Vincent Canby

Alien 3 belongs to that branch of fantasy comics, best exemplified by the "Road Warrior" movies, in which the iron and space ages meet for dizzy results.

The best things about Creepshow are its carefully simulated comic-book tackiness and the gusto with which some good actors assume silly positions. Horror film purists may object to the levity even though failed, as a lot of it is.

Streisand never plays to or with the other actors. She does A Star Is Born as a solo turn. Everybody else is a back‐up musician, which is okay when she's belting out a lyric, but distinctly odd when other actors come into the same frame.

A suspense-horror film of unusual psychological intelligence and wit.

Murder by Death is as light and insubstantial as one could wish.

Even as action melodrama of a Shaft sort, the film is inept, so confused that occasionally it seems surreal.

The direction by Michael Caton-Jones, the Englishman whose first theatrical feature was Scandal, is undistinguished here, but the material is not great.

Robert Mulligan's Summer of '42 is a memory movie, written, directed and acted with such uncommon good humor that I don't think you'll be put off by its sweet soft-focus, at least until you start analyzing it afterwards.

the film that Mr. Annaud and his producer, Claude Berri, have made is something of a triumph. It's tough, clear-eyed, utterly unsentimental, produced lavishly but with such discipline that the exotic locale never gets in the way of the minutely detailed drama at the center.

A good-natured, end-of- the-world B-movie, written and directed by Thom Eberhardt, a new film maker whose sense of humor augments rather than upstages the mechanics of the melodrama.

Clash of the Titans is profligate in its use of talented people who are not particularly at home in this sort of film, though they all pay serious attention to their work.

Diamonds Are Forever is great, absurd fun, not only because it recalls the moods and manners of the sixties (which, being over, now seem safely comprehensible), but also because all of the people connected with the movie obviously know what they are up to.

It is a movie without a single thought in its head, but its action sequences are so ferociously staged that it's impossible not to pay attention most of the time.

It is absurd, sentimental, pretty, never quite as funny as it intends to be, but quite acceptable, if only as a seasonal ritual.

With the exception of Mr. Strasberg and Mr. Levene, the actors are as hysterical as their material. The screenplay has one funny exchange. Other than that, the screenplay and the direction are a complete muddle.

It's not that Oliver and Company is not up to par. It actively denies its own unique heritage. [18 Nov 1988, p.C8]

The former lead singer of the Supremes is on-screen from start to finish, which is to say almost endlessly, but her only apparent limitations are those imposed on her by a screenplay and direction seemingly designed to turn a legitimate legend into a whopper of a cliché.

It's apparent that someone connected with They Came From Within has an impertinent sense of humor even though the film is so tackily written and directed, so darkly photographed and the sound so dimly recorded, that it's difficult to stay with it.

A Brief History of Time is a kind of adventure that seldom reaches the screen, and it's a tonic.

Class Action won't put you to sleep. Yet it vanishes from the memory as fast as anything dreamed in the conventional manner.

The movie seems to want to be a James Bond sort of adventure in black drag, but it's more reminiscent of Batman.

It's a marvelous attempt to recreate a kind of farce that, with the notable exceptions of a handful of films by Blake Edwards and Billy Wilder, disappeared after World War II.

The movie is extremely long (two hours and 34 minutes) and so slow that by the end you feel as if you've been standing up even if you've been sitting down.

The Object of Beauty might have been practically perfect escapist entertainment if the screenplay had been as smooth as the cast. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg has written some attractive characters and a lot of bright lines, but he needs a script doctor. He has let the plot confuse things.

As wild as the premise is, Under Siege is almost guiltily enjoyable.

As adapted by Miss Henley and directed by Bruce Beresford, this Crimes of the Heart has been turned into a majestic, totally humorless star turn for three individually splendid, collectively lost actresses -Diane Keaton (Lenny), Jessica Lange (Meg) and Sissy Spacek (Babe).

Unlike most sequels, which seem to get bigger, fancier and emptier the further removed they are from their source material, Psycho III has a lean, serviceable, stripped-down quality to it.

The movie finally is never very convincing. Even the special effects aren't great. Mr. Connery, however, wears the movie as if it were a favorite old hat. He makes it look good.

The Escape Artist represents a lot more talent than is ever demonstrated on the screen.

Mr. Sargent and Mr. Zinneman have amplified the story with solemn care, in good taste (which is not always desirable), and have come forth with a film that is both well-meaning and on the side of the angels but with the exception of a half-dozen scenes, lifeless.

To watch it is to try to put together the pieces from three different jigsaw puzzles. Not everything fits. [19 June 1980, p.19]

Return of the Jedi doesn't really end the trilogy as much as it brings it to a dead stop. The film...is by far the dimmest adventure of the lot.

The best things in the production are the garishly absurd sets. The costumes, including the gold lame athletic supporters worn by the members of Ming's palace guard, suggest an adolescent's fever dream. The pacing is so funereal that this Flash Gordon seems far longer and far less funny that the 15-chapter serial, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938), which starred Buster Crabbe. [05 Dec 1980, p.C8]

The three actresses make an attractive team, but neither the screenplay, by Colin Higgins and Patricia Resnick, nor the director, Mr. Higgins, uses them very effectively. It's clearly a movie that began as someone's bright idea, which then went into production before anyone had time to give it a well-defined personality.

A big, brave, stouthearted, sometimes romantic, sometimes silly melodrama with the kind of visual sweep you don't often find in movies anymore.

It leaves itself wide open to charges of pretentiousness. Yet "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" is so entertaining and so vigorously performed, especially by Newman in the title role, that its pretensions become part of its robust, knock-about style.

Watching it is like spending a day at an amusement park, which is probably what Mr. Spielberg and his associates intended. It moves tirelessly from one ride or attraction to the next, only occasionally taking a minute out for a hot dog, and then going right on to the next unspeakable experience.

The Thing is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.

The movie is sorrowful, funny and beautiful. It is also, finally, very unsatisfactory.

Dracula has the nervy enthusiasm of the work of a precocious film student who has magically acquired a master's command of his craft. It's surprising, entertaining and always just a little too much.

The Last Tycoon doesn't really build to any climax. We follow it horizontally, as if it were a landscape being surveyed by a camera in a long pan-shot.

Nothing in the movie works properly. For all of the time and money that went into it, it's jerry-built, a ship that slides straight to the bottom at its christening. Heaven's Gate is something quite rare in movies these days - an unqualified disaster.

