Rita Kempley

Hairspray is definitely self-congratulatory, like the message movies it aims to spoof. But there's a sweet morality mixed with the camp clumsiness of this nostalgic goof. Waters couldn't care less about the subtleties of plot or character. He writes and directs the way a kid finger paints. As usual, he's gathered a tantalizing cast from the so-out-they're-in crowd. [26 Feb 1988, p.b1]

Like the director, the cast seems to have burrowed into the material, made all the more wrenchingly realistic by Dogme precepts.

An uncompromising, emotionally draining drama that presents the urbanization of New Zealand's Maori as a cultural disaster, one that is mirrored in the shards of a shattering marriage. This explosive first film by director Lee Tamahori focuses on the transformation of a battered wife, but its story is fueled by the machismo of the disenfranchised Maori male.

Early on, Lumet wastes too much time characterizing Newman, following him from bar to bar to bar. Though Newman plays a good drunk, his performance is far from intoxicating. When he rests his case, the jury goes to sleep. [17 Dec 1982, p.19]

The Road Warrior is ferocious and unpredictable. It's energetic. It's peculiar. It's big and it's dirty. But mostly it's cosmically irrelevant. Hey, but, one thing's for sure, we are driven.

Filled as it is with unforced errors, A League of Their Own isn't a perfect picture, but it is irresistibly ebullient with not one, but nine Babes on base.

Joyous redemptive romantic comedy.

A modestly budgeted but richly rewarding look at a Tennessee housewife's search for a better life.

Unlike "Heathers," a satiric treatment of teen suicide, Pump Up the Volume is passionately caring. It's a howl from the heart, a relentlessly involving movie that gives a kid every reason to believe that he or she can come of age. It appreciates the pimples and pitfalls of this frightening passage, the transit commonly known as adolescence.

Chock-full of celeb cameos, puns and contemporary camp, the movie is annoyingly hip. It wants to belong even more desperately than its title character, who yearns to be a god almost as much as Pinocchio wanted to be just plain human. Hercules, alas, is hardly in the same class with the emotionally compelling Pinocchio -- although on many occasions its hulking hero seems just as wooden.

Filmed in the mock-documentary style pioneered by acknowledged mentor Robert Altman, it does for baby-kissing phonies what This Is Spinal Tap did for heavy metal poseurs.

Never mind that Best Intentions, which was filmed both as a six-part TV miniseries and a three-hour movie, is occasionally uneven and sometimes confusing. It remains a rare August pleasure, a film for grown-up audiences that challenges and enriches.

A brain-cramping and eye-straining experiment in digital filmmaking.

There are insightful scenes, fragmented scenes and sudden outbreaks of violence. It's a little like mixing the white and the dark loads, but somehow it all comes out in the wash and love prevails. [28 Mar 1986, p.25]

The Sure Thing is fresh, funny, sure-fire stuff. And much of the credit for that goes to an energetic comic actor named John Cusack, who was only 17 when he made the film.

Though dark and harrowing, explicit and unsparing, the movie proves a riveting biography of these burnt-out icons and their iconoclastic half-decade. Symbolism aside, Sid & Nancy is an indelible drama of undying love and meaningless decline.

It's a movie that walks on air.

A hilarious new addition to the wonderfully warped Generation X-Files.

With its energetic cast and insistent street score, it still manages to be poignant without becoming bathetic, and violent without being exploitative.

A case of art imitating the electorate, it's a comedy that rides in on Clinton's coattails, bringing with it a landslide of laughs.

Overlong and repetitious, the film doesn't live up to the high expectations set by its charming opening scene, but the musical numbers, which often feature the original wigs and trashy Ikettes gear, are handily directed by Brian Gibson of the HBO movie The Josephine Baker Story. The mitigating factor is that Bassett overcomes the limitations of the role to become more than a punching bag.

This spooky film's ostensible subject—an environmental illness known as multiple chemical sensitivity—is merely a starting place for this mesmerizing horror movie, feminist tract and medical mystery.

You have the right to remain silent. But if you do, call 911 -- your funny bone is busted. [2 Dec 1988]

Sadly, The Secret of NIMH is beautiful but unbalanced: The animators gambled when they should have gamboled. [09 July 1982, p.13]

Though Mother has already collected two prizes for its screenplay, it's really rather thin. If it weren't so slow and repetitious, there'd only be enough whining and grousing for a Seinfeld episode. [10 Jan 1997, p.D01]

Mann, who's best known for such urban crime dramas as "Vice" and "Manhunter," is equally at home whether the chase concerns a cigarette boat or a birch-bark canoe. He brings the same flair pairing action and style to The Last of the Mohicans, an attempt to resurrect and redefine the American hero.

This is not a movie that wraps up its story in a tidy bow, but it's a lot more fun than most of the ones that do.

It's not that Wayans lacks wit, it's that he's stomped it to death. A sweet-natured performance -- and the fact that he and Tom Cruise probably have the same orthodontist -- doesn't quite make up for the muddle. Don't be a sucka.