Janet Maslin

Mr. Garcia gives one of his sleeker dreamboat performances.

Overshadowed by its own ambition and not-quite-ironic pageantry, Jefferson in Paris doesn't quite come to life.

Eventually, though it happens later rather than sooner, the conventional aspects of Alien Nation overwhelm the novelty.

More often, the film is like a ride through a car wash: forward motion, familiar phases in the same old order and a sense of being carried along steadily on a well-used track. It works without exactly showing signs of life.

The Legend of Billie Jean' is competently made, sometimes attractively acted, and bankrupt beyond belief. It's hard to imagine that even the film makers, let alone audiences, can believe in a sweet, selfless heroine who just can't help becoming a superstar.

If the Turtles insist on remaining a mainstream box-office attraction, at least they've now had the decency to make a mainstream movie.

Mr. Lyne's films may not cast any new light on the human condition, but they do keep you glued to the screen.

Cocoon: The Return is so tired, in fact, that it can barely recapitulate the winning formula of the original hit.

If you can get past the movie's aimlessness and its visual drabness, it has its share of isolated laughs.

Ms. Midler's performance manages to be both involving and wildly inconsistent. The story is so full of holes that both she and Ms. Alvarado sometimes experience full personality changes from scene to scene.

To be fair, ''Adventures in Baby-Sitting'' is determinedly cute, and its pep may well be appreciated by anyone with a frame of reference as narrow as the film makers' own. It's clear from the film's opening moments that pep is all that matters here anyhow.

Foul Play is a slick, attractive, enjoyable movie with all the earmarks of a hit. But as “House Calls” did a.few months ago, it starts out promising • genuine wit and originality only to fall back on more familiar tactics after a half‐hour or so. If either film had a less winning opening, perhaps it wouldn't leave a vague aftertaste of disappointment.

These are performances that lost too much in the editing room, smothered by music and overshadowed by a picture-postcard vision of the American West.

More American Graffiti is grotesquely misconceived, so much so that it nearly eradicates fond memories of the original.

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.

Brain Donors is a short, reasonably snappy attempt at nothing less than a present-day Marx Brothers comedy,

Innocent Blood, which could easily have been titled "A French Vampire in Pittsburgh" in homage to one of Mr. Landis's earlier triumphs, is even more dependent on gruesome special effects than "An American Werewolf in London" was, and is a lot less imaginative.

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.

But Mr. Berenger, grousing steadily, and Mr. McNamara, in a boyish Ricky Nelson mode, are likably matched. Ms. Eleniak, who also made a playful and picturesque Elly May Clampett in "The Beverly Hillbillies," succeeds here in rising above the cheesecake level.

Inherently condescending, and finally awash in warm-bath sentimentality, this setup never goes out of style.

Tom Hanks is utterly out of place in the Israeli romance Every Time We Say Goodbye...for at least two reasons: because there's something so innately comic about him, even in solemn surroundings, and because he has so much more energy than the film does.

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.

Rodman, awkward but definitely lively, is the occasion for har-har hair jokes ("Who does your hair, Siegfried or Roy?") and gives the film some much-needed comic relief. Rourke, as a villain named Stavros, is scary. And for once, he's supposed to be.

It's a pleasant but fairly standard movie about a subject that's anything but.

Mr. Lee isn't as successful at shaping a story around Girl 6, but enjoying her company is all his slender, sunny film really tries to do.

A gloomy film with a story whose outcome... is an especially foregone conclusion.

The Loveless, a pathetic homage to the 1950's, has been made by two writer-directors, Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery, who share an unmistakable longing for that era. But their nostalgia expresses itself no more interestingly than through a lot of silly, lifeless posturing, plus the use of colors like chartreuse.

Cadence, which is the first feature Martin Sheen has directed, allows the director and his son Charlie ample opportunity to grapple with one another, as well as with questions of racial harmony and with another of Mr. Sheen's sons, Ramon Estevez. The result is well meaning and at times even gently likable.

It winds up illustrating the very emptiness it mocks.

Anyone who has been following the ''Superman'' saga will find this installment enjoyable enough, but some of the magic is missing.

Works well as family entertainment.

This sequel has no real purpose beyond the obvious one of following up a hit, although the original film was just as casual at times. Both of them rely on Billy Crystal's breezy, dependably funny screen presence to hold the interest, even when not much around him is up to par. Both also count on the irascible Jack Palance, even though Mr. Palance's Curly was dead and buried when the first film was over.

The best things about the movie are probably its amusingly modish outfits and hairdos, which demand that the audience keep its eyes open, and the music, which doesn't.

Not surprisingly, there are some slow patches and formulaic touches, but that's a fair trade for the fun of watching Mr. Williams and Mr. Crystal make an irresistible comic team.

Unlike ''The Fugitive,'' which had tremendous dramatic urgency, this film isn't clear enough to build suspense that escalates from scene to scene...A lively look and some frantically inventive action scenes generate energy, even if the gimmicks do have an edge of desperation. Mr. Davis churns out vigorous excitement inside the working of a drawbridge, in a science museum, in a secret bunker and on a frozen lake.

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

Medicine Man transports a lot of Hollywood-style hot air to the remote jungle outpost where Dr. Campbell has accidentally stumbled upon a cancer-reversing formula.

Hope Floats, which often resembles a rosy commercial, does indulge in too much awkward slow motion, and in occasional embarrassing romps that are meant to signify family fun.

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.

The film has energy even when it hasn't much sense, in a manner that will strike most non-cultists as exhausting.

