Janet Maslin

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.

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

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

Doing himself a great disservice, the writer and director Gregg Araki labels his work "an irresponsible movie" when in fact it has the power of honesty and originality, as well as the weight of legitimate frustration. Miraculously, it also has a buoyant, mischievous spirit that transcends any hint of gloom.

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.

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.

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

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.

Stiffly playing a filmmaker with a growing passion for the tango, she makes this a handsome, drily meticulous film with no real fire anywhere beyond its supple dance scenes.

What elevates these scenes from the usual concert simulations - and what gives the entire film its tremendous immediacy - is the extraordinary way in which Miss Lange has molded herself to fit the music. Although the performance is conspicuously prop-heavy, with brittle wigs and an enormous number of costume changes, Miss Lange makes herself a perfect physical extension of the vibrant, changeable, enormously expressive woman who can be heard on these recordings.

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

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.

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.

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

Mr. Brosnan, as the best-moussed Bond ever to play baccarat in Monte Carlo, makes the character's latest personality transplant viable (not to mention smashingly photogenic), but the series still suffers the blahs.

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.

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

Even when the action seems wrongheaded—and it frequently does—the movie is richly textured and well played.

A stirring and tragic evocation of terrible times.

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

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

This is Rebel Without a Cause without the grown-ups and without boundaries, transposed to a world of hard drugs, petty crime, hand-to-mouth existence and hopes that somehow will not die.

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.

A well-made work with much to recommend it, even if its worthiness is not the brightest flare on the movie horizon this season.

Basketball, bold urban landscapes, larger-than-life characters and red-hot visual pyrotechnics are the strong points of Mr. Lee's biggest three-ring circus, not to mention the central presence of Denzel Washington.

The director Michael Dinner, making his feature debut, and the screenwriter Charles Purpura have an unusually good feeling for the time, the place, the characters as kids and the adults they later turned into.

The ending of Real Life is the most uproarious of a good many inspired moments.

An ingenious, cathartic exercise in illusion and fear.

The effort to turn Outbreak into an action picture insures that little of it will be believable, regardless of how much scientific data has been woven into the story. The film's shallowness also contributes to the impression that no problem is too thorny to be solved by movie heroics.

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.

Deliciously silly.

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.

Ms. Garofalo, in a lovely, winning performance, gives Abby lots of heart while also making defensive snappishness a big part of her charm.

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.

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

Makes mincemeat of an excellent novel.

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

The film is shot by Bill Pope with such enterprising flair that it never looks claustrophobic, but the action inevitably stalls in such close quarters.

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

Directed by Eastwood with righteous indignation and increasingly strong momentum.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Although Robbins might have drawn some of these characters with less obviousness and more satirical bite, he ably keeps this lively, complicated film on track.

Based on a novel by Fannie Flagg, the comedian, and directed by Jon Avnet, Fried Green Tomatoes has some good performances and a measure of homespun appeal, some of which can be credited to Elizabeth McBride's gently evocative costumes and Barbara Ling's detailed production design.

The film is a labor of love for Casper Andreas, who wrote, directed and starred in this first feature. For the actors he has chosen, it's a labor of lust, with copious necking and grappling required. For the audience, it's just a labor.

Besides being one of Woody's most consistently witty films, Love and Death marks a couple of other advances for Mr. Allen as a film maker and for Miss Keaton as a wickedly funny comedienne.

Mr. Craven's attempts at such effects are always gripping, but here they are sometimes overpowered by the complexity of the material. The search for the zombifying elixir, the influence of the Tontons Macoute, the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship and the mysterious powers of voodoo sometimes run together in a manner less provocative than confusing.

Once Bitten affects a glossy, sophisticated look that does little to upgrade the film's adolescent humor. As directed by Howard Storm, it has a lot more stylishness than wit. Miss Hutton looks great in black, but her predatory vampire grows tiresome very quickly, as do all the Bloody Mary jokes.

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 fierce-looking Sean Bean is outstandingly good as Ryan's main antagonist, and Patrick Bergin brings the right air of calculation to the terrorist mastermind he plays. Several of the film's main sequences, like an encounter between Mr. Bean's Sean Miller and David Threlfall as the police inspector who has been his captor, derive their horror from the looks of pure loathing that these terrorists bestow upon their prey.

Dwarfed by the enormity of what it means to illustrate, the diffuse Amistad divides its energies among many concerns: the pain and strangeness of the captives' experience, the Presidential election in which they become a factor, the stirrings of civil war, and the great many bewhiskered abolitionists and legal representatives who argue about their fate.

