Lawrence Van Gelder

Harrowing yet hopeful film.

The medium is more palatable than the saccharine message because Hopkins and Gooding know how to put on a show.

Simultaneously fascinating and vexing in ways that might tax informed devotees of both baseball and film.

The card announcing the film's G rating was roundly booed by the youngsters though at almost every sight of the dog they screamed with mouth-filled delight.

Slight but bright and charming.

Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin are appealing performers, but none of the energy, professionalism and gameness they display -- can surmount the mess that surrounds them in this misguided comedy.

A mere slip of a movie, a wan character study of people who add up to little more than a series of studied quirks.

Even pretensions toward the humorous and hip cannot save this blood-drenched film from its innate tastelessness.

As long on adrenaline and special effects as it is short on genuine novelty and intellectual content.

Yakusho and Ms. Shimizu deliver unerring performances in a splendid film that harvests hope from a bleak landscape.

Astringent and unsentimental, it is a case study of losing, its clear eye focused unwaveringly on the realities of commerce and kinship.

An unusually cerebral filmed essay that demands focus and patience from its audience as it sets about the task of unearthing a secret history of the 20th century. Adam Curtis, the film's director and writer, saves the proceedings from being overly dry with his visual wit and deft touch with archival materials.

Experience filmgoing joy.

Leave It to Beaver is the sort of movie that could be described as good clean fun if it happened to be good or fun.

Plods along, never catching dramatic fire, sometimes suffering from amateurish acting and often relying on its intrusive and treacly music to impart mood and rhythm.

Tedious descent into cinema hell.

But while rooted in British sensibilities, Bean is not to be confused with a Noel Coward comedy. Not every gag in Bean succeeds, but compared with most comedies, this one is a keeper.

C.H.U.D. makes no pretension toward serious theses about government or the environment. It is meant to be light commercial entertainment, and in the category of horror films it stands as a praiseworthy effort.

Five-year-olds who have read their Shakespeare will recognize that Turbo is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Light on originality and low on suspense though high on design and special effects.

Torturously boring.

In the spring a monster's fancy lethally turns to thoughts of lust. This thought, reduced to a level contemptuous of taste and reasonable intelligence, underlies Species II.

Sometimes even a talented lineup produces unexceptional results.

High-spirited entertainment .

Like Giuseppe Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso," Just One Look is a tribute to the formative power of cinema, a coming-of-age film that nimbly interweaves the adolescent hero's struggles with clips from the movies that shape his romanticized notions of life.

Travel from Mars to Earth is an amazing feat, but not much more remarkable than reviving a sitcom that had been dead for a third of a century.

Amounts to recycling rather than reinvention.

Artfully treading a fine line between operatic tragedy and romantic comedy.

It is probably hopeless in the presence of Trekkies to do anything but sit back -- amused, bemused and astonished -- and watch the devotions of fans of the various incarnations of "Star Trek."

The director, who also served as producer along with Lisa Comforty, his wife, spent 12 years compiling the archival clips and photographs that make up this compact and elegant film.

A smoother, funnier, more suspenseful and more endearing version of the 1980 John Cassavetes film of the same title.

Mr. Caan's debut film is not quite a whole thing, but it offers up enough promising fragments to make his sophomore effort worth watching for.

Lovingly shot on location in the Italian neighborhoods of Providence, this comfortably predictable film has its pleasures, most notably a dryly funny Adrienne Barbeau as the brothers' hip, hard-drinking Aunt Lidia.

Establishes its ominous mood and tension swiftly, and if the suspense never rises to a higher level, it is nevertheless maintained throughout.

Vampires aren't the only things in Bordello of Blood that can't stand up to daylight. Neither can the plot.

Monotonously paced and too long, Jersey Guy also suffers in its early scenes from attempts at humor that probably read better on the page than they play on the screen.

J.D.'s Revenge crosses the line from a stupid movie to a potentially harmful one.

Lavish in its depiction of surfaces -- clothing, furniture, lighting fixtures -- Flowers of Shanghai proves deficient in its revelation of inner lives.

Poor old Mr. Magoo should have been allowed to rest in piece. This film suggests that when you loot a crypt, you're likely to find a corpse.

The innate suspense and charm of the spelling bee, along with a trio of crack performances, turn what is in essence a formulaic sports picture into something more satisfying: an underdog tale that manages to inspire without being sappy.

Easy to like and difficult to admire.

Literate and handsome.

Though Three ... Extremes may seem tame to jaded fans of what has been termed New Asian Horror, it serves as a fine introduction to the genre for those who are curious but squeamish.

It is the absence of genuine comedy that exposes glaringly the film's fundamental attitude of condescension and scorn toward blacks and women, and a tendency toward stereotyping that clashes violently with its superficial message of tolerance, compassion and fair play.

Once again, the proceedings have been directed with high energy and rapid pace by Bob Clark, and the results are slicker and more sophisticated than before. Refined sensibilities may understandably recoil from all this: high art is not among the aspirations of Porky's II. But lots of lowdown fun? Well, that's another matter.

It keeps its tongue firmly in its cheek, offers a few genuine laughs, moves swiftly, if not at warp speed, and is led by a talented cast.

To make a film in 2005 that asks audiences to sympathize with the plight of a band of terrorists is an intellectually audacious gesture.

Mr. Toledo's performance as the shallow and cowardly, yet strangely sympathetic Rafael is a wonder of comic timing, while Ms. Cervera is unforgettable as Lourdes, the ugly duckling who becomes not a swan, but a monster.

Richly atmospheric and suspenseful.

Sometimes amateurishly acted by the appealing younger cast but is nonetheless a neat blend of well-drawn major characters and drama, music, dance, romance and humor that generates considerable charm and achieves a heartwarming resolution of its generational conflict.