Conceived frankly as a product, complete with hit-to-be theme song over the closing credits, this adventure film cares less about storytelling than about keeping the Musketeers' feathered hats on straight whenever they go galloping.

The special effects are suitably catastrophic, though they aren't much more clever than the computer tricks that turn up in beer commercials these days.

Though this is by no means the grisliest or most witless film made from one of Mr. King's horrific fantasies, it can lay claim to being the most unpleasant. Why? Because when you strip away the suspenseful buildup to a King story, you're often left with mechanical moralizing and crude, sophomoric small talk. Needful Things has more of both than any film could ever need.

With a too-many-cooks screenplay credited to Ron Osborn, Jeff Reno, Kevin Wade and Bo Goldman, it's so long that every character regrettably wears out his or her welcome.

Basic Instinct transfers Mr. Verhoeven's flair for action-oriented material to the realm of Hitchcockian intrigue, and the results are viscerally effective even when they don't make sense. Drawing powerfully on the seductiveness of his actors and the intensity of their situation, Mr. Verhoeven easily suspends all disbelief.

A simple, bullet-riddled, crowd-pleasing action movie.

M. Butterfly as idiosyncratic as Mr. Cronenberg's work always is, is sometimes too flat and ambiguous for its own good.

Culminates in a show-stopping action sequence set in midtown Manhattan, directed by Ms. Leder with crisp economy and furious energy.

Instead, Mr. Carrey turns up in a sloppy second Ace Ventura film that's little more than an echo of the first. A two-minute trailer wouldn't miss many of its highlights.

As stomach-turning as might be expected, but it has a lot going for it: clever special effects, a good leading performance and a villain so chatty he practically makes this a human-interest story.

Ought to please an undemanding kiddie audience, but Flipper offers little else in the way of excitement or plot.

Katherine Heigl, playing the teen-age daughter who is mistaken for Mr. Depardieu's girlfriend, parades about in skimpy bathing suits, displaying almost everything but a sense of humor.

Risky as it sounds, Raising Cain is enjoyable precisely because it makes the most of its own lunacy and stays so far out on a limb. The fact that Raising Cain is beautifully made is, of course, another attraction.

Unfortunately, the mad romanticism of Rimbaud's exploits has been made to look preposterous here, despite a cast that should have been magnetic in its own right. Total Eclipse clumsily exaggerates both these characters, from the moment when Rimbaud begins savoring experience in a laughably over-the-top poetic manner.

A whopping wrong turn throws this lightweight, benign-looking movie terminally off course.

For all the funny possibilities of Mr. Murphy's neat transformation here, the latest comedy from Stephen Herek ("Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," "The Mighty Ducks") doesn't know what to do with him.

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.

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.

Ms. Davis gets to deliver the film's obvious message in a single unremarkable line: ''You can tell a lot about a society by who it chooses to celebrate.'' But most of what you can tell from the fun-house mirrors of Celebrity is what you already know.

The actors mark time, and the gung-ho heroics on display are embarrassingly hollow.

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

Christopher Penn very nearly steals the movie as Ren's hayseed friend, and the two share a musical scene (to Deniece Williams's ''Let's Hear It for the Boy'') that's almost as sensational as the opening credits.

Jungle 2 Jungle' still finds time to appreciate Mr. Allen's easy way with a child actor, an audience or a heavily tranquilized pet cat.

This latest special-effects free-for-all from Jan De Bont is a lavish illustration of how to take a fairly modest black-and-white horror film from 1963 and amplify it so relentlessly that the sight of the flying cow in Twister would not be all that amiss.

The frontiersmen are wild and woolly, and most of the Indians remain scalp-collecting savages. [13 Sep 1980, p.C14]

In Hollywood Buddha, Mr. Caland plays, directs and reimagines himself. This is truly a vanity project, as evidenced by the ample amount of screen time he gives his own pecs and thighs.

Its light classical manner and its happyish ending. Whatever Mr. Allen is doing in constructing this pretty, slight, gently entertaining movie, he isn't doing the thing he does best. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy gives the impression of someone speaking fluently but formally in a language not his own.

Hiller makes this warm, friendly and sometimes cute, but he doesn't make it move very quickly.

It's a flimsy sentimental comedy with more product plugs and fewer laughs than might have been hoped for.

The Burning makes a few minor departures from the usual cliches of its genre, though it carefully preserves the violence and sadism that are schlock horror's sine qua non.

P.C.U. turns out to be a surprisingly lame and unfocused campus comedy, one that pays remarkably little attention to its own comic possibilities.

It's easy to see why this cheerfully dopey film has struck pay dirt.

The inventiveness that has gone into this, and into turning Oz into a land of lavish special effects, will be lost on anyone with a fondness for the 1939 musical classic. That film will always enchant adults and children alike. This joyless new Return to Oz isn't likely to appeal to the former, and may give many of the latter a good scare. Children are sure to be startled by the new film's bleakness.

there is so little genuine wit to be found in ''Clue.'' The film does have a speedy pace, but that could hardly be confused with Mr. Hawks's madcap humor; instead, it involves a lot of running around through secret passages, and some slapstick routines involving dead bodies. The actors are meant to function as an ensemble, but that merely means that they often repeat the same line simultaneously.

Van Damme, who has nonetheless made eight films in six years, including "Bloodsport," "Cyborg" and "Kickboxer." His looks are memorable but his acting skills stunningly limited, confined mostly to the flexing, seething and pouting realm. Should anyone be in the market for an all-new Hercules, Mr. Van Damme might at the very least take a number. But when it comes to even the minimally dramatic events of Lionheart, he's in over his head.

