For Keeps is schizoid entertainment. It begins as a comedy, shifts briefly into social commentary and winds up in soap opera land, with Ringwald acting nobly and self-sacrificing. The movie has been heralded as a sign of Hollywood's new maturity, because the kids face up to their situation. That is applaudable, but For Keeps is old-fashioned and obvious. It is to teen pregnancy what My Three Sons was to family life. [15 Jan 1988, p.C5]

Children will at least be diverted. Adults, after they tire of trying to detect the hidden strings, are likely to find Batteries Not Included too manipulative to tolerate, but predictable enough that they can safely nap for long stretches. [18 Dec 1987, p.D1]

Those opening minutes, in which Hawn plays a heavy, are some of her best work. The rest we've seen before, a lot. Overboard is overlong, and stale as can be. [18 Dec 1987, p.D6]

Even at 85 minutes, Throw Momma From the Train seems flabby; it's out of jokes before an hour is up. [11 Dec 1987, p.D5]

Empire of the Sun seems to end a half-dozen times -- always a bad sign. Its merits notwithstanding -- and Spielberg probably can't make a bad film -- in its own way this movie is as ego-heavy and ponderous as Ishtar. It's literary, all right. Empire of the Sun is a weighty tome indeed. [11 Dec 1987, p.D1]

The whole four hours or so of the two films is as handsome a package as France has produced in years. [30 Dec 1987, p.D6]

Planes, Trains and Automobiles is the movie equivalent of a tired stand-up comic's air-travel routine. It strikes some resonant chords indeed, but it never quite leaves the ground, either. And given the stars here, that's a real bungle. [25 Nov 1987, p.D1]

The best performance in Three Men and a Baby is given by the baby, played by twins Lisa and Michelle Blair. They are wonderful. The movie is not. [25 Nov 1987, p.D8]

Teen Wolf Too is a relentlessly idiotic sequel to 1985's Teen Wolf. [1 Dec 1987, p.B5]

The story is thick with implausibilities and, like the source, almost unbelievably turgid in the telling. [20 Nov 1987, p.B5]

The music video tendency to make everything literal binds Prince's third film effort too tightly, and in all the wrong places. Rather than allowing the spacious set and the music and the interaction to communicate his boiling-energy concert persona, Prince spells out every little meaning, often plopping his songs into unnatural contexts just to make the grand statement. [20 Nov 1987, p.D5]

Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest, The Running Man, is a septic tank of a movie. This atrocious futuristic drama forms a dumping ground for bad acting, derivative writing and stomach-churning violence. The movie stinks. [13 Nov 1987, p.D1]

Hiding Out is a pleasant bit of fluff; it's Back to the Future without the fantasy. It's no breakthrough in movie- making, but it's not dumb either. There are enough funny lines and enough winning performances to forgive the implausibilities and the ridiculous action scene at the end. [06 Nov 1987, p.D5]

The performances are standard brat-pack; you could rotate the casts of anything from Risky Business to About Last Night . . . into the picture and it would stay exactly the same. [6 Nov 1987, p.D1]

The production has a Disney-ish, well-scrubbed feel to it, and were it not for a sprinkling of obscenities would be G- rated. But Russkies is never quite right, even as pap. [06 Nov 1987, p.D5]

The Hidden cannot be dismissed as just a police story with a couple of aliens affixed to it. In fact, without the aliens, there wouldn't be any story. [30 Oct 1987, p.D5]

The sole mystery is the apparent collapse of Carpenter's skills as a storyteller. Prince of Darkness is shapeless and almost utterly lacking in rhythm, as if it had been slashed and then badly reassembled, like a Carpenter victim. [28 Oct 1987, p.D8]

It is surprisingly dull...Sheen and Sweeney appear dazed, or merely bored, throughout, as if they had ODd on the film's determined sleekness. The director, Peter Werner, is best known for his work on installments of Moonlighting. Alas, his TV roots are showing, and No Man's Land seems like nothing so much as a "special, two-hour episode" from the little screen. [29 Oct 1987, p.7]

