Walter Goodman

There are enough plots here for several movies, but not enough for this one.

The main characters tend to be either grotesques or stereotypes, who keep getting into incoherent arguments, composed largely of variations on America's favorite epithet...For a movie with pretensions to laying out political realities, the colorful Salvador is black and white.

For all those out there who can't get enough of Prince, Under the Cherry Moon may be just the antidote.

The plots are fairly basic, but the direction by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper is droll, the effects are all a fan could ask for, and the playing is appropriately agitated. [06 Aug 1993, p.D15]

Humor and horror make an uneasy combination.

THE muddy football game that concludes The Best of Times is such a rouser that it almost makes up for the incomplete passes and stopped runs that precede it.

Frank Deese's script is as rudimentary as the lyrics that pound through the hallways, and Christopher Cain's direction provides no surprises.

Now and then, there is some horseplay involving the whole group or an angry exchange between a couple of them, but mostly we're watching a set of shticks, some amusing, some not. It's like being at an Actor's Studio showcase.

Whatever shred of credibility the movie retains is dispersed by the final, dead serious directorial hocus‐pocus.

All the people and places in Demons seem imported. The dialogue is spoken in colloquial American and matches the lip movements, but it sounds dubbed. Nonetheless, there are some apt observations.

The excitement is switched off on landing. Once Top Gun, which opens today at Loews Astor Plaza and other theaters, gets back to earth, the master of the skies is as clunky as a big land-bound bird.

Richard Benjamin's strategy in directing Little Nikita seems to have been to paper over the holes in the plot with routine moves from spy shows past, in hopes of making the improbable passable.

Alan Rudolph's latest movie seems to be striving to say something but isn't able to break through the fog of his script.

THE smashing, crashing, thrashing battle between Farrah Fawcett and James Russo that takes up about half of Extremities leaves the contestants in a state of exhaustion -and the movie along with them.

Steel Dawn has been directed by Lance Hool to emphasize Mr. Swayze's biceps. The movie starts with the mysterious fighter standing on his head. Maybe it looks better that way.

The setting is Las Vegas, where Mex wins and loses a lot of money in blackjack without getting too excited about it, and things work up tepidly to the big battle in a factory handily stocked with murderous devices.