Janet Maslin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dumb, vulgar and mostly humorless.

Winter Kills isn't exactly a comedy, but it's funny. And it isn't exactly serious, but it takes on the serious business of the Kennedy assassination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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