Mr. Garity's performance doesn't quite redeem this sorely lacking production.

Most of For Keeps is entirely predictable, but that should do little to diminish its interest for audiences of high-school age. Here again, Miss Ringwald is the very model of teen-age verisimilitude, and she's most impressive in making even the most hackneyed situations seem real.

Crocodile Dundee II has been attractively photographed, if unremarkably directed, and it aims for affable, low-key escapism just as the first film did. But the earlier one had novelty to keep it going, and this time the novelty has begun to wear thin, even if Mr. Hogan remains generally irresistible.

Style overwhelms substance by default.

Oh Heavenly Dog is diverting enough for its dog tricks - I like dog tricks, don't get me wrong - but it otherwise shows few signs of life, and many signs of depressing modernism.

The slackest and most harebrained of Mr. Eastwood's recent movies. It is overlong and virtually uneventful, even though there are half a dozen cute characters and woolly subplots competing for the viewer's attentions.

Mallrats mixes clever bits and an appealing quirkiness (which goes a long way) with gross-out practical jokes, needless repetition and obvious padding, since it has no real plot.

Aiming at a target as easy as suburban sterility, She's Having a Baby might be expected to hit its mark every now and then. But the film's mood is simply too sour, despite the best efforts of a cast filled with appealing actors, a number of whom have had walk-ons in other Hughes efforts.

Really, it's all as funny as a hernia.

Tango and Cash is loaded with sweating, straining, smashing and grunting, with bulging-bicep shots and sadistic special effects. Watery electrocution sequences are a particular favorite, since these mean wet clothes, shooting sparks, writhing bodies and other current staples of high style. Images like these are so all-important in Tango and Cash that the idea of storytelling has virtually been annihilated.

The pace is so plodding and the dialogue so unwaveringly banal … that the film can't rise to the extraordinary sensations it means to capture.

Eschewing warm, cuddly imagery just as Mr. Van Allsburg's book does, the film affects a strange, artificial style that has the invasive weirdness of "Gremlins" but none of the charm.

Iron Eagle is a very shrewd teen-age variation on the Rambo/Missing in Action formula, a military rescue movie with a nice young hero and a fun-loving feeling.

This is another of the iron-buttercup roles in which Miss Hawn has been specializing since ''Private Benjamin,'' films in which her inspired dizziness masks an unexpectedly strong will. Initially, that contrast was delightful. But it has begun to seem less and less funny as Miss Hawn's films develop a preachier edge.

This escapist comedy is so cheerfully outlandish that it's hard to resist, and so good-hearted that it's genuinely endearing.

Mr. Carpenter gives this formerly black and white story a handsome color retelling and a lot of new punch. And he avidly exploits the fears that are at its heart. Now add a new one. With its baleful little villains, Village of the Damned is even creepier to watch as a parent than it was to see as a child.

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.

Mr. Seagal is effective for both his novelty value and his ability to be both literally and figuratively disarming. And the film itself is a lively one for its genre, ambitious enough to do more than simply string fight scenes together.

A weird blooper reel, shown as the credits roll, records how often the actors broke into nervous laughter, and this goofy coda undermines any serious intent or honest emotion in the previous, tedious 80 minutes.

Supergirl arouses some initial curiosity about the differences between the two cousins; for instance, that Supergirl can't change in phone booths and is much the better flier of the two. However the film, as directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by David Odell, quickly loses its novelty.

SEVERAL of the characters in Dune are psychic, which puts them in the unique position of being able to understand what goes on in the movie.

Genuinely disturbing in its vision of fearless students and powerless teachers locked in struggle.

Would-be Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse games...are more memorable for their settings...than for their sense.

Renaldo and Clara is so personal it borders on being obscure, yet it remains surprisingly deficient in personality.

This film is quite literally lost in the wilderness, with an intermittent, picturesque prettiness that doesn't suit the action at all. More damagingly, Mr. Dickerson does nothing to keep his cast from chewing up the mountain scenery. [16 Apr 1994, p.11]

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

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.

It's cheerfully inoffensive entertainment designed for the crowd that liked "Car Wash," with which one of the present film's producers was also involved, and it offers a similarly shapeless brand of merriment.

The film's facile treatment of racial issues may be enough to bring back the practice of throwing tomatoes at the screen.

The comforting sameness of all the ''Rockys'' and the overbearing star quality of Mr. Stallone in his lovable-lug incarnation may well make Rocky IV another hit. But when it flashes back to its antecedents, particularly to the original ''Rocky'' with its bashful heroine and self-effacing star, it becomes clear how bloated and hollow the story has become.

Gleaming the Cube (the title refers to achieving the skateboarding equivalent of cosmic bliss) has an intrigue plot that is unremarkable, and it doesn't do anything terribly novel with the relationship between Brian and the policeman (Steven Bauer) who helps investigate the case. It becomes somewhat more interesting in exploring the Vietnamese community of Orange County, Calif., especially in its tinier details.

Isn't much when it comes to either deliberate or inadvertent humor. But it does have a few amusing moments.

One of Mr. Stallone's more muddled efforts but by no means a flop on the order of F.I.S.T. or Rhinestone.

Garret is played by Kevin Costner, who should avoid all future roles that call for overalls and goggles and who this time crosses the line from teasingly laconic to stodgy.

This film lacks even the inadvertently buoyant awfulness that makes some bad movies fun. It's just plain dull.