The movie is full of holes, but there's never time to worry about them, and everyone's having too good a time ducking in and out of the subplots anyway. [23 Oct 1987, p.D5]

Barfly is a perfectly incorrigible comedy, a movie of unusual shape and unpredictable moves. [25 Nov 1987, p.D9]

Before it's done, Hello Mary Lou has touched most of the bases, flirting with taboos (incest, locker-room lesbianism, fingernails on the blackboard) and purloining effects from the Nightmare on Elm Street series. It's a badly made film, as awkward as can be, and long stretches of it make no sense whatsoever. Nor does it manage, as the better slasher films do, to re-create a high-school milieu of even passing authenticity. [21 Oct 1987, p.D5]

Three O'Clock High is one of those ideas that must have sounded wonderful at one point, and to be fair it still sounds better than the pop-out plots of most teen-explo projects. It turns out, however, to have surprisingly little range. Once the story is under way, there's nowhere for it to go but home room, lunch and out the door. [13 Oct 1987, p.C7]

A handsome but empty romantic thriller with the most passionless love triangle you may ever see. [9 Oct 1987, p.D1]

Keaton is funny when she's tough, and funny when she's soft; the Baby Boom combination, for all the film's calculations and shameless cooing (the baby's dubbed, for pity's sake), is quite appealing. [7 Oct 1987, p.D8]

Near Dark never drags. When it is funny, it can be wonderfully dark, and when it's scary it is wonderfully mean. Bigelow has a rough-trade sensibility that shows through just often enough. None of the romance of the vampire legend for her and Red; just blood and guts and weird trouble from that odd family down the road. The ensemble cast (three of whom, Henriksen, Paxton and Goldstein are veterans of Aliens) treats it all like red-blooded fun, the effects are swell, and Bigelow is just mean enough to bear watching. [9 Oct 1987, p.D1]

Slamdance has an unusual problem: It's too creative. Director Wayne Wang throws in so many artsy shots and technical tricks that the drama, an intricate murder mystery, is muddled. After the lights come up, you're left wondering exactly what you witnessed. [6 Nov 1987, p.D7]

For a stretch of 20 minutes or so, Like Father Like Son is as funny a film as you could hope to see. [02 Oct 1987, p.D1]

Obsession is central to the film's thesis, such as it is. The characters don't converse so much as hold forth, and Greenaway presents the landmark buildings of Rome tableaux with a devotion that seems quite fierce. Dennehy is eye-rolling good as the tormented Kracklite. But what does it all mean? [20 Nov 1987, p.D6]

The plot is rather basic when you remove the clutter. Boy gets busted, needs girl to save his soul. It's all stiff and forced. So are the performances. [10 Oct 1987, p.B6]

Real Men is too goofy for its own good, but not nearly funny enough. [21 Oct 1987, p.D5]

You may not be able to keep your lunch down after viewing his film, but you'll at least be momentarily intrigued. [24 Sep 1987, p.C6]

The movie is 75 minutes of easy entertainment, important mainly as the launching pad for Downey, whose glibness, good looks and quickness of spirit mark him as a man who may pick up as many accolades as ladies in a promising future career. [19 Sept 1987, p.B5]

The Principal has no principle. It aspires to be a gritty look at a troubled inner-city school, but despite all its tough talk and its seething students, it's a cornball fantasy. [18 Sep 1987, p.D5]

The film likewise lurches here and there, but for the most part its aim is true. Action accelerates nicely, a series of pointless cuts to parallel action in Moscow and London provides a false but convincing sense of urgency, and not until the final moments do the filmmakers run out of steam. They have an answer for that, too, in the film's coda. [28 Aug 1987, p.D5]

Though there's a scene of racial discomfort (nothing more serious) and a few rather flat-footed references to anti-war feelings back home in Hamburger Hill, the sense of time and place is missing altogether. Hamburger Hill is an all-purpose war movie with the requisite noble message -- war is hell, and futile, too -- but it could be set anywhere. In those parts of the world where local audiences will not accept an American adventure movie with the Vietnamese as vanquished foe (parts of Southeast Asia were shown Rambo with subtitles that portrayed it as a anti-Japanese commando raid from World War II), Hamburger Hill will play with few problems...Unhappily, neither screenwriter Jim Carabatsos (who did Heartbreak Ridge for Clint Eastwood) nor director John Irvin is able to provide the story any tighter focus, either. [28 Aug 1987, p.D1]

