Janet Maslin

It's rambling and unfocused, but still fresh enough to break the usual Hollywood mold.

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.

An appreciably better-than-average revenge drama.

Mr. Brosnan, as the best-moussed Bond ever to play baccarat in Monte Carlo, makes the character's latest personality transplant viable (not to mention smashingly photogenic), but the series still suffers the blahs.

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.

Backbeat, directed by Iain Softley, is lively, galvanizing and unexpectedly well made, a far cry from the Madame Tussaud approach often used to enshrine contemporary celebrities.

The film winds up taking a clear anticrime stance, and Mr. Epps ably conveys Q's trepidation about his friends' behavior. But Juice also revels in the flash, irreverence and tough-guy posturing to which the film's violence can ultimately be traced.

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.

Affectionately told ...beguiling.

The movie's biggest challenge, one that it does not exactly meet, is to persuade the audience that this husband and father's escapade is somehow an act of love.

Even by the standards of escapist entertainment, little of Lassiter seems to matter.

Half the film is an ingenuous love story, but the better half consists of pop culture time-warp jokes set in 1985.

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

For Mr. Sayles, whose idealism has never been more affecting or apparent than it is in this story of boyish enthusiasm gone bad in an all too grown-up world, Eight Men Out represents a home run.

Mr. Woo's obvious gusto and his taste for myth making are readily apparent. But so is his fondness for the slow, lingering death scene coupled with sickening sound effects. Presenting Mr. Van Damme as reverentially as Sergio Leone did the young Clint Eastwood, Mr. Woo displays a real aptitude for malignant mischief, which is this story's stock in trade.

Captivating.

Morris has fashioned a brilliant work of pulp fiction around this crime. [26 Aug 1988, p.C6]

A film bursting with enthusiasm for a fresh, appealing fantasy has been replaced by one most eager to maintain the status quo.

The Good Son has a handsome, scenic look that sustains interest, and a suspenseful ending that is quite literally gripping. The film's final scene is one of its few suspenseful and original moments.

A good, taut movie for red-meat action audiences, but it's not one you will be seeing on an airliner. Not ever.

As directed by John Carpenter, Memoirs of an Invisible Man does much more with special effects than it does with character, and even the visual tricks begin to seem commonplace when they've been repeated too often. [28 Feb 1992, p.C17]

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.

Undeniably, there's an element of corniness to this. But that doesn't keep An Officer and a Gentleman from being a first-rate movie - a beautifully acted, thoroughly involving romance.

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.

Bad Boys is a suspenseful movie, but it's also an extremely brutal one. It begins with someone's brains spattered on a wall, and ends with a particularly bloody battle. In between, there's a lot more of the same.

Red Dawn may be rabidly inflammatory, but it isn't dull. Mr. Milius does know how to keep a story moving. He might well have turned this into a genuinely stirring war film, if he had not also made it so incorrigibly gung-ho. But the effectiveness of its chilling premise, from a story by Kevin Reynolds, is dissipated by wildly excessive directorial fervor at every turn.

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

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

Mr. Schlesinger draws lively performances out of his cast and surprising variety out of the film's secondary sights, which range from a gala soiree to a heap of steaming dung.

Jetsons: The Movie will appeal only to small children, and only to the most patient among them.

The Witches of Eastwick does have enough flamboyance to hold the attention, directed as it has been by Mr. Miller in a bright, flashy, exclamatory style. But beneath the surface charm there is too much confusion, and the charm itself is gone long before the film is over.

The net effect is that of having read the comic strip for an unusually long spell, which can amount to either a delightful experience or a pleasant but slightly wearing one, depending upon the intensity of one's fascination with the basic “Peanuts” mystique.

The best that can be said for Bleak Moments is that it earns its name. The film, while it has been handsomely photographed, seems entirely given over to pained, wordless interludes. [23 Sep 1980, p.C6]

Despite Mr. Brosnan's best efforts to be lethally debonair, the Bond franchise has sacrificed most of what made this character unique in the first place, turning the world's suavest spy into one more pitchman and fashion plate. This latest film is such a generic action event that it could be any old summer blockbuster, except that its hero is chronically overdressed.

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.

A handsome and fully imagined work of cautionary futuristic fiction.

But Night Falls on Manhattan is also oddly listless. It doesn't often live up to the doomy eloquence of its title.

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

A narrative path leading from the sincere to the ludicrous, and culminating in a final image of flabbergasting transcendance, gives Breaking the Waves its surprising power.

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

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

The Idolmaker is a modest, interesting, well-acted movie, more lively than it is exciting.

