Janet Maslin

Dutch is never more than glancingly comic, and rarely even that.

Miss Clarke's methods tend to be as fanciful as Ornette Coleman's are rigorous and abstract, but the collaboration between film maker and subject has its own kind of harmony.

Mr. Assayas's screenplay is loose and uneventful, but his direction has more energy.

The fierce-looking Sean Bean is outstandingly good as Ryan's main antagonist, and Patrick Bergin brings the right air of calculation to the terrorist mastermind he plays. Several of the film's main sequences, like an encounter between Mr. Bean's Sean Miller and David Threlfall as the police inspector who has been his captor, derive their horror from the looks of pure loathing that these terrorists bestow upon their prey.

Charlie Sheen brings just the right exaggerated seriousness to his ace pilot's role, and Cary Elwes perfectly captures the ingenue arrogance of Topper's handsome rival. Jon Cryer, as a pilot with major eyesight problems, also displays expert deadpan timing, especially when he delivers the film's most uproarious line.

This feature-length concert film is hilarious, putting Mr. Murphy on a par with Mr. Pryor at his best.

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

The forcefulness and mystery of Mr. Melville's direction often generate an urgency that keeps the film from feeling vague. [30 Nov. 1979]

Three Men and a Baby follows the French film as faithfully as it possibly can, and it too revolves around one lone idea: that there's humor in the spectacle of a grown man, heretofore ignorant of his own gentler nature, discovering that he can indeed administer formula and change diapers. The hilarity inherent in this has its limits, but it's a premise with enough timeliness and warmth to account for the first film's success. And in terms of success, this glossier, more effervescent remake will undoubtedly outstrip the original.

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.

Ms. Foster and the screenwriter, W. D. Richter, have given this film some peculiar mood swings, so that it starts out zanily and winds down to a wistful note.

despite such maladroit moments, The Last Temptation of Christ finally exerts enormous power. What emerges most memorably is its sense of absolute conviction, never more palpable than in the final fantasy sequence that removes Jesus from the cross and creates for him the life of an ordinary man.

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.

The film uses morphing and Rick Baker's monster effects strikingly, but it also keeps its gimmicks well tethered to reality.

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

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.

Mr. Dalton, the latest successor to the role of James Bond, is well equipped for his new responsibilities.

When the movie backfires, which it finally does, it's because too much grisly footage has been used too lightly. Mr. Landis's comic detachment, which has been fascinating throughout much of the movie, is something he holds on to even when a deeper response is needed. Eventually it becomes less comic than callow.

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

Combine two stars of this wattage with a lot of techno-talk and elaborate heist plotting and you get plenty of good reasons to pay attention.

A warm, surprising, gently incandescent film that discreetly describes a family tragedy.

A tight, energetic sleeper in the action-adventure genre, manages to pack a few anti-machismo sentiments into an otherwise brawny tale.

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

This film works hypnotically, with great subtlety and grace, in ways that are gratifyingly consistent with Gould's own thoughts about his music and his life.

Mr. Cage digs deep to find his character's inner demons while also capturing the riotous energy of his outward charm.

Mulholland Falls is so well cast and relentlessly stylish (thanks to some fine technical talent assembled here) that its sheer energy prevails over its shaky plot.

Splash could have been shorter, but it probably couldn't have been much sweeter. Only purists will quibble with the blissfully happy ending, which has the lovers swimming through a shimmering underwater paradise that is supposed to be the bottom of the East River.

Thanks to Glenn Close's delicious villainy, it succeeds in breathing archly theatrical life into the irresistibly monstrous Cruella DeVil. Otherwise, this remake goes to the dogs too often.

Something special.

Married to the Mob works best as a wildly overdecorated screwball farce.

Wonderfully funny behind-the-scenes look at the perils of film making, no-budget style.

Once Bitten affects a glossy, sophisticated look that does little to upgrade the film's adolescent humor. As directed by Howard Storm, it has a lot more stylishness than wit. Miss Hutton looks great in black, but her predatory vampire grows tiresome very quickly, as do all the Bloody Mary jokes.

