Janet Maslin

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Genuinely disturbing in its vision of fearless students and powerless teachers locked in struggle.

A funny and good-natured comedy that marks the directing debut of Richard Benjamin. Mr. Benjamin works in a steady, affable style that is occasionally inspired, always snappy and never less than amusing.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch speaks to the gleeful hell-raising monster in each of us, and it speaks with much more verve, cleverness and good humor than the film on which it is based. Add this to the very short list of sequels that neatly surpass their predecessors.

What Mr. Linklater does best here is to come up with conversational gambits that have just the right fancifulness to suit this situation.

A suspenseful, involving detective drama with one of the screen's most durable tough-guy heroes, doing what he does best and still managing to show something new.

Despite its "based on a true story" opening credit, this earnest, nostalgic film has a way of seeming too good to be true.

The Outsider is vivid even if it isn't much of a character study, and energetic even though it's often clumsy.

It's a movie struggling with its own identity crisis, and with the obvious constraints created by its subject matter.

Only when it comes time to justify its excesses and deliver on a promise of wider revelation does the otherwise audacious screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks look too specific and small.

Mr. Seagal is effective for both his novelty value and his ability to be both literally and figuratively disarming. And the film itself is a lively one for its genre, ambitious enough to do more than simply string fight scenes together.

Powaqqatsi, which is the second part of a planned trilogy, reaffirms Mr. Reggio's diligence and sincerity, though it does not signficantly advance his achievement.

It benefits not only from Mr. Brando's peculiar presence, but also from Johnny Depp, who again proves himself a brilliantly intuitive young actor with strong ties to the Brando legacy. The movie is cheesy, but its stars certainly are not.

The movie has lots of glossy charm even if Ms. Roberts and Grant seem less like lovers than members of a support group for the desperately attractive.

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.

Even when Best Friends isn't working uproariously as a comedy, there's an element of original, offbeat humor that keeps it promising.

Has warmth and good cheer. The film is loosely focused, but its ensemble cast is as affable as anything on television these days.

Familiar but likable, thanks largely to Mr. Jacoby's irrepressible clowning and Miss Hyser's good-sport manner.

Truth or Dare is at the very least a potent conversation piece. It can also be seen as a clever, brazen, spirited self-portrait, an ingeniously contrived extension of Madonna's public personality and a studied glimpse into what, in the case of most other pop luminaries, would be at least a quasi-hidden realm.

Some parts of it are rapturous and stirring, others hugely improbable, and the film moves unpredictably from one mode to another. From another director, this might be fatally confusing, but Mr. Spielberg's showmanship is still with him. Although the combination of his sensibilities and Miss Walker's amounts to a colossal mismatch, Mr. Spielberg's ''Color Purple'' manages to have momentum, warmth and staying power all the same.

Seeming warmer and more comfortable in this antic comedy than she has before, Ms. Goldberg is helped not only by the right co-star but also by the right role.

OF all the Spielberg-inspired fantasy films afoot at the moment, Joe Dante's Explorers is by far the most eccentric. It's charmingly odd at some moments, just plain goofy at others.

Mr. Hunter has an extraordinarily clear understanding of teen-age characters, especially those who must find their own paths without much parental supervision. Though its Midwestern locale and lower socioeconomic stratum give it a different setting, River's Edge shares something with Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, a novel that is also full of directionless, drug-taking teen-age characters who are without moral moorings and left entirely to their own devices. This is as chilling to witness as it is difficult to dramatize, if only because at their centers these lives are already so empty.

In Mr. Holland's Opus, Mr. Dreyfuss gives a warm and really touching performance. He's firmly in control of the film's comic moments and just as comfortable delivering the film's calculatingly Capraesque payoff: a good cry.

There's no great show of wit or tunefulness here, and the ingenious cross-generational touches are fairly rare. But there is a lively kiddie version of the Dickens tale, one that very young viewers ought to understand.

Sheena is the perfect summer movie for anyone who's dissatisfied with the season's intentional comedies, and who doesn't believe in looking a gift horse in the mouth. Actually, it's more like gift zebra.

Only late in the game do they make an unforgivable mistake. Blue Chips falls apart when the film makers, figuratively speaking, haul their soapbox right onto the court. Most of the time, Blue Chips is too energetic to sound self-righteous.

