Janet Maslin

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.