There’s something earthy and elemental in this tale that was missing in Blue, something quirky and (measured by Kieslowskian standards) energetic.

Everything about the movie feels secondhand, including the wheezy plot about a treasure map and buried gold. The real problem, though, is plain old sequel-itis: Because the first story completed the narrative of these characters, the only reason to make a second film is money.

The big underachiever turns out to be DeVito, who is incapable of exhibiting believable warmth and complexity, or, indeed, of playing anyone who is not a cartoon.

Fear of a Black Hat never achieves the dizzying cinema verite swirl that made Spinal Tap such a timeless satire. Many of the jokes are too literal (a goof on Vanilla Ice named Vanilla Sherbet). Still, Cundieff has what nearly every commentator on the rap scene has lacked: a first-class bull detector.

The Flintstones is a big, shiny package of comic nostalgia, as much a theme park as a movie.

Though not quite the fiasco of revved-up gunplay that Beverly Hills Cop II was, this new movie, directed by John ''Rock-'em Sock-'em'' Landis, is just a clunky action thriller, with occasional comic moments rationed out to the audience like stray crumbs.

You hardly need to be devoted to the ways of Buddhism to see when a gifted filmmaker, for the sake of multicultural niceness, has enthusiastically abandoned his mind.

Cowgirls, a flaky-surreal adaptation of Tom Robbins' 1976 feminist hipster road novel, finds the director of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho" lost in the ozone of his own private whimsies.

True deft wit is just plum missing from this good-natured, flat-footed, eager-to- please, tee-hee Western.

Crooklyn has a warm, nostalgic, spilling-over-the-edges effusiveness that is new to Lee's work. At the same time, the movie often seems every bit as high-strung as the family it's about.

Lee's performance is by far the best thing about The Crow. Unfortunately, he's just good enough to make you wish that the movie had had a whisper of storytelling invention to go along with its showy visual design.

Being Human doesn't seem to be about anything: Its five astonishingly limp parables might have been spun by a depressed Aesop who forgot to take his Prozac.

What's ultimately shocking about Kika is how empty mayhem can be made to look.

Filled with martial-arts action, bathroom humor, and slapstick, 3 Ninjas Kick Back even has a politically correct kicker: The champion ninja is a girl.

Possibly the greatest anti-date video ever...Writer-director Nicholas Kazan was obviously too enamored of his final twist to clean up all the loose ends and red herrings, but the acting has enough verve to put this sour valentine over but good.

Hopper peppers the cast with his usual assortment of fringe players (Dean Stockwell, Crispin Glover, Seymour Cassell), but his own cameo as a horny salesman is an embarrassment, and the dreadful script mistakes cuss words for wit every step of the way.

Essentially, the movie is Cliffhanger with one third the firepower. Ice-T, looking like a depressed lion in his thick Rasta braids, remains a charismatic camera subject, though he’s too much the snaggletoothed urban runt to make a convincing action dynamo.

Serial Mom has traces of Waters’ acid wit, but most of the movie is tame and overly conscious of its naughty felicities.

Naked Gun 33 1/3 has a sluggish, one-gag-at-a- time rhythm, and it aims at too many soft targets. Aside from the Oscar sequence, the movie’s big satirical coup is a send-up of prison-escape pictures (yawn).

Keaton is at his most urgent and winning here. His fast-break, neurotic style — owlish stare, motor mouth — is perfect for the role of a compulsive news junkie who lives for the rush of his job.

Sadly, the movie indicates that Polanski’s erotic narcissism may have consumed not just his life but, by all appearances, his art as well.

There are no big thrills, only gentle laughs in this light story by Hugh Wilson and Peter Torokvei (Wilson also directed).

For all its technical bravado, The Hudsucker Proxy is an unsettling contradiction, a ''whimsical'' fable made by acerbic control freaks. It's a balloon that won't fly.

It’s a measure of the film’s middlebrow kitschiness that its centerpiece sequence turns out to be a tasteful soft-core version of the lesbian ravishment of Marilyn Chambers in "Behind the Green Door."