200 Motels is not all bad, but because it's a movie with so many things going on simultaneously, it becomes too quickly exhausting—in actual effect, soporific.

The beauty of the sport, especially the ultimate grace of a player of Pele's extraordinary caliber, is captured in a series of slow-motion shots that communicates something of the appreciation and excitement that can be experienced only by a true aficionado. The form of the film is conventional, but the manner in which it has been executed is not.

It's not giving away state secrets to report that Rocky finds that success has made him fat and that to triumph again, he has to learn to be ''hungry.'' Rocky's problem is thus not that of America in the 80's but more like America in the affluent 60's and early 70's.

The best thing about the movie, flimed mostly in Kenya, is its performances, funny and hip and self-assured in the manner of television personalities working in front of loving audiences. Mr. Caine and Mr. Poitier are never unaware that their material may not be the greatest, but that doesn't spoil their good spirits, and when a good line comes along they get maximum results without stomping on it or us.

There are some pleasant things in Saint Jack, but there are few surprises, except for the fact that either the movie's editor or Mr. Bogdanovich, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Howard Sackler and Paul Theroux (based on the novel by Mr. Theroux), hasn't found a simple way to indicate the passage of time.

The visual style is charmingly conventional, as gently reassuring as that of a Donald Duck cartoon, sometimes as romantically pretty as an old Silly Symphony.

The characters don't motivate the drama in any real way. They are cut and shaped to fit it, and if the cast of Black Sunday were not so good, and if Mr. Frankenheimer were a less able director, the movie would be unendurably boring.

Though the new movie has its share of blood and gore, it is mostly creepy and, considering the bizarre circumstances, surprisingly funny.

American Pop is a dazzling display of talent, nerve, ideas (old and new), passion and a marvelously free sensibility. The man may well be a genius, though that sort of pronouncement will have to wait on time.

Wind is not commonplace movie making. The sailing sequences, including one short, very funny race off Newport involving the kind of small boats you and I might sail, surpass anything I've ever seen on the screen. There are collisions at sea, wrecked spinnakers and freak accidents, like the one during a race when a sailor finds himself hanging upside down from the mast as the other boat gains. These things exhilarate as they threaten to stop the heart.

It's a seriously intended movie that goes grossly comic when it means to be most solemn. It's a tale of mother love and freedom that is both mean and narrow.

Though publicized as a breakthrough into adult comedy for Mr. Reitman (''National Lampoon's Animal House,'' ''Meatballs,'' ''Ghostbusters''), this new film is less a true adult comedy than a teen-age comedy populated by adults who are functioning in an adult world.

The problem with "Nicholas and Alexandra" is not inflation, but deflation, the attempt to cram too big a picture into too small a frame.

The film wants to be honest (and in its cruelties, it is), but the operative sensibility is that of a sitcom world. The characters aren't necessarily idealized, but they are flat and uninteresting. The material is lugubrious. The only seemingly spontaneous moment comes at the very end, which is too late.

The film's mysteriousness is not profound. Anybody who hasn't guessed the killer's identity after 30 minutes should be forced to watch Rising Sun three times a day until Christmas.

Mr. Boorman takes these myths very seriously, but he has used them with a pretentiousness that obscures his vision.

Written and directed by Walter Hill, who once wrote and directed a good movie, Hard Times, with Charles Bronson. This one is not good. It is Awful Movie. It is Pretentious Movie. It is Silly Movie. It talks just like this.

Falling Down is the most interesting, all-out commercial American film of the year to date, and one that will function much like a Rorschach test to expose the secrets of those who watch it.

It demonstrates the kind of intelligence and thought one doesn't often find in a movie aimed at the action-adventure crowd. This is evident as much in what the film doesn't do and say as in what is actually seen on the screen.

A terribly gentle if wisecracking comedy about the serious business of growing up.

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF, a Western period farce about a town-taming supersheriff, is something designed for sensibilities shaped by "Petticoat Junction" and "Green Acres."

Wall Street isn't a movie to make one think. It simply confirms what we all know we should think, while giving us a tantalizing, Sidney Sheldon-like peek into the boardrooms and bedrooms of the rich and powerful.

Even the special effects are more to the point of the comedy than they were in the first film. For some reason, this appears to leave more room for the sort of random funny business that Mr. Murray and his friends do best, or to which they react with most aplomb.

Stir Crazy is an energetic but spiritless shambles.

Steel Magnolias is pop entertainment of an especially condescending, superficial sort. Its bitchiness and greeting-card truisms are made no more palatable by the fact that Mr. Harling probably wrote it with as much sincerity and passion as Mr. Shepard put into "Fool for Love."

At its best, Black Rain has the glitzy quality of an extremely long and clever television commercial. One can't be sure what is being sold, but the eye isn't bored.

The action and the violence of The Getaway are supported by no particular themes whatsoever. The movie just unravels.

Mr. Almodovar's comic invention runs out too soon, leaving the audience to giggle weakly in anticipation of the big laughs and disorienting shocks that never arrive.

Except for Mr. Lloyd, the film is so sweet-natured and bland that it is almost instantly forgettable.

Movies are not like people who, if they're basically nice and decent, can be liked even if they're not very stimulating company. Movies of that order wear one down. They demand attention without giving much in return - amiability is not enough. This is Vision Quest.

The Fog is constructed of random diversions. There are too many story lines, which necessitate so much cross-cutting that no one sequence can ever build to a decent climax. The movie looks quite pretty but prettiness of this sort is beside the point in such a film.

A singularly lumpy sort of movie. The film's most riveting sequence comes at the very beginning, when we see a crucified Jesuit missionary being tossed - cross and all - into the river and carried over the spectacular Iguassu Falls. Nothing that follows, including more pretty scenery and quaint costumes, comes close to equaling the drama of that one sequence - about a character who remains forever anonymous.

Even as sequels go in this era of movie mega-series, The Karate Kid Part II peters out faster than most.

Gadget-happy American moviemaking at its most ponderously silly.

Like many album covers, Purple Rain, though sometimes arresting to look at, is a cardboard come-on to the record it contains.