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.

A handsome and fully imagined work of cautionary futuristic fiction.

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

A coolly efficient thriller with an octopus of a plot.

Mr. Murphy proves himself a surprisingly strong actor here, playing Sherman with sweetness and poignancy, not to mention loads of funny weight-related humor.

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

Lacks the sexy elan of "La Femme Nikita" and suffers from infinitely worse culture shock. [18 Nov 1994, p.C18]

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Mr. Black's screenplay is mean-spirited, but it earns its keep with sharp, sarcastic dialogue and ingenious ways of setting up this story.

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.

Mr. Douglas, who delivers a new shade of cruel elegance each time he plays another urbane monster, is the ideal star for this vigorously contrived thriller.

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.

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.

A hilariously brazen comedy whose heroine is an improbable hoot.

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.

If it was finally the book's whimsical side that endeared it to so many readers, the movie is missing none of that charm. If anything, it's got a little more...A gentle, intelligent film and an interesting one.

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.

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.

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.

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

[Hanson] does another deft job of conveying a heroine's secret anxieties, at least during the first half of his story.

What it doesn't have, unfortunately, is enough true conviction to rise above novelty status. Nor does it really have a plot.

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.

Mr. Bogosian's venomously funny play, which he adapted himself for the screen, is given warmth and generosity by Mr. Linklater, whose elegantly fluid direction and great skill with actors are accentuated by the play's spareness.

Good-humored, try-anything fun.

Another nice thing about Circle of Friends is that it escapes a happily-ever-after scenario to provide more bite and toughness than it first promises.

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

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

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

This is hot-weather escapism so earnestly retrograde that it seems new.

Arizona Dream is enjoyably adrift, a wildly off-the-wall reverie. It's more than a fish out of water.

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

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

But for all its enthusiasm, this film isn't sharp enough to afford all the time it wastes on small talk, long drives, trips to the mall and favorite songs played on car radios.

The ending of Jacob's Ladder, when it finally arrives, is, like much of the film, both quaint and devastating.

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.

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.

A meat-and-potatoes American thriller that means business all around the world.

The characters' sexual abandon is so complete that it robs the story of any shape.

As a film about heroism, it is chiefly remarkable for its gutlessness.

But this knotty investigative thriller has trouble achieving the rock-solid credibility to hold an audience in thrall.

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.

It's rambling and unfocused, but still fresh enough to break the usual Hollywood mold.

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.

Romantic comedies, of which Chances Are is nominally one, are better off making their characters appear glamorous and attractive than making them look like ineffectual, long-suffering nincompoops, which is the case here.

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

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

Mr. Scott's affinity for the visceral and strenuous, from ''Alien'' to ''Blade Runner'' to ''White Squall,'' is much more central here than the renegade feminism of his ''Thelma and Louise.'' With punishing intensity, he plunges his audience into the maelstrom of the training program.

It has crooks, bats, cobwebs, skeletons, a lovable monster, an underground grotto and a treasure hidden by some of the most considerate, clue-loving pirates who ever lived. Their ghostly ship is the movie's piece de resistance.

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.

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

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.

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.

A rueful, warmly affecting film featuring a wonderful performance by Mr. Troisi, The Postman would be attention-getting even without the sadness that overshadows it. [14 June 1995, p. C15]

The real fun here comes from watching Mr. Kline bounding through two archly good performances, Mr. Cleese coming hilariously unstrung in the presence of Ms. Curtis and all those adorable animals.

The whole film has the intensity of a dream, and Mr. Kazan selects his fantasy elements with great care.

Mr. Hamilton's knack for comedy has been a well-kept secret until now, but he's certainly funny in Love at First Bite, a coarse, delightful little movie with a bang-up cast and no pretensions at all.

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

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

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.

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.

His sumptuous film is as strange and mesmerizing as it is imaginatively ghastly. It's a sophisticated, spookily intense rendering of Ms. Rice's story.

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 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.

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

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.

The film's best scenes are those between the goofily nonchalant Mr. Reinhold and the precociously stern Mr. Savage, however bluntly these moments call attention to the craziness of the premise.

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

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.

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

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

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

The film's flamboyant portrait of Nino may be stereotypical, but Mr. Snipes makes it chilling.

By turns funny, vulgar and backhandedly clever, never more so than when it aspires to absolute stupidity. And Mr. Martin, who began his career with an arrow stuck through his head, has since developed a real genius for playing dumb.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Though Star Maps lacks a strong ending or a Ratso Rizzo to play off Spain's ingenuous hustler, it introduces Arteta as a filmmaker with a credible style and a flair for caustic storytelling. And his film takes the interesting tack of sharing Carlos' matter-of-fact outlook.

