Lawrence Van Gelder

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

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

An earnest study in despair.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Not a subtle film; and, most curiously -- to put it mildly -- for a sermon on tolerance, it resorts to history's eternal scapegoat.

These tales of upward mobility seem at odds with Mr. Pérez-Rey's choice to include a clip from the 1983 remake of "Scarface," in which Al Pacino, playing a Marielito thug, introduces a machine gun as his "little friend."

Lots of people will probably like The Kentucky Fried Movie, just as they like Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's hamburgers. But popularity is still no reason for deifying mediocrity.

If an Olympic competition for overplotted movie is ever held, Circus seems a likely contender for the gold.

Though it flies in the face of credibility and becomes downright silly by its end, I Know What You Did Last Summer knows its way around the rules of the popular horror-film genre.

What Yellowbeard establishes is that for even the funniest of performers, a good script may be as essential as pitching is to baseball.

Street-wise older children might find it to their taste; but all the new trappings cannot disguise the fact that "Together Brothers" is an old story, being retold perhaps wisely, but not exceptionally well.

The film, at least 20 minutes too long, has too many competing story lines to succeed as more than an oddball mood piece.

When it comes to an ending, Drive Me Crazy offers no surprises, but it arrives there in amiable, sensible style.

No more than a sentimental little comedy.

Weighing in at almost exactly one pound and unable to breathe or eat on his own, Nicholas James Baba-Conn seemed doomed to a very short life; his chance for survival was calculated at close to zero.

This mediocre sci-fi horror film about an Ohio high school being taken over by thirsty space aliens intent on world domination breaks no new ground. But it has an engaging cast.

Warm of heart, modest in polish, Amy provides satisfactions that must be balanced against its flaws.

However fascinating the source material, there's something less than cinematic about 90 minutes of watching people read letters in front of windows.

Knock Off runs breathlessly over land and water in familiar comic book fashion, offering more action than sense and next to nothing in the way of suspense, humor or romance.

In the failure of Electric Dreams to blend and balance its ingredients properly, plot elements are lost (the brick), credibility is overtaxed (the lovelorn computer), and what remains is high tech without being high art.

Slight but bright and charming.

Amounts to recycling rather than reinvention.

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