Beaches is a melodrama in the original sense of the term: a drama with music. And as long as the melo is handled by Bette Midler, who performs half a dozen songs, Beaches can`t be all bad. But the drama, as transacted between Midler and Barbara Hershey, is pretty dreadful.

Though the costumes are beautifully designed, the chateau locations carefully chosen and the dialogue full of curling locutions, something cloddish and naive still comes through in Frears' direction, and not only because he can seldom get his shots to match. [13 Jan 1989, Friday, p.A]

Though it's well directed, written and performed, Rain Main still slips irreversibly into the so-what category. [16 Dec 1988]

A character comedy requires some notion of respect and integrity. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels has none. [14 Dec 1988, p.1]

A satire is only as good as its subject, and in the very funny I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Keenen Ivory Wayans has found a rich and relatively untapped one. The wit and openness of I'm Gonna Git You Sucka has more to contribute to race relations than the smug piety of "Mississippi Burning." As a positive image, a good, shared laugh is hard to beat. [14 Dec 1988, p.1]

There is a genuine sweetness in Reitman's work that balances the innate cruelty of much '80s film comedy. But this time the gags are too feeble to provide a counterweight and the film tips into the cute, benign and pointless. [9 Dec 1988, p.A]

As a filmmaker, Benjamin is capable of the occasional light, graceful touch, but the overall view eludes him; just as he was unable to bring out the sly blend of satire and psychological drama in Bo Goldman's script for Little Nikita, he's unable to find any harmony of tone in this scattered, cacophonous material. [09 Dec 1988, p.B]

Hugely funny, but it's also liberating-precisely because it centers its aim on that cold, closed system and blows it apart. The straight lines are shattered; the empty spaces in the images are packed full until they burst. [2 Dec 1988]

As a screenplay Tequila Sunrise is a very impressive piece of work. But as a movie, it's knotty and confused. [2 Dec 1988, p.B]

The film works very well, providing lots of laughs, in its first half, setting up the Bill Murray character and his callousness. For a Christmas Eve special he wants to staple antlers on a mouse. [25 Nov 1988, p.A]

As directed by Daniel Petrie from the slightest excuse for a story by Stephen McPherson and Elizabeth Bradley, Cocoon: The Return amounts to little more than a desperate effort to fill a couple of hours of screen time, to which the commercially potent title can be affixed. [23 Nov 1988, p.C1]

It is, in the best Disney tradition, a story of childhood's end, of leaving the family and accepting adult responsibilities. Bluth relates it through a smooth counterpoint of humor, sadness and horror.

The musical voices belong to Billy Joel and Bette Midler, respectively, but this material is far afield of their best work. As a result, a Chihuahua (voice by Cheech Marin) steals the movie with wisecracks. [18 Nov 1988, p.A]

The film shows very little of the nar-rative assurance that has character-ized Jordan's previous work. [21 Nov 1988, p.2C]

With Maura delivering an explosive performance, Almodovar presents Pepa's tale with real gusto--with vibrant colors, gaudy personality, mad jokes and a sexiness that erupts off the screen.

Though Ernest barely exists apart from his trademark catch phrase (Kno- whut-I-mean?) and his propensity for waggling his nose in wide-angle lenses, Varney's energetic mugging is good for a few mild laughs.

Director Fred Schepisi manages his outdoor and courtroom scenes with equal skill. But at the center is Streep, far less mannered than in some of her recent work. [11 Nov 1988, p.A]

Child's Play would probably be sickening if it weren't so relentlessly stupid.

The looniest movie of the season and also one of the most engaging. [7 Nov 1988]

For much of its length the picture is brilliantly successful-light, surprising and, because it asks the audience to participate in its creation, unusually engaging.

Director Peter Markle, whose credits include TV documentaries and commercials as well as "Young Blood," has taken pains to make this a craftsmanlike production, shot in Malaysia, full of laborious attention to detail and enterprising stunt flying. Regrettably, the script doesn`t fly quite as smoothly.

Working from a forgotten Victorian thriller by Bram Stoker ("Dracula"), director Ken Russell has fashioned his most watchable film in a long while, largely by staying out of the way of the material.

It's meant to be open, heartwarming and real, but beneath its often attractively performed surface, the clichés are grinding as heavily as in any ''Rambo'' picture [21 Oct 1988]

Foster and McGillis never quite make the transition from ideological mouthpieces to fully developed dramatic figures. [14 Oct 1988, p.C]

A horror picture very nearly as mushbrained as its title character-a terrible demon that rises from a pumpkin patch to seek vengeance...As a technician, Winston clearly knows how to make a monster, but as a director he's yet to learn how to bring one to life. [28 Oct 1988, p.C]

Alien Nation is a sluggish, forced and hopelessly derivative action thriller, sporadically redeemed by the wit of its stars and the velvety sheen of Greenberg's night photography.