Protocol is a breezy, not entirely unpredictable comedy that was made to order for the gifted Goldie Hawn by Buck Henry, the writer, Herb Ross, the director, and Miss Hawn herself, who is the film's executive producer. [21 Dec 1984, p.C25]

Falling in Love is not a bad movie by any means. It's not stupid or gross or cheap. It's been done with taste, but it's the sort of production that, even when it works, which it frequently does, seems too small and trite to have had so much care taken on it.

Bustin' Loose is not unbearable, though a soft-hearted Richard Pryor is not a terribly funny Richard Pryor.

A fragmented, far from‐great movie, and it won't change cinema history, but in its own odd fashion it celebrates humdrum lives without ever resorting to patronizing artifice.

Howard Franklin's screenplay plays less like a feature film than like the pilot for a failed television series about New York policemen.

The Package is a feeble attempt to keep the old-fashioned cold-war thriller alive in this era of glasnost...Mr. Davis has directed what may be the worst movie Gene Hackman has ever made.

Though Psycho II is essentially camp entertainment, Mr. Perkins plays Norman as legitimately as possible, and sometimes to real comic effect. His new Norman doesn't seem as much rehabilitated as reconstituted, but as what? That's the point of the film.

Brubaker is an earnest, right-minded, consistently unsurprising movie about a penologist named Brubaker (Robert Redford), who sets out to reform a single corrupt prison and finds himself bucking an entire system, including the state administration that appointed him to his job. It says a lot about a movie that the only mildly interesting characters in it are those who are corrupt, such as the insurance-selling member of the prison board, played by Murray Hamilton, and a smarmy building contractor, played by M. Emmet Walsh, who attempts to buy Brubaker's neighborly good feelings with a homemade chocolate cake.

In the case of Plaza Suite, I don't have the feeling that anything much has been lost, but rather that nothing much was ever there.

F.I.S.T. is a big movie that benefits more from the accumulation of small, ordinary detail than from any particular wit or inspiration of vision. It's also played with great conviction by its huge cast.

A low, bawdy cartoon feature that hasn't forgotten that there still can be something uniquely funny in animated films that exaggerate human actions and emotions (in this case, love, rage, compassion and, especially, lust) to the extraordinary extents available only in cartoons.

With the exception of a running gag about the gangsters' use of cellular telephones, the film is singularly humorless. Though full of the kind of simulated violence achieved by special-effects artists, it's not too heavy on suspense. Everything in the screenplay seems arbitrary, including the firefighting jobs assigned to the two would-be treasure-seekers.

The movie is full of the kind of atmosphere that can be created by elaborate sets, dim lighting and misty landscapes, though it has no singular character or dominant mood.

Though a seriously conceived film about the American experience in Vietnam, Gardens of Stone has somehow wound up having the consistency and the kick of melted vanilla ice cream.

Yanks never succeeds, however, in making these three stories urgent or especially moving.

Bride of Re-Animator is less a sequel to the critically praised 1985 horror film Re-Animator than a rehash based on the same H. P. Lovecraft stories.

As a film, Lifeguard is romantic twaddle, but as sociology it's a spontaneous assault on a very American way of life.

The three stars are good actors, but they have nothing much to work with. Their biggest challenge is to make the audience believe they are blood relatives, a question that would be quickly dismissed if the script were more compelling.

Most of the time, though, For Your Eyes Only is a slick entertainment...not the spaced-out fun that "Moonraker" was, but its tone is consistently comic even when the material is not.

What the film demonstrates most obviously is that when there is this much plot on the screen, there isn't time for actors to develop anything much in the way of plausibility of characterization.

This may sound like heresy, but The Exorcist III is a better and funnier (intentionally) movie than either of its predecessors.

There's nothing dreadfully wrong with The Dream Team, Howard Zieff's new comedy, except that it's not funny too much of the time. On those occasions when it is funny, the humor less often prompts laughter than mute appreciation of the talents of the principal performers - Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd and Peter Boyle.

A perfectly adequate though not really comparable - sequel to Stanley Kubrick's witty, mind- bending science-fiction classic, ''2001: A Space Odyssey.'

Pat Garrett and Billy the kid suggest either that he (Peckinpah) has begun to take talk about his genius too seriously (it can happen to the best) or that he has fallen in with bad company.

The special effects aren't bad, and there are fewer decapitations than in Conan the Barbarian. Mr. Fleischer seems to want this film to be funnier than was the first one, directed by John Milius, but Mr. Schwarzenegger, a body builder who can lift freight trains, can't easily get his tongue into his cheek.

Because both Miss Redgrave and Miss. Jackson possess identifiable intelligence, Mary, Queen of Scots is not as difficult to sit through as some bad movies I can think of. It's just solemn, well-groomed and dumb.

Big Business, which, though it never quite delivers the boffo payoff, is a most cheerful, very breezy summer farce, played to the hilt by two splendidly comic performers.

A phony, attitudinizing, self-indulgent mess, a multimillion-dollar B (for boring) picture with the ear of a cauliflower, the heart of a hustler and the soul of a used-car salesman.

Logan's Run is less interested in logic than in gadgets and spectacle, but these are sometimes jazzily effective and even poetic. Had more attention been paid to the screenplay, the movie might have been a stunner.

A comedy so lazily hip and so laid back that it often seems to be asleep.

This study of the growing pains of the leather jacket‐bobby soxer Brooklyn high school set of 1957 is, by turns, cheerful, confused, juvenile and never fully realized.

This is a ridiculous mishmash of a movie for people who never grew up, which is not so say it's for children. One would think that Mr. Fonda and Mr. Oates had better things to do, but perhaps not. American movie production is in a bad state.

The film sounds pretty silly, and it is, but it's not painful to watch. Harley Cokliss, the director, and John Carpenter, Desmond Nakano and William Gray, who wrote the screenplay, never allow credibility to worry them, or even those of us in the audience. Like a stolen car, it moves pretty fast, if erratically. It has a tendency to put Quint into impossible situations from which he walks away with unexplained ease.

Another Stakeout is made for the kind of person whom television drives out of the house to the movies but who doesn't want surprises when he arrives at the theater. It's big-screen television fare.

The Great White Hope is one of those liberal, well-meaning, fervently uncontroversial works that pretend to tackle contemporary problems by finding analogies at a safe remove in history.

The film, directed by Joel Silberg in and around Los Angeles, employs a very small story that is meant to be functional but still interrupts the dancing far too often.