The performances are uniformly excellent — even Leary knows when to shut up and just listen — and this nasty romp delivers so many honest laughs, you may end up watching it twice in the same night to make sure you weren’t hallucinating.

Grant is the rare actor who can mix the characteristics of sex appeal and ambivalence in believable, rather than irritating, proportions.

This is one nowhere boy who commands your attention.

Sugar Hill wants to tear up our insides, but I’m afraid the movie leaves us hooting with disbelief instead.

The folly of Blue Chips is that the film makes this greased-palm corruption seem an even bigger sin than it is. (It's like a political drama made by someone who is shocked, shocked at the sleaze of campaign financing.)

Ryder, good as she was in The Age of Innocence, gives her first true star performance here. Beneath her crisp, postfeminist manner, Lelaina is bristling with confusion, and Ryder lets you read every crosscurrent of temptation and anxiety, the way her tentative search for love slowly grows into a restless hunger. Yearning, hilarious, lost within their precocious self-awareness, these slackers have soul.

What is there to do but laugh in self-defense at such pompous self-regard when blood gushes, fuses pop, and Seagal scowls in a series of snappy, embroidered buckskin jackets?

The movie is a true throwaway: By the end, it seems to have disposed of itself.

Because I’m not a 9-year-old boy, however, this story of a kid who acquires a blank check, cashes it for a million bucks, spends it all, and learns that having stuff isn’t nearly as satisfying as having a father’s love comes across as a calculated, mechanical production owing much too much to Home Alone.

Carrey suggests an escaped mental patient impersonating a game-show host-and, what's worse, his hyperbolically obnoxious shtick is the whole damned show.

A hateful ”family” comedy based on jokey insinuations of incest.

Romeo Is Bleeding just ends up flaunting its Grand Guignol outrageousness, rubbing our noses in its desire to be a gaudy hipster freak show. By the end, the film has become so mired in pointless sensation that it ceases to be any fun at all.

Not even the presence of the irrepressible David Johansen (here playing the Gunther Toody role originated by the ineffable Joe E. Ross on the ’60s television show) and a paddy wagon full of engaging Noo Yawk types can pull Car 54, Where Are You?‘s woebegone comedy out of the vulgar ditch that its screenwriters drove it into.

An appropriately absurd finale for a series that long ago went over the top.

Body Snatchers is inky and somber, with some of the creeping bad-dream naturalism of George Romero’s Living Dead films.

Few comedies have worked this hard to make everyone on screen look this dumb.

By the end of the movie, you realize that these two have devised nothing less than a media-age alternative to the Nixon era’s dirty tricks. The War Room is a giddy celebration of clean tricks.

Sheridan, however, works with such piercing fervor and intelligence that In the Name of the Father just about transcends its tidy moral design.

Relaxed, valedictory, exquisitely titled, Grumpy Old Men feels like an odd couple's last hurrah.

If only director George P. Cosmatos (Rambo) knew how to do something with cliches other than throw them into the pot and stir. A preposterously inflated 135 minutes long, Tombstone plays like a three-hour rough cut that’s been trimmed down to a slightly shorter rough cut.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is simply the closest any TV or movie incarnation has ever come to the spirit of the original Batman comic books.

But Philadelphia turns out to be a scattershot liberal message movie, one that ties itself in knots trying to render its subject matter acceptable to a mass audience.

Pakula insists that The Pelican Brief is haute cuisine, and the seriousness nearly wrecks it.

Spielberg restages the Holocaust with an existential vividness unprecedented in any nondocumentary film: He makes us feel as if we're living right inside the 20th century's darkest-and most defining-episode.

It also made me laugh harder than anything I’ve seen at the movies this year.

To say the script is lame is to be charitable, but Whoopi’s irrepressible charm makes the nunsense watchable. Once again Hollywood doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone: Renting this sequel is like advancing a grade and getting last year’s teacher.

By the end, most moviegoers are liable to see it as much ado about nothing.