The best western in a long while is Barbarosa, a film that uses one American legend, Willie Nelson, to create another.

It is a great disappointment, halfway into the movie, to find The Star Chamber so far off the track that its credibility almost entirely disappears...The Star Chamber has a well- meaning urgency, and it is an entertaining film even when it becomes so thoroughly misguided.

Mr. Rifkin's direction does display, in addition to an appreciation of Mr. Lynch and perhaps John Waters, a promising eye for design and a taste for the unusual. With less noxious material and a less patronizing manner, those talents would amount to a lot more.

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

Miss Dunaway gives the uncanny, meticulous Crawford imitation that is at the heart of Mommie Dearest. The movie itself has nothing like the brilliance of the impression, which is why it remains an impression and can't altogether rise to the level of a performance. But on its own terms Miss Dunaway's work here amounts to a small miracle, as one movie queen transforms herself passionately and wholeheartedly into another.

Mr. Eggleston proves the polished granddaddy who, early on, recognized beauty in a garish wasteland. In this accomplished look at a storied career, he instructs - without words - how to see all that is hauntingly familiar.

Tony Scottmdoes his utmost to pump up the audience's adrenaline at all times, which means that the film's big moments - the races, the crashes, the news that someone needs brain surgery - don't seem that different from the small ones.

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

The principal thing that keeps "The Seduction of Joe Tynan" engrossing is the level of acting it sustains throughout.

No one who sees Full Metal Jacket will easily put the film's last glimpse of D'Onofrio, or a great many other things about Kubrick's latest and most sobering vision, out of mind.

Manages to have playful comic ingenuity of its own.

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 film's mix of romance and reading matter is seductive in its own right, providing comfy book-lined settings and people who are what they read and write.

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.

Barcelona, like "Metropolitan," indulges in long, hair-splitting discussions without resorting to broad gags or worrying about wearing out its welcome.

Multiplicity weaves such an uninteresting plot around its bland, generic principals that it rarely reaches the absurdist heights its premise demands.

Eastwood directs a sensible-looking genre film with smooth expertise, but its plot is quietly berserk.

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

A cute, buoyant sports fantasy, jolted along by a reggae soundtrack and playfully acted by an appealing cast. This new Disney comedy is slick, funny and warmhearted, very much in the old-fashioned Disney mode.

Mr. Spielberg's 1971 television film Duel took advantage of the very narrowness of its premise, building excitement from the most minimal ingredients and the simplest of situations.

The film is in fine shape as long as it revels in its own craziness, making no claims on the viewer's reason. But when it asks you to believe that what you're watching may really be happening, and to wonder what it means, it is asking far too much.

Mr. Hamilton's knack for comedy has been a well-kept secret until now, but he's certainly funny in Love at First Bite, a coarse, delightful little movie with a bang-up cast and no pretensions at all.

Mr. Bogosian's venomously funny play, which he adapted himself for the screen, is given warmth and generosity by Mr. Linklater, whose elegantly fluid direction and great skill with actors are accentuated by the play's spareness.

Mr. Marshall does a much better job with the feistier early scenes than with this subsequent mush, so the film does have a good first hour. But by the end, the film goes on much longer than it should. The physical look of Overboard is also surprisingly dreary. Though the yacht scenes have some visual wit, particularly where Miss Hawn's outrageous costumes are concerned, John A. Alonzo's cinematography is conspicuously poor.

Smoothly directed and acted with glee... showing quick-witted comic spirit.

A technological marvel, arch and innovative with a daringly offbeat visual conception. But it's also a strenuously artful film with a macabre edge that may scare small children. And beyond that, it lacks a clear idea of who its audience might be.

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.

Cheerful, giddy fun.

An American remake with plenty of new pizazz.

Day of the Dead has a less startling setting, since most of it takes place underground. But it still affords Mr. Romero the opportunity for intermittent philosophy and satire, without compromising his reputation as the grisliest guy around.