Target is far more accomplished than anything Chris would have seen on television in the 1970's. However, its narrative shape is so familiar and its automobile chases so spectacularly choreographed that the humanity of the characters, carefully established at the start, gets lost -ground down - by the obligatory mechanics of melodrama.

The Dark Half is an exceptionally entertaining film of its kind. Only Stanley Kubrick has ever adapted a King novel (The Shining) in such a way that the ending remains as satisfyingly spooky as the beginning.

As the gritty, raspy-voiced sergeant, Mr. Eastwood's performance is one of the richest he's ever given. It's funny, laid-back, seemingly effortless, the sort that separates actors who are run-of-the-mill from those who have earned the right to be identified as stars.

Sweet Charity, the film adaptation of the Broadway musical, has been so enlarged and so inflated that it has become another maximal movie: a long, noisy and, finally, dim imitation of its source material.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is as aimless as its dimly seen characters, who talk a lot of dreadful, cute-tough dialogue but are never recognizable except as the actors who play them. Even that factor isn't much help in enjoying the film.

Zorro, the Gay Blade, which was directed by Peter Medak (''The Ruling Class'' and ''The Changeling'') and written by Hal Dresner, has some of the slapdash bounce of Bob Hope's long-ago Paramount comedies. Though it doesn't have the authoritative timing and leering presence of Mr. Hope, it has its own careless charm and an appealing tolerance for jokes that aren't wildly funny.[24 July 1981, p.16]

Though light of weight, it hugs the road around every hairpin curve in its cruel and twisty narrative.

The idea is funnier than the execution. Miss Goldberg is only funny when she is being foul-mouthed, which seems rude since no one else is allowed to respond in kind or degree.

A Little Romance is a movie that seems to have melted the minds of everyone of any stature connected with it.

Too much of the film seems unfinished. Almost every four scenes could be condensed into one. The comedy doesn't build to any climax. It just rolls on, with Ms. Hawn doggedly working to create some sense of oddball fun. The characters, as written, are as flimsy as Newton's dream house, which, even though based on a House Beautiful award-winning design, looks less habitable than a billboard. Even its brand-new furnishings are tacky.

The only people who emerge from this precious nonsense smelling good are Richard MacDonald, the English production designer, and Sven Nykvist, the Swedish cameraman.

Tepid...A big Punchline problem is that it's impossible to tell the difference between Miss Field's routines that are supposed to be awful, and the awful ones that are supposed to be funny.

The screenplay is ridiculous, and Mr. Eastwood's direction of it primitive, which is surprising because he has shown himself capable in such films as ''The Outlaw Josey Wales'' and ''The Gauntlet.''

Breathless has a lot of mindless drive, but it's also funny. It's full of knowing quotes from other movies and from literature - William Faulkner in addition to Marvel Comics. It's less a film maker's journey of discovery than the film maker's testimony to his awareness of ''cinema,'' and sometimes it's just too much.

Mr. Scott directs the film as if he were trying to win a prize for demolishing a building in record time. The opening is good: stylish video images of a night football game played in a torrential rain, climaxed by the only scene in the film that has legitimate shock. After that, the brutality and the pace don't slacken, but interest does.

A peculiar sort of Disney movie in that it's likely to scare the daylights out of the very young while reducing their usually sober-sided elders to unfortunate giggles. The audience in-between may well enjoy the standard spook-movie effects, but I challenge even the most indulgent fan to give a coherent translation of what passes for an explanation at the end.

This time, though, Mr. Lynch's conceits are less often pleasurably disorienting than out of focus.

Hook is overwhelmed by a screenplay heavy with complicated exposition, by what are, in effect, big busy nonsinging, nondancing production numbers and some contemporary cant about rearing children and the high price paid for success.

So flecked with minor dishonesties that you come to recognize it as a sort of Formica Western, something that amounts to a parody of the real thing.

The movie can't make up its mind whether it's about a tumultuously difficult but rewarding friendship or whether it's a sendup of the contemporary literary scene. It fails as both.

What makes The Hunger so much fun is its knowing stylishness, which Mr. Scott, who makes his theatrical film debut here, has brought to movies from a career in commercials and documentaries.

A couple of professional actors, Ben Johnson and Andrew Prine, head the cast, but the film looks nonprofessional in every other respect.

Gene Kelly, who directed two classic musicals with Stanley Donen, here acts like a caretaker of a big, valuable property. He and Michael Kidd, his choreographer, have protected everything Gower Champion gave the original, and added nothing to the heritage of the musical screen except statistics.

Sometimes funny and, in the way of small-screen entertainment, so perfectly predictable that one could mail in the laughs.

Though the new Robin Hood observes all of the classic confrontations that keep the tale alive, the film winds up as a mixture of listless adventure, wispy comedy and what is meant to pass for social realism.

Although its aspirations are high, the film works only fitfully when Mr. Singleton exercises his gift for vernacular speech, for finding the comic undertow in otherwise tragic situations, and even for parody.

An enchanted lark about wiseguys and those hustlers who think they are wiseguys, but aren't.

Frogs, which is not to be confused with The Birds for an instant, is an end-of-the-world junk movie, photographed rather prettily in Florida and acted by Milland as if he were sight-reading random passages from the dictionary.

Miss Kinski is a major problem. She's a beauty, all right, but she appears to have no flair whatever for comedy of this sort, or maybe of any sort.

The Heartbreak Kid occasionally goes for laughs without shame (which is what has always bothered me about Simon's brand of New York comedy), but behind the laughs there is, for a change, a real understanding of character — which is something that I suspect, can be attribued to Miss May.

The footage dealing with the mechanics of the Nimitz is, in fact, interesting, and there is one quite comic sequence in which several of the Nimitz's jet fighters take on two, totally baffled World War II-vintage Japanese Zeros. As an entertainment film, though, the movie is utter nonsense. [01 Aug 1980, p.C3]

Some of the action sequences have been well staged, but they've been dropped into the film so indiscriminately that Jaws 2 never builds to a particular climax. It simply drones on and on and on, like a television movie.

In spite of its authentic scenery (it was filmed in Belize), this Mosquito Coast is utterly flat.

Death Wish is so cannily fabricated that it sometimes succeeds in arousing the most primitive kind of anger. Yet it's a despicable movie, one that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers.

Cute is the operative word for the movie, which stars some good actors doing material that is not super.

A horror film that is less mindless than most in that it is both funny and gross.