Rocky II has a waxy feeling, and it never comes to life the way its predecessor did. As the characters go through their stock routines — Talia Shire shyly whispering I love you, Mr. Stallone making self-deprecating jokes, Burgess Meredith telling the kid he's either a bum or a hero — you get the feeling that you've been here before. Well, you have.

Charlie Sheen brings just the right exaggerated seriousness to his ace pilot's role, and Cary Elwes perfectly captures the ingenue arrogance of Topper's handsome rival. Jon Cryer, as a pilot with major eyesight problems, also displays expert deadpan timing, especially when he delivers the film's most uproarious line.

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.

The beat-up poetry, soused look and bad habits of She's So Lovely are often dated. The showy bravado is not.

Mr. Howard has made Ransom in the same clean, swift, logical style that sent his "Apollo 13" into orbit, resulting in a spellbinding crime tale that delivers surprises right down to the wire.

Amusing but sloppy and overcomplicated.

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

Three Men and a Baby follows the French film as faithfully as it possibly can, and it too revolves around one lone idea: that there's humor in the spectacle of a grown man, heretofore ignorant of his own gentler nature, discovering that he can indeed administer formula and change diapers. The hilarity inherent in this has its limits, but it's a premise with enough timeliness and warmth to account for the first film's success. And in terms of success, this glossier, more effervescent remake will undoubtedly outstrip the original.

Unlawful Entry manages to be more gripping than it is convincing, thanks to the story's inevitable movement toward a violent showdown.

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]

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

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

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.

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

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.

Brilliantly eccentric even when it yields mixed results.

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 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.

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

The film uses morphing and Rick Baker's monster effects strikingly, but it also keeps its gimmicks well tethered to reality.

Bright, stylish, ridiculously alluring.

But Night Falls on Manhattan is also oddly listless. It doesn't often live up to the doomy eloquence of its title.

Jagged Edge has harsh lighting, blunt performances, and artless, no-nonsense dialogue relieved by the occasional bit of excess color.

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

Cheerful, giddy fun.

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.

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.

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

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.

A cute, buoyant sports fantasy, jolted along by a reggae soundtrack and playfully acted by an appealing cast. This new Disney comedy is slick, funny and warmhearted, very much in the old-fashioned Disney mode.

With coolly expressive cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth and an insinuating Ennio Morricone score, State of Grace has a somber and chilling tone that is only occasionally breached.

Day of the Dead has a less startling setting, since most of it takes place underground. But it still affords Mr. Romero the opportunity for intermittent philosophy and satire, without compromising his reputation as the grisliest guy around.

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

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

Point Break, though it's anything but watertight where plotting is concerned, again reveals Ms. Bigelow's real talents as a director of fast-paced, high-adrenaline action. Whenever the flakiness of Point Break threatens to become lulling, Ms. Bigelow wakes up her audience with a formidable jolt.

Tony Scottmdoes his utmost to pump up the audience's adrenaline at all times, which means that the film's big moments - the races, the crashes, the news that someone needs brain surgery - don't seem that different from the small ones.

No less amazing than the material Mr. Annaud has captured on the screen is the fact that he has gone to such crazily elaborate lengths to capture it at all.

There are parts of The Blues Brothers that would have played infinitely better with a knock-about feeling, a sloppiness like that of "Animal House." As it is, the movie is airless. The stakes needn't have been so suffocatingly high.

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

As he demonstrated in "Groundhog Day," Ramis knows how to handle a high-concept story with unusual cleverness, and he does it again here. It helps to no end that De Niro and Crystal, despite their obvious differences, are perfectly in tune.

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.

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

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

What About Bob? does work as comedy for a while, thanks to the fortuitous teaming of Mr. Dreyfuss and Mr. Murray.

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

What's remarkable is how seldom it delivers. For all its technical brilliance, not even Ms. Foster's intense, accomplished performance in the title role holds much surprise.

A vibrant, grisly, gleefully amoral road movie.

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.

Mr. Dalton, the latest successor to the role of James Bond, is well equipped for his new responsibilities.

Taken on its own terms, "Army of Darkness" displays some ambition and wit, though not nearly enough to lend it broad appeal.