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

Mr. Mom would be funny if it had jokes. That's not so self-evident as it sounds, because it's not a claim that every failed comedy can make. The actors here, Mr. Keaton and Teri Garr, are likable and bright, and the situation has possibilities. Very little is made of them, except for such predictable developments as Jack's going to the supermarket with the kids in tow, and knocking over soup cans and fruit.

Even for American audiences used to the argot of Mike Leigh films, the accents are thick here and the characters impenetrable at first. But it isn't long before the film begins exerting a powerful hold, once the hard edges of its story begin to emerge.

The situation that Neighbors starts off with is funnier than anything that grows out of it, at least the version of the tale by Mr. Avildsen's and Larry Gelbart, the screenwriter. While Mr. Berger's novel has an aspect of the mysterious to keep it going, the film is solely devoted to hijinks, and the hijinks have nowhere to go.

Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles was directed by Steve Barron, who has a number of music videos to his credit, and shows off the skills of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, without which there would have been no film at all.

When it comes to holiday films worth swooning over, here's the one to see.

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.

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

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

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 early parts of the film are engaging and well acted, creating a believable high school atmosphere. Unfortunately, the later part of the film is slow in developing, and it unfolds in predictable ways. The special effects are good, the performances are nicely deadpan, and the score is clever. But Christine herself is something of a bust.

Mr. Boorman, working in top form with a keenly acerbic overview, has written the film so sharply that the facts speak well for themselves.

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

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.

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

This film includes several remarkable episodes illustrating the strange events that shaped Mr. Perel's destiny and the full force of his terror and sorrow.

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.

With unexpected success, Robert Altman plays a John Grisham mystery in a seductive new key.

Dwarfed by the enormity of what it means to illustrate, the diffuse Amistad divides its energies among many concerns: the pain and strangeness of the captives' experience, the Presidential election in which they become a factor, the stirrings of civil war, and the great many bewhiskered abolitionists and legal representatives who argue about their fate.

All things being relative, this is a dreamy, lulling film but also a more concise and straightforward one than the magnificently grandiose Ulysses' Gaze, the Angelopoulos opus that directly preceded it.

The film's greatest directorial success is in finding a thoroughly entertaining way of inviting the audience to share Valerie's point of view.

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

Having introduced the two principals and had some fun with their antagonism, the film has nowhere to go.

Doing himself a great disservice, the writer and director Gregg Araki labels his work "an irresponsible movie" when in fact it has the power of honesty and originality, as well as the weight of legitimate frustration. Miraculously, it also has a buoyant, mischievous spirit that transcends any hint of gloom.

Unlike the screenwriters, who often cross the thin line between wit and silliness as they outline Celeste's neo-I Love Lucy-isms, Miss Basinger reveals unfailingly sound instincts for comedy.

Mr. Alda's direction is particularly strong for bringing out his actors' humanity, and for developing a comic timing that helps unite the cast.

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.

Arizona Dream is enjoyably adrift, a wildly off-the-wall reverie. It's more than a fish out of water.

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.

Flattering the daylights out of Rob Reiner and his Spinal Tap crew, Rusty Cundieff turns Fear of a Black Hat into an unapologetic Spinal Tap imitation. And there's no point in faulting Mr. Cundieff for such derivativeness, because Fear of a Black Hat is too savvy and cheerful to warrant complaints.

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

Walter Hill, the director of such beautiful but stilted tough guy movies as ''The Warriors'' and ''The Long Riders,'' has attempted something very different in 48 Hours a male-buddy action film that's positively witty and warm-hearted compared with his other work.

This film, like the dazzling but many-tentacled "He Got Game" before it, makes up in fury much of what it lacks in form.

Helen Hunt is a real scene-stealer as a girl who wears things like toy dinosaurs in her hair, in keeping with the film's relentlessly silly mood. The audience at the National Theater seemed giddy enough in its own right.

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.

Mr. Shyer has no idea how to frame this material, let alone make it funny. Most of Irreconcilable Differences is terribly flat; the camerawork is dim and unflattering, the sets are bare even when they're supposed to look lived in and some of the dialogue is simply beyond the actors.