This Ninja Turtles tale is less violent and more scenic than its predecessors, since it gets the title characters out of the sewer and transports them back to feudal Japan.

This comedy has the earmarks of humor and even a few genuine laughs, but it also has a prefabricated, automatic-pilot feeling.

As lavishly escapist as they are, the latest James Bond films have become strenuous to watch, now that the business of maintaining Bond's casual savoir-faire looks like such a monumental chore.

Poltergeist III suffers from bad casting and from the actors' having been encouraged to behave as if sampling an exciting new toothpaste; everyone smiles unreasonably, except when screaming.

Jack Frost is so sugarcoated that it makes other recent efforts in this genre look blisteringly honest. On the other hand, it's just cheerful and bogus enough to keep children reasonably entertained.

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 portion of the audience will be strongly offended by Porky's, just as another portion will find it filthy but fun. However, there is no debating the success of Mr. Clark's casting, for he has assembled a cheerful, likable bunch of actors, most of them unknowns.

It cares far more about herding audiences into theaters than about what they hear or see.

Swing Kids looks good and moves quickly at first; later on, mired in familiar-feeling moments, it flounders

The characters remain funny and likable, and they all live on Earth.

More than enough sadism to go around. But the net effect is less excitement than overkill. The screenplay, by Larry Brothers, has a tendency to forget old plot elements as it picks up new ones.

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

Teachers is Arthur Hiller's attempt to do for public education what he did for medicine in The Hospital, and the results are very uneven.

Aeronautically and otherwise, it's a bumpy trip.

With a score by Giorgio Moroder, and with ingenious costumes that are utterly au courant, Flashdance contains such dynamic dance scenes that it's a pity there's a story here to bog them down.

Deep inside the vague, unfocused excesses of The Bodyguard, the tale of a buttoned-down security agent hired to protect a glamorous pop star, there lurks the potential for a compelling film noir.

While Mr. Howard ably maintains a strong forward momentum, Backdraft often feels directionless beneath its overlay of frantic activity. One clear story line would have been worth more than a series of subplots and tangents.

Mr. Cassavetes is effectively black-hearted, and makes a striking figure, and Randy Quaid does a lot with the underdeveloped role of a local sheriff. Mr. Marvin directs at a brisk pace, but his screenplay, though lively, seems to be written in an alien language.

Overdressed and overplotted as it is, City Heat benefits greatly from the sardonic teamwork of Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds. Without them the film would be eminently forgettable, but their bantering gives it an enjoyable edge.

If all of Virtuosity were as tightly controlled as that, it would exert a greater fascination than it finally does.

The episodes are marginally interesting, but each is a little too long. And each could be fully explained in a one-sentence synopsis.

Brilliantly schematic, endlessly fascinating...this prescient 1958 spellbinder can now be admired as the deepest, darkest masterpiece of Hitchcock's career. [Restored version]

Police Academy 2 isn't as funny as its predecessor, but as sequels go it's certainly amusing. [31 Mar 1985, p.55]

It's a beach party movie, marginally better than the average, with snow taking the place of surf.

Mr. Tannen's strength is his ability to grab his audience's interest quickly and to hold on to it, even by the most superficial means. Even when the movie doesn't entirely make sense, it manages to be effective.

Mr. Englund, playing the Halloween favorite whom audiences love to hate, now delivers lines like this with the broadness of a latter-day Jimmy Durante. But he sustains Freddy's peculiar charm even when appearing without ghastly makeup in scenes of Freddy's early years.

First-time screenwriters Jeff Wadlow and Beau Bauman prove more adept at staging mind games than creating chills and thrills for the audience.

Sometimes overly silly, with the kinds of sight gags and brief pastiches that might make for a middling ''Airplane'' imitation; in one unforgivable moment, it shows what happens when a spaceman sneezes. Much of it is better than that, however.

Nothing spoils a horror story faster than a stupid victim. And Nightmares, an anthology of four supposedly scary episodes, has plenty of those.

Sheena is the perfect summer movie for anyone who's dissatisfied with the season's intentional comedies, and who doesn't believe in looking a gift horse in the mouth. Actually, it's more like gift zebra.

An interminable car chase punctuated by dumb stunts and even dumber dialogue, plus the well-worth-missing sight of Paul Williams in a dress.

The gags, like the plotting, have a giddy edge that can be sharp, but just as often they go nowhere.

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

Summer Rental is a wan but good-natured hot-weather comedy, with a big debt to National Lampoon's Vacation plus a few nice touches of its own.

Nobody could shine in the listless atmosphere created by Phillip Noyce's perfunctory direction. And nobody could do much with a line like "Zeke, I want to have a real relationship." Or "Listen, do you work out?"

Depp moves through the film suavely and imperturbably, never letting the particulars bog him down.

Though Mr. Williams sometimes seems on the verge of "Aladdin"-caliber improvisation with the ever-morphing green flubber, the film bogs him down with a fiancee (Marcia Gay Harden) hellbent on making him remember a wedding date, and with the full Hughes retinue of thugs and bullies.

The film never gets past the unlikelihood that its characters have much chance of living happily ever after. Or of finding real heat or humor along the way.

Action fans may well find Uncommon Valor enjoyably familiar, but for others it will smack of war movie dej a-vu, despite the new angle provided by its concern for American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam.

