Janet Maslin

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

This time, Mr. Reynolds has made a movie to please fans of all persuasions, and to please them a great deal.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert presents a defiant culture clash in generous, warmly entertaining ways.

Tykwer deliberately blows away all traces of the mundane and the familiar, so that not even the closing credit crawl moves in the expected way.

An interestingly wild hybrid of visual styles and cultural references.

A dense, quirky, uncommonly interesting movie, this time with a high quotient of suspense.

The web of lies, failures and brutal revelations here is strong stuff, and it's the work of an original filmmaker who takes no prisoners.

However simply he approaches this familiar milieu, Mr. Stone winds up treating his story's sin-soaked connivers the way Francis Ford Coppola treated vampires. Neither of them is really capable of anything plain.

The film turns into a preposterous but engrossing spectacle, fueled by a resource more enduring than steam or its successors: big ideas.

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.

Mamet's handsome, stately adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play The Winslow Boy does not embellish upon its source material. Instead it skillfully pares the play down to its essentials, arriving at a faithful but tighter version of this drama.

For anyone who doesn't think an hour and a half is a long time to spend with a comic book, Heavy Metal is impressive. Though it owes some slight bit of its toughness and nihilism to Ralph Bakshi, this animated feature is off on its own track, combining science fiction, mysticism, sex, violence and rock music. Much of the time, these elements do what the film makers want them to, and make for a heady mix.

I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, a documentary about Mr. Wilson that ought to fascinate anyone who's ever turned on a car radio in America, does more than induce this legendary rock recluse to speak for himself. . . . This film also illuminates the music itself and makes interesting, accessible sense of Mr. Wilson's very real genius.

Even if Clueless runs out of gas before it's over, most of it is as eye-catching and cheery as its star. [19 July 1995]

While Body Heat involves murder, fraud, a weak hero led astray and a seductive, double-dealing broad, it also incorporates something new: a sexual explicitness that the old films could only hint at.

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 new menu movie has a soapy plot, appealing stars, family values, down-home atmosphere and a conviction that there's rarely a problem fried chicken can't cure.

Queen Victoria is played with splendid regal grace by Judi Dench.

Another fast, gripping spy story with some good tricks up its sleeve.

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

A movie that's as sweet as it is clever, and never so clever that it forgets to be entertaining.

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

Fresh features delicate and sympathetic work from both Mr. Esposito and Mr. Jackson, whose fine characterizations say a lot about the originality of this film's vision.

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.

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

Hal Ashby directs Being There at an unruffled, elegant pace, the better to let Mr. Sellers's double-edged mannerisms make their full impression upon the audience.

The Long Good Friday charts a perilous course through a world of powerful people, ghastly acts of vengeance and ominously shifting fortunes.

There's plenty of room for sentimentality here, but the wonder of Salles' film is all in the telling.

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

Das Boot is yet another moving testament to the wastefulness of battle.

Mr. Jarman's visual sense easily eclipses his conceptual talents. And The Garden has a burning, kaleidoscopic energy to compensate for the facile nature of some of its more unavoidable thoughts.

Gary Kemp, as the more commanding and peculiar Ron Kray, makes an especially scary impression, particularly once the Krays' perfect control has begun to unravel. In a series of events set off by Reg's marriage, the Krays are seen on a downhill spiral that Mr. Medak conveys with great and effective understatement.

Big features believable young teen-age mannerisms from the two real boys in its cast, and this only makes Mr. Hanks's funny, flawless impression that much more adorable. This really is the performance to beat.

The sardonic, testosterone-fueled science fiction of Fight Club touches a raw nerve.

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

Until its final reel, when it strains badly to accommodate an almost biblical stroke of retribution, The Man in the Moon is a small, fond film that achieves a kind of quiet perfection.

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.

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle has its flaws, but it also has a heartfelt grasp of what set Dorothy Parker apart from her fellow revelers and makes her so emblematic a figure even today.

But Mr. Costa-Gavras, a galvanizing filmmaker working with a splendid cast, is able to tell this story in style.

This film's very lack of surprise and sophistication accounts for a lot of its considerable charm.

There's no need to worry that Mamet is on foreign territory with this action premise. The Edge succeeds ably in blending his famously acerbic dialogue with nerve-racking adventure scenes.

Barry Sonnenfeld...proves that he does not need the Addams family to develop a wry, cartoonish atmosphere filled with funny, well-etched minor characters.

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.

A marvelous toy. It's funny, it's full of tricks and it manages to be royally entertaining, which is really all it aims for.

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."