Little Buddha displays a deliberate innocence that suits its subject, even if it contrasts so markedly with much of Mr. Bertolucci's moodier, more unsettling work.

Dry White Season is no less predictable than its predecessors, but its frankness and sincerity matter more than its fundamental bluntness.

Freddy Krueger is the most talkative of slashers, and also the most creative. In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, he displays a great debt to Dali in concocting surreal visions for his prey. When Freddy enters the dreams of his teen-age victims, ordinary objects become armed and dangerous.

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

It winds up illustrating the very emptiness it mocks.

A generous and touching film that is essentially smaller than its own sweeping ambitions, a crowded and skillfully drawn landscape from which no oversize figures emerge. Affection and memory are the forces that give Avalon its vibrancy, but they are also its limitations.

Jagged Edge has harsh lighting, blunt performances, and artless, no-nonsense dialogue relieved by the occasional bit of excess color.

Romantic comedies, of which Chances Are is nominally one, are better off making their characters appear glamorous and attractive than making them look like ineffectual, long-suffering nincompoops, which is the case here.

Deep Impact confines much of its horror to television news reports and has a more brooding, thoughtful tone than this genre usually calls for.

Joseph Ruben, whose other films include The Stepfather and True Believer, has directed Sleeping With the Enemy with full appreciation of his leading lady's disarming beauty but less successful attention to the people and places that surround her.

Wag the Dog, the poison-tipped political satire that's as scarily plausible as it is swift, hilarious and impossible to resist.

A film like this is quite naturally a showcase for its star, and as Valens, Lou Diamond Phillips has a sweetness and sincerity that in no way diminish the toughness of his onstage persona.

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

Audiences are apt to root for the film's Mr. Clark even when they aren't entirely enthusiastic about what he's doing. Much of this is attributable to Mr. Freeman's fiery and compelling performance, but a lot of it also comes from the director John G. Avildsen (''Rocky''), who has stacked the deck in every way he can.

A clean-cut, affable family film without objectionable elements, beyond the brief and needless violence that complicates its finale.

More so than the exuberant movie miracles that came before it, this latest animated juggernaut has the feeling of a clever, predictable product. To its great advantage, it has been contrived with a spirited, animal-loving prettiness no child will resist.

But even after the documentary affectation gives way to a more conventional narrative, the film has trouble ringing true.

Mr. Lyne takes a brilliantly manipulative approach to what might have been a humdrum subject and shapes a soap opera of exceptional power.

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

Both actors play their roles so trickily that tensions escalate until the horror grows unimaginatively gothic.

This story has now been gracefully adapted by Bille August into a sleek, good-looking film that captures the book's peculiar fascination.

Leonard Nimoy, who directed this third installment, hasn't matched the playfulness and energy of ''Star Trek II,'' but he's way ahead of the first film, making up in earnestness what he lacks in style. That kind of conviction, while sometimes verging on undue self-importance, goes a long way toward making the material touching.

"Generations" is predictably flabby and impenetrable in places, but it has enough pomp, spectacle and high-tech small talk to keep the franchise afloat. And in an age when much fancier futuristic effects can be found elsewhere, even its tackiness is a comfort.

The Dinner Game, which Veber wrote and directed, is one of his better-constructed comedies of errors.

While it's very much a retread, it succeeds in following up the first film's humor with more in a similar vein.

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.

Mr. Gray's feature-length monologue brings people, places and things so vibrantly to life that they're very nearly visible on the screen.

The screenplay represents recycling at its best. The material has been successfully refurbished with new jokes and new attitudes, but the earlier film's most memorable moments have been preserved.

Only charm and sentimentality could have brought the requisite magic to Clint Eastwood's Honkytonk Man; unfortunately, this well-intentioned but weak film hasn't nearly enough of either.

Ms. Heche and Mr. Ford make an appealing, wisecracking team, and they look comfortable with the rugged demands of their roles.

With coolly expressive cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth and an insinuating Ennio Morricone score, State of Grace has a somber and chilling tone that is only occasionally breached.