It really would be unfair to take such a narrow view of Mr. Seagal's appeal. In fact, he combines street-smart swagger and a flair for wisecracks with a martial arts background and the pampered look of a Hollywood eminence, all of which makes for a lively mix. [13 Apr 1991, p.12]

Unfortunately, the skimpy screenplay by Ralph Farquhar insists upon entangling the performers in the most conventional subplots imaginable. Talent contests, feeble attempts at romance and the travails of a struggling young record company are all enlisted, however briefly, in the effort to drum up backstage activities for the players, who are best watched in performance anyhow. Rap music is infinitely more original than these creaky devices, and it deserves something better.

Written mostly as ensemble comedy, Striptease grinds to a halt whenever the star goes through her dance paces, most of which prove awkwardly strenuous and are daring only by the standards of A-list movie stars.

This movie has nothing but foolishness to carry it along. At least it is foolishness that pretends, however unsuccessfully, to be grand. [19 Dec 1980, p.C18]

Neither performer upstages the other, but the admirable film is weakened by timidity or a lack of skill.

The film does nothing to accommodate Mr. Pryor's singular comic talents...It keeps the crazy premise but does away with such essential ingredients as funny material and antic timing.

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

It is by no means the dopiest thing on the big screen.

Mr. Boyle's brand of heaven-sent love story comes with a strange and whimsical mean streak. Tender thoughts and ha-ha shootings don't automatically mix.

After his triumphant Beverly Hills Cop, Eddie Murphy could have done anything. Why, then, did he choose to head for the mysterious Orient to make a film as rich in mumbo jumbo as The Golden Child? Mr. Murphy's comic skepticism in the face of all this is the film's greatest asset. But it is worn thin by the awareness that not even he seems able to take the adventure seriously, and by the preposterousness and inconsistency of what surrounds him.

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.

Mr. Brando's performance will be deemed interestingly audacious only by those who found "Apocalypse Now" too sane.

Cutthroat Island proves too stupidly smutty for children, too cartoonish for sane adults and not racy enough for anyone who regards Ms. Davis in a tight-laced bodice as its main attraction. The only serious incentive for seeing this spectacle is a fascination with extravagance, since Cutthroat Island is indeed scenic, hectic and big.

Moving isn't anything out of the ordinary, but those who have shared at least some of these experiences ought to find it amusing.

The enthusiastically nutty Color of Night has the single-mindedness of a bad dream, and about as much reliance on everyday logic.

Prince's direction is on a par with his acting, roughly equivalent to his aptitude for Presidential politics. Nonetheless, the film has a lively style, a galvanizing score and some dance numbers in which the star truly shines.

The film jabs so relentlessly at the viscera that the audience is never allowed to notice anything independently; if Mr. Joanou wants you to spot a license plate, for instance, he drives the car right into a floor-level camera.

The dramatic possibilities of the material are weak at best, and its satirical underpinnings are nowhere to be found. As for the characters, they are either deeply unsympathetic or, when they resort to technical jargon for very long periods of time, incomprehensible.

The film borrows themes and cast members from HBO's "Sopranos," but the script lacks the nuance and wit of that series's creator, David Chase.

The film's many voids are not meaningfully filled by all the monsters and assembly-line workers that crop up.

Rhinestone isn't unrelievedly terrible. It is helped by a director, Bob Clark, who treats the material good- humoredly and takes it lightly, as well as by a funny supporting cast.

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.

The Fly II is competent but hardly clever. The only respect in which it matches Mr. Cronenberg's Fly is in its sheer repulsiveness, since this film degenerates into a series of slime-ridden, glop-oozing special effects in its final half hour.

A confused horror film custom-designed for those who prefer their scares set in a clean, comfortable, architecturally correct atmosphere, rather than the usual Gothic settings.

Mr. Lundgren, who glowers his way all too convincingly through the role of a rabid bully, may well be the only man in the universe who can make Mr. Van Damme look like an actor.

The mirthless follow-up to a film that wasn't all that funny in the first place. [03 Oct 1980, p.8]

Newly benign and noticeably clumsier than the hits (Williamson) has written.

But the film, written by Phoef Sutton and Lisa-Maria Radano and directed by Richard Benjamin in a style cute enough to peel paint off the walls, can't do much to generate romantic sparks between its two young leads.

St. Elmo's Fire is most appealing when it simply gives the actors a chance to flirt with the camera, and with one another. When it attempts to take seriously the problems of characters who are spoiled, affluent and unbearably smug, it becomes considerably less attractive.

This bizarre, special effects-filled movie doesn't have the jaunty hop-and-zap spirit of the Nintendo video game from which it takes -- ahem -- its inspiration. What it has instead are a weird, jokey science-fiction story, "Batman"-caliber violence and enough computer-generated dinosaurs to get the jump on "Jurassic Park."

The cast of Once Upon a Crime performs energetically, as if the material was funny, although most of the time it is not. As a general rule, films whose plots revolve around lost dogs are apt to be short on comic inspiration, and this one is no exception.

Mr. Fleischer brings absolutely no playfulness to what might, at least, have been enjoyably light. And he brings out the worst in a cast that was ill-chosen to begin with. The most memorable thing about the film is the costume/production design by Danilo Donati, which is genuinely demented. Even the horses wear too much junk jewelry.

The director, B. W. L. Norton, and the writers, Richard Martini, Tim Metcalfe and Miguel Tejada-Flores, display no idea whatsoever of how to keep a film moving or how to hold an audience's interest. Listlessness and sloppiness on this scale are truly depressing.

Gathers a partyful of young players and barely gives them enough of a story line to puff on, but it gets by on personality anyhow.

It must be said that Berkowitz's shamelessness and persistence aren't inevitably irresistible.