But the film Schindler's List, directed with fury and immediacy by a profoundly surprising Steven Spielberg, presents the subject as if discovering it anew.

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.

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.

The real flavor of Davis's account, and of the ferocity that earned Geronimo his place in history, is nowhere evident on screen.

When you get the shivers watching this wintry tale unfold, it won't be from the cold.

Travolta again carries a film with enjoyable ease, even if this one remains badly diminished by its perverse streak.

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

Risky Business improves as it goes along.

Kalifornia, which was written by Tim Metcalfe, lets its stars overact to the rafters as it vacillates between wild pretentiousness and occasional high style.

A B-movie with flair.

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

Bruising but illuminating documentary.

This is a formula film, but it has the kind of good cheer and fine tuning that occasionally give slickness a good name.

For the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway.

A yuppie mid-life crisis is in the offing, and Albert Brooks has made it the basis for Lost in America, an inspired comedy in his own drily distinctive style.

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.

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.

Leviathan compares favorably with the other recent aquatic horror film Deepstar Six but probably not with anything else.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This is a bland, no-fault Frankenstein for the 90's, short on villainy but loaded with the tragically misunderstood.

Mr. Van Peebles and his screenwriters, Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane, care most about making their points emphatically, even if that sometimes leaves Posse riding heavy in the saddle. Luckily, most of their film is fast-paced and star-studded enough to avoid an overly preachy tone.

The visual illusion that Ms. Lohan is actually two characters has been accomplished so seamlessly that it barely diverts attention from one of the film's greatest passions, its product plugs.

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.

What About Bob? does work as comedy for a while, thanks to the fortuitous teaming of Mr. Dreyfuss and Mr. Murray.

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.

Twisted enough by Mr. Dahl and given a jolt of caricature by Mr. DeVito, Matilda makes too perverse a tale for very young children. But this one has playful flamboyance and a dark verve that older children should appreciate. And it has a sweet, self-possessed little heroine.

A sunny, exuberant confection and an enjoyably skillful one.

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.

The purity and breadth of this meticulous study are all the more gratifying in view of its unprepossessing style.

This film aspires to be a meditation on (among other things) art, trust, loyalty, politics and popular culture. With utter simplicity, and with unexpectedly intense storytelling, it achieves all that and more.

Beloved works on its own but is much enhanced by familiarity with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In so ambitiously bringing this story to the screen, Ms. Winfrey underscores a favorite, invaluable credo: read the book.

I Went Down owes much of its novelty to steering clear of Irish movie stereotypes and instead showing off a spare and quizzical indie spirit.

The central portion of Corvette Summmer, set in Las Vegas with an Alice in Wonderland air, has a visual zaniness that meshes effectively with the script. But for the most part, the movie takes a slender, boyish conceit — of the sort that is suddenly so popular among Hollywood's current batch of boy wonders — and invests it with silliness rather than whimsy.

Mr. Carpenter has directed the film with B-movie bluntness, but with none of the requisite snap. And his screenplay (written under the pseudonym Frank Armitage) makes the principals sound even more tongue-tied than they have to. [4 Nov 1988, p.C8]

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

Less a sequel than a retread...Dizzy and slight, with an even more negligible plot than its predecessor had. This time the story can't even masquerade as an excuse for stringing the songs together.

The specifics of the spider rampage have been very enjoyably executed by Mr. Marshall and particularly well played by Mr. Daniels, whose dryly self-deprecating manner and underlying decency make him an irresistible hero. Arachnophobia falters only when it becomes too broad, as in a dopey nod to Psycho that captures none of Hitchcock's formal elegance, and in various minor characters who serve as comic grotesques, like the town's potato-chip-munching mortician. 

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.

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.

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.

The Crash characters sleepwalk through this story in a state of futuristic numbness, seeking extreme forms of sensation because familiar feelings have long since failed them. It's a chilling, ghastly possibility that manages to exert a grim fascination.

Its name, the film's title, is pronounced "eggs is tense" and meant to have a whiff of the philosophical, even if its intellectual ambition seems mostly limited to spelling affectations.

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.

Pretty actors, grisly critters, brains sucked out of skulls, buckets of green slime and a plot that is half beach blanket bingo, half Iwo Jima.

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

Drawing a parade of colorful performances from a constantly surprising cast, the curiously titled ''John Grisham's 'The Rainmaker' '' is Mr. Coppola's best and sharpest film in years.

Rush is often more successful at being clinical than at being clear.

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.

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.