Mr. Howard has made Ransom in the same clean, swift, logical style that sent his "Apollo 13" into orbit, resulting in a spellbinding crime tale that delivers surprises right down to the wire.

Awakenings both sentimentalizes its story and oversimplifies it beyond recognition. At no point does the film express more than one idea at a time. And the idea expressed, more often than not, is as banal as the reality was bizarre.

As for comedy, Mr. Grodin's deadpan manner supplies a fair amount of that until the adventure-mystery aspects become overpowering.

Kristy McNichol and Dennis Quaid, as a mutually devoted sister and brother, are personable but idle in this largely uneventful tale.

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.

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.

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.

One Fine Day makes for sunny, pleasant fluff. Both stars are enjoyably breezy, and there's enough chemistry to deflect attention from the story's endless contrivances. The screenplay by Terrel Seltzer and Ellen Simon is full of energetic wisecracks. But it's jokey rather than actually funny most of the time.

The film roams from the Upper West Side to Coney Island to Atlantic City, maintaining a lighthearted style that doesn't quite match the hints of obsessiveness in Mr. Toback's screenplay.

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

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.

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.

The movie Phar Lap is as much of a crowd pleaser as the champion Australian race horse for whom it is named. In a gently rousing style that should appeal in equal measure to adults and children.

It's astonishing to see a film begin this brilliantly only to torpedo itself in its final hour.

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.

Ms. Olin looks great, and she's a lot more fiery in this hit-woman's role than she has been when trying, in tamer films, to be nice. But otherwise, "Romeo Is Bleeding" adds up to much less than the sum of its parts. Mr. Medak fared better in the service of true, wrenching stories than he does under the spell of this material's desperate fancifulness. The joke isn't much of a joke to begin with, and it wears thin.

The movie often seems even more uneventful than material like this need make it, and Mr. Milius's attention to his actors focuses more closely on their pectorals than on their performances.

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

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.

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.

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.

In his six years working for various movie executives, Mr. Huang filed away trenchant observations about great big egos and helpless little assistants. Now he gleefully brings those observations to the screen. His witty, score-settling Swimming With Sharks is the perfect revenge for anyone who has ever been showered with paper clips, compared unfavorably with a bath mat or ordered to place an urgent phone call to somebody who's out white-water rafting with Tom Cruise -- right now! No excuses!

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

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

There are some funny routines here, though Mr. Carpenter doesn't seem to have cared much about integrating or sustaining them. Mr. Carpenter makes his amateurishness unmistakable, especially when it comes to the film's four actors. Only one of them can act even crudely (fortunately, his is the largest role). The other three, neither photogenic nor particularly extroverted, look like well-meaning fraternity brothers helping out a pal with his class project.

A mildly facetious tone limits Anderson's film to the lightweight, but the collective enthusiasm behind this debut effort still comes through. What's best about Bottle Rocket is not the laid-back pranks that inflate its story to feature length but the offbeat elan with which that story is told.

South-Central plays more like an exploitative potboiler than a civics lesson. Only late in the film, thanks to a sobering of tone and Mr. Plummer's credible performance, does the story develop any real impact.

Dryly clever.

A small, personal, independently made film with the sweep of El Norte, with solid, sympathetic performances by unknown actors and a visual style of astonishing vibrancy, must be regarded as a remarkable accomplishment. [11 Jan 1984, p.15]

The material is extremely slight, but at least it's benign.

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.

Alan J. Pakula has directed an intense, enveloping, gratifyingly thorough screen adaptation of Mr. Turow's story. Mr. Pakula, who also co-wrote the film with Frank Pierson, is well suited to the job of conveying both the story's suspense and its underlying sobriety.

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.

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

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

Deep Cover eventually degenerates into so much gratuitous violence that "kill" sounds like the most-used verb in the screenplay's last stages. The screenplay's frequent emphasis on homophobic insults is another unfortunate touch.

The spare, enjoyable Naked Fame, by the documentarian Chris Long, suggests that today's pornography performers enjoy better life options than those revisited in "Inside Deep Throat."