Violent as it is on the surface, Akira is tranquil at its core. The story's sanest characters plead for the wise use of mankind's frightening new powers, lending the whole film the feeling of a cautionary tale.

Enough wild-card energy to keep it bright and surprising.

Young Guns is best watched in the playful, none-too-serious spirit in which it was made. Though the film concentrates reverentially on its young stars, it also includes good performances from a few grown-ups, notably Terry O'Quinn as a lawyer and Jack Palance as the story's wild-eyed villain.

Affectionately told ...beguiling.

Finding hilarity in John Waters's latest movie title is the basic pre requisite for enjoying the goofy ingenuity of his new film.

Captivating.

Ms. Holland's film of The Secret Garden is elegantly expressive, a discreet and lovely rendering of the children's classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Mr. Modine's performance is exceptionally sweet and graceful; Mr. Cage very sympathetically captures Al's urgency and frustration. Together, these actors work miracles with what might have been unplayable.

The film is loaded with brotherly affection and with warm, funny and poignant evocations of a gentler time.[20 September 1996, p.C12]

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.

Even more impressive than the tact, warmth and humor of Sidewalk Stories is the fact that it exists at all. Mr. Lane has flown quite fearlessly in the face of fashion, and done this so confidently that any comparisons with Chaplin deserve to be appreciative.

Watching it amble along is enough of a treat, since the Coens populate this story with oddballs and bowling balls of such comic variety.

Beverly Hills Cop finds Eddie Murphy doing what he does best: playing the shrewdest, hippest, fastest-talking underdog in a rich man's world.

This comedy has less to do with narrative than with sheer chutzpah and a first-rate cast. It manages to be irreverently funny despite a subject that is no laughing matter.

The result is a film as maddening and unpredictable as the character herself, held together by a fierce, risk-taking performance and flashes of overwhelming honesty.

That glimmer of recognition is what makes Groundhog Day a particularly witty and resonant comedy, even when its jokes are more apt to prompt gentle giggles than rolling in the aisles.

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

Against All Odds is so lively and enjoyable on its own terms that its genre problems, while real, are easily overlooked. Mr. Hackford's brand of glossy, romantic escapism doesn't have to work as an homage. It has a vitality of its own.

A sunny, exuberant confection and an enjoyably skillful one.

It has a hurtling pace, nonstop intensity and a stylish, appealing performance by Will Smith in his first real starring role.

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.

Pacific Heights deserves a little credit for originality, and a little more for remaining within the realm of realism until a contrived, violent ending becomes overdue. Thanks to its three stars and a well-chosen supporting cast, the film remains sly fun even when its characters begin making silly mistakes.

A funny, romantic film filled with cozy intimacies and lovely, wide-screen images of the French countryside.

Like a great chef concocting an exquisite peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, Mr. Burton invests awe-inspiring ingenuity into the process of reinventing something very small.

Duvall's unobtrusive direction moves the film at a leisurely pace that lets many scenes build the gentle, pleasing rhythms of small-town Southern life. A rare display of spiritual light on screen.

Miss Walker, who also plays a terrorist femme fatale in "Patriot Games," makes a mesmerizing impression as she holds her own against Miss Plowright without seeming remotely ruffled.

Mr. Mogotlane makes Panic much more than a symbol, treating him as a raffish, amusingly overconfident figure at first and a visibly shaken man as the film progresses, until at last he utters the single syllable that encapsulates the film's final point.

Freed from the slavishness of most authorized biography, the film makers try bold strokes.

Mr. Lee, whose lean, straightforward documentary style loses none of his usual clarity and fire (the film has been exceptionally well shot by Ellen Kuras), summons a powerful sense of Birmingham's past and a galvanizing sense of how this bombing would change its future.

The movie's special gift happens to be Mark Wahlberg, who gives a terrifically appealing performance in this tricky role.

Frantic generates its suspense precisely because it appears so reasonable, because it takes such a calm, methodical approach to the maddening events that lure Dr. Walker into the maelstrom.

Horrocks's phenomenal mimicry of musical grande dames...makes a splendid centerpiece for the otherwise more ordinary film built around it.

Good-humored, try-anything fun.

Shaking off the solemnity that smothers many a well-meaning, high-minded family film, this one revels in an exuberant sense of play, drawing its audience into the wittily heightened reality of a fairy tale. The material, like the title, is a tad precious, but the finished film is much too spirited and pretty for that to matter.

Mr. Olmos seems to be living and breathing this role rather than merely playing it, and his enthusiasm really catches on.

Cheech and Chong have a good time with Things Are Tough All Over, and you will, too.

A well-acted drama more eerie than terrifying, more rooted in the occult than in sheer horror.