The film tends to be funny when confining itself to short sketches or dopey television-based humor, flat when pretending to be anything more.

A portion of the audience will be strongly offended by Porky's, just as another portion will find it filthy but fun. However, there is no debating the success of Mr. Clark's casting, for he has assembled a cheerful, likable bunch of actors, most of them unknowns.

Events are minor and they unfold slowly. The audience has plenty of time to get ahead of the game.

Lawrence and Murphy make an entertaining team. And they are surrounded by a supporting cast that makes the prison setting more pleasant than it has any right to be.

ELMORE LEONARD'S thrillers leap so easily to the screen that it's astounding so few of them have gotten there. Even with the kind of slapdash, unsightly production that's been given 52 Pick-Up, Mr. Leonard's stories make terrific, unself-conscious B-movies of the sort that are more and more rare.

Ms. Jenkins, who makes her writing and directing debut with wit and confidence, keeps the small surprises frequent and the coming-of-age perspective sharp.

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.

Antz works best just showing off its prodigious voice talent.

However adversely it must have affected the morale of those involved in making Brainstorm, the death of Natalie Wood hasn't damaged the film. Her performance feels complete. Playing a more mature character than she had done before, Miss Wood brought hints of a greater sturdiness and depth to this role, which is pivotal but relatively small.

A well-made but sugar-coated working-class fable about a football star.

Its comic episodes are nicely controlled, and the movie has a consistent zany style.

Hardcore never gives in to the rhythm of its nighttime world, never swoons; Mr. Schrader doesn't seem capable of the perversely rhapsodic style his subject demands. But he does work with speed and intelligence, paying sharp attention to detail and making the movie as funny as it is quick and frightening.

Films like "The Pianist" and "Schindler's List" immerse viewers in the bleakness of that time. The Red Orchestra is set in a sunnier world, which seems more frighteningly false. The bright, quotidian landscape seems a facade that threatens to tumble at any moment.

A better-than-average horror film, in large part because it isn't about terrified coeds being stalked by an ax wielding loon. Its story is more original than that -although where horror-movie ingenuity is concerned, it's only a thin line that separates the original from the bizarre.

Though it all comes together, most tragically, at the conclusion, Colors is less notable for its plot than for its chilling urgency and its sense of pure style.

Wish You Were Here has a quaint, inviting period look - the year is 1951, the setting a British coastal village - and a cast that's well attuned to Mr. Leland's brand of cleverness.

Dragonslayer has pacing problems, and its special effects tend to be more overpowering than helpful. But it also has a sweetness and conviction that amount to a kind of magic.

Soapdish, directed with good-natured zest by Michael Hoffman, has as serious a split-personality problem as any of its characters, perhaps because its screenplay is the work of Robert Harling (who wrote the story) and Andrew Bergman, two screenwriters with decidedly different comic sensibilities.

The chief thing it counts on is a built-in appreciation of the Murray sense of humor, which is growing ever more refined as Mr. Murray proceeds with his movie career. Mr. Murray hasn't yet reached the point at which his routines can be sustained for more than 10 minutes at a time. But he has achieved a sardonically exaggerated calm that can be very entertaining.

Bitter Moon is, by any reasonable standard, just awful. It's smutty, far-fetched and bizarrely acted, especially by Ms. Seigner, who gives the kind of performance that can only be explained by the fact that she is the director's wife. The good news: Mr. Polanski seems to know all this, and even to encourage it. This material obviously appeals to his sense of mischief, which remains alive and well.

At the very least, a warmly old-fashioned soap opera with several significant new twists. And for all its flaws, Falling in Love is one of those ordinary-seeming modern films that present unremarkable characters in the throes of all-too-familiar contemporary crises. When films in this genre succeed fully and realistically in mirroring the audience's concerns, they aren't ordinary at all. [09 Dec 1984, p.21]

The terrifically confident Mr. Snipes gives a funny, knowing performance with a lot of physical verve. And Mr. Harrelson (of Cheers) further perfects the art of appearing utterly without guile. Their comic timing together shapes the film's raucous wit, and their basketball playing looks creditable, too.