Punchline is supposed to be Tom Hanks' big dramatic breakthrough movie, but the script is boring and his character repellant. [30 Sept 1988, p.A]

As directed by Robert Mulligan, the stately pace here feels sluggish and the music is no elegiac Pachelbel's "Canon" but a medley of dreadful cocktail lounge piano and swooning strings. [21 Oct 1988, p.G]

It still had some juice a few years ago, when it was Hector Babenco's "Pixote," but "Salaam Bombay!" is a disturbingly professional, self-assured piece of work. [28 Oct 1988, p.A]

It's almost too rich in ideas for its own good: The sense of concentration and proportion isn't there. But it remains an astonishing, magnetic, devastating piece of work. [23 Sept 1988]

The enigma not only remains, but, cloaked in Schrader`s mysticism, seems more impenetrable than ever.

In a film which can't seem to decide whether it's comedy or drama, folksy or sinister, every scene is played for ambivalence. The result is a definite maybe. [23 Sep 1988, p.L]

In "Crossing Delancey," veteran independent filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver returns to the Jewish milieu of her early hit "Hester Street." This time, however, she turns ethnic drama into romantic comedy. [16 Sep 1988, p.A]

A gripping and original piece of work, itself sure to be remembered as one of the finest films of the year.

A John Hughes-ish teen drama unaccountably complicated by politics and method acting.

The ensemble performances are of such a uniformly high caliber that our interest in the story never wavers.

It is an intriguing subject, though so far all that Morris has brought to it is a combination of the morbid and the cruel; he needs to develop some sympathy, too. [16 Sept 1988]

It's true that there has been a shocking dearth of talking-horse pictures lately, but even so, Hot to Trot has few pleasures to offer.

It's a movie of a thousand pleasures - of glinting insights and sly twists. [19 Aug 1988]

Directed by the Finnish-born Renny Harlin, it's a deft, fluid piece that rushes from one surrealist epiphany to the next, and along the way displays a craft and imagination far above the norms for the genre.

The late '40s world Coppola has put together for Tucker is an extremely stylized one: Vittorio Storaro's cinematography has the bright, hard, almost lacquered look of old Technicolor; Dean Tavoularis' sets, built with slanting floors and surfaces, create an imaginary, compacted space in which actors and objects seem to be thrusting out toward the camera; and the transitions between scenes, based on visual rhymes and elaborate wipes, effectively remove the movie from the orderly flow of normal film time. [12 Aug 1988]

Dafoe manages to draw us into the mystery, anguish and joy of the holy life. This is anything but another one of those boring biblical costume epics. There is genuine challenge and hope in this movie. [12 Aug 1988, p.A]

Billy's burning, self-destructive energy is about all Young Guns has going for it-the suicidal kicks James Dean found in chickie races are here transposed to six-gun shoot-outs, filmed in a slow-motion process that strives vainly to evoke Sam Peckinpah. [12 Aug 1988, p.H]

This is what happens when someone doesn't make a sequel to a hit movie fast enough. Someone else, with a lot of brass, makes a ripoff that is even less satisfying. [19 Aug 1988, p.A]

Contains some gaspingly funny moments. [29 July 1988, Friday, p.A]

Tom Cruise does with bartending pretty much what he did with a pool cue in "The Color of Money." In other words, he shows skill at a con game while being less successful with the woman in his life. [29 Jul 1988, p.A]

One of Romero's most complex and challenging creations. The film shifts effortlessly between playfulness and outrage, between a distanced irony and an awful, immediate horror.

It`s shoddy, lazy and numbingly stupid.

Graciously filmed by Martin Brest and imaginatively performed by Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, the tired concept yields a steady stream of little discoveries and surprising insights that add up to some uncommonly rich comedy. [20 July 1988]

Has everything but a personality. [15 July 1988, Friday, p.A]

Where the previous sequels have been mostly dour gun blasts, The Dead Pool is a thriller with wit and humor and tension. [15 Jul 1988, p.A]

Coscarelli has captured the texture of a disjointed, half-remembered nightmare, full of figures and events that seem to have some symbolic value, but which have lost their precise meaning in the process of floating up from the subconscious.