While this is no quick-witted treat on a par with Mr. Levinson's ''Wag the Dog,'' it's a solid thriller with showy scientific overtones.

The film's frequently dark, grimy look and such digressions as a demonstration of how to eat river rat will appeal chiefly to those who like their science fiction on the squalid side.

103 minutes is an awfully long time to watch people whiz along the boardwalk. The novelty wears off in a hurry.

Even the fish lack personality in Deepstar Six, a film that makes the exotic undersea world not much more interesting than the average bedroom closet.

The two-minute trailer for Black Sheep is so crammed with pratfalls that it appears funny. But a full hour and a half leaves this comedy looking one-note and virtually laugh-free...This may sound like a John Belushi role, but Mr. Farley has little of Mr. Belushi's gift for sneaky, subversive mischief. He spends his time here just getting his thumbs caught in a car's hood, being dragged on his stomach until sparks fly, etc. Almost all the film's jokes involve physical pain.

This claustrophobic mess of a movie offers only carnage.

Two ridiculous blood-soaked hours.

Trouble is, while not trading quips, the characters actually go through the motions of being scared of the croc, menaced by the croc and so on. And since even the gator horror satire is old hat (remember ''Alligator?''), there's no remaining way to make this interesting.

[It] has a gentle approach to its characters and an occasionally striking visual style. What it doesn't have is much momentum or originality.

In the cast are many, many dogs, who are charmed by Damien in a way no audience is likely to be.

Disarmingly, the film thus acknowledges the Spice Girls' flash-in-the-pan status and lets them kid around about their frankly synthetic career.

Never succeeds in becoming either torrid or scary. It does generate a few chuckles in its depiction of what are supposedly the workings of a chic and hard-hitting magazine...The Crush is for the most part grindingly predictable and mechanically played.

It has a breezy, unapologetic manner. And it also happens to be funny, which goes a long way toward making up for any underlying obtuseness or insensitivity.

As martial-arts movies go, it's pretty tame. As movies of any other sort go, tame is putting it nicely.

There was more Allenesque potential in (Schaeffer's) earlier ``My Life's in Turnaround'' (directed with Donal Lardner Ward) than there is in this painfully cute concoction, which is about two old friends with a pact to leap off the Brooklyn Bridge. There are too many occasions when the viewer may wish they would just go ahead and jump.

The cast never has much chance to shine. And the main attraction is kept all too understandably under wraps.

While not exactly an actress picture, The Final Chapter takes pains to make its characters a little more personable than the horror- movie norm. This is unfortunate, since there is nothing to do during the second half of the film but watch them die.

Mr. Seagal's own film is awesomely incoherent, a mixture of poorly executed violence and Dances With Wolves-style astral musings.

North, a playful modern fable about a boy in search of new parents, doesn't always work, but much of it is clever in amusingly unpredictable ways.

Humorous slashings and car accidents constitute similar high points in a film that is glaringly short on ''Scream''-style self-mockery to match its dopey mayhem.

Though the combination of Linda Fiorentino, Chazz Palminteri and David Caruso promised Jade some fire, it winds up with no more spark than a doused campfire.

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

Carl Reiner's hit-or-miss film noir parody, a collection of gags that vary much too wildly in terms of timing and wit. All that hold this comedy together are a playful outlook and a conviction that detective stories are intrinsically funny, especially if the detective is as much of a blockhead as Ned Ravine.

Existential terror, in the case of Robert Harmon's Hitcher, means an unmotivated viciousness that's as cryptic at the story's end as it was at the beginning.

References to Harry Truman and the Roaring Twenties are perhaps meant to appeal to an older audience, as is Red Buttons as Jack's friend, but ''18 Again'' isn't successfully aimed at anyone in particular.

Something like a sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The characters are different, but the perspective on teen-age Americana, West Coast-style, is very much the same. This time around, though, the material is less funny.

King Kong Lives, which was directed by John Guillerman, has a dull cast and a plot that's even duller, but the ape himself is in good form.

Mr. Bronson is stony as ever, and a little more nattily dressed.

Only fleetingly amusing, but Miss Long does make it fun for a while.

Like The Wiz...Xanadu is desperately stylish without having any real style.

Nestor Almendros's cinematography is soothingly gorgeous, and so are Miss Shields and Mr. Atkins. Both are quite adequate to the movie's requirements, and neither has much acting to do--Miss Shields's hardest job, for instance, is to pretend she is giving birth to a baby without ever having wondered why she's put on so much weight. Her second hardest job is to keep the wind from ruffling her hair.

It means to be funny, with a cast including several talented young comedians (among them Bill Maher, as a record business exectuvie), but it's not.

This film has enough new characters and independent spirit to have a light, cheery style of its own.

Not unfunny, and not really an offense to the memory of Inspector Clouseau, it's merely a movie with very little reason to exist.

It's mostly just slight, and none of it elicits more than the mildest of chuckles.

Has a droll tone that sets it well above comedy's lowest common denominator. But it also has a bloodlessness that keeps it from being funny very often.

It doesn't help that the mystery plot seems half-baked in the end, or that none of the actors appear entirely comfortable with their roles. Miss Ryan looks edgy and spends a lot of time tossing her hair. Mr. Harmon is easygoing and attractive, but his nice-guy manner belies his character's steely talk.

Through all this, Mr. Reynolds displays little understanding of the very good reasons why audiences usually like him. He is at his most ponderous here, with none of his trademark resiliency or sardonic humor.