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

Nothing about Tales From the Darkside is likely to give anyone much of a scare. But thanks to casting that is savvier than the horror norm, and to direction by John Harrison that is workmanlike and sometimes even witty, at least it's fun.

Though Videodrome finally grows grotesque and a little confused, it begins very well and sustains its cleverness for a long while.

A thoroughly pleasant, down-to-earth romantic comedy that never entirely takes flight, though it picks up immeasurably whenever Mr. Martin is on screen.

No more convincing on screen than it was on the page. But it is greatly helped by the presence of Mr. Spader, who was apparently born to play life-denying, icy-veined young heroes, and especially Ms. Sarandon, who has made a career out of coaxing such characters out of their buttoned-down ways.

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.

It may not capture Mr. McInerney's novel completely or even succeed in standing on its own, but it does go a long way toward bringing the book to life. If Mr. McInerney's readers think it incomplete, they should also find it enjoyably familiar.

Mr. Lyne's films may not cast any new light on the human condition, but they do keep you glued to the screen.

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.

Baz Luhrmann's Australian film Strictly Ballroom is, in short, pure corn. But it's corn that has been overlaid with a buoyant veneer of spangles and marabou, and with a tireless sense of fun.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, the Walt Disney production of Ray Bradbury's 1962 novel, begins on such an overworked Norman Rockwell note that there seems little chance that anything exciting or unexpected will happen. So it's a happy surprise when the film...turns into a lively, entertaining tale combining boyishness and grown-up horror in equal measure.

Starting Over depicts an abandoned man in all his misery, and still manages to be fast and funny while it breaks new ground.

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.

Mr. Ferrara has his saving graces, too, the chief one being raw talent, which he continues to display while telling even the most far-fetched story.

Disarmingly, the film thus acknowledges the Spice Girls' flash-in-the-pan status and lets them kid around about their frankly synthetic career.

The punchy little flourishes that load this English gangster film with attitude are perfectly welcome, because there's no honest, substantial part of the movie they can hurt.

However hamstrung it occasionally becomes, "Wild Bill" is impressive for a thoughtful, daring spirit and a charismatic hero, so unapologetically larger than life.

The spiky documentary in their honor keeps alive the echoes of their slapdash, Smithsonian-worthy sound.

Ladybird, Ladybird is a tough, utterly absorbing film even at moments when it seems to skirt some of the fine points of Maggie's difficulties.

A Bronx Tale offers a warm, vibrant and sometimes troubling portrait of the community it describes. Almost everyone within that community sounds a little bit like Robert De Niro except Mr. De Niro himself.

Mr. Pacino has not been this uncomplicatedly appealing since his Dog Day Afternoon days, and he makes Johnny's endless enterprise in wooing Frankie a delight. His scenes alone with Ms. Pfeiffer have a precision and honesty that keep the film's maudlin aspects at bay.

Thanks in large part to Mr. Candy, who gives an honestly touching performance in what might have been a cloying role, this story does have its simple charms.

A very good-humored sequel for anyone in tune with its subject.

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.

Not surprisingly, there are some slow patches and formulaic touches, but that's a fair trade for the fun of watching Mr. Williams and Mr. Crystal make an irresistible comic team.

Messy as the semiautobiographical Crooklyn often is, it succeeds in becoming a touching and generous family portrait, a film that exposes welcome new aspects of this director's talent.

Loose, rambling and sometimes rudderless as it is, The Indian Runner has a fundamental honesty that gives it real substance.

A minor but witty entry on the exceptionally strong slate of French films at the New York Film Festival this year.

The technical minutiae, the solemn silliness and the preachy tone occasionally sounded here...are all essential to the Star Trek mystique. Whatever it is, it seems durable beyond anyone's wildest dreams. And Mr. Nimoy, by injecting some extra levity this time, has done a great deal to assure the series' longevity.

It's the overall resourcefulness of Mr. Tsukerman and his talented colleagues that gives Liquid Sky its high style. Visually bright and arresting, with a varied and insinuating electronic score, the film is full of eye-catching images.

In the end, thanks to such effects and to the simple grace of Mr. Hanks's performance, this film does accomplish what it means to. Philadelphia rises above its flaws to convey the full urgency of its difficult subject, and to bring that subject home.