Any Which Way You Can is a loose, lighthearted Eastwood vehicle aimed at the good-timey sector of this actor's audience. The real star of this series is Clyde the orangutan, and it looks as if Clyde has another hit on his hairy hands.

The beat-up poetry, soused look and bad habits of She's So Lovely are often dated. The showy bravado is not.

At heart, the film version of Less Than Zero is deeply conventional, with its underlying notion that these young people's lives are ruined because their rich parents neglect them. However, Mr. Kanievska gives it a superficial stylishness that is quite spectacular; every scene revolves around one ingeniously bizarre touch or another (the lighting effects are especially dazzling), and the cumulative effect is as striking as it means to be.

His sumptuous film is as strange and mesmerizing as it is imaginatively ghastly. It's a sophisticated, spookily intense rendering of Ms. Rice's story.

Mr. Pollack's film runs into these obstacles so hard, in fact, that it runs right over them without difficulty. His "Sabrina" succeeds as a breezy, lighthearted throwback, made without benefit of the Hepburn magic but with much else in its favor.

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 central friendship in the movie, beautifully delineated, is the one between Mr. Nolte and Mac Davis, who expertly plays the team's quarterback, a man whose calculating nature and complacency make him all the more likable, somehow.

The real fun here comes from watching Mr. Kline bounding through two archly good performances, Mr. Cleese coming hilariously unstrung in the presence of Ms. Curtis and all those adorable animals.

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

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.

Point Break, though it's anything but watertight where plotting is concerned, again reveals Ms. Bigelow's real talents as a director of fast-paced, high-adrenaline action. Whenever the flakiness of Point Break threatens to become lulling, Ms. Bigelow wakes up her audience with a formidable jolt.

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.

Ms. Garofalo, in a lovely, winning performance, gives Abby lots of heart while also making defensive snappishness a big part of her charm.

There's a certain ghoulish excitement to all this, but it is quickly dissipated.

Brisk and unsettling.

As directed by Lewis Teague, Cujo is by no means a horror classic, but it's suspenseful and scary. The performances are simple and effective, particularly Miss Wallace's. And Danny Pintauro does a good job as the frightened child.

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.

In any case, Love and a .45 is too mean-spirited to be funny, and it winds up nastily derivative rather than clever.

The good thing is that the principals and film makers make the absolute most of a conventional opportunity.

An intense, volatile film full of sorrow and wild, mordant humor.

Nothing about his modest coming-of-age comedy demands anything like this awestruck approach.

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

Unlike ''Le Dernier Combat,'' which had humor and urgency, Subway appears to have been a good deal more exciting to film than it is to see.

Mr. Rodriguez demonstrates his talents more clearly than ever -- he's visually inventive, quick-witted and a fabulous editor -- while still hampering himself with sophomoric material.

When karate is not being treated as the latest excuse for an Impossible Dream success story, and when the film is able to find more in Daniel's martial-arts career than pure Rocky-esque competitiveness, The Karate Kid exhibits warmth and friendly, predictable humor, its greatest assets.

If this, the best American comedy since Tootsie, doesn't have you in stitches, check your vital signs: you may be in as much trouble as Edwina Cutwater, the dying dowager Miss Tomlin plays.

Made with such overriding jubilation that its coarseness is mostly liberating...well worth admiring for its sheer glee.

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.

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.

The fact that Miss Brown and Miss Jones have obviously tried to inject a little satire and innovation into the genre just makes the ultimate vulgarity of their film all the more disappointing.

The film is shot by Bill Pope with such enterprising flair that it never looks claustrophobic, but the action inevitably stalls in such close quarters.

The filmmaker creates schematic, intuitive images that hauntingly crystallize the characters' situations.

The filmmaker's equal fondness for bright floral paintings and exploding blood bags is sure to keep an audience on its toes, even if some of the effects are as blunt as (quite literally) chopsticks in the eye.

Ronin can be watched as appreciatively for its hard-boiled performances as for its visceral excitement.

If Assayas doesn't always transport his film's events beyond the all too commonplace, his understatement can also yield moments of quiet simplicity.

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.