Deliver laughs and skewer a few stereotypes, thanks to extremely sly wit and a fine cast.

Tender Mercies has a bleak handsomeness bordering on the arty, but it also has real delicacy and emotional power, both largely attributable to a fine performance by Robert Duvall.

This Elizabeth is presented as a glamorously stressed-out modern woman who must cope with a super-intense case of having it all.

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

Limited by the vapidity of this material while he trims its excesses with the requisite machete, Mr. Eastwood locates a moving, elegiac love story at the heart of Mr. Waller's self-congratulatory overkill.

A romantic comedy that's a hoot in every sense, worth a smidgen of disapproval and a whole lot of helpless laughter...The film works ridiculously well because it never stoops to being mean-spirited or (despite all appearances) authentically inane.

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.

Despite its underlying predictability, Courage Under Fire manages warmth, intelligence and a healthy share of surprises.

Features a cast that would do any live-action film proud, a visual style noticeably different from that of other children's fare, and a story filled with genuine sweetness and mystery.

Rekindling the delicacy and invigorating naturalness he brought to "The Black Stallion," and again helped immensely by the radiant cinematography of Caleb Deschanel, Ballard turns a potentially treacly children's film into an exhilarating '90s fable.

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

BY the time you realize what's wrong with "The Rose," it will have you hooked anyhow...The Rose has an earnest, affecting character at its core. Even at its most preposterous, it never feels like a fraud.

Bright, stylish, ridiculously alluring.

A vibrant, grisly, gleefully amoral road movie.

Goes straight to cult status without quite touching one important base: the audience's emotions. This movie finally isn't anything move than an intricate feat of gamesmanship, but it's still quite something to see.

And the dancing, as in ''Strictly Ballroom,'' is filmed with a wishful Fred-and-Ginger sweetness that gives the film a studiously effervescent mood.

A stirring and tragic evocation of terrible times.

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.

despite such maladroit moments, The Last Temptation of Christ finally exerts enormous power. What emerges most memorably is its sense of absolute conviction, never more palpable than in the final fantasy sequence that removes Jesus from the cross and creates for him the life of an ordinary man.

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

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

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.

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.

A technological marvel, arch and innovative with a daringly offbeat visual conception. But it's also a strenuously artful film with a macabre edge that may scare small children. And beyond that, it lacks a clear idea of who its audience might be.

Cheerful, giddy fun.

A terrific offbeat cast operating on one shared, loony wavelength.

This film includes several remarkable episodes illustrating the strange events that shaped Mr. Perel's destiny and the full force of his terror and sorrow.

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.

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.

Mr. Alda's direction is particularly strong for bringing out his actors' humanity, and for developing a comic timing that helps unite the cast.

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

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

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.

Dry White Season is no less predictable than its predecessors, but its frankness and sincerity matter more than its fundamental bluntness.

Though Heavy begins beautifully, it isn't always able to sustain its balance between narrative subtlety and inertia.

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.

Deep Impact confines much of its horror to television news reports and has a more brooding, thoughtful tone than this genre usually calls for.

A film like this is quite naturally a showcase for its star, and as Valens, Lou Diamond Phillips has a sweetness and sincerity that in no way diminish the toughness of his onstage persona.

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.

Both actors play their roles so trickily that tensions escalate until the horror grows unimaginatively gothic.

This story has now been gracefully adapted by Bille August into a sleek, good-looking film that captures the book's peculiar fascination.

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.

The screenplay represents recycling at its best. The material has been successfully refurbished with new jokes and new attitudes, but the earlier film's most memorable moments have been preserved.

Ms. Heche and Mr. Ford make an appealing, wisecracking team, and they look comfortable with the rugged demands of their roles.

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.

There is the sense that Mr. Leigh, whose unusual collaborative method with actors is an essential facet of his writing and direction, is too willing to confuse tics with truth. Indeed, this time the actors' solipsism is more apparent.

The movie Phar Lap is as much of a crowd pleaser as the champion Australian race horse for whom it is named. In a gently rousing style that should appeal in equal measure to adults and children.

Any Which Way You Can is a loose, lighthearted Eastwood vehicle aimed at the good-timey sector of this actor's audience. The real star of this series is Clyde the orangutan, and it looks as if Clyde has another hit on his hairy hands.

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

Rambo's self-important, weight-of-the-world manner and his taste for political posturing would make him genuinely silly were they not counterbalanced by Mr. Stallone's startling, energetic physical presence and the film's stabs at self-mocking humor.

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.

Brisk and unsettling.

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

Mr. Rodriguez demonstrates his talents more clearly than ever -- he's visually inventive, quick-witted and a fabulous editor -- while still hampering himself with sophomoric material.