Beeman and Tolkin drain every trace of real life friction from the story line, pumping it up instead with the standard Hughes synthetics: kids who are preternaturally smart, sophisticated and poised (Haim's best friend, played by Corey Feldman, has a swagger that suggests Robert Mitchum at his cockiest); adults who are monstrous, cretinous and ultimately pathetic. [07 July 1988, p.3C]

It's a sweet, oft-told story, and Murphy and Hall add a number of very sharp supporting roles-hidden by makeup-to add spice to the general level of gentleness. [1 Jul 1988, p.A]

Brilliantly funny, bracingly smart and surprisingly moving. [22 June 1988]

The world of his films may be violent, but Hill's vision is a delicate, subtle one-of individuals packing away the tiny bit of meaning and emotion life has granted them, and fighting to protect it at all costs. It's not a sentiment that can survive in cartoons; that it emerges at all in Red Heat is a tribute to Hill's still great talent. [17 Jun 1988, p.A]

Even for John Hughes, who writes movies in less time than most people write postcards, The Great Outdoors seems unusually slapdash.

There are few marquees that could contain the title The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: the Metal Years, but Penelope Spheeris' documentary on the heavy metal bands of rock 'n' roll turns out to be much more graceful than its name. [05 Aug 1988, p.B]

Successfully avoids the grandiose mythmaking that has been the bane of the baseball movie from ''Pride of the Yankees'' to ''The Natural.'' Rather than a vapid national epic, it is a warm, droll, deftly cracked romantic comedy. [15 June 1988]

It's a movie that doesn't have an original thought in its head, and seems to like it that way.

Poltergeist at this point is a brand name without a distinctive product to sell-no vivid characters, no unique situations, no look or meaning of its own.

It's too smoothly controlled to be funny, which is Big Business's problem as a whole. [10 Jun 1988, p.A]

Big moves with polish and assurance. It's too soon to tell whether Marshall has anything of her own to say, but Big is proof that she can handle the Hollywood machine, and that is no small thing.

Chevy Chase doesn't seem to have enough to do in "Funny Farm." He's a physical actor whose appeal can turn flat if he spends too much camera time sitting at a typewriter or working on his love relationship. Smith, as Elizabeth, is gorgeous and competent, but she lacks the comic verve of Beverly d'Angelo, Chase's memorable co-star in the National Lampoon series. This is a vehicle that does a lot for its supporting character actors and almost nothing for its stars. [3 June 1988, p.B]

This is a comic book movie, its outcome as predictable as it is satisfying, which is part of its charm. [25 May 1988, p.7]

It's comfortable and Disneyfied and, with shots of the splendid Australian wilderness filling the long valleys between dramatic peaks, probably the safest way to travel.

Directed by Ron Howard and produced by George Lucas, the film seems to mark the final paroxysm of a genre-the big-budget fantasy-adventure-that dominated American filmmaking for a decade but has recently been weakened by changing tastes, altered economics and sheer exhaustion. It's less a movie than a collection of morbid symptoms: a labored, arrhythmic narrative; a pathetic dependency on recycled themes and borrowed images; a sour, self-mocking humor that suggests the end is near. [20 May 1988, p.2]

The result is a weak "Carrie" versus Jason finale after Jason has impaled about eight young people, mostly women. The filmmakers have mastered the blood but not the tedium of all of the predictable killings. Nor have they eliminated the "hate-women" subtext to the entire series of films. [20 May 1988, p.A]

The fight scenes are staged cleanly enough by Newt Arnold, a veteran assistant director (to Sam Peckinpah, among others) making his debut at the helm. But the contest format is hopelessly repetitive and inert, the characters would seem underdeveloped in a comic book, and the restricted setting ensures that the action will never develop any real scale or velocity. The Chinese may take it on the chin in Bloodsport, but their own movies are infinitely better.

Good, grungy fun.

Director Zalman King has literally created a bad B-movie here, photographing breasts, buttocks and bubbleheads. The film is erotic until its first coupling; that's when we realize these dullard characters might as well be mannequins. Two Moon Junction deserves a genre all its own: very soft-core porn. [6 May 1988, p.A]

Director Godfrey Reggio gives us some ordinary and a few spectacular shows of people doing hard work to the accompaniment of the boring music of composer Philip Glass. This film is not in the same league with its fine predecessor, "Koyaanisqatsi." [20 May 1988, p.A]

Much of the film`s charm resides in the fact that there is no reason for any of this to happen, except for the director`s sheer will that it be so.