An appreciably better-than-average revenge drama.

Backbeat, directed by Iain Softley, is lively, galvanizing and unexpectedly well made, a far cry from the Madame Tussaud approach often used to enshrine contemporary celebrities.

The film winds up taking a clear anticrime stance, and Mr. Epps ably conveys Q's trepidation about his friends' behavior. But Juice also revels in the flash, irreverence and tough-guy posturing to which the film's violence can ultimately be traced.

Half the film is an ingenuous love story, but the better half consists of pop culture time-warp jokes set in 1985.

Mr. Woo's obvious gusto and his taste for myth making are readily apparent. But so is his fondness for the slow, lingering death scene coupled with sickening sound effects. Presenting Mr. Van Damme as reverentially as Sergio Leone did the young Clint Eastwood, Mr. Woo displays a real aptitude for malignant mischief, which is this story's stock in trade.

A good, taut movie for red-meat action audiences, but it's not one you will be seeing on an airliner. Not ever.

Mr. Schlesinger draws lively performances out of his cast and surprising variety out of the film's secondary sights, which range from a gala soiree to a heap of steaming dung.

The net effect is that of having read the comic strip for an unusually long spell, which can amount to either a delightful experience or a pleasant but slightly wearing one, depending upon the intensity of one's fascination with the basic “Peanuts” mystique.

The Idolmaker is a modest, interesting, well-acted movie, more lively than it is exciting.

Bruising but illuminating documentary.

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.

A yuppie mid-life crisis is in the offing, and Albert Brooks has made it the basis for Lost in America, an inspired comedy in his own drily distinctive style.

Iron Eagle is a very shrewd teen-age variation on the Rambo/Missing in Action formula, a military rescue movie with a nice young hero and a fun-loving feeling.

Mr. Van Peebles and his screenwriters, Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane, care most about making their points emphatically, even if that sometimes leaves Posse riding heavy in the saddle. Luckily, most of their film is fast-paced and star-studded enough to avoid an overly preachy tone.

The visual illusion that Ms. Lohan is actually two characters has been accomplished so seamlessly that it barely diverts attention from one of the film's greatest passions, its product plugs.

Twisted enough by Mr. Dahl and given a jolt of caricature by Mr. DeVito, Matilda makes too perverse a tale for very young children. But this one has playful flamboyance and a dark verve that older children should appreciate. And it has a sweet, self-possessed little heroine.

I Went Down owes much of its novelty to steering clear of Irish movie stereotypes and instead showing off a spare and quizzical indie spirit.

Tauntingly flirtatious scenes between Ms. Ryder and Ms. Weaver give this film a sexual boldness that the others' action-adventure spirit lacked.

Blaze has been beautifully photographed by Haskell Wexler in the soft, lulling colors of the Louisiana countryside, against which Ms. Davidovich's amusingly garish costumes stand out as markedly as they're meant to. The costumes, by Ruth Myers, are particularly good, with ice-cream-colored suits for Mr. Newman that allow him to dominate the film visually just as surely as he dominates it dramatically.

Stylish and eerily compelling before it overplays its campy excesses, Heavenly Creatures does have a feverish intensity to recommend it.

Food assumes near-religious importance in Mr. Jaglom's portrait of needy, anxious women who spend an entire day playing upon one another's insecurities, and waxing rhapsodic about well-remembered culinary thrills.

In addition to tossing in the occasional spy-movie homage (there's certainly a Hitchcock touch to Mr. Franklin's choice of villains), he has kept the story moving and the actors lively.

It's a film with a number of strengths, not the least of them its fierce, agile, hollow-eyed hero.

The story, neatly compressed, unfolds in dependable and photogenic ways. And it is coaxed along by Mr. Pakula's considerable skills as a brisk, methodical film maker.

Unobjectionable even when it doesn't work, and certainly amusing when it does.

An engrossing study of loose talk, weakness and seduction, played out in both the world of high-powered journalism and the seediest corners of Times Square.

The Favor remains funny and credible in ways that prove feminist comedy is not an oxymoron.