A decently acted, extremely mild romantic comedy that you may think you've seen before, although you haven't.

Crichton the director seems to have had more fun with the film than Crichton the writer, whose screenplay can offer us no better explanation for the sudden, bloody robot rebellion than an epidemic of "central mechanism psychosis."

The Lord of the Rings, is both numbing and impressive. Yet it would be difficult to recommend this movie to anyone not wholly absorbed by the uses of motion-picture animation or to anyone not familiar with Tolkien's home-made mythology, which borrows liberally from various Norse myths, the Eddas, the Nibelungs and maybe even Beatrix Potter.

I suspect that another, tougher director might have made something quite interesting of the same script.

The comic possibilities of this are generally ignored in Brian Taggert's screenplay and the direction of George P. Cosmatos, which features about as many shots from the point of view of the rat as of Bart Hughes.

A mushy movie with occasional, isolated moments of legitimate comedy, all provided by Mr. Scott with an assist by Mr. Goldman, whose sense of humor seems to surface in peripheral incidents only.

An amiable, $20-million musical. That's a high price to pay for something that is more an expression of good intentions than evidence of sustained cinematic accomplishment. However, because amiability is never in over abundant supply, especially in Hollywood super-productions, the movie can be enjoyed more often than simply tolerated.

A good, stylish mixture of the kind of hokey horror and science-fiction elements in which Mr. King specializes.

Cadillac Man does not stay long in territory pioneered by Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Mr. Levinson. It turns, rather awkwardly, into a hostage-situation comedy featuring a cuckolded young man named Larry (Tim Robbins).

Ideas and issues in this film are as scarce as hen's teeth. In their place are little signposts that tell us what we are supposed to believe without thinking...Power is a well-meaning, witless, insufferably smug movie that -if it does anything at all, and I'm not sure it does - anesthetizes legitimate outrage at some of the things going on in our society.

Meant to be funny, but it only swells the sinus passages. It is a painfully inept comedy.

Hoffa is an original work of fiction, based on fact, conceived with imagination and a consistent point of view.

A cheerful, inoffensive fantasy in which such attractive live actors as Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy play second fiddle to machinery that, in this case, means No. 5, designed by Syd Mead and engineered and realized by Eric Allard.

Wes Craven's Swamp Thing wants desperately to be funny and, from time to time, it is. However, you might wish it would trust the audience to discover the humor for itself.

The most depressing thing about this Godard work is that it seems so tired, familiar and out of date. The movie's 1960's-ish worship of film as an end in itself, which was a mark of so many earlier, more ebullient Godard movies, now is lifeless.

Fat Man and Little Boy is so confused, so stunningly ineffective, that General Groves's hawkish statements are more persuasive than the dove-ish apprehensions expressed by the scientists. Even the sight of a scientist dying horribly of radiation poisoning fails to be moving.

Even though American Flyers is a fatal disease movie involving a couple of bike-racing brothers, it's the film - and not any character - that dies as you watch it.

Watching Star Trek — the Motion Picture...is like attending your high-school class's 10th reunion at Caesar's Palace. Most of the faces are familiar, but the décor has little relationship to anything you've ever seen before.

In 9 1/2 Weeks, he has created a work that might well qualify as a truly nouveau film. Here is a movie in which actors impersonating characters are blended into the decor so completely that they take on the properties of animated products, no more or less important than exquisitely photographed strawberries.[21 Feb 1986, p.C17]

In Twins, which is supposed to be funny, the former Mr. Universe and pint-sized Danny DeVito play twins, the result of a genetic experiment that went awry. To the extent that Twins is carried by anybody, it is carried by Mr. DeVito. Mr. Schwarzenegger is dead weight. [9 Dec 1988, p.C18]

A surprisingly cheesy horror film to come from Mr. Carpenter (''Halloween,'' ''Escape From New York,'' among others), a director whose work is usually far more efficient and inventive.

I'm told by someone whose opinion I respect that the novel was very moving and very sad. The movie is not. It's science-fiction without gadgets, a horror film without thrills.

Funny Farm is good-natured even when it's not funny...As a comedy style, it has the impatience of a child who plants radish seeds and then pulls up the first tiny sprouts to see how they're doing.

A silly, jumbo-size sequel to the original film adaptation of Arthur Hailey's Airport.

Mr. Wallace clearly has a fondness for the cliches he is parodying and he does it with style.

Mr. Brooks has a couple of major defects to be successful in this kind of project. He is a man with no great feeling for comedy of any sort, and his reactions to the lunacies of contemporary life are trivial.

The Neverending Story is a graceless, humorless fantasy for children, combining live actors and animated creatures in mostly imaginary settings.

A no-frills, no-imagination reworking of the story about the ventriloquist who is taken over by his dummy.

It's a see-through movie composed of a lot of clanking, silly, melodramatic effects that, like rib-tickling, exhaust you without providing particular pleasure, to say nothing of enlightenment.

Though a lot of the dialogue would seem absurd even on daytime soap opera, the movie keeps coming up with scenes so arresting or eccentric you are aware of the wicked intelligence behind them.

Class of 1984 is sort of crudely funny. The movie's idea of punk culture is also picturesque. But it quickly gets worse and worse until it achieves a degree of awfulness that, though rare, isn't much fun.

A tough-talking street melodrama, both shocking and sorrowful, acted by Paul Newman and a huge cast with the kind of conviction that can't be ignored.

The dialogue is mostly composed of rude variations on ''eek,'' ''ugh'' and ''I'd like to sleep with you this evening.''

If you can imagine a remake of Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist in which the spirits of the dead have been shoved aside by equally loud, unruly plumbers and carpenters, you'll have some idea of The Money Pit.

There are times when Texasville, like the Larry McMurtry novel on which it is based, seems top heavy with eccentrics. Everybody is tirelessly and (worse) lovably oddball. The snappy dialogue occasionally exhausts. Yet also like the book, the movie becomes seriously involving, a cockeyed acknowledgment of an especially American kind of inarticulate despair.

Mason Gamble, the 7-year-old who plays the title role, won't be any competition for Macaulay Culkin of "Home Alone." He's a handsome boy, but he displays none of the spontaneity that initially made Mr. Culkin so refreshing. He seems to follow direction well, if in a somewhat robotic way.

Still another, thoroughly depressing demonstration of the extent to which television now dictates the style and the manners of so many of the movies we see in theaters.