The action sequences are sleek and strong enough, but the story that chains them together is too ambitious for its own good

LaLoggia clearly loves his chosen medium: He has a passion for filmmaking-for ferreting out unusual angles, for planning elaborate camera movements, for designing elaborate special effects-that sometimes leads him way over the top. Yet it's the extravagance of his gestures that gives Lady in White its character and imaginative force. [22 Apr 1988, p.A]

Even and assured, Colors may not descend to the sloppy, indulgent depths of ''Easy Rider'' and ''The Last Movie,'' but neither does it rise to the delirious, dangerous heights of those films. [15 Apr 1988]

For the record, this movie stars George Burns and Charlie Schlatter, and its one distinguishing feature is a consistent tastelessness, which still doesn't manage to make it much fun. [08 Apr 1988, p.H]

Save for the compelling oddity of seeing Michael J. Fox as a cocaine addict, this drama offers nothing special. [1 Apr 1988, p.A]

For all the film's popped eyeballs and severed limbs, Beetlejuice retains an innocence that makes the grotesque humor very appealing. Burton has captured the sweet ghoulishness of a 12-year-old pouring over horror comics, dreaming of the greatest Halloween costume ever invented. [30 Mar 1988]

Biloxi Blues also wants to be a confessional, coming-of-age memoir, but again, it works better around the edges than it does in its central conception.

Buried somewhere in the screenplay are some Robert Altman-esque satirical intentions, in which the wildly corrupt college football recruitment process is offered as a panoramic image of frenzied American venality. But Bud Smith's broad, colorless direction removes whatever sting the material may once have had, edging the action instead toward sub-"Police Academy" slapstick-flying pizzas, exploding fire extinguishers, mass fist- fights that break out for no discernible reason. [25 March 1988, p.D]

I didn't laugh once during the entire film-not at the slapstick, not at the humor, all of which is pitched at the preschool level. [25 March 1988, p.A]

Like a series pilot, Stand and Deliver has a strong character, a promising situation and not a lot of story-it seems to be setting things up for future episodes.

Shoulders sloping, not quick on the uptake, utterly agog at the adult world of sex and high-powered business, Reinhold's character is a wonder to behold. And Fred Savage is completely inoffensive as the officious boy-man, which is quite an achievement for a child actor. [11 Mar 1988, p.A]

It's a wholly passive performance, and one that touches not at all on Pryor's special gifts. This man desperately needs a new agent.

A strangely powerful yet meandering film that takes a long time to make its point.

From its opening shot-of little girls with huge hairdos-Hairspray is a relentlessly silly, crude and hilarious lampoon of modes and mores in teenage America, 1962. But it's also more than that. By closing credits, it has made some provocative observations about the influence of rock music on race relations in America, about how the '50s became the '60s and about the volatility of fashion and politics. [26b Feb 1988, p.F]

Certainly, the elements for a better movie are here. The credits are dotted with multi-Oscar nominees. But not all are well used. What Frantic needs most is an infusion of chemistry. Somehow Polanski has failed to make these actors connect.

It's a rich, funny, bracing film, one of Boorman's finest.[06 Nov 1987, p.41]

Despite a few high-spirited sequences, School Daze succumbs to preachiness and choppiness. It's a movie with too much to say and not enough style to say it with. [12 Feb 1988, p.0]

Weathers turns out to be a disappointingly weak lead whose low-key likability doesn't make up for his lack of anger and drive-crucial attributes for any action hero. And Baxley is surprisingly stingy with his action sequences.

The movie's rhythm and scope are pure sitcom, but that keeps the vehicle running smoothly over sizable plotholes. [15 Feb 1988, p.7C]

Ironweed is more than a chance to watch two multimillion-dollar actors play bums. Each character has a particular story; each is given a dignity that seems honest in the context of a worldwide Depression in the late '30s, and at no time are we certain what the future holds in store for either character. [12 Feb 1988, p.A]

His first confrontation with Berenger allows Poitier to display the overwhelming, nearly palpable moral force that was his great strength as a performer, but the balance of the film makes very little use of his special skills. [12 Feb 1988, p.A]

Mingling a frank trashiness with unexpected ambition, Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow emerges as one of the more commanding horror movies of recent months.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is anything but light, though it very nearly is unbearable.

She`s Having a Baby wants to be everyone`s story, but its hollowness makes it no one`s.

If Godard's use of sound is as inventive as it was in his Dolby "Detective" of 1985, that's reason alone to check it out. [08 Apr 1988, p.B]