Picturesque and warm-hearted, Into the West moves enjoyably toward the inevitable family reconciliation, and an ending with a supernatural spin. Along the way, it manages to sustain a high level of interest, thanks to fine acting and plenty of local color. [17 Sep 1993, p.C17]

Mr. Reynolds's third and best directorial effort - the first two were Gator and The End - is an unexpectedly accomplished cop thriller. There is, as is often the case with movies of that genre, less here than meets the eye: the plot has its unreasonable spots, and the story doesn't come to much in the end. But one measure of the success of Sharky's Machine is that it's too fast and exciting for those considerations to count until after the movie is over.

Mythic pulp has its allure, and it also has its limitations. El Mariachi displays no real emotion except a profound appreciation for the genre film making that has inspired it, and a delight in manipulating the elements of such stories.

Seldom is it clearer that a film is nothing more than high-gloss jokey escapism, or that when visual cliches are this relentless they become weirdly fascinating in their own right.

Basic Instinct transfers Mr. Verhoeven's flair for action-oriented material to the realm of Hitchcockian intrigue, and the results are viscerally effective even when they don't make sense. Drawing powerfully on the seductiveness of his actors and the intensity of their situation, Mr. Verhoeven easily suspends all disbelief.

On the whole, Mr. Apted's approach to the material is archly effective, making for a crisp, intricate thriller, well able to hold an audience's interest.

Beyond his struggles with an unwieldy accent and the screenplay's hokum, Mr. Pitt gives a sincere if labored performance enhanced by a sense of genuine struggle.

Most of what keeps Flesh and Bone so gripping is the ways in which the characters themselves evolve.

The main action of The Daytrippers is bright, real and even poignant enough to make this journey worth the ride.

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

It's the cleverness of Eyes of Laura Mars that counts, cleverness that manifests itself in superlative casting, drily controlled direction from Irvin Kershner, and spectacular settings that turn New York into the kind of eerie, lavish dreamland that could exist only in the idle noodlings of the very, very hip.

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.

The cinematic safari's simple pleasures are best experienced with the littlest ticket-holders, who get an edifying thrill ride and a computer-assisted sense of a wider world.

The screenplay is inelegant but lively, and the direction gives the material a wicked edge.

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

Culminates in a show-stopping action sequence set in midtown Manhattan, directed by Ms. Leder with crisp economy and furious energy.

Dazed and Confused has an enjoyably playful spirit, one that amply compensates for its lack of structure.

But this miracle of self-invention has more virtue in the abstract than it does on screen.

In the film's briskly paced 72 minutes, any open-minded viewer will discover something about identity and about the comfort these women have obviously found in learning to be their unusual, unfettered selves.

Over all, this deferential film salutes Mr. Hockney's artistry as an elixir for creaky texts, a hallucinogen for orthodox opera fans, and an antidote to his own senescence. As much as he lets the filmmaker be present, he successfully avoids real intimacy, keeping his personal life comfortably backstage.

As snappy and assured as it is mean-spirited. Its originality extends well beyond the limits of ordinary high school histrionics and into the realm of the genuinely perverse.

Foul Play is a slick, attractive, enjoyable movie with all the earmarks of a hit. But as “House Calls” did a.few months ago, it starts out promising • genuine wit and originality only to fall back on more familiar tactics after a half‐hour or so. If either film had a less winning opening, perhaps it wouldn't leave a vague aftertaste of disappointment.

The movie is cheerful and light, showcasing Mr. Hughes's knack for remembering all those aspects of middle-class American adolescent behavior that anyone else might want to forget.

Ms. Foster and the screenwriter, W. D. Richter, have given this film some peculiar mood swings, so that it starts out zanily and winds down to a wistful note.

When the movie backfires, which it finally does, it's because too much grisly footage has been used too lightly. Mr. Landis's comic detachment, which has been fascinating throughout much of the movie, is something he holds on to even when a deeper response is needed. Eventually it becomes less comic than callow.

A tight, energetic sleeper in the action-adventure genre, manages to pack a few anti-machismo sentiments into an otherwise brawny tale.

Married to the Mob works best as a wildly overdecorated screwball farce.