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

The plot sounds like that of a straight porn film, which is what Bolero would have become with anyone other than John Derek directing. Mr. Derek, who also wrote the screenplay, shows off his wife in an oddly self-contradictory way. He's glad to flaunt her tanned torso and her radiant smile, which is fortunate, since these are the movie's only assets.

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.

Though in essence this is little more than a girls' romance novel brought to life, it has been filled with heart and humor. The place, the people and even the largely predictable situations in which they find themselves are presented in an entirely winning way.

The moral ambiguity of James's novel has been skillfully captured in the film, as has its remarkable modernity.

Small-scale, perfectly acted family film.

For all its studied sultriness, the movie feels unsexy, perhaps because its inspiration is the kind of hard- hearted western that concentrates on manly combat while eschewing all sentiment.

Gloriously colorful, cleverly conceived and set in motion with the usual Disney vigor, Pocahontas is one more landmark feat of animation.

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

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.

Two reasons it's impossible to resist "Independence Day": because of its pitch-perfect cartoonish dialogue ("Now you're never gonna get to fly the space shuttle if you marry a stripper!") and because the Captain, like Indiana Jones, is so unflappably tough.

Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon is a multimedia movie of sorts, designed for those who can't bear the monotony of only one thought or sound or activity at a time.

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

The film itself works eagerly to emphasize the frankly entertaining aspects of its story.

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

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.

The Coca-Cola Kid is of more interest for these oddball peripheral touches than for its awkward attempts at satire.

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

The film's mix of romance and reading matter is seductive in its own right, providing comfy book-lined settings and people who are what they read and write.

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.

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

The storytelling of Disclosure is too forced and polemical to be on a par with better Crichton tales like "Jurassic Park." This time, it's the author who's the dinosaur.

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.

In Year of the Dragon, a busy and elaborate film that manages to be inordinately messy, his tactics are a constant distraction, dissipating the viewer's interest at every turn.

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

A benign adventure saga that has attractive stars, elaborate gimmicks and nice production values -- everything it needs except a personality of its own.

It is beautiful -spectacularly so, at times - but dumb. Computer fans may very well love it, because Tron is a nonstop parade of stunning computer graphics, accompanied by a barrage of scientific-sounding jargon. Though it's certainly very impressive, it may not be the film for you if you haven't played Atari today.

Beloved works on its own but is much enhanced by familiarity with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In so ambitiously bringing this story to the screen, Ms. Winfrey underscores a favorite, invaluable credo: read the book.

The gimmick behind When a Stranger Galls is a scary one, but it's been played for more than it's worth.

Audiences are apt to root for the film's Mr. Clark even when they aren't entirely enthusiastic about what he's doing. Much of this is attributable to Mr. Freeman's fiery and compelling performance, but a lot of it also comes from the director John G. Avildsen (''Rocky''), who has stacked the deck in every way he can.

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.

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.

It's hard to imagine what the film might have been with anyone other than Mr. Hackman in this role, for this actor's quintessential decency and ordinariness have never seemed more affecting. It's precisely the lack of bravado in Hambleton that makes him an interesting character, and a poignant anti-Rambo.

Bruising but illuminating documentary.

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

A film this intent on authenticity might easily grow dull, but this one doesn't; Mr. Apted is a skillful storyteller. He gives Thunderheart" a brisk, fact-filled exposition and a dramatic structure that builds to a strong finale, one that effectively drives the film's message home.

The real flavor of Davis's account, and of the ferocity that earned Geronimo his place in history, is nowhere evident on screen.

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.

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.

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.

With its long silences washed over by banal, overused music, The Indian in the Cupboard is best watched for its ingenious tricks of scale and for an invitingly peaceful look. [14 July 1995, p.C3]

Leonard Nimoy, who directed this third installment, hasn't matched the playfulness and energy of ''Star Trek II,'' but he's way ahead of the first film, making up in earnestness what he lacks in style. That kind of conviction, while sometimes verging on undue self-importance, goes a long way toward making the material touching.

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

In his third and most comfortable effort to model the Bond mantle, Pierce Brosnan bears noticeably more resemblance to a real human being.

Permanent Midnight is as enveloping as it is darkly cautionary, thanks to the effectively varied layers of Mr. Veloz's direction and the bitter intensity Mr. Stiller brings to his central role.

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

It's both a frantic, innovative mixture of animation technologies and a fan magazine full of adulation for Michael Jordan. He handles this tribute with regal bearing and good grace.

The good thing is that the principals and film makers make the absolute most of a conventional opportunity.