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.

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

A B movie with a vengeance, one that offers a wickedly feminine (though hardly feminist) view of nominally happy family life and its failings.

The mice themselves are enjoyably dowdy, comfortable throwbacks to a time before earth-shattering conquests were the sine qua non of children's entertainment. The film's action sequences, on the other hand, provide the dizzying heights and spectacular exploits to which live-action audiences are by now well accustomed, and they seem derivative despite the ingenuity of the animators.

Chet Baker's face, and the extraordinary ways in which Bruce Weber has photographed it, encapsulate the story of Baker's life in a succession of ghostly, indelible images that are at once hauntingly beautiful and desperately sad.

By turns funny, vulgar and backhandedly clever, never more so than when it aspires to absolute stupidity. And Mr. Martin, who began his career with an arrow stuck through his head, has since developed a real genius for playing dumb.

Lost Highway, an elaborate hallucination that could never be mistaken for the work of anyone else, finds Mr. Lynch echoing the perversity of "Blue Velvet," the earlier film of his that this most closely resembles.

Based on a novel by Fannie Flagg, the comedian, and directed by Jon Avnet, Fried Green Tomatoes has some good performances and a measure of homespun appeal, some of which can be credited to Elizabeth McBride's gently evocative costumes and Barbara Ling's detailed production design.

False and condescending films in this genre are nothing new, but Dangerous Minds steamrollers its way over some real talent.

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

The music alone would be enough to make Say Amen, Somebody worth seeing. But it has warmth and friendliness, too, and some of its family scenes are as memorable as its songs.

Mr. Scott's affinity for the visceral and strenuous, from ''Alien'' to ''Blade Runner'' to ''White Squall,'' is much more central here than the renegade feminism of his ''Thelma and Louise.'' With punishing intensity, he plunges his audience into the maelstrom of the training program.

If it was finally the book's whimsical side that endeared it to so many readers, the movie is missing none of that charm. If anything, it's got a little more...A gentle, intelligent film and an interesting one.

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

The film itself works eagerly to emphasize the frankly entertaining aspects of its story.

He (Liman) creates a film that lives up to the momentum of its title and doesn't really need much more.

The appeal of character and story line here is thoroughly overshadowed by the various technical feats involved in bringing the film to the screen.

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.

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

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.

Mr. Day-Lewis, looking wearily rugged and battling his way through several plausible boxing matches, once again breathes fire into the character of a high-minded loner, and his vitality lends real force to the film's moral arguments.

Mr. Cooper's abrupt, stylized direction can't tease much delicacy or meaning out of the material, though delicacy is all that might recommend it. John Alcott's handsome cinematography is most effective, but the beauty it imparts is skin-deep.

Cary Grant's shoes aren't fillable, but Mr. Beatty could have come closer if Love Affair had given him half a chance.

The bourgeois splendor of the Banks house is a major feature of Father of the Bride Part II, a cheerful, harmlessly ingratiating sequel on a par with its 1991 predecessor.

Its strongest assets, aside from a performance by Ms. Watson that pierces through the nonsense, are Mark Knopfler's fine, expressive score and the attractiveness of its star.

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

This material marks a gutsy, fascinating departure for Mr. Eastwood, and makes it clear that his directorial ambitions have by now outstripped his goals as an actor.

But for all its enthusiasm, this film isn't sharp enough to afford all the time it wastes on small talk, long drives, trips to the mall and favorite songs played on car radios.

No less amazing than the material Mr. Annaud has captured on the screen is the fact that he has gone to such crazily elaborate lengths to capture it at all.

There have been few sharper portraits of the film maker as alchemist than Hearts of Darkness: A Film Maker's Apocalypse, in which Francis Ford Coppola is seen struggling with hellish logistical problems, wild-card actors, freak accidents and other unseen demons, then ultimately pulling a miracle out of his hat.

As directed by George Miller, this film has an appealingly brisk, unsentimental style and a rare ability to compress and convey detailed medical data. It also displays tremendous compassion for all three Odones and what they have been through.