The filmmaker's equal fondness for bright floral paintings and exploding blood bags is sure to keep an audience on its toes, even if some of the effects are as blunt as (quite literally) chopsticks in the eye.

If Assayas doesn't always transport his film's events beyond the all too commonplace, his understatement can also yield moments of quiet simplicity.

Shows colorful style and a wisdom beyond precocity about its setting and its people.

A B movie with a vengeance, one that offers a wickedly feminine (though hardly feminist) view of nominally happy family life and its failings.

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.

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.

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

The bourgeois splendor of the Banks house is a major feature of Father of the Bride Part II, a cheerful, harmlessly ingratiating sequel on a par with its 1991 predecessor.

This material marks a gutsy, fascinating departure for Mr. Eastwood, and makes it clear that his directorial ambitions have by now outstripped his goals as an actor.

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.

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.

[Smith] also has an uncommonly sure sense of deadpan comic timing.

Its thoughts about its characters don't go much deeper than the bottom of a soup bowl, but those thoughts are still expressed with affection, wit and an abundance of fascinating cooking tips.

This feature-length concert film is hilarious, putting Mr. Murphy on a par with Mr. Pryor at his best.

Still, watching the plot unfold remains fun, if only for its "Can you top this?" brand of craziness.

Kevin Reynolds, who wrote and directed Fandango, is for the most part making just another coming-of-age film. But at its best, his debut feature has an appealing boisterousness, and it successfully walks a fine line between sensitivity and swagger.

This time, he takes no great risks, nor does he break new ground in the 20-something serial-small-talk genre. (Currently, Nicole Holofcener's sprightly "Walking and Talking" does it better.) But Burns emphatically avoids sophomore slump with an inviting, ruefully funny film that lives up to his initial promise.

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.

Far more memorable for the spectacular wildness of its Arctic and Dresden scenes (as photographed by Eduardo Serra) than for its uneven efforts to bind such images together.

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.

The colorfully written Con Air is a solid chip off "The Rock," pumped up and very well cast, with the prettiness and polish of advertising art.

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

National Lampoon's Vacation, which is more controlled than other Lampoon movies have been, is careful not to stray too far from its target. The result is a confident humor and throwaway style that helps sustain the laughs - of which there are quite a few.

This isn't a particularly well-made film, or even a truthful one - as a matter of fact, its fraudulence is its one uncompromising aspect. And yet it is mesmerizing, if not as a drama or documentary, then as an artifact.

It comes as a welcome surprise that "So I Married an Axe Murderer," which might have been nothing more than a by-the-numbers star vehicle, surrounds Mr. Myers with amusing cameos and gives him a chance to do more than just coast.

The Ghost and the Darkness, a lion-hunting story set in 19th-century Africa, is the rare Hollywood action-adventure that becomes more surprising and exotic as it moves along. While it begins on an unpromisingly starchy note, the film soon picks up speed, color and nicely nonchalant humor as it tells a true story about near-mythic beasts.

The Long Walk Home offers a careful, dispassionate, finally moving evocation of its setting. In attempting to present segregated Southern society matter-of-factly, it avoids shrillness and keeps its potential for preachiness more or less at bay.

In spite of this sogginess, and despite a self-congratulatory, do-gooder streak that the film discovers within Dave, this comedy remains bright and buoyant much of the way through.

Set against lovely verdant scenery but structured as a series of rambling vignettes, the stories in Being Human don't entirely mesh.

The Client, with a fast, no-nonsense pace and three winning performances, is the movie that most clearly echoes the simple, vigorous Grisham style.

It is to the credit of Mr. Apted, and to a cast including some very believable young actors, that Firstborn moves swiftly and smoothly enough to dispel much nitpicking about plot points, at least for a time.

The best and funniest Clint Eastwood movie in quite a while.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Mr. Argento's methods make potentially stomach-turning material more interesting than it ought to be. Shooting on bold, very fake-looking sets, he uses bright primary colors and stark lines to create a campy, surreal atmosphere, and his distorted camera angles and crazy lighting turn out to be much more memorable than the carnage.

It's a big, lavishly staged farce that aims to please even those who favor sophisticated screwball comedy, a genre to which it is greatly indebted.

Of all the bravura visual effects in Martin Scorsese's dazzingly stylish Casino, it's a glimpse of ordinary people that delivers the greatest jolt.

Brooks brings vast reserves of quarrelsome, hairsplitting hilarity to the story of a man going mano a mano with his sweet little mom.

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.

Deliciously silly.