The subtle patina of make-believe created by Sayles' directorial techniques gives Matewan an old-fashioned feel that separates it from the harsh, blood-and-guts style so popular among contemporary filmmakers. [09 Oct 1987, p.D5]

The result is a kind of quiet epic of rural life, redolent of the Taviani brothers' Tuscan reveries. And though Jean de Florette is whole enough to stand on its own, there's unfinished business at the end -- enough to hook us. [25 Sep 1987, p.D5]

Born in East L.A. is a real middle-of-the-roader as comedies go -- not hysterically funny, sort of laid back in pace, with a plot as substantial as the peso -- but its heart is as warm as an enchilada. [22 Aug 1987, p.B4]

At times it doesn't make a lick of sense, and at times it's as shaky as a Poindexter memory. But it's full of goofy developments and paranoid fantasies; it's the perfect movie for its place in time. [14 Aug 1987, p.D1]

The movie isn't terribly well written, and the acting is rarely more than OK, but there's one character who brightens the screen. Seth Green plays Ronald's pain-in-the-neck kid brother Chuckie, and he's as droll as Frankie and Annette's kid in Back to the Beach. [14 Aug 1987, p.D5]

The Monster Squad is schoolyard-clever and cut to the rhythms of Saturday morning TV, within which limitations it's actually a lot of fun. It's a swell movie for kids under 13. [20 Aug 1987, p.C8]

Much of the big-surf footage is stunning; some of it is terrifying. But is it worth sitting through North Shore to get to the big sets? No way, dude. [14 Aug 1987, p.D5]

Masters of the Universe is an enjoyable escape, borrowing rather successfully from E.T., Star Wars and Back to the Future. [17 Aug 1987, p.C5]

It's more fun than you'd figure, this sendup aimed at two distinct generations, only one of which ever took Annette or Frankie seriously. You wind up, by the end, thinking of them both as awful good sports. [08 Aug 1987, p.B1]

Who's That Girl's writers botched the creation of their confection. A successful screwball comedy is like a souffle. This is a souffle made of concrete. [07 Aug 1987, p.D1]

Strangely, considering the source, the most appealing aspect of Stakeout is Badham's success with the characters. Dreyfuss and Estevez work well off one another, Stowe and Dreyfuss are a likable couple and there's something approaching depth to most of the people on screen. [7 Aug 1987, p.D5]

Superman IV works rather well as a children's movie. It even has a line or two for adults -- though not, one hastens to qualify, enough to actually warrant adult attendance. [25 July 1987, p.B1]

Though the filmmakers have clearly done their homework, and clearly care, they don't find much remarkable in the story of Ritchie Valens. Even given the short life at hand, La Bamba is as schematic and predictable as it is likable. [24 July 1987, p.D1]

Among the mysteries of Hollywood life is the terribleness of Jaws sequels; they are the very worst of a bad lot. Now comes No. 4 -- Jaws the Revenge -- and it is as wretched as it is ungrammatical. [17 July 1987, p.1D]

Rita, Sue and Bob Too is ultimately like a one-night stand. When it's all over, it leaves you, not laughing, but feeling soiled and rather depressed. [23 Nov 1987, p.C6]

The movie operates on the same principle as the first: Show that each of us, however nerdy, has value; demonstrate that an ideal appearance can mask a nasty person; and give heart to nerds of the world by presenting these losers as triumphant. It does all these things, but not nearly as well as the first Nerds. [10 July 1987, p.D5]

Watching Adventures in Babysitting is like eating a carton of candy bars. The first bites are sweet, but after a while, you're gagging. This is one gooey confection. [07 July 1987, p.C7]

Innerspace suffers from a problem afflicting many of this summer's movies: excess. First, it's too long. Then director Joe Dante (Gremlins) piles on the gadgetry and the inside-the-body special effects, and the movie buckles. [1 July 1987, p.D1]