Brilliantly as it begins, Safe eventually succumbs to its own modern malady, as the film maker insists on a chilly ambiguity that breeds more detachment than interest.

Tauntingly flirtatious scenes between Ms. Ryder and Ms. Weaver give this film a sexual boldness that the others' action-adventure spirit lacked.

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.

A solidly old-fashioned courtroom drama such as The Verdict could have gotten by with a serious, measured performance from its leading man, or it could have worked well with a dazzling movie-star turn. The fact that Paul Newman delivers both makes a clever, suspenseful, entertaining movie even better.

Blaze has been beautifully photographed by Haskell Wexler in the soft, lulling colors of the Louisiana countryside, against which Ms. Davidovich's amusingly garish costumes stand out as markedly as they're meant to. The costumes, by Ruth Myers, are particularly good, with ice-cream-colored suits for Mr. Newman that allow him to dominate the film visually just as surely as he dominates it dramatically.

The characters' sexual abandon is so complete that it robs the story of any shape.

Stylish and eerily compelling before it overplays its campy excesses, Heavenly Creatures does have a feverish intensity to recommend it.

The film's best scenes are those between the goofily nonchalant Mr. Reinhold and the precociously stern Mr. Savage, however bluntly these moments call attention to the craziness of the premise.

Food assumes near-religious importance in Mr. Jaglom's portrait of needy, anxious women who spend an entire day playing upon one another's insecurities, and waxing rhapsodic about well-remembered culinary thrills.

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.

Edward Zwick's ultimately sedate thriller starts out with crisply efficient style and the potential for a much more involving story.

In addition to tossing in the occasional spy-movie homage (there's certainly a Hitchcock touch to Mr. Franklin's choice of villains), he has kept the story moving and the actors lively.

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.

The visual style of The Freshman isn't always up to its verbal wit, but then the writing sets an exceptional standard.

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 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 a film with a number of strengths, not the least of them its fierce, agile, hollow-eyed hero.

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

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

The story, neatly compressed, unfolds in dependable and photogenic ways. And it is coaxed along by Mr. Pakula's considerable skills as a brisk, methodical film maker.

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.

Unobjectionable even when it doesn't work, and certainly amusing when it does.

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.

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

His The Wall is a good-looking film, and it has no shortage of nerve. When he puts an entire schoolchildren's choir on a conveyor belt leading into a meat grinder as they sing, ''We don't need no education,'' he is being nothing if not bold. These effects, while some are individually powerful, are dwarfed by the towering selfimportance of The Wall and by its lack of focus.

The film's concerns emerge as heartfelt even when they aren't clearly expressed. On those occasions when clarity prevails the style becomes emphatic and tough, but at other times it tends to preach and to wander.

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.

True as it is, Reiner's film feels like the Hollywood version.

An engrossing study of loose talk, weakness and seduction, played out in both the world of high-powered journalism and the seediest corners of Times Square.

Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon is a multimedia movie of sorts, designed for those who can't bear the monotony of only one thought or sound or activity at a time.

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.

Elegant, festive and very, very funny.

Stiffly playing a filmmaker with a growing passion for the tango, she makes this a handsome, drily meticulous film with no real fire anywhere beyond its supple dance scenes.

It takes great confidence to think of a second film before the first is even finished; either that, or it takes great nerve. In any case, Innerspace, which opens today at the Criterion and other theaters, has all the brashness of a hit, if not all the luster.

A coolly efficient thriller with an octopus of a plot.

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.

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

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.

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

As directed exquisitely by Gillian Armstrong in a headstrong spirit that recalls her debut feature, "My Brilliant Career," this elliptical tale makes up in visual beauty whatever it lacks in universal meaning.

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.

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]

The Favor remains funny and credible in ways that prove feminist comedy is not an oxymoron.

If Suspect amounts to less than the sum of its parts, those parts are often valuable on their own.

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.

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.

Picturesque and warm-hearted, Into the West moves enjoyably toward the inevitable family reconciliation, and an ending with a supernatural spin. Along the way, it manages to sustain a high level of interest, thanks to fine acting and plenty of local color. [17 Sep 1993, p.C17]

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.

Mr. Reynolds's third and best directorial effort - the first two were Gator and The End - is an unexpectedly accomplished cop thriller. There is, as is often the case with movies of that genre, less here than meets the eye: the plot has its unreasonable spots, and the story doesn't come to much in the end. But one measure of the success of Sharky's Machine is that it's too fast and exciting for those considerations to count until after the movie is over.

The Accidental Tourist often relies on Miss Tyler's methods without tempering them, and gives a tone of crashing obviousness to material that need not have seemed that way. [23 Dec 1988, p.C12]

A routine Joe College movie.

