Janet Maslin

Brazil may not be the best film of the year, but it's a remarkable accomplishment for Mr. Gilliam, whose satirical and cautionary impulses work beautifully together. His film's ambitious visual style bears this out, combining grim, overpowering architecture with clever throwaway touches.

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

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

There is a dazzling array of talent on display here, and the film surely has its memorable moments. But it articulates so little of the end-of-an-era feeling it hints at—and some of Mr. Scorsese's accomplishments have been so stunning—that it's impossible to view The Last Waltz as anything but an also-ran.

High Hopes manages to be enjoyably whimsical without ever losing its cutting edge.

For all its pretty glimpses of the desert island, the film never offers a clear, overall sense of what the place looks like; neither the camera nor the boy really goes exploring.

Those unfamiliar with the book will simply appreciate a stirring, many-sided fable, one that is exceptionally well told.

Dryly clever.

If you don't share the film's piercing vision of what really matters, someday you will.

THE view of the future offered by Ridley Scott's muddled yet mesmerizing Blade Runner is as intricately detailed as anything a science-fiction film has yet envisioned.

The fact that Cannonball Run II isn't much good may not prevent it from becoming this summer's best- loved lowest-common-denominator comedy, if only because of the utter absence of any competition.

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

BLACK humor, abundant originality and a brilliant visual style make Joel Coen's Blood Simple a directorial debut of extraordinary promise.

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. 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.

Grandly entertaining...matches the Austen-based "Clueless" for sheer fun. [13 Dec 1995]

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

A B-movie with flair.

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.

Banderas directs capably enough to keep the film lively.

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.

Local Hero is a funny movie, but it's more apt to induce chuckles than knee-slapping. Like Gregory's Girl, it demonstrates Mr. Forsyth's uncanny ability for making an audience sense that something magical is going on, even if that something isn't easily explained.

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.

With a fine vengeance along with flashes of great, unexpected tenderness, Mr. Solondz lethally evokes every petty humiliation that his seventh-grade heroine can't wait to forget.

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.

Frankly geriatric, and made without a single gunfight or explosion, the weak but genial romp Out to Sea supplies touristy scenery, familiar players and enough rumba scenes for 10 weddings. Everything about the film is as intentionally dated as its gag about Normandy.

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.

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.