The plot in Throw Mama from the Train is top-heavy, but the movie doesn't make as much as it could from its weird characters.

Empire of the Sun adds up to a promising idea, a carefully observed production and some interesting performances.

It moves with a majestic pacing over the affairs of four generations, demonstrating that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.

It is perfectly cast and soundly constructed, and all else flows naturally. Steve Martin and John Candy don't play characters; they embody themselves.

Luckily, there's enough of the domestic comedy to make the movie work despite its crasser instincts. One of the big surprises in the movie is Selleck's wonderful performance as the bachelor architect. After playing action heroes on TV and in the movies, he now reveals himself to be a light comedian in the Cary Grant tradition - a big, handsome guy with tenderness and vulnerability

In Purple Rain, Prince found an answer in his own life, and provided intercuts to an autobiographical story. This time, he lets the music simply speak for itself. It's fun as far as it goes, but Purple Rain, of course, went further.

The one element in the movie that is not standard and that does have some energy is the TV show itself, with Dawson's performance as the egotistical, sleaze-bag host.

For the first half of this movie, I was able to suspend judgment. Interesting things were happening, the performances were good and it is always absorbing to see how other people live. Most of the second half of the movie, alas, is taken up with routine cloak-and-dagger stuff.

The most curious thing about Hiding Out is that the plot continued to intrigue me even after I'd more or less given up on the movie's ability to find anything interesting in its material. What would it really be like to be in high school again? To revisit your past, knowing what you know now? Hollywood ought to make a good movie about that idea. In fact, Hollywood has: Peggy Sue Got Married. This one fails by comparison.

The movie's last 30 minutes are like a kick in the gut.

What is best about the movie are the sequences where it permits itself to establish a child's-eye point of view, in which comic books, fantasy and reality are all combined into a terrific adventure.

For people who love London and yet are thoughtful about it, this film is indispensable.

A sleeper that talks like a thriller and walks like a thriller, but has more brains than the average thriller.

John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness gets off to an intriguing start. But then the movie loses its way.

No Man's Land is better than the average thriller because it is interested in those moral questions - in the way money and beautiful women and fast cars look more exciting than good police work.

Suspect is a well-made thriller, but it was spoiled for me by an extraordinary closing scene where Cher, as the defense attorney, solves the case with all of the logic of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

A truly original American movie, a film like no other, a period of time spent in the company of the kinds of characters Saroyan and O'Neill would have understood, the kinds of people we try not to see, and yet might enjoy more than some of our more visible friends.

This movie is awake. I have seen so many films that were sleepwalking through the debris of old plots and second-hand ideas that it was a constant pleasure to watch House of Games, a movie about con men that succeeds not only in conning the audience, but also in creating a series of characters who seem imprisoned by the need to con, or be conned.

At the time, I was never interested in getting into a fight with the toughest kid in high school. And now that I'm not in high school, I am even less interested in seeing a movie on the subject, particularly a bad one.

The makers of this film got so carried away by their High Concept that they missed the point of the whole story.

Baby Boom makes no effort to show us real life. It is a fantasy about mothers and babies and sweetness and love, with just enough wicked comedy to give it an edge.

There are some nice things in "Slamdance." Hulce has a certain dogged charm as the hero who draws cartoons in the spirit, if not the style, of Gary Larson, and who is extremely upset that there is a dead body in his apartment. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio gives a sound, three-dimensional performance as the ex-wife who has to decide if this guy is worth the trust - and the trouble. And Harry Dean Stanton remains quintessentially himself.

The movie’s premise doesn’t work – not at all, not even a little, not even part of the time – and that means everyone in the movie looks awkward and silly all of the time.

It is filled with good-hearted fun, with performances by actors who seem to be smacking their lips and by a certain true innocence that survives all of Reiner's satire.

The story is predictable, but the style had me on the edge of my seat.

The film is so well made and acted, because it captures its period so meticulously.

Fatal Attraction is a spellbinding psychological thriller that could have been a great movie if the filmmakers had not thrown character and plausibility to the winds in the last minutes to give us their version of a grown-up "Friday the 13th."

This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination.