Janet Maslin

As for comedy, Mr. Grodin's deadpan manner supplies a fair amount of that until the adventure-mystery aspects become overpowering.

Hurtling pace, by-the-numbers character development and exotic science. Tornado-chasing suddenly takes on a sex appeal not usually associated with horrendous storms.

Thanks in large part to Miss Streep's bravura performance, it's a film that casts a powerful, uninterrupted spell.

A generous and touching film that is essentially smaller than its own sweeping ambitions, a crowded and skillfully drawn landscape from which no oversize figures emerge. Affection and memory are the forces that give Avalon its vibrancy, but they are also its limitations.

It reimagines the buddy film with such freshness and vigor that the genre seems positively new.

The best thing about Yentl is its earnestness. It may resemble a vanity production from afar (or at close range, too, for that matter), but even at its kitschiest it seems to be heartfelt. That goes a long way, though not far enough, toward saving the film from its own built-in difficulties.

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.

As both a skillful director and a lovable oddball, [Moretti] commands interest. It's easy to follow him anywhere.

Mr. Gray's feature-length monologue brings people, places and things so vibrantly to life that they're very nearly visible on the screen.

Citizen's Band, is so clever that its seams show. Mr. Demme's tidiest parallels and most purposeful compositions are such attention-getters that the film has a hard time turning serious for its finale, in which characters who couldn't communicate directly come to understand one another at long last.

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.

The mice themselves are enjoyably dowdy, comfortable throwbacks to a time before earth-shattering conquests were the sine qua non of children's entertainment. The film's action sequences, on the other hand, provide the dizzying heights and spectacular exploits to which live-action audiences are by now well accustomed, and they seem derivative despite the ingenuity of the animators.

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

Meticulously detailed and never less than fascinating, The Shining may be the first movie that ever made its audience jump with a title that simply says "Tuesday."

The second Star Trek movie is swift, droll and adventurous, not to mention appealingly gadget-happy. It's everything the first one should have been and wasn't.

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

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

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.

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.

This film, like the dazzling but many-tentacled "He Got Game" before it, makes up in fury much of what it lacks in form.

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.

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

Running on Empty works best when it plays upon emotions generated by the Popes' unique predicament, something that it often does rather shamelessly. It helps that Sidney Lumet has directed the film in a crisp, handsome style that diminishes the maudlin or unlikely aspects of its story, even when they threaten to intrude.

Mr. Lyne takes a brilliantly manipulative approach to what might have been a humdrum subject and shapes a soap opera of exceptional power.

What emerges, in the end, are a clever premise that has been allowed to go awry and several performances that are lively and unpredictable enough to transcend the confusion. Mr. Bridges, always a fine intuitive actor, has never displayed a greater range.

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

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.

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.