Ms. Stone's presence nicely underscores the genre-bending tactics of Sam Raimi, the cult director now doing his best to reinvent the B-movie in a spirit of self-referential glee. Mr. Raimi is limited by a sketch mentality, which means his jokes tend to be over long before his films end. But his tastes for visual mischief and crazy, ill-advised homage can still make for sly, sporadic fun.

It works because Miss Midler and Miss Long are hilarious, both separately and together. Another thing that works is Leslie Dixon's screenplay, which has energy, wit and a supreme confidence that's just this side of bluster.

Both Paul and the film would seem maddening if they weren't so passionately sincere, and if Paul did not gaze at the film's many beautiful young actresses with such an amazed, seductive gleam in his eye.

The fundamentals here go beyond first-rate: animation both gorgeous and thoughtful, several wonderful songs and a wealth of funny minor figures on the sidelines, practicing foolproof Disney tricks. Only when it comes to the basics of the story line does Aladdin encounter any difficulties.

Robert Downey Jr.'s Blake Allen is enough of a raging dynamo to find the dark humor and desperate romanticism at the heart of Mr. Toback's ego trip of a premise, and to make Blake sympathetic too.

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.

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.

Mr. Burton's new Batman Returns is as sprightly as its predecessor was sluggish, and it succeeds in banishing much of the dourness and tedium that made the first film such an ordeal.

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

Drawing upon the novel with merciful selectivity, and adding such a contemporary flavor that the film's woodsmen often have a laid-back air, Michael Mann has directed a sultrier and more pointedly responsible version of this story.

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

For a time, The Best Intentions captures the elements of a profoundly difficult and credible love story, one plagued by essential differences that cannot be resolved.

The screenplay for Copycat, by Ann Biderman and Jay Presson Allen from a story by David Madsen, is otherwise so crackling good that character development threatens to eclipse the actual crimes.

It has a style that is unexpectedly snappy. Scares are not its strong suit, but it has a trim, bright look and better performances than might be expected. William Katt, looking weathered and sounding very Robert Redfordlike as Roger Cobb, brings some conviction to his role, and George Wendt is funny as a nosy next-door neighbor named Harold.

The movie is nicely whimsical, and elaborate in a way that no fantasy film this side of outer space has lately been. It's dopey, but it's also lots of fun.

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 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.

True Stories may well appeal more to those who don't know much about Mr. Byrne's music career than those who do. The soundtrack songs have the catchy simplicity of Talking Heads' most recent and least demanding compositions. And the film's imagery, expertly captured in bold, bright colors by Ed Lachman, will be even more striking to those who find it novel.

There's some variety to the crimes, as there is to the characters, and an audience is likely to do more screaming at suspenseful moments than at scary ones. The gore, while very explicit and gruesome, won't make you feel as if you're watching major surgery. The direction and camera work are quite competent, and the actors don't look like amateurs.

The martial arts stunts that are its single strongest selling point.

The Land Before Time isn't heavily plotted; it doesn't do much more than concentrate on the amusingly lifelike dynamics among the dinosaur children as they make their journey. Luckily, it isn't very long either. At a just-right length of 73 minutes, it ought to win audiences' hearts without wearing out their patience.

Mr. Stone's compassion for his subject overwhelms his film's false moves. And the barrage of undramatized, undigested data gives way to a much tighter and more artful vision...the film starts snowballing its way to real dramatic power. [20 Dec 1995, p.C11]

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

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

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.

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.

The film's outstanding nastiness, which is often diabolically funny until a poorly staged final battle sequence simply takes things too far, has something real and recognizable at its core.

Mr. Parker immerses his audience in a world in which popular art amounts to a communal high, a means of achieving identity and a great escape from the abundant problems of everyday life. As in Fame, he does this with a mixture of annoying glibness and undeniable high-voltage style. [14 Aug 1991, p.C11]

Slinky, sexy Love Jones brings new life to an old story: a courtship and all its predictable detours on the road to romance, with a boy-meets-girl inexorability along the way to love.

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.

If Ed Wood has a major failing, it's the lack of momentum. Wood's career had nowhere to go, and to some extent the film has the same problem.

Toy Soldiers is a crisp, suspenseful thriller well tailored to the tastes of teen-age audiences, who will doubtless appreciate such touches as the equivalent microchips found in one student's radio-controlled airplane and the chief terrorist's detonator, which is rigged to blow up the entire school.

All things considered, Benji's ability to hold the viewer's interest is remarkable, as is his sweetness with the cubs and his fearlessness with larger, predatory types. Adults are likely to stay alert, and any child who has so much as petted a poodle will probably find the animal footage irresistible.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brilliantly eccentric even when it yields mixed results.

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