The movie only really comes alive when the music plays and people sing and dance.

Short on suspense, routine in its action and monotonous in its performances.

Throughout this lame film, directed by Stephen Kessler and written by Elisa Bell, situations are developed -- complicated directions to a hotel room, Clark clinging to the face of Hoover Dam, Ellen the object of Mr. Newton's seductive charm -- and left to wither without a payoff.

Special effects in which the actors appear repeatedly in black outline and occasionally distorted perspective; and an assortment of tricks (rearing up on hind wheels, blushing and blinking his lights) that possesses a somewhat limited power to captivate...Reluctant adults marched off to "Herbie" by tiny press gangs may take what consolation they can from the scenery, featuring France and Monaco.

Mr. Beesley, an Oklahoma City native who has been following and filming the Flaming Lips for 15 years, is far too close to his subject to offer a critical perspective, but he achieves a level of intimacy with the band members that most rock documentary directors can only dream of.

Here's the lowdown on the latest chapter in Mortal Kombat: deadly dull.

With its heavy symbolism and awkward, lurching pace, A Hole in One leaves viewers with little more than the vague conviction - which I think I already had going in - that falling in love is better than an ice pick to the brain.

Mysterious, poetic and allusive, The Werckmeister Harmonies beckons filmgoers who complain of the vapidity of Hollywood movie making and yearn for a film to ponder and debate.

Theresa Russell is terrific as Angela's slatternly but loving mother, but her character disappears abruptly midway through the movie.

The Devil's Rejects is a trompe l'oeil experiment in deliberately retro filmmaking. It looks sensational, but there is a curious emptiness at its core.

In the end the elaborate gimmickry of Inspector Gadget cannot conceal its very ordinary storytelling.

An intriguing and entertaining introduction to Johnson through his varied art; the mystery surrounding his death, which may have been his final performance piece, and the reminiscences of contemporaries.

Poverty, capable of stunting lives, can also blight films. A case in point is the earnest and heartfelt but undernourished and plodding Off the Hook.

An earnest study in despair.

The law of averages demands that every once in a while a movie must come along starring young nonprofessional actors who aren't very good. That's unfortunately the case in 15.

Notable chiefly for its eye-catching urban backgrounds and an eclectic score that ranges from jazz and country to classical and choral.

Memo to Shaquille O'Neal: Don't give up your night job.

A quintessential Renny Harlin film: a big, dumb, loud action movie.

More focused on surface than true revelation.

The pleasures are familiar, but not the least bit inspired.

Film Geek has a likable premise, an unusual setting in downtown Portland, Ore., and a pleasantly homemade indie feel. Unfortunately, Scotty Pelk, as written by James Westby and played by Mr. Malkasian, is actually so irritating, so genuinely hard to take, that like the rest of the characters in this semiautobiographical movie, we soon find ourselves itching to get away from him.

The kind of movie most independent films strive in vain to be: a small, beautifully faceted gem.

Most of the principal female characters are either sexually voracious, sexually promiscuous, pregnant out of wedlock or angrily bent on revenge.

Combines old-fashioned boys' adventure with a heavy-handed modern lecture on parenthood. The film possesses a decent heart but suffers from a simple mind.

Suffers from clumsy exposition and uneven acting, except in the case of Eddie T. Robinson.

There's not much sense to the plot. But the film makers' blunderbuss approach to humor, with visual and verbal jokes coming in profusion and scattering high and low, guarantees that just about every funnybone is bound to be hit, some more than once.

Brigham City, like "God's Army," may proselytize for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but Brigham City is also an example of concise, skillful filmmaking.

Serious, competent and unsurprising debut film.

Sheds heat but insufficient light.

Neither approves of nor condemns the choices made by its headstrong protagonist; rather, it quietly observes her transformation from naïve schoolgirl to wary but proud single mother.

The buoyancy is only intermittent.

It's easy to be seduced by this film's warmhearted, if slightly utopian, vision.

A rare hybrid: an underdog sports picture that's also a transgender fairy tale.

The team that gave the world "Dumb and Dumber" returns with something feeble and feebler.

Think of it as a modern-day variant on a Shakespearean comedy, only without the verbal felicity or dramatic structure.

Though it generates its share of unintentional giggles, Desert Wind does manage to take us to a seldom-visited place: the hidden corners of the straight male mind.

A well-cast disaster movie more notable for special effects and stunts than for credible drama.

Too much soap opera colors its love story, and the industrial- strength dancing by booted men that is its centerpiece falls short of exhilaration.

The Time We Killed has the raw intimacy of a filmed diary, but as with reading a stranger's journal, it eventually gets dull.

Within that narrow framework, the film is quite successful, using archival photographs, clips from pornographic films and television commercials, and interviews to evoke the period between June 1969, when the Stonewall riots brought homosexuality out of the shadows, to June 1981, when the AIDS epidemic began.

Quite simply a treat for the ear.

With Christopher Eccleston as Jude and Kate Winslet of ''Sense and Sensibility'' as his great love, Sue Bridehead, and with convincing evocations of 19th-century England from locations in Edinburgh and the north of England, Jude remains a handsome if gravely flawed film.

Where "Ringu" derived its power from the simplicity of its premise and the purity of its execution, One Missed Call staggers under the weight of its director's taste for baroque excess.

This clunky juvenile comedy lurches among multiple story lines without fully realizing the comic potential of any.

A modest but engaging mixture of comedy and drama that derives most of its energy from the performance of Callie Thorne.

Eventually becomes preaching that is likely to tax the credibility of the unconverted.

What results is a candy-colored broad comedy with noteworthy performances.

Mr. Tarkovsky appears so absorbed in grappling with his own demons that universality suffers. [17 Aug 1983, p.C14]