Janet Maslin

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

This is Rebel Without a Cause without the grown-ups and without boundaries, transposed to a world of hard drugs, petty crime, hand-to-mouth existence and hopes that somehow will not die.

Thanks to sharp editing and surprisingly strong comic timing, the film puts less emphasis on the Stern raunchiness than on how his wilder routines make listeners drive off the road.

A meat-and-potatoes American thriller that means business all around the world.

Mr. Reiner seems to understand exactly what Mr. Goldman loves about stories of this kind, and he conveys it with clarity and affection.

Unless the viewer has ever been inside an anthill, Microcosmos is sure to reveal a strange and transfixing secret universe, one in which even the physics of splashing raindrops looks suddenly new.

Re-Animator has a fast pace and a good deal of grisly vitality. It even has a sense of humor, albeit one that would be lost on 99.9 percent of any ordinary moviegoing crowd...All of this, ingenious as it may be and much as it will redound to Mr. Gordon's credit in hard-core horror circles, is absolutely to be avoided by anyone not in the mood for a major bloodbath.

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

Terms of Endearment is a funny, touching, beautifully acted film that covers more territory than it can easily manage.

The author's sardonic voice has been lost in most films based on his fiction, but this one nicely captures that unruffled Leonard authority. And since Get Shorty is about Hollywood, it invites the sneaky self-mockery that gives this film its comic punch.

The director Michael Dinner, making his feature debut, and the screenwriter Charles Purpura have an unusually good feeling for the time, the place, the characters as kids and the adults they later turned into.

The actors are best when they avoid exaggeration and remain weirdly sincere. That way, they do nothing to break the vibrant, even hallucinogenic spell of Mr. Waters's nostalgia.

Gwyneth Paltrow makes a resplendent Emma, gliding through the film with an elegance and patrician wit that bring the young Katharine Hepburn to mind.

Prince, whose ties to soul and jazz are clearer than ever before, whose willingness to embrace different musical forms seems to grow all the time, has never cast a stronger spell.

Silverado is sufficiently modern to make its landscapes bigger, its people smaller and its moral polarities less powerfully distinct than those of simpler, more starkly beautiful westerns gone by.

This film's reflective, even stately style elevates it from the ranks of ordinary stake-through-the-heart vampire dramaturgy, turning it into something much more exotic.

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

Mischievously entertaining...Dahl's film has character in oversupply even if its actual characters are sometimes thin. Poker fever makes up for whatever the story lacks in everyday emotions.

Directed by Eastwood with righteous indignation and increasingly strong momentum.

The usual elements of scheming and deception are well represented here, but they are made all the knottier by shifting time frames.

It has crooks, bats, cobwebs, skeletons, a lovable monster, an underground grotto and a treasure hidden by some of the most considerate, clue-loving pirates who ever lived. Their ghostly ship is the movie's piece de resistance.

The brilliant, mercurial portrayal of Ike Turner by Laurence Fishburne, formerly known as Larry, is what elevates What's Love Got to Do With It beyond the realm of run-of-the-mill biography.

Back to the Future deserved a chance to come back, especially under the cheerful, enterprising, mathematically minded stewardship of Mr. Zemeckis and Mr. Gale. Their new film isn't an ordinary sequel. It's as if the earlier film had been squared.

The film is best watched as a richly sensual stylistic exercise filled with audaciously beautiful imagery, captivating symmetries and brilliantly facile tricks.

Philip Borsos, who directed ''The Grey Fox,'' builds the suspense of The Mean Season slowly and, for the most part, very effectively.

A delectable comic performance by Sharon Stone.

Mr. Weir's work has a delicacy, gentleness, even wispiness that would seem not well suited to the subject. And yet his film has an uncommon beauty, warmth and immediacy, and a touch of the mysterious, too.

The don't quite do for "Oklahoma!" what they did for heavy metal, but they come close. [31 Jan 1997, p.C6]