The revelations explode predictably, like the ingredients of a 24-hour cold capsule, but the dramatic impact is real while one is watching it.

Considering the dreary circumstances, the performances are quite good, especially those of Mr. Scott, who can do this sort of thing before breakfast; Timothy Hutton, an Oscar winner for Ordinary People; Sean Penn, as the one cadet at Bunker Hill with a grain of sense; Tom Cruise, as a murderously gung-ho cadet, and Evan Handler, as a cadet who remains a humane civilian at heart.

The problem with comedies as witless as this is that the villains are much more appealing than the good guys. One winds up rooting for the fellows who would tear down the Plaza to put up a 100‐story, glass‐andbrass breadstick.

Willard, which is otherwise a dull movie of no major consequence, is a rather astonishing footnote to a major urban problem.

The movie was directed by Jack Gold from a screenplay by John Briley and it's fuzzy on a number of key issues that possibly could have made it fun, had they been sharper.

It's more cheerful than funny, and so insistently ungrudging about Americans and Japanese alike that its satire cuts like a wet sponge.

The movie proceeds at the pace of a child reluctant to go to bed. It dawdles over irrelevant details and grows sleepier and sleepier until it seems to be snoozing, though still standing up.

Outland is what most people mean when they talk about good escapist entertainment. It won't enlarge one's perceptions of life by a single millimeter, but neither does it make one feel like an idiot for enjoying it so much.

Such a vulnerable movie that if it were a little less sappy, one might feel compelled to protect it, as if it were someone under 7 or over 65 -- that portion of the public for which it is intended.

Hello Mary Lou has nothing much to do with the original "Prom Night" (1980), except that it's somewhat more entertaining if female nudity, bizarre violence and comically deadpan special effects amuse you...Bruce Pittman, the director, and Ron Oliver, who wrote the screenplay, have constructed the movie as if it were a gourmet banquet for toddlers. From the first course to the last, it's all ice cream.

Nothing in Switch is that plausible or compelling. Any movie that depends on the presence of either the Devil or God is asking for trouble, and Switch has them both.

Much of the movie is occupied by people as they race one another down Mulholland Drive, but because most of the races are run at night, they aren't as exciting as they might be.

Entertainingly slapdash.

It's not as funny as "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie," but it is less pushy than "Meatballs." It is not as thickly stocked with outrageous moments as "Animal House," yet it is far easier to take than "Where the Buffalo Roam."

Midway solemnly cross-cuts between the war councils, chart rooms and communications offices on the American side and those on the Japanese side, with characters, who often have to be identified by subtitles, laboriously trying to give us all of the exposition necessary to make the battle coherent. There's no way to act such roles.

Daisy Miller transfers to the screen simply and elegantly. Very little is lost that isn't regained through the always unpredictable conjunction of performers with material.

Even though most of the gags are too familiar or too dumb to be hilarious, Airplane II is too good-natured to be a serious irritant.

Less a movie than an extended sketch, and it's to the credit of Mr. Ritt, his stars and Gary Devore, the screenwriter, that the movie is so much fun, even given its occasional soggy patches.

It contains too many show-down scenes, too much raw material that hasn't been refined, and more brutality than either the movie or the audience can make dramatic sense of. Yet it also contains a magnificent performance by Jessica Lange in the title role. Here is a performance so unfaltering, so tough, so intelligent and so humane that it seems as if Miss Lange is just now, at long last, making her motion picture debut.

Put them all together and you have complete confusion, a movie without any identity whatsoever.

Chaplin is to serious biography, even to Mr. Attenborough's Gandhi, what unfortified cornflakes are to real food. It's slick packaging around what is mostly warm air.

A good deal more tolerable than any such gimmick movie has a right to be.

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is the most barren comedy I've seen in years, maybe ever.

The movie is a big, costly, phony exercise in myth‐making, machismo, romance-of-the-open-road nonsense and incredible self‐indulgence.

That The Mirror Crack'd never builds up much momentum has less to do with Guy Hamilton's direction and the performances than with the screenplay by Jonathan Hales and Barry Sandler, which promises more sophistication than it ever delivers.

Though Coming to America is a romantic comedy the director steers the film more often toward quick, in-and-out comic situations and gags that are only mildly funny. In part this is due to the fact that Mr. Murphy plays the prince with cheerful, low-keyed innocence that is completely legitimate, but is not supported by the short attention span of the screenplay. The romance is tepid.

1492 is not a terrible film. Yet because it is without any guiding point of view, it is a lot less interesting than the elaborate physical production that has been given it. Only a very great writer could do justice to all the themes the Columbus story suggests. Ms. Bosch may be a very good researcher, but she's not a very great writer. She can't even squeeze in many relevant facts, much less define the relevance of those she does include.

Bound by Honor looks and sounds authentic but, like many community wall paintings, it has the manner less of one artist's vision than of a community endeavor. This may explain its singular shortcomings and its redeeming sincerity.

To anyone who doesn't share the camera's adoration, this sort of behavior becomes so comic that Rambo turns into something of a camp classic.

It's full of the old Meyer preoccupations — insatiable women, impotent men, lonely desert landscapes in which the promise of sex is the only reliable compass. Yet something has been lost. Could it be innocence?

Given the premise, which is said to be inspired by the song by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, virtually everything that happens can be predicted from the opening frame.

Manufactured comedy of a slick order, depending aImost entirely for its effects on the sight and sound of a bunch of kids behaving as if they were small adults. It's a formula that worked for Our Gang Comedy for many years, and works again here with a bright screenplay by Paul Brickman, based on Bill Lancaster's original characters, and direction of intelligent lightness by Michael Presman.

Big, expensive, ultimately ridiculous movie that appears to have been constructed to be a Love Story on wheels.

Too superficially knowing to be a camp classic, but it's an unintentionally hilarious mixture of muddled moralizing and all-too-contemporary self-promotion.

The Dead Pool, possesses a couple of good jokes, but nothing can disguise the fact that it's a mini-movie in the company of a mythic figure.

Kafka is opaque without ever being mysterious, frightening or suggestive of anything but movie making. Its chases through dark narrow streets don't create suspense, since nothing is at stake.

Roger Donaldson's White Sands is set entirely in the vast painterly landscapes of the American Southwest, but it means to be a suspense thriller reflecting the scaled-down undercover realities of the post-cold-war era. In fact, it's almost as difficult to follow as the politics of the federation that replaced the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and as difficult to remember as that federation's official name.