I wanted to show how the underlying racism of society can transform a banal love story into a tragedy, Mr. Dumont has said. His film, for all its characters' uncommunicativeness, is too flat and unswerving to convey that idea surprisingly. But it does bring haunting power to the bitter, tongue-tied helplessness that sets its tragedy in motion.

Predicated on two ideas -- that human nature is rife with perfidy and that it's important to get the cast into hot cars or bathing suits whenever possible -- Mr. McNaughton and the cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball (''Top Gun,'' ''True Romance'') give a decadent gloss to this far-fetched, quintuple-crossing tale.

Though Star Maps lacks a strong ending or a Ratso Rizzo to play off Spain's ingenuous hustler, it introduces Arteta as a filmmaker with a credible style and a flair for caustic storytelling. And his film takes the interesting tack of sharing Carlos' matter-of-fact outlook.

You can know every glitch that made this such a dangerous mission, and Apollo 13 will still have you by the throat.

[Smith] also has an uncommonly sure sense of deadpan comic timing.

Its thoughts about its characters don't go much deeper than the bottom of a soup bowl, but those thoughts are still expressed with affection, wit and an abundance of fascinating cooking tips.

Elegant and deeply disquieting drama.

Coneheads falls flat about as often as it turns funny, and displays more amiability than style.

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.

What is well worth watching here, much more so than the train itself, is Jon Voight, who gives a fiery performance in an unusually hard-edged role.

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

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.

A lot of attention has gone into the film's video games, computer imagery and costumes, to the point where simply watching these artifacts is half the fun...But eventually Hackers turns tedious, perhaps not realizing that an audience can get tired of the same old equations floating in cyberspace.

The movie manages to be painless and pointless in equal measure.

As in Blue Collar and Hardcore, Mr. Schrader shows himself capable of launching the action in a powerhouse style. Once again, that forcefulness deteriorates as the film progresses.

Kevin Reynolds, who wrote and directed Fandango, is for the most part making just another coming-of-age film. But at its best, his debut feature has an appealing boisterousness, and it successfully walks a fine line between sensitivity and swagger.

The War Within succeeds only as a thriller with some wartime overtones, rather than as a character study that thrills.

What elevates these scenes from the usual concert simulations - and what gives the entire film its tremendous immediacy - is the extraordinary way in which Miss Lange has molded herself to fit the music. Although the performance is conspicuously prop-heavy, with brittle wigs and an enormous number of costume changes, Miss Lange makes herself a perfect physical extension of the vibrant, changeable, enormously expressive woman who can be heard on these recordings.

The Stepfather is too often disappointingly thin.

This time, he takes no great risks, nor does he break new ground in the 20-something serial-small-talk genre. (Currently, Nicole Holofcener's sprightly "Walking and Talking" does it better.) But Burns emphatically avoids sophomore slump with an inviting, ruefully funny film that lives up to his initial promise.

Running on Empty works best when it plays upon emotions generated by the Popes' unique predicament, something that it often does rather shamelessly. It helps that Sidney Lumet has directed the film in a crisp, handsome style that diminishes the maudlin or unlikely aspects of its story, even when they threaten to intrude.

A film this intent on authenticity might easily grow dull, but this one doesn't; Mr. Apted is a skillful storyteller. He gives Thunderheart" a brisk, fact-filled exposition and a dramatic structure that builds to a strong finale, one that effectively drives the film's message home.

A scenic and enveloping nature film about a young man and his beloved pet. But it is by no means strictly a children's film, and it certainly isn't Lassie.

Far more memorable for the spectacular wildness of its Arctic and Dresden scenes (as photographed by Eduardo Serra) than for its uneven efforts to bind such images together.

Basketball, bold urban landscapes, larger-than-life characters and red-hot visual pyrotechnics are the strong points of Mr. Lee's biggest three-ring circus, not to mention the central presence of Denzel Washington.

Eraser means to show off the star's standard persona against a backdrop of lavish special effects, which is certainly a formula that's worked before. But this is no "Terminator," since its tricks are so much more arbitrary and over-the-top.

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.