The movie has so many other delights, though, that it's fun anyway. Maybe it wasn't exactly intended to be a love story.

This movie is more sophisticated and complicated than the Westerns of my childhood, and it is certainly better looking and better acted.

This is a movie that strains at the leash of the possible, a movie of great visionary wonders.

The movie, in fact, resembles Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" more than other, conventional time-travel movies.

No actor is more aware of his own instruments, and Eastwood demonstrates that in Pale Rider, a film he dominates so completely that only later do we realize how little we really saw of him.

This is the most bizarre comedy in many a month, a movie so dark, so cynical and so funny that perhaps only Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner could have kept straight faces during the love scenes. They do.

The Goonies, like Gremlins, shows that Spielberg and his directors are absolute masters of how to excite and involve an audience. "E.T." was more like "Close Encounters"; it didn't simply want us to feel, but also to wonder, and to dream.

Fletch needed an actor more interested in playing the character than in playing himself.

The basic mistake in the movie isn't in the pacing, but in the storytelling. They've made the movie about its less interesting major character.

The ads for Code of Silence look schlocky, and Chuck Norris is still identified with a series of grade-zilch karate epics, but this is a heavy-duty thriller - a slick, energetic movie with good performances and a lot of genuine human interest.

It is not a children's film and it is not an exploitation film; it is a disturbing and stylish attempt to collect some of the nightmares that lie beneath the surface of Little Red Riding Hood.

Stephen King seems to be working his way through the reference books of human phobias, and Cat's Eye is one of his most effective films.

Desperately Seeking Susan does not move with the self-confidence that its complicated plot requires. But it has its moments, and many of them involve the different kinds of special appeal that Arquette and Madonna are able to generate. They are very particular individuals, and in a dizzying plot they somehow succeed in creating specific, interesting characters.

Simon's not in a lighthearted mood, and so the silliness of the story gets bogged down in all sorts of gloomy neuroses, angry denunciations, and painful self-analysis.

The 1954 film version of Orwell's novel turned it into a cautionary, simplistic science-fiction tale. This version penetrates much more deeply into the novel's heart of darkness.

Mask is a wonderful movie, a story of high spirits and hope and courage.

Take out the gangsters, pump up the Shogun role, give Taimak and Vanity a little more screen time, and you'd have a great entertainment instead of simply a great near-miss.

The Sure Thing is a small miracle. Although the hero of this movie is promised by his buddy that he'll be fixed up with a "guaranteed sure thing," the film is not about the sure thing but about how this kid falls genuinely and touchingly into love.

A fitfully funny, aimless, unnecessary thriller.

Lost in America is being called a yuppie comedy, but it's really about the much more universal subjects of greed, hedonism and panic. What makes it so funny is how much we can identify with it.

A movie with some nice surprises, mostly because it takes the time to create some interesting characters.

The sad thing about Turk 182! is that, the whole project sounds like a High Concept movie, in which the idea of the Turk was allowed to substitute for a story about him. Sure, it would be neat to see a movie about a guy like this. But not this movie.

The Breakfast Club doesn't need earthshaking revelations; it's about kids who grow willing to talk to one another, and it has a surprisingly good ear for the way they speak.

This is, first of all, an electrifying and poignant love story....And it is also one hell of a thriller.

This is a movie about spies, but it is not a thriller in any routine sense of the word. It's just the meticulously observant record of how naiveté, inexperience, misplaced idealism and greed led to one of the most peculiar cases of treason in American history.

Heaven Help Us has assembled a lot of the right elements for a movie about a Catholic boys' high school - the locations, the actors, and a lot of the right memories. But it has not found its tone. Maybe the filmmakers just never did really decide what they thought about the subject. For their penance, they should see "Rock and Roll High School."

One of the risks taken by The Killing Fields is to cut loose from that tradition, to tell us a story that does not have a traditional Hollywood structure, and to trust that we'll find the characters so interesting that we won't miss the cliché. It is a risk that works, and that helps make this into a really affecting experience.

Forster's novel is one of the literary landmarks of this century, and now David Lean has made it into one of the greatest screen adaptations I have ever seen.