A most genial surprise, a comic update of cold war espionage movies that, because of the New Orleans location, has the enhanced charm of a stolen holiday...This movie is a breeze.

This is half-heartedly satiric material that's been directed by Mr. Reynolds as if it were broad, knock-about comedy sometimes and, at other times, as if it were meant to evoke pathos, which it never does.

Silverstein has elected to tell the story of Lord John's survival largely in terms of Sioux rituals relating to such things as wars, weddings, deaths, and even spiritual deliverance. I must admit that I found all this interesting, although I'm the sort of Indian buff and tourist who gets a kick out of watching contemporary Navajos do their rain dances in tennis shoes.

The River has a meticulously detailed physical production and, from time to time, is acted with passion by its cast. Yet its ideas are so profoundly muddled that the film must run mainly on sentimentality.

White Nights is only tolerable when Mr. Baryshnikov is on screen, especially when he is dancing alone or with Mr. Hines, with whom he does a couple of ballet-tap numbers that are of an order of excellence that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.

Another elaborately produced, brutal, all-too-jocular adventure film, which cost so much money that it's difficult to take it as lightly as it means to be taken. There's something deeply unpleasant about seeing this many millions of dollars being spent to such paltry purpose.

From the moment you read the ads for Tora! Tora! Tora! ("The Most Spectacular Film Ever Made!”), you are aware that you're in the presence of a film possessed by a lack of imagination so singular that it amounts to a death wish.

A Chorus Line is less a movie than an expensive souvenir program.

So little goes on that it might be argued that The Burbs means to be a comment on the vacuity of popular entertainment in the television age, though it's much more an example of it. The film does nothing for the reputation of anyone connected with it, including Mr. Hanks, who deserves the Oscar nomination he has just received for his work in Big. This time he's attempting to act a role in a screenplay whose pages are blank.

Not since "Howard the Duck" has there been a big-budget comedy with feet as flat as those of Joe Versus the Volcano. Many gifted people contributed to it, but there's no disbelieving the grim evidence on the screen.

For those who take Mr. King seriously, this is high-proof King corn, which is to say it has a kick to it even though it hasn't much taste.

Some intelligent, sophisticated people have knocked themselves out to transform bland into bland, and they have succeeded to the extent that anyone who fondly remembers the comic strip, or the old movie serial with Buster Crabbe, probably will not feel cheated.

Manages to be both prissy and prurient at the same time, as well as goofily romantic and nasty. To this extent, I suppose, it is an accurate reflection of Miss Hinton's sentimental fiction about earnest, inarticulate young readers.

A suspense melodrama made by people whose talent for filmmaking and knowledge of international affairs would both fit comfortably into the left nostril of a small bee.

Though it's as foolish as the first film, is rather more fun to watch and sometimes very stylish-looking.

As written, directed and played, Miller is as much of a nonentity as Beckett. Their initial enmity and subsequent reconciliation have no more dramatic impact than the battle scenes, which look as if they were planned by amateurs. The two central characters remain as vague as their targets, who are briefly seen at a distance through gun sights.

A remarkable piece of work. [30 June 1989]

The Distinguished Gentleman is an easy, breezy romp of a movie, a low comedy of highly entertaining order.

More problematical is the tone of the film, which attempts to be both compassionate and goofy, though the events are funny only if they are seen as farcical.

Prom Night is a comparatively genteel hybrid, part shock melodrama, like Halloween, and part mystery, though it's less a whodunit than a who's-doing-it.

Has the manners and the gadgetry of a sci-fi adventure film but is, at heart, an engagingly mean, cruel, nasty, funny send-up of television. It's not quite Network, but then it also doesn't take itself too seriously.

Miss Streep dives into this thimble-sized comedy and makes one believe - at least, while she is on the screen - that it is an Olympic-sized swimming pool of wit.

It's not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be. Its 134 minutes induce a state of simulated brain death, an effect as easily attained in half the time by staring at the blinking lights on a Christmas tree.

It is spectacularly out of touch, a laughably earnest attempt to impose heroic attitudes on some nice, small characters purloined from a ''young-adult'' novel by S.E. Hinton, the woman who wrote the novel on which ''Tex'' was based.

With the exception of Miss D'Angelo and Lauren Hutton and Elizabeth Ashley, who make cameo appearances, almost everything in Paternity is tired and perfunctory. This is especially true of Mr. Reynolds.

The only thing The Bedroom Window seems to be about is movie making - that is, it's about putting pieces of film together to create momentary effects that needn't signify anything at all. Sometimes this is called ''pure cinema.'' Sometimes, in fact, it's pure nonsense.

Come the end of the year, Above the Law may well rank among the top three or four goofiest bad movies of 1988.

A busy, bewildering, exceedingly jokey science-fiction film that looks like a Star Wars spinoff made in an underdeveloped galaxy.

Three Men and a Cradle is almost totally charmless. It's funny in the way of someone who, in attempting to explain a joke, thoroughly destroys the humor, which, I assume, is mostly the fault of Coline Serreau, who wrote and directed it.

Warlock is unexpectedly entertaining, having been concocted with comic imagination by D. T. Twohy, who wrote the screenplay, and Steve Miner, the director.

Lookin' to Get Out is not as bad as Mr. Ashby's Second Hand Hearts though, like that film, it is a showcase in which excellent actors are allowed to make fools of themselves.

Last Action Hero is something of a mess, but a frequently enjoyable one. It tries to be too many things to too many different kinds of audiences, the result being that it will probably confuse, and perhaps even alienate, the hard-core action fans.

The film, which opens today at the Sutton and other theaters, is composed of a prologue, written for the movie, plus four separate stories, each of them either based directly on a script from the television series or suggested by one. A lot of money and several lives might have been saved if the producers had just rereleased the original programs.

It's the none too promising assumption of See No Evil, Hear No Evil that one physical disability complements another, and that Wally and Dave are made for each other. Yet, against all odds, the movie goes on to prove it with a lot of good, unlikely humor that is often not in the best of taste.Mr. Pryor and Mr. Wilder have never worked better together, possibly because they are playing characters who, being blind and deaf, are not especially funny to begin with, but who also have a certain amount of intelligence.

It hits a couple of ecstatically funny high points, only to plummet into a bog of second-rate gags, emerging a long time later to engage the audience by the sheer, unstoppable force of the Brooks chutzpah.