It is a great disappointment, halfway into the movie, to find The Star Chamber so far off the track that its credibility almost entirely disappears...The Star Chamber has a well- meaning urgency, and it is an entertaining film even when it becomes so thoroughly misguided.

Miss Dunaway gives the uncanny, meticulous Crawford imitation that is at the heart of Mommie Dearest. The movie itself has nothing like the brilliance of the impression, which is why it remains an impression and can't altogether rise to the level of a performance. But on its own terms Miss Dunaway's work here amounts to a small miracle, as one movie queen transforms herself passionately and wholeheartedly into another.

The principal thing that keeps "The Seduction of Joe Tynan" engrossing is the level of acting it sustains throughout.

Manages to have playful comic ingenuity of its own.

More often, the film is like a ride through a car wash: forward motion, familiar phases in the same old order and a sense of being carried along steadily on a well-used track. It works without exactly showing signs of life.

Eastwood directs a sensible-looking genre film with smooth expertise, but its plot is quietly berserk.

The film is in fine shape as long as it revels in its own craziness, making no claims on the viewer's reason. But when it asks you to believe that what you're watching may really be happening, and to wonder what it means, it is asking far too much.

Hiller makes this warm, friendly and sometimes cute, but he doesn't make it move very quickly.

This Ninja Turtles tale is less violent and more scenic than its predecessors, since it gets the title characters out of the sewer and transports them back to feudal Japan.

Flattering the daylights out of Rob Reiner and his Spinal Tap crew, Rusty Cundieff turns Fear of a Black Hat into an unapologetic Spinal Tap imitation. And there's no point in faulting Mr. Cundieff for such derivativeness, because Fear of a Black Hat is too savvy and cheerful to warrant complaints.

Freddy Krueger is the most talkative of slashers, and also the most creative. In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, he displays a great debt to Dali in concocting surreal visions for his prey. When Freddy enters the dreams of his teen-age victims, ordinary objects become armed and dangerous.

A clean-cut, affable family film without objectionable elements, beyond the brief and needless violence that complicates its finale.

"Generations" is predictably flabby and impenetrable in places, but it has enough pomp, spectacle and high-tech small talk to keep the franchise afloat. And in an age when much fancier futuristic effects can be found elsewhere, even its tackiness is a comfort.

While it's very much a retread, it succeeds in following up the first film's humor with more in a similar vein.

Mr. Englund, playing the Halloween favorite whom audiences love to hate, now delivers lines like this with the broadness of a latter-day Jimmy Durante. But he sustains Freddy's peculiar charm even when appearing without ghastly makeup in scenes of Freddy's early years.

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.

Kristy McNichol and Dennis Quaid, as a mutually devoted sister and brother, are personable but idle in this largely uneventful tale.

Most of For Keeps is entirely predictable, but that should do little to diminish its interest for audiences of high-school age. Here again, Miss Ringwald is the very model of teen-age verisimilitude, and she's most impressive in making even the most hackneyed situations seem real.

One Fine Day makes for sunny, pleasant fluff. Both stars are enjoyably breezy, and there's enough chemistry to deflect attention from the story's endless contrivances. The screenplay by Terrel Seltzer and Ellen Simon is full of energetic wisecracks. But it's jokey rather than actually funny most of the time.

The film roams from the Upper West Side to Coney Island to Atlantic City, maintaining a lighthearted style that doesn't quite match the hints of obsessiveness in Mr. Toback's screenplay.

A mildly facetious tone limits Anderson's film to the lightweight, but the collective enthusiasm behind this debut effort still comes through. What's best about Bottle Rocket is not the laid-back pranks that inflate its story to feature length but the offbeat elan with which that story is told.

South-Central plays more like an exploitative potboiler than a civics lesson. Only late in the film, thanks to a sobering of tone and Mr. Plummer's credible performance, does the story develop any real impact.

The spare, enjoyable Naked Fame, by the documentarian Chris Long, suggests that today's pornography performers enjoy better life options than those revisited in "Inside Deep Throat."

Though Three Amigos is the kind of skin-deep contemporary comedy that assembles its stars and then just coasts, it's friendlier than most. And it contains a few elements that are destined for immortality.

There's a certain ghoulish excitement to all this, but it is quickly dissipated.