Since Trapped in Paradise assembles three actors as amusing as Nicolas Cage, Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz, it's a minor holiday miracle that this homey comedy barely elicits even a chuckle.

The Secret of the Sword is a Saturday morning kiddie cartoon stretched out to feature length, which by some lights is an awfully long time.

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.

No film winds up with a name like Feeling Minnesota if it has anything definite in mind.

Mr. Diesel could not have succeeded as a genre-switcher without the proven television talents of the film's able ensemble.

The film's only bright idea is a duo named Chain Saw (Cameron) and Dave (Riley), who love horror films and instigate grisly but imaginative practical jokes, like pretending to be attacked by bunnies when the class makes a field trip to a petting zoo.

Mr. Allen might just as well have devoted his talents to man-eating goldfish, poodles on the rampage or carniverous canaries.

Troll has a knowing tone that's more smart-alecky than clever. And it hovers uncomfortably between comedy and horror, without ever landing decisively in either camp. The film is as funny as it gets in a sequence that has Sonny Bono pretending to be a great ladies' man.

Made with great effort and no charm, this mirthless fantasy film returns its young hero, Bastian Balthazar Bux (Jonathan Brandis), to the land of Fantasia, which when first glimpsed here appears to be made entirely of cellophane.

How bad could it be? Not exactly awful. But not funny, sexy or romantic either, which doesn't leave anything for this inert and oddly confused movie to do.

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.

To his credit, Mr. Ropelewski comes up with fairly novel forms of mayhem and makes an effort to tie up most of the loose ends when the film is over.

The only real value of Damnation Alley is educational: This is the movie to see if you don't understand what was so wonderful about the special effects in, say, Star Wars.

Mr. Zeffirelli and his screenwriter, Judith Rascoe, have bitten off so much more than they can chew that their film is virtually unintelligible at times. A great deal happens in the novel, much more than this two-hour movie can contain. But it tries to touch so many bases that its transitions are jolting, its scenes often undeveloped, and the motives of its characters frequently unclear.

Guardian angel movies almost always have a little charm, but The Heavenly Kid has none.

Joel Schumacher, director and ringmaster, piles on the flashy showmanship and keeps the film as big, bold, noisy and mindlessly overwhelming as possible.

It's a shock to find Neil Simon's name attached to something as resoundingly unfunny as The Slugger's Wife.

One of the many problems with Gus Van Sant's tortured, worked-over Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is that Sissy Hankshaw talks like a novel, and a dated one at that.

At least slightly more varied than the average fraternity-boy comedy.The nerds' rap number, in which they sing of nerd pride, is probably the high point of this whole endeavor.

As directed by Ralph S. Singleton, Graveyard Shift works better above ground than below. The early scenes that allow the actors a little color are more fun than the all-basement episodes, which are visually monotonous despite the fact that the film's monster plot is a multi-media affair.

So many horror-movie clichés have been assembled under the roof of a single haunted house that the effect is sometimes mind-bogglingly messy. There is apparently very little to which the director, Stuart Rosenberg, will not resort. Scary things do happen in the movie, but they're always telegraphed in advance and make too little sense to have a cumulative effect.

Surf Nazis Must Die isn't funny in the slightest, the title notwithstanding. It's a standard, thoroughly stupid gang-war exploitation film intercut with occasional low-energy surfing footage, featuring characters named Adolf, Eva and so on who chant slogans, wear swastikas on their wetsuits and burn surfboards from time to time. Not even the actors' relatives will find this interesting.

Dragonheart joins Mission: Impossible in wasting the talents of charismatic European actors, and in cobbling together exciting-looking ads that are much better than the finished film.

The third in a 3-D series, as in Jaws 3-D or now Amityville 3-D, simply isn't a good idea. Once the first two films in a series have exhausted most opportunities for action, the third is liable to average half a dozen exposition scenes for every eventful episode. And 3-D exposition is the stuff of which headaches are made.

It's harmless but unsurprising...Without Steven Spielberg's timing or John Williams's music, the shark's periodic visits become feeding scenes rather than ferocious attacks. It's like watching someone make regular raids on a refrigerator in search of midnight snacks.

As it is, the suspense is sludgy and the character development nil; even the inadvertent comedy is spotty.

The plot of Michael Grais's and Mark Victor's screenplay is even more nonsensical than it needs to be. [11 Jul 1992]

The movie may have been conceived in a spirit of merriment, but watching it feels like playing shuffleboard at the absolute insistence of a bossy shipboard social director. When whimsy gets to be this overbearing, it simply isn't whimsy any more.

The Police Academy series seems to shoot for an ever younger crowd. The optimum viewer for Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol would be a 10-year-old boy. Even better, it would be a whole pack of them. That's not to say the film isn't funny; it means only that the sense of humor being addressed is very specific. Stay away if drawing room farce is what you're after.

Low humor might count for more here if it weren't constantly overshadowed by the film's maudlin streak.

The latest Irwin Allen disaster movie is When Time Ran Out, which is waxen even by Mr. Allen's standards.

Movies like Private School usually make money, no matter how sleazy or derivative they happen to be.

Ultimately, Ms Lynch has nowhere to take her erotic parable except to a dead end, but she makes the unfolding of the story a spooky, engrossing process.

YOU could live a long time and never see anything as awful as Fever Pitch, Richard Brooks's shrill, hysterical peek at the world of compulsive gambling.