Williams gives an inspired comic performance. Unfortunately, he outclasses the movie, which is basically a patchwork rip-off of Tootsie.

The trouble with Eastwood’s attempt to make a thriller with heart is that, in retreating from his darker impulses, he muffles his own voice as a moviemaker.

Wittier and more consistent than the first Addams Family movie. Paul Rudnick’s script offers sharp-edged variations on the topsy-turvy Addams worldview, and it’s much better at getting the Addamses out into the straight world, where they can really do some damage.

Carlito’s Way is perfectly okay entertainment, yet this 2-hour-and-21-minute movie never convinced me it wouldn’t have been every bit as good (if not better) as a lean and mean Miami Vice episode.

It’s packed with swordplay, fast getaways, and heaving bosoms.

Lie down with dogs like Look Who’s Talking Now! and you’ll end up with fleas.

Ultimately, though, it’s the film that’s tentative-and more than a little plodding. Instead of following through on the relationships, Nunez allows Ruby in Paradise to get bogged down in his heroine’s economic woes. The film ends up being about whether she’ll land on her feet, when what we really want to see is whether she can stand tall.

In Baker Boys, Kloves crafted a melancholy vision laced with ripe possibilities for pleasure and love. But the movie was (inexplicably, to me) a commercial disappointment, and Kloves, perhaps as a delayed response, has returned with a vision drained of joy, freedom, excitement.

It's like a film-school thesis gone disastrously wrong.

By the end, Campion views all her characters with a compassion bordering on grace, a humanity-like her heroine's-as dark, quiet, and enveloping as the ocean.

Too dopey to cut it as a theatrical release, but more knowingly and competently made than most of its straight-to-video analogues, this Carl Reiner-directed pastiche-parody of film noir occupies a lonely corner of video purgatory.

Never a terribly coherent storyteller, here the gorehound’s Godard dispenses almost entirely with the plot development. Instead, Argento concentrates on mood, and, making terrific use of various run-down Minneapolis locations, he succeeds in giving Trauma the feel of a waking nightmare

Is it any wonder this Nightmare never coalesces? He couldn’t make up his mind about whether to be naughty or nice.

The plot, which features Lea Thompson as a gold digger scheming to marry Jed, is like something you’d catch on the USA Network at 4 a.m. But enough of beating a dead possum. After sitting through The Beverly Hillbillies, I now realize that the best tribute anyone can make to the pop detritus of our childhood is to let it rest in peace.

Dramatizing totalitarian oppression is hardly novel, but Farewell My Concubine may be the first film to capture the unique spiritual cruelty of a regime in which beauty itself had become a crime.

In short, a little too spongy for high- quality junk food.

Icky doesn’t begin to describe it.

Cronenberg directs this doomed romance in the same flat, claustrophobic, night-of-the-zombies style he employed in ''Naked Lunch''; as a dramatist, he's still stuck in Interzone.

The only thing that makes this ludicrous botch even borderline watchable is Alec Baldwin’s enjoyably supercilious performance as a leering stud surgeon who thinks nothing of belting back shots of bourbon before going in to perform an operation.

By now, I’m not sure even Donald Trump could love a movie that asks us to get misty-eyed over real estate.

That’s already more laughs than a month of Saturday Night Lives.

From the opening shot of a burnt-orange GTO cruising a high school parking lot to the strains of Aerosmith's ''Sweet Emotion,'' Richard Linklater's film nails mid-'70s adolescence so precisely that you'll need Clearasil by the end credits.

There’s sorrow here to fill a thousand Hollywood movies—and in the end, it swamps the boundaries of movie convention.

(Culkin's) attempt to broaden his range with the not-for-kids thriller The Good Son — in a part that calls for complex emotions rather than amusing reactions-comes up way short.

James Caan is underused as the crusty coach who needs a championship season, but he is supported by good turns from the highly angst-ridden quarterback (Craig Sheffer) and the straight-from-the-streets rookie running back (Omar Epps).