Unlike ''Le Dernier Combat,'' which had humor and urgency, Subway appears to have been a good deal more exciting to film than it is to see.

When karate is not being treated as the latest excuse for an Impossible Dream success story, and when the film is able to find more in Daniel's martial-arts career than pure Rocky-esque competitiveness, The Karate Kid exhibits warmth and friendly, predictable humor, its greatest assets.

Sometimes overly silly, with the kinds of sight gags and brief pastiches that might make for a middling ''Airplane'' imitation; in one unforgivable moment, it shows what happens when a spaceman sneezes. Much of it is better than that, however.

Lost Highway, an elaborate hallucination that could never be mistaken for the work of anyone else, finds Mr. Lynch echoing the perversity of "Blue Velvet," the earlier film of his that this most closely resembles.

Brain Donors is a short, reasonably snappy attempt at nothing less than a present-day Marx Brothers comedy,

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

Its strongest assets, aside from a performance by Ms. Watson that pierces through the nonsense, are Mark Knopfler's fine, expressive score and the attractiveness of its star.

I wanted to show how the underlying racism of society can transform a banal love story into a tragedy, Mr. Dumont has said. His film, for all its characters' uncommunicativeness, is too flat and unswerving to convey that idea surprisingly. But it does bring haunting power to the bitter, tongue-tied helplessness that sets its tragedy in motion.

Predicated on two ideas -- that human nature is rife with perfidy and that it's important to get the cast into hot cars or bathing suits whenever possible -- Mr. McNaughton and the cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball (''Top Gun,'' ''True Romance'') give a decadent gloss to this far-fetched, quintuple-crossing tale.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If The Journey of Natty Gann were only a speedier, more energetic movie, Natty might have real staying power.

It isn't necessary to believe Blue Steel fully to find it gripping all the way through, and to be both fascinated and frightened by its icy, gleaming vision of urban life. For the audience, it's both a sobering and invigorating experience. For Ms. Bigelow, it's a breakthrough.

Contrived and cliched as it turns out to be, Reckless has enough vitality to carry it for a while, although it never stops recalling other films.

At the very least, Lady Jane ought to summon more emotion than it does. But the early part of it is so reserved, and the latter part so incongruously fulsome, that it never manages to draw any deep response - not even when a beheading costs the hapless young Jane her luxuriant, Brooke Shields-like hair.

It has a bold, bright look and a crisp tempo, propelling the action from one shootout to another until it finally reaches the most violent of its crescendos. By the time it has arrived at this last stage, the film is so close to being ludicrous that it's hard to know whether it is deteriorating or ascending.

This film has enough new characters and independent spirit to have a light, cheery style of its own.

A simple, bullet-riddled, crowd-pleasing action movie.

Best watched as a showcase for radiant young talent.

The film shows off Ms. Bullock to amusing if overly frenetic advantage. It also leaves Affleck without enough of a Cary Grant aura to play his wimpier character with style.

Hope Floats, which often resembles a rosy commercial, does indulge in too much awkward slow motion, and in occasional embarrassing romps that are meant to signify family fun.

A sky-high level of misanthropy overwhelms his film in ways that prove more sour than droll, despite the presence of skillful actors and a bizarrely enveloping plot.

Sirens is best watched as a soft-core, high-minded daydream about the liberating sensuality of art. Its bubble tends to burst whenever the nymphs are asked to make clever dinner-table conversation, but the mood is nicely lulling anyhow.

Banderas directs capably enough to keep the film lively.

Gathers a partyful of young players and barely gives them enough of a story line to puff on, but it gets by on personality anyhow.

Despite its flaws, the film gets across some genuine melancholy, played up by a sobbing Irish fiddle.

The film's aimlessness and repetitiveness eventually become draining. And its small touches often work better than its more elaborate ones, like an extended party sequence that seems awkward and largely unnecessary.

This is another of the iron-buttercup roles in which Miss Hawn has been specializing since ''Private Benjamin,'' films in which her inspired dizziness masks an unexpectedly strong will. Initially, that contrast was delightful. But it has begun to seem less and less funny as Miss Hawn's films develop a preachier edge.

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

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.

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.

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

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]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Mr. Garcia gives one of his sleeker dreamboat performances.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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