Rita Kempley

It's deeply vapid, with the emotional consistency of styling mousse.

Tired conventions, hoary themes and obvious conclusions.

Isabelle Huppert and generic Steve Guttenberg prove incompatible costars in The Bedroom Window, a cockamamie mystery that finds these bi-continentals drawn together like, say, refrigerator magnets to styrofoam coolers. Yes, it's magic.

The blarney and bohunkery builds to a shaky apex of nothingness, then ends with a slaughter in slo-motion, a romantic ode of blood, bullets and body parts.

It practically celebrates convenience of plot, over-the-top acting and follow-the-footprints dialogue, but mostly it is a salute to sequins and sashay. With just a hint of sarcasm.

Astute and entertaining documentary.

Unhappily, the attractive twosome never give into the pull, just as this coquettish variant of "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" never arrives at its promised destination.

A Dry White Season is political cinema so deeply felt it attains a moral grace. A bitter medicine, a painful reminder, it grieves for South Africa as it recounts the atrocities of apartheid. Yes, it is a story already told on a grander scale, but never with such fervor.

The Wizard is not only tacky and moribund, but it teaches gambling and bad sportsmanship.

Mr. Whipple squeezing his Charmin is scarier than this phony baloney computer effects-driven anaconda.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock isn't really a movie, it's a happy reunion. The Enterprise is 18 years older and the crew members look like Gray Panthers in space. It may be old stuff, but it's still the right stuff up there. [8 June 1984, p.23]

Most of the time Creepshow works.

South Central covers some of the same ground as Boyz N the Hood, but certainly there's nothing wrong with reiterating its positive message for black sons and fathers.

After one scummy role after another, Rourke finally stops taking himself so seriously. Instead of the usual Neanderthal, he treats us to a sensitive, likable blob with a sense of humor.

Director John McTiernan, who redefined the action genre in the original "Die Hard," does devise some smashing explosions, crashes and so on, but nothing really new.

Diane Keaton's kooky sensibilities as a director are ideally suited to the sweet madness of Unstrung Heroes.

A soppy songfest about a tubercular pea picker who drives to Nashville, where he hemorrhages and dies. It's unfit for human consumption. [17 Dec 1982, p.20]

A flawed but funky adventure.

An uplifting, superbly acted and intelligent family drama.

Ford's earthy Everyman and Pitt's vengeful youth are probably more interesting than they have any right to be inside these tired macho roles. Of course, Rory and Tom could be bursting with blarney and the movie still wouldn't gather any momentum.

Blue Thunder hovers just this side of trash and the other side of credibility, but it propels a willing audience into adrenaline heaven.

The rich visuals seem at odds with the spartan content of the screenplay, with skating nuns like penguins on a frozen pond, cows lowing, pigeons flapping, statues weeping, novices in white gowns splayed like crucifixes on the stone cold floor. We're left with these images when we should be left pondering the cosmos, shortchanged by the saints and the scientists alike, denied our just epiphany. [27 Sept 1985, p.25]

As love interests go, Shepherd and Downey are about as hot as Ike and Mamie Eisenhower, though the apoplectic Downey does have his comedic moments. Always a standout, Masterson is pensively provocative as Miranda, something of a teen-age Kim Novak.

The author of such shoot-'em-ups as "Executioner" and "Road House," Henkin has hard-boiled the action genre twice over with this lurid, ludicrous, appallingly violent, offhandedly moralistic spoof.

Amadeus isn't meant to be a biography of the composer's life, but a bawdy, black fantasy, a fiction based on a few curious facts. [21 Sep 1984, p.23]

The script boasts more writers than the computerized menagerie's got megabytes, but they haven't come up with much variety or humor in what is essentially a string of catastrophes.

The potential for hokum is there, but Duvall and co-star James Earl Jones capably avoid the sticky pitfalls of Tom Epperson and Billy Bob Thornton's sugar-cured script.

Lethal Weapon opens with a shot of Mel Gibson in his birthday suit and just gets better. Likewise we meet costar Danny Glover in the bathtub, fêted by his family on his 50th birthday. This endearing double exposure introduces us to the vulnerabilities of these superduper heroes, an odd couple of cops who mature into friends as they quell crime.