Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is the happiest surprise of this summer so far, a children's film from Walt Disney Productions that effortlessly renews the best tradition of that studio's live-action features.

A refreshing if obvious drama. [9 June 1989, Friday, p.A]

The film gets by on the sheer good-naturedness Reitman is able to place in all of his efforts, though it doesn't seem likely to inspire the same level of affection as the original. Innocence is one quality that can never quite be recaptured. [16 Jun 1989, p.28]

Called upon to blend the fey and the fiendish, the usually fine Cage is reduced to acting like some kind of combination of Dudley Moore and John Carradine. Throughout, though, he seems to be enjoying it; I can't imagine why. [2 June 1989, Friday, p.E]

The film is utterly lacking in the campy quality of the World Wrestling Federation telecasts.

Renegades steams along very nicely, with more than enough momentum to compensate for the callowness of its stars. [05 Jun 1989, p.3C]

Pink Cadillac is the most graceful, warm-hearted and engaging of Clint Eastwood's comedies. [26 May 1989, p.A]

Fully up to, as well as virtually indistinguishable from, its predecessors… The guarantee of Indiana Jones is that the pace never varies and the tone never changes; when you've had enough, you can feel free to leave. [24 May 1989, Tempo, p.1]

Road House is startling because of the intensity of its violence and because of Swayze`s mindless posturing. A young star has sold himself to become a pinup boy.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil is a strange concoction - a bad taste comedy with a big, beating heart. [12 May 1989, p.B]

There isn't a better time at the movies right now than Earth Girls Are Easy, a delirious pop musical directed by Julien Temple as a widescreen swirl of color and high spirits.

The leap from pointing out the hollow values of advertising to a full-scale attack on capitalism is broad, and in trying to make it, Robinson falls into an abyss of speciousness. Nevertheless, his intensely personal style and vision mark him as one of the most promising filmmakers working in England today. [12 May 1989, p.G]

Director Claire Denis has attempted a meditative mood piece on the intertwined themes of colonialism and forbidden love. It's difficult, in fact, to tell which is the metaphor for which. But while the movie's tone is impeccably muted, and though its horizontally composed images are striking, and its dramatic rhythms are subtle and sure, there is something gnawingly simplistic in the conception. [12 May 1989, p.A]

However you look at it, K-9, a crime comedy starring Jim Belushi, Mel Harris and a German shepherd named Jerry Lee, barks up a few of the right trees. Its moments of hilarity are due entirely to the dog, whose orchestrated growls and grimaces could start a whole new school of dog acting. [28 Apr 1989, p.N]

Add the American work ethic to an Italian bedroom farce, give it to a director reknowned for small, natural, gently humorous films, and you come up with Loverboy, a comedy that is more often distasteful than funny. [2 May 1989, p.7C]

A play based on the most delicately nuanced interactions inevitably loses electricity as a movie. Worse, it becomes predictable. [28 Apr 1989, p.L]

As shrewd and accomplished as the movie is, there's still something uncomfortably manipulative about it... It doesn't explore its primal theme as much as it exploits it, tapping into the automatic, nearly universal power of guilt and regret. [21 Apr 1989, Friday, p.A]

There is a crazed, dark poetry here, but Mary Lambert's direction of Pet Sematary captures none of it, and the film falls into a flat, frequently laughable literalism. [24 Apr 1989, p.C2]

The coarse material, from a screenplay by Seth Winston and Michael J. Nathanson, is roughed up even more by Dragoti's abrasive exaggeration, both of performance (there's a terrifying sequence in which Hicks finally gets her long dreamed-of engagement ring and goes into a frenzy of triumph and delight) and of visual style (visits to the office of sinister shrink Wallace Shawn are filmed in weird expressionist off-angles). [14 Apr 1989, p.D]

Major League is a movie that knows what it's up to. It skims along agreeable surfaces, expertly balancing its comedy with melodrama and fulfilling expectations right on schedule. As a movie, it`s a superior industrial product.

Though the film resorts to a hackneyed ending, what goes on before is modest but effective terror. [07 Apr 1989, p.A]

It's a baffling, unconvincing experience, though it has a few moments of mild charm.

Pyun obviously enjoys filming Armageddon, and Cyborg is visually interesting even at its most preposterous. Everything is in ruins, with enough scenes in burnt-out factories to give new meaning to the term "loft living." Still, the plot is hopelessly confused, there are cuts that don't match and scenes that move suddenly from full sun to late afternoon. [07 Apr 1989, p.B]

Complex, knotty and at times even uncomfortable; its world has a weight and heft that makes its ultimate romanticism seem genuinely transcendant, genuinely magical. [14 April 1989]

The sheer outrageousness of its attitude is enough to make Heathers a very welcome relief in a field dominated by sanctimonious and second-hand virtue. [31 March 1989]

Shelley Long stars in a limp copy of "Private Benjamin" with a location switch from the Army to the Girl Scouts. Long plays a Beverly Hills wife who decides to take over the local troop of spoiled brats. A number of tedious jokes about conspicuous consumption fall flat and Long is no Hawn when it comes to comedy. [24 March 1989, p.A]

A complete disaster, almost certain to kill any more sequels. Chase waltzes through a series of boring costumes and cliches as he journeys to the South to claim a mansion as an inheritance only to find it's a hot property. The script here is anything but a hot property. [24 March 1989, p.A]

A lively, well-made schlock thriller that will doubtlessly be forgotten in two weeks, but in the meantime should provide a few pleasant evenings for fans of the genre.