Set in the 1960s, Robert De Niro's directorial debut is a work of vitality and flair. [22 Oct 1993, p.58]

Up through its first half, The Age of Innocence is a masterfully orchestrated tale of romantic yearning.

Bruce Willis is at his most morose in this flat, dankly lit, grindingly inept thriller about a serial killer whose victims all turn out to have been acquaintances of Willis’ rumpled, alcoholic cop hero. As his by-the-book partner, Sarah Jessica Parker is the only one in the movie who doesn’t look sleep-deprived.

High production values and a moderately appealing cast do nothing to ameliorate the tedium... The sappy concoction concludes with a genuinely impressive race sequence, but it’s not worth the wait.

You never forget you're watching a derivative, machine-tooled entertainment; the fun is in how the machine keeps spinning off course.

The movie’s a dog, but you almost wish for a sequel, if only to do right by these two.

A sumptuous two-and-a-quarter-hour emotional epic built on one lachrymose climax after another. What little plot there is exists only to set up the next Big Cry.

Soft-core trash with a tent-show hook.

When Lambert is onscreen, Fortress is just an effective action cheapie. Whenever Smith is the focus, it approaches junk poetry.

By now, we’ve come to expect certain things in movies adapted from Stephen King novels: brooding misanthropy, a pound or two of viscera, and — perhaps most horrifying of all — Hollywood actors delivering their lines with bad Maine accents. Needful Things delivers on said expectations, no more, no less.

Son of the Pink Panther isn’t an unwatchable mess like 1982’s Curse of the Pink Panther; it trots along quickly with series veterans like Herbert Lom adding needed class. But there’s a void at the center of this film about Inspector Clouseau’s long-lost son, and its name is Roberto Benigni. Where Peter Sellers’ Clouseau had a blissfully out-of-it officiousness, the Italian comedian’s sole shtick is to beam idiotically. He’s that ruinous oxymoron: an unsurprising clown.

You sense River Phoenix would rather be elsewhere, and whether he’s responding to the movie or to something larger is not ours to say. But the feeling persists. It’s like watching a premature ghost.

Gibson stages the movie episodically, as a series of quiet actors' moments; his direction is scrupulous, tasteful, and, I'm afraid, rather sodden. By the end, he wrings a tear or two, but more from the story's sentimental outline than from anything he does to fill it in.

This story of a 12-year-old boy who drops through the net of middle-class life invites us-in each shimmering frame-to gaze upon the world with a child's freshly awakening vision.

By the time Hard Target reaches its amazing climax, set in a warehouse stocked with surreal Mardi Gras floats, the film has become an incendiary action orgy, as joyously excessive as the grand finale in a fireworks show. Woo puts the thrill back into getting blown away.

The plot is clever and absorbing, with one wild Hitchcockian twist (a comic variation on Vertigo). Manhattan Murder Mystery is both a genuine thriller and a cheeky goof on thrillers. It is also, in part, another Woody Allen relationship movie — and I’m afraid that’s the one way in which it falls flat.

While the Nightmare on Elm Street movies possess a sick yet clever surrealism, and the first Halloween was at least well crafted, the Friday the 13th series has always been the cut-rate horror franchise, offering barely functional sex-and-slash pitched straight at the moron brigade. Jason Goes to Hell varies the formula a bit, with ideas swiped from The Terminator, The Hidden, and Alien, but after nine installments the impalements and dismemberments all look the same. So go to hell already, Jason — and take Sean Cunningham, the ”brains” behind this dreck, with you.

The movie is earnest, heartfelt, and, for all its lavishness, rather plodding.

There’s plenty of simulation here and not much stimulation.

Downey’s deftness is so miraculous, in fact, that it’s a shame Heart and Souls never really lets him cut loose.

A wonderful movie, a delicate and touching drama that takes us deep inside the eccentric competitive mystique of grandmaster chess.

Gruesome stuff — and yet Body Bags moves along with such jaunty, good bad taste that it’s hard not to smile.