Janet Maslin

Beautiful and heartfelt, an oasis of humanity in a season of furious hyperbole.

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

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

Jerry Maguire is loaded with them: bright, funny, tender encounters between characters who seem so winningly warm and real.

Ruby in Paradise is more often pensive than genuinely thoughtful, but it is helped immensely by Ms. Judd's gravity and strength.

Fever beings to flag when, after an initial hour filled with high spirits and jubilant music, it settles down to tell its story; the effect is so deflating that it's almost as though another Monday has rolled around and it's time to get back to work.

On any level, earthly or otherwise, the ingenious new animated Hercules is pretty divine. With inspired intuition, Hercules brings together ancient lore, gospel singing, girl-group choreography and lots of free-floating mischief into a jubilant pastiche of classical references.

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.

Winter Kills isn't exactly a comedy, but it's funny. And it isn't exactly serious, but it takes on the serious business of the Kennedy assassination.

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

Cool, stark compositions and the occasional audacious visual trick give Buffalo '66 a memorable look even when its narrative enters the occasional uneventful stretch.

Behind the film's easygoing mood there is firm directorial control. This, together with Mr. Roemer's keen sense of personality and place and his wry humor, accounts for why The Plot Against Harry holds up so well.

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

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

The Sure Thing is glowing proof of two things: Traditional romantic comedy can be adapted to suit the teen-age trade, and Mr. Reiner's contribution to ''This Is Spinal Tap'' was more than a matter of humor.

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.

A deeply felt, deceptively simple film that marks the high point of Mr. Eastwood's directing career thus far.

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

The film's strength is that it sustains an intimate and realistic tone. Mr. Fishburne, who is called upon to deliver several lectures, manages to do so with enormous dignity and grace, and makes Furious a compelling role model, someone on whom the whole film easily pivots.

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

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.

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

Its sensational looks pale beside storytelling weaknesses that expose the more soulless aspects of this cat-and-mouse crime tale.

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.

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

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.

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

It will help if, while watching The Naked Gun, viewers can assume a mental age of about 14. The jokes will seem fresher that way, and they will also, much to the writers' credit, seem screamingly funny at times.