Mr. Bronson grows ever more coolly dependable with each new film, but Love and Bullets is too clumsy to show him off to much advantage.

Fierce and disturbing, with a plot that skillfully resists following any familiar course. The film's hero fears that he's half-crazy, and for two hours Mr. Gilliam artfully keeps his audience feeling the same way.

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

Even though this film may do for chess what "The Red Shoes" did for ballet, it works movingly and most effectively as a family drama.

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

Just Cause has been directed so antiseptically that it lacks all sense of lifelike detail. Despite good looks and some ostentatious technical polish, it offers a textbook example of direction (by Arne Glimcher) that's utterly out of sync with its subject matter.

Luckily, High Spirits has a good cast and enough joie de vivre to rise above some of its underlying clumsiness.

Mythic pulp has its allure, and it also has its limitations. El Mariachi displays no real emotion except a profound appreciation for the genre film making that has inspired it, and a delight in manipulating the elements of such stories.

Good-humored, try-anything fun.

Seldom is it clearer that a film is nothing more than high-gloss jokey escapism, or that when visual cliches are this relentless they become weirdly fascinating in their own right.

Vivid, full of conviction and more than a little foolish at times.

Small-scale, perfectly acted family film.

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.

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.

The storytelling of Disclosure is too forced and polemical to be on a par with better Crichton tales like "Jurassic Park." This time, it's the author who's the dinosaur.

On the whole, Mr. Apted's approach to the material is archly effective, making for a crisp, intricate thriller, well able to hold an audience's interest.

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.

IF Norman Rockwell had wanted to make ''Porky's,'' he might have come up with something like Mischief.

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.

Beyond his struggles with an unwieldy accent and the screenplay's hokum, Mr. Pitt gives a sincere if labored performance enhanced by a sense of genuine struggle.

Most of what keeps Flesh and Bone so gripping is the ways in which the characters themselves evolve.

The main action of The Daytrippers is bright, real and even poignant enough to make this journey worth the ride.

If the film sometimes gives the impression of too much talent in the service of too little, that talent is evident all the same.

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 story is filled with strange, homespun miracles, and this single-minded little film could be counted as one of them.

Baby Boom isn't much more than a glorified sitcom, but it's funny, and it's liable to hit home. The reason: a devilishly good performance by Diane Keaton.

Yet this film, for all its apparent immediacy, winds up less affecting than a more poetic or roundabout approach might be.

Red succeeds so stirringly that it also bestows some much-needed magic upon its predecessors, "Blue" and "White." The first film's chic emptiness and the second's relative drabness are suddenly made much rosier by the seductive glow of Red.

Something disturbing has happened to this story en route to the screen.

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

It's the cleverness of Eyes of Laura Mars that counts, cleverness that manifests itself in superlative casting, drily controlled direction from Irvin Kershner, and spectacular settings that turn New York into the kind of eerie, lavish dreamland that could exist only in the idle noodlings of the very, very hip.

But the film's central figure remains a cipher, the subject of a colorful scrapbook rather than a revealing portrait.

The film succeeds in finding something sweetly romantic and visually fresh in Grover's flashback memories of Jane, along with allowing Grover plenty of room for wisecracks.

French Kiss may have a more putatively foolproof formula, but everyone here has done vastly more interesting work. Too much gets lost in translation.

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

The cinematic safari's simple pleasures are best experienced with the littlest ticket-holders, who get an edifying thrill ride and a computer-assisted sense of a wider world.

For all its exaggerated ordinariness, this film seems to start where others leave off.

As Owen, Mr. DeVito is such an odd combination of the childlike and the diabolical that he remains a captivating figure throughout the story. Mr. DeVito's comic timing is particularly enjoyable, since he has such a slow, steady, deliberate way of building up to outrageous behavior.

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.

With its long silences washed over by banal, overused music, The Indian in the Cupboard is best watched for its ingenious tricks of scale and for an invitingly peaceful look. [14 July 1995, p.C3]

Mr. Pitt moves through this unexpectedly solid thriller with dazzling confidence, showing off all the star power that he usually works overtime to hide.

The screenplay is inelegant but lively, and the direction gives the material a wicked edge.

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

Kubrick left one more brilliantly provocative tour de force as his epitaph.

Parts of French Postcards have considerable charm, even if it is charm with the consistency of bunny-fluff.

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

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

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.