These sequences—the dogfights over Dover, the disintegration of planes in mid-air, the graceful tactics of evasion—are more than just technically stunning. They also are beautiful, in the completely impersonal way that the spectacle of machines—working well and seemingly with wills of their own—can be beautiful. Unfortunately, something less than one-third of the film takes place in the air.

Firefox is only slightly more suspenseful than it is plausible. It's a James Bond movie without girls, a Superman movie without a sense of humor.

Though the language is vulgar, the macho posturing absurd and some of the plotting inscrutable, Raw Deal has a kind of seemliness to it. It delivers every punch it promises.

Instead of moving the audience, Mr. Goldberg achieves the kind of effect that Jack Benny got when he played his violin. The flesh crawls.

The screenwriter, who often uses bits of dialogue from the novel, doesn't hesitate to add new material that is completely inappropriate.

A comic-book movie whose heart is in the right place.

The Trail of the Pink Panther is less a conventional comedy than an uproarious retrospective devoted to the particular achievements of the Edwards-Sellers collaboration. Some of the routines seem totally new to me, and others are familiar, but either way, most of them are huge fun, and a couple approach greatness.

Mr. De Niro and Mr. Grodin are lunatic delights, which is somewhat more than can be said for the movie, whose mechanics keep getting in the way of the performances. [20 July 1988, p.C15]

Mr. Ritter is an engagingly comic actor, but the women in his life are so uncharacterized, in the writing, casting and the playing, that the comedy fizzles. All that's left is a movie about a seriously alcoholic writer making a mess of things.

As directed by Mr. Ross, True Colors is dreary, humorless, heavy-handed and self-important.

A velvety-smooth looking romantic mystery melodrama that has far less to do with life than with other movies. It's clever but chilly in the way of something with a mechanical heart.

Conan the Barbarian is an extremely long, frequently incoherent, ineptly staged adventure-fantasy set in a prehistoric past.

Nothing that Mr. Clayton does with the actors or with the camera comes close to catching the spirit of Fitzgerald's impatient brilliance. The film transforms "Gatsby" into a period love story that seems to take itself as solemnly as "Romeo and Juliet."

Miss Armstrong, who was seen as the second, prettier wife in Alan Alda's ''The Four Seasons,'' is the best thing in the film, though even she seems to be a cross between Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett. Mr. Selleck is, indeed, a handsome actor, but his good looks here have no individual personality, which may be the script's fault.

The Lawn Mower Man depends mostly on a lot of colorful video-game-like special effects. They are very loud but, after a while, the noise and the lights induce a torpor that is quite soothing.

Attention must be paid when a movie is as aggressively awful as Harry and the Hendersons, though it's so pin-headed that it could be the last of its inbred line. It's not likely to spawn.

The members of the cast are undercut by both material and direction.

The movie's attitude toward the mentally and emotionally disturbed is even worse. If Crazy People displayed an ounce of real wit, one wouldn't care, but it's so smug in its ignorance that it begins to look elitist.

Airport, the film version of Arthur Hailey's novel, is the sort of movie most people mean when they say Hollywood doesn't make movies the way it used to. This isn't just because Airport resembles any number of old Grand Hotel movies. Rather it's because it evokes our nostalgic feelings, not only for the innocence of old movies but also for the innocent old times in which we saw them.

Philippe Mora is the director, but the only name really worth noting is that of Tom Burman, who did the frequently grotesque special effects.

Fire in the Sky treats the story with cautious, unimaginative, quite boring politeness.

The story, as well as Peter Yates's direction of it, is juvenile without being in any attractive way innarcent, but the underwater sequences are nice enough, alternately beautiful and chilling. The shore‐based melodrama is as badly staged as any I've seen since Don Schain's “The Abductors” (1972), which is to remember incompetence of stunning degree.

The sort of comedy that leaves you exhausted, though not from laughing.

Hardware is a sci-fi-horror film of such dopiness that it seems certain to become a cult classic somewhere. Movies that are so insistently silly often have the effect of seeming to expand the mind after midnight, which may have something to do with metabolism if not with controlled substances.

The screenplay, by Jerry Belson and Brock Yates, is not so surreally funny as the one for the first film, but funny lines are not what the picture is about. Smokey and the Bandit II is about movement, action, frustration and destruction, and Mr. Needham, one of Hollywood's most successful stunt artists before he became a director, is very good at this sort of thing. Smokey and the Bandit is entertaining in a brainless way.

The Rookie is an astonishingly empty movie to come from Mr. Eastwood.

Student Bodies just slowly topples over as you watch it, like a stand-up comedian in the act of failing.

Prophecy is full of lingering lap-dissolves and elegant camera movements that suggest history is being made. Leonard Rosenman's soundtrack music is so grand it could be played at a coronation, and it's so loud that it pierces the ears and threatens the head. None of this fits the movie.

The Toho moviemakers are quite good in building miniature sets, but much of the process photography—matching the miniatures with the full-scale shots—is just bad.

The structure of the movie is so loose that a narrator (Victor Jory) must be employed from time to time to explain the plot, as if it were a serial. Most surprising in a movie that obviously cost a good deal of money is the sloppy matching of exterior and studio photography with miniature work for special effects.

The movie plows through one outrageous sequence to the next with the momentum of a freight train.

A little bit of Into the Night is funny, a lot of it is grotesque and all of it has the insidey manner of a movie made not for the rest of us but for moviemakers on the Bel Air circuit who watch each other's films in their own screening rooms.

Though Mr. Van Damme's collaborators have become more upscale and mainstream, Nowhere to Run remains your basic exercise in kick-him-in-the-groin, stab-him-with-a-pitchfork cinema politics.

Lethal Weapon 3 isn't that much worse than the two earlier films.

Hungry Wives has the seedy look of a porn film but without any pornographic action. Everything in it, from the actors to the props, looks borrowed and badly used. [12 Dec 1980, p.8]

Experiencing it is like watching a 10-ton canary as it attempts to become airborne. It lumbers up and down the runway tirelessly, but never once succeeds in getting both feet off the ground at the same time. The spectacle is amusing in isolated moments but, finally, exhausting.

Fletch Lives looks less like ''Fletch 2,'' which it is, numerically speaking, than ''Fletch 7,'' the bitter end of a worn-out series.