enchant adults and children alike. This joyless new Return to Oz isn't likely to appeal to the former, and may give many of the latter a good scare. Children are sure to be startled by the new film's bleakness.

Depp moves through the film suavely and imperturbably, never letting the particulars bog him down.

First-time screenwriters Jeff Wadlow and Beau Bauman prove more adept at staging mind games than creating chills and thrills for the audience.