This rabidly bad revenge movie is directed by John Schlesinger, who made "Midnight Cowboy," "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" and "Billy Liar" -- and unfortunately more to the point here, "Honky Tonk Freeway" and "Pacific Heights." Never in his varied career has Mr. Schlesinger made a film as mean-spirited and empty as this. The sole purpose of "Eye for an Eye" is to excite blood lust from the audience after the killer, played by Kiefer Sutherland as a walking smirk, slips through the hands of justice because of the improper handling of a sperm sample. Mr. Schlesinger shamelessly underscores this outrage by including a glimpse of the O. J. Simpson trial.

The film makers had declared they were bravely exploring new levels of licentiousness, but the biggest risk they've taken here is making a nearly $40 million movie without anyone who can act. The absence of both drama and eroticism turns Showgirls into a bare-butted bore.

It's cute and jokey and has no particular edge.

Threadbare as it's beginning to look, the Superman series hasn't lost its raison d'etre. There's life in the old boy yet.

An especially weak teen- age comedy even by today's none-too- high standards. Everything about it is either second best or second hand.

Porky's Revenge proceeds with the kind of comic pacing that has the audience laughing way ahead of each joke. Some of it is funny, but it's also entirely predictable.

This glib, overheated film about vicious primates delivers little suspense, nor are there signs of the 65 cited volumes and articles that turned Mr. Crichton's book into such a learning experience.

Renny Harlin, who did a much better job directing ''Die Hard 2,'' displays no sense of humor and takes the film's nonsensical action scenes much too seriously, at one point even blowing up a beach house in the process.

The film's bright look and visual energy are much more liberating than the machinations of its teen queens.

Though the film never becomes actively unfunny, neither does it do much more than tread water. The raccoons have a better time than the audience will.

Despite huge resources at Mr. De Bont's disposal and the fact that both he and Ms. Bullock have achieved stellar status since ''Speed'' screeched onto movie screens, the sequel is still a B-movie at heart.

This one is clumsy, mean spirited and amazingly unmusical.

Video-addicted kids may well find this exciting, but for anyone old enough to stay out later than 9 P.M. it's a distinct bore.

There is an essential meanness to the entire project, tapping the manipulative power of taunts. Such jokes don't jibe with the times, the culture.

A movie with a sloppily sentimental heart that's as big as the city in which its story takes place.

Although Michael Dinner's direction is noticeably better than the material, the film aims consistently for the lowest common denominator.

Mr. Allen, who directed Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and produced it too, is so obviously ill-equipped to stage action scenes in cramped quarters that his audience winds up wishing as fervently as his characters for a chance to see the light of day.

There are seeds of something funny in the film's beginning and in its premise, but they are soon dissipated by so little sustained wit, and so much scenery.

Mr. Douglas does a lot of stunts, some of them reasonably good; these seem to be the would-be comic backbone of a movie that's not after laughs but heehaws, which in any case it doesn't get.

In place of a real story, there is just the spectacle of stock characters being put through their paces to fill up the time.

Schumacher almost invariably breathes more life into his material than he has here. It's a lot easier to tick off the forced, farfetched touches in Eight Millimeter than to count the ones that ring true.

Miss Rivers's jokes mostly have to do with racial stereotypes and the essential revoltingness of pregnancy, but a few of them are funny just the same. However, as a director, Miss Rivers is forever sandbagging her own scenes, throwing away a good chuckle in a sequence that desperately needs a punch line, or wasting something fairly subtle right after a broad, dopey joke about a urine sample.

October is early, but not too early to acknowledge Harmony Korine's Gummo as the worst film of the year. No conceivable competition will match the sourness, cynicism and pretension of Mr. Korine's debut feature.

Early in his career, at the time of ''Diner,'' Mr. Rourke managed to do this sort of thing very seductively, with a charming nonchalance. This time he seems puffy, sleazy and sadly ineffectual, well over the edge into self-parody.

The Pirate Movie stars Kristy McNichol and Christopher Atkins in a cut-rate kiddie version of Gilbert and Sullivan, laced with synthetic pop ballads and leavened with infantile dirty jokes.

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.

The heads may be dead, but at least they have a comical look.

Mr. Needham's secret weapon is Mr. Reynolds, and Mr. Reynolds isn't here. Without his overriding friendliness and humor on hand, there is too much opportunity to notice the weak spots in Mr. Needham's direction.

A colossally sour and ill-conceived misfire.

Each beer-guzzling marathon inevitably leads to one of those bathroom scenes that provide the film with just about its only jokes.

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.

One of the few things this listless bore of a film makes clear is that Mr. Penn, ever since his hilarious performance as a stoned surfer in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, has been greatly overrated.

Wide-eyed and mirthlessly peppy, Mr. Arnold soon wears out his welcome as a bumbling would-be bank robber who commandeers a group of young hostages.

Staged as pure fluff without an ounce of ballast, Mixed Nuts succeeds only in getting its cast into Halloween-caliber crazy costumes by the time it's over.

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.

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.

It's a film to gall fans of the old television series and perplex anyone else.

THE actors in Transylvania 6-5000 seem to have the impression that they are doing something funny, though where they got that idea is anybody's guess. It cannot have come from the screenplay, which was written by Rudy DeLuca, who also directed the film, as a series of utterly listless comic setups. It's not that Mr. DeLuca has done anything wrong, exactly; it's simply that he never does anything right. There's no reason for this material to be funny, so, not surprisingly, it never is.

Dumb, vulgar and mostly humorless.

Though it has a potentially funny cast, this sprawling comedy has been made in a near-total wit vacuum.

One way to get through Baby Geniuses is to think about whether it really is the worst movie you've ever seen. Probably not, but pretty darn close.