Munchausen is indeed a beautiful, burgeoning, madly voluptuous movie from minute to minute and image to image; it's in the aggregate that the film fails to find the weight and the rhythm it needs to truly enthrall. [10 Mar 1989, p.A]

Though the gags make great use of embarrassment, they stop short of actively humiliating the characters, a gesture that these days counts as something fine and noble. [10 March 1989, p.E]

It's not, however, a particularly pleasant surprise. Directed by 25-year-old Marc Rocco (son of actor Alex Rocco, who appears in the film), Dream a Little Dream places the usual plot inanities of the genre in the context of a wildly ambitious, baroque-surrealist style. The effect is a little as if the late Russian mystic Andrei Tarkovsky had directed "Police Academy VI." [9 March 1989, p.6]

The ability to subjugate everything to the story is both Avildsen's strength and his weakness. Lean on Me, with its warts-and-all hero, its driving rhythm, its carefully calibrated climaxes, is a finely tuned machine. It also happens to be a steamroller. [3 March 1989, p.Q]

There is one hilarious sight gag involving prophylactics, and one can't argue with the film's sobering message, but otherwise Ritter's character is mostly a bore. [3 March 1989, p.A]

It's this balance of vivid performance and directorial detachment that allows Leigh to move freely between delicate sentiment and highly caustic wit; even in his most harshly satirical moments, he never denies the humanity of his characters.

There is little to dislike in The Mighty Quinn, but neither is there any compelling reason to see it. [17 Feb 1989, p.C]

It helps if you think of "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" as sort of a "Sesame Street" for teens. Beneath the self-aggrandizing plot, the rock music, the dudespeak and the humor lurks a smattering of knowledge. The premise is spectacularly silly, but harmless. Bill and Ted are a couple of woolly-brained teens who spend so much time dreaming about the rock band they're going to start that they are about to disqualify themselves from a public education. [20 Feb 1989, p.7]

The original dealt with a collision of intellect, destiny and the soul, this sequel is content to limit its concern to survival. Darwin might not approve. [16 Feb 1989, p.2C]

Selleck's persona can seem coherent and mildly pleasant in the airless, miniature world of series television, but when he walks into the larger, more physical world of movies he melts away. There's too great a disparity between his bulk and his whining delivery, and he carries himself awkwardly on screen, as if he knew he was taking up too much space. [3 Feb 1989, p.A]

Kinjite is clearly the work of dedicated industry veterans, all of whom decided to go home after lunch. [03 Mar 1989, p.P]

The film never adequately uses either the dramatic talents of Nolte nor the comic talents of Short. The young girl (Sarah Rowland Doroff) is most effective because she rarely speaks.

One might wish - fleetingly - that Parents were a cuddlier film, if for no other reason than it deserves to be seen by the same numbers that flock to such inanities as "Working Girl." Instead, it is uncompromising in its mordant humor, part of an international trend towards uncomfortable, deeply satirical comedy that includes David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," Pedro Almodovar's "Matador" and Colin Gregg's "We Think the World of You." [7 Apr 1989, p.F]

Clifford can muster no interest in the cardboard characters or absurd plot developments, which leaves Gleaming the Cube to limp along listlessly between indifferently filmed skateboard demonstrations.

Where the "Friday the 13th" movies demand nothing less than virginal purity as a condition of living through the last reel, Deepstar Six, which seems intended for a slightly older crowd, is willing to settle for a firm commitment to monogamy. [13 Jan 1989, p.O]

If the setup, with its theme of two radically different brothers drawn to the same woman, recalls Moonstruck, the follow-through of The January Man has none of the earlier film's pleasing symmetry or emotional force. Sarandon seems to get lost in the shuffle (in a way that suggests some last-minute trimming of her role), and the picture eventually trails off into a tangle of unresolved plot threads. [13 Jan 1989, p.K]

Griffith gives the fullest performance of her career; Weaver, the most likable, even though she's the villain of the piece. Michael Nichols directs his best film in years. [23 Dec 1988, Friday, p.A]

The film's frequent longeurs, compulsive over-explicitness and unshakably morose hero seem like so many insistently ''literary'' qualities, ostentatiously laid over a cute, cartoonish vision that suggests not so much Anne Tyler as the affectionate quirkiness of ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show.'' [6 Jan 1989, Friday, p.A]

Hellbound offers a consistent, low-level queasiness, an effect more of revulsion than horror. It's nothing that a good shot of Pepto-Bismol wouldn't take care of.