Not even a film maker of Mr. Malle's intelligence and taste can make this stilted story add up. The only ingredient that can make sense of "Damage" is the obvious one: outright eroticism, of the sort that presumably got the film its original NC-17 rating.

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

Aeronautically and otherwise, it's a bumpy trip.

As directed by Barry Levinson and acted by an incredible collection of male stars, Sleepers settles the authenticity question by allowing not a whiff of real life into its universe.

The film's sole ray of sunshine is Fred Ward, who reveals an unexpected flair for comedy in the role of Deborah Ann's father, a police detective with a very hot temper and a vein in his forehead that visibly throbs.

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.

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

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

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.

Newsies is a long, halfhearted romp through what is made to seem a not terribly compelling chapter in New York City's history.

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.

Like "The Quick and the Dead," Desperado wavers uneasily between myth making and parody, so that too many scenes drag on long after they've lost their punch.

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.

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.

Dazed and Confused has an enjoyably playful spirit, one that amply compensates for its lack of structure.

When the film announces, halfway through, that it will be devoting the rest of its running time to tying up these loose ends, the audience may as well give up the ghost.

But this miracle of self-invention has more virtue in the abstract than it does on screen.

Unfolds beautifully, with a rueful, knowing intelligence that rises above easy assumptions. [27 September 1996, p.C1]

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

It proves to be one of the more exotic blooms in the Disney hothouse, what with voluptuous flora, hordes of fauna, charming characters and excitingly kinetic animation that gracefully incorporates computer-generated motion.

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.

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

Sid and Nancy doesn't try to win its audience's sympathy in any conventional way, which is just as well, since that would have been a losing battle. But it does succeed in offering bleak, nasty and sometimes hilarious glimpses of life in the punk demimonde.

Yet for all the film's hard work at capturing Savannah's spirit, there is seldom enough context to make these characters seem anything but adorably whimsical to excess.

In the film's briskly paced 72 minutes, any open-minded viewer will discover something about identity and about the comfort these women have obviously found in learning to be their unusual, unfettered selves.

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.

In the end, "Falling From Grace" is more a series of separate reflections than a sustained story. But Mr. Mellencamp does bring out the naturalness of his actors, and he has assembled a large and believable cast.

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.

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

Over all, this deferential film salutes Mr. Hockney's artistry as an elixir for creaky texts, a hallucinogen for orthodox opera fans, and an antidote to his own senescence. As much as he lets the filmmaker be present, he successfully avoids real intimacy, keeping his personal life comfortably backstage.

As snappy and assured as it is mean-spirited. Its originality extends well beyond the limits of ordinary high school histrionics and into the realm of the genuinely perverse.

Although Robbins might have drawn some of these characters with less obviousness and more satirical bite, he ably keeps this lively, complicated film on track.

Crackling good... the best crime movie in a long while.

Ms. Armstrong instantly demonstrates that she has caught the essence of this book's sweetness and cast her film uncannily well, finding sparkling young actresses who are exactly right for their famous roles.

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.

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.

Nothing if not earnest. It's also eccentric enough to remain interesting even when its ghost story isn't easy to believe.

For all its studied sultriness, the movie feels unsexy, perhaps because its inspiration is the kind of hard- hearted western that concentrates on manly combat while eschewing all sentiment.

Magdalena relies on the magical-realism aspects of religious devotion, even though it began as a story more firmly, and admirably, rooted in a gritty reality.

A potentially strong cast makes its way in deadly earnest through material that's often better suited to a Monty Python skit.

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.

Mr. Demme has captured both the look and the spirit of this live performance with a daring and precision that match the group's own.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Likable for its outlandishness, less so when it shows a self-important streak.

A vibrant, grisly, gleefully amoral road movie.

The funniest parts of this uneven, ostentatiously upscale comedy are those that find Mr. Murphy's Marcus adopting the behavior of a sexually insecure woman.

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

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

As directed by Randall Miller, the movie doesn't aspire to much more than cartoonish verve, but Kid 'n' Play easily hold it together. Their comic timing is right, and their humor manages to be both traditional and current.

The movie is cheerful and light, showcasing Mr. Hughes's knack for remembering all those aspects of middle-class American adolescent behavior that anyone else might want to forget.

The material itself, thoroughly unsurprising on the stage, is if anything even more so on the screen.

Mr. Giraldi, who also directs commercials, takes a fairly ordinary approach to this easygoing teen-age comedy about a stockbroker in his mid-20's who must pretend to be a high-school student. The material is pleasant enough, and Mr. Cryer is a good deal less strained here than he has been in other roles, affecting a natural manner and a good way with wisecracks.

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.

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.

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