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

Little Buddha displays a deliberate innocence that suits its subject, even if it contrasts so markedly with much of Mr. Bertolucci's moodier, more unsettling work.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 early parts of the film are engaging and well acted, creating a believable high school atmosphere. Unfortunately, the later part of the film is slow in developing, and it unfolds in predictable ways. The special effects are good, the performances are nicely deadpan, and the score is clever. But Christine herself is something of a bust.

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

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.

This is a strong, affecting story but it's also a straggly one, populated by tangential figures and parallel plotlines; the criminals' histories are every bit as convoluted and fascinating as those of the policemen they abducted. Even the courtroom drama is unusually complicated, introducing a new legal team with each new trial.

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.

A delectable comic performance by Sharon Stone.

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.

But the film's central figure remains a cipher, the subject of a colorful scrapbook rather than a revealing portrait.

In Who's Harry Crumb? Mr. Candy has a varied role, a good supporting cast, a script full of comic setups and every imaginable opportunity to shine. But the result is little more than a weak comedy, one that suggests Mr. Candy is potentially a great deal better than his material.

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.

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

The Accidental Tourist often relies on Miss Tyler's methods without tempering them, and gives a tone of crashing obviousness to material that need not have seemed that way. [23 Dec 1988, p.C12]

As directed by Lewis Teague, Cujo is by no means a horror classic, but it's suspenseful and scary. The performances are simple and effective, particularly Miss Wallace's. And Danny Pintauro does a good job as the frightened child.

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.

This is essentially a formula film, and as such it's nothing fancy. But it has crisp, spare direction, enormous momentum and a story full of twists and turns. For anyone who thinks they don't make spine-tingling detective films the way they used to, good news: they've just made another.

True as it is, Reiner's film feels like the Hollywood version.

This carefree comedy film does its best with material that would have been totally ephemeral in a less Brady world.

The Night We Never Met is never lifelike enough to evoke the madly romantic New York atmosphere it seems to be after. The actors try hard, but they are hamstrung by too many broad strokes and silly inconsistencies.

It takes much longer than might be expected for Bachelor Party...to degenerate into a mindless mob scene. Until it takes that turn for the worse, the movie is actually funny. That is, it's as funny as "Police Academy," which like this film was written by Neal Israel and Pat Proft. And it's certainly funnier than it has been made to look by its advertising campaign, which seems to feature the usual gang of suspects enjoying the usual sophomoric sex romp.

Eraser means to show off the star's standard persona against a backdrop of lavish special effects, which is certainly a formula that's worked before. But this is no "Terminator," since its tricks are so much more arbitrary and over-the-top.

When the film announces, halfway through, that it will be devoting the rest of its running time to tying up these loose ends, the audience may as well give up the ghost.

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.

It lacks the coherent fantasy of truly enveloping science fiction, preferring to concentrate on flashy, isolated stunts that say more about expense than expertise. [28 July 1995]

The film's cool, sober texture and its clever characters are often more interesting than the larger plot.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Helen Hunt is a real scene-stealer as a girl who wears things like toy dinosaurs in her hair, in keeping with the film's relentlessly silly mood. The audience at the National Theater seemed giddy enough in its own right.

Brisk and unsettling.

Yet for all the film's hard work at capturing Savannah's spirit, there is seldom enough context to make these characters seem anything but adorably whimsical to excess.

An uneasy amalgam of inconsistent attitudes, without enough humor or zaniness to divert attention from its questionable premise.

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

Mr. Pollack's film runs into these obstacles so hard, in fact, that it runs right over them without difficulty. His "Sabrina" succeeds as a breezy, lighthearted throwback, made without benefit of the Hepburn magic but with much else in its favor.

The screenplay, by Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman and Daniel Pyne, is occasionally sharp-tongued but more often pleasantly knee-deep in rustic corn. Mr. Fox also seems a shade more substantial this time, possibly because he is seen making life-or-death decisions when not fielding comic lines.

Death Becomes Her dares to invent a world of spectacular self-interest and populate that world with two fabulous harridans (Ms. Streep and Goldie Hawn) giving wonderfully spirited performances. But in spite of that, it remains surprisingly tame. A lot of the problem arises from simple -- and inexplicable -- lapses in the screenplay.

As Owen, Mr. DeVito is such an odd combination of the childlike and the diabolical that he remains a captivating figure throughout the story. Mr. DeVito's comic timing is particularly enjoyable, since he has such a slow, steady, deliberate way of building up to outrageous behavior.

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.

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

Fortunately, the actors are mostly likable, and the story is told gently enough to downplay both its trendiness and its conventionality.

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.

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.