Hanks is pleasant doing his standard playboy schtick. Aykroyd is even better, showing his ability for mimicry while revealing true feeling as an actor. He can't help it, though, that Friday's stridency grows tiresome. And that's Dragnet's main problem. As funny as the movie is, the excesses weigh it down the longer it runs. [26 June 1987, p.D1]

Something is missing in Roxanne. The greatness of Rostand's play was that it touched, underneath Cyrano's panache, a place of deep yearning, a heartwarming truth about human loving. Martin and Schepisi are satisfied with the shine. [19 June 1987, p.D1]

The acting is strong, especially from the raging Grant and the comically wistful Griffiths. Still, Withnail and I doesn't come off as an affectionate contemplation of the director's down-and-out days. [25 Sept 1987, p.5]

The Witches of Eastwick is a diverting, impeccably polished and excellently cast movie. But its charms fade fast, about as fast as it takes to leave the theater. [12 June 1987, p.D1]

The occult thriller boasts snazzy photography, passionate acting and considerable suspense. But like Marathon Man, it is empty. This pulp never rises above being pulp. [10 Jun 1987, p.D7]

It has several amiable performances, including Lithgow's usual nice guy, Lainie Kazan's savagely nosy neighbor, Margaret Langrick's petulant teen and Don Ameche as a bullion- hearted Bigfoot expert. And like Harry, in its own ham-handed, goofy way the film means so well. What the heck. [5 June 1987, p.D1]

Benji the Hunted is better-than-average family entertainment with some flaws. An irritating musical score undercuts the beauty of the nature scenes. The human performances are regrettable and look downright amateurish next to the animal. Benji is good. Just look into his haunting eyes, and you know why this doggie is a star.

It's genuinely terrifying, as scary as it is unexpected. [22 May 1987, p.D5]

This is a big, beautifully designed movie in which the filmmakers' intelligence is everywhere; it's the product of a special vision. And Brian De Palma continues to be good news from Hollywood. [3 June 1987, p.D1]

Despite some clever stunts and Varney's energetic persona-recycling, Ernest Goes to Camp, which was directed by the same man who makes the Ernest commercials, requires heroic patience for those much over 12. [25 May 1987, p.C8]

Cop II doesn't sizzle like the original. It plays like a movie made by the numbers, an excuse to trot out Murphy and let him reprise the moves that earned the first Cop $350 million and status as the top-grossing comedy in film history. [20 May 1987, p.D1]

The movie puts us back in Poltergeist territory, but it cannot approach that film's shock value. The plot is too simple. Watch the children pulverize the demons. Watch the demons terrorize the children. You get the idea. [22 May 1987, p.D5]

What Hunter does is to re-create, starting from the moments after the crime has been committed, the milieu in which its horrifying aftermath might plausibly have taken place. Without violence or suspense, River's Edge is horrifying. [29 May 1987, p.D5]

The plot, a series of missed connections, grows boring. The action scenes have no oomph. And the actors are lost. As the disheveled Dan, Cusack is charming, but he can't make this tired tourist tale go. And he can't fall down a mountain as well as Kathleen Turner. [19 May 1987, p.D5]

The production values are downright dowdy. Creepshow looks more like Cheapshow. Yet the strong writing offsets the film's weaknesses. Creepshow 2 may not have the major-league excitement of The Exorcist or Aliens, but in its own right, it succeeds. The persistent screams from the audience tell you that. [13 May 1987, p.D7]

My Life as a Dog is sad. And sweet. And sublimely funny. It shouldn't be missed. [11 Feb 1987, p.D8]

That final half-hour bears the scars of frenzied re- editing, and it's still overblown -- purple and heaving. And when Hill loses control, he loses it everywhere. Hill, who usually makes half a good movie, might make a good whole one if he ever stuck to a genre and had some fun. But he doesn't do things simply. More often than not, his movies simply do not work. [24 Apr 1987, p.D1]

Kudos to the production team for finding a perfect chimp for the lead role. Little Virgil has a look of such perfect solemnity and clearness of intent that not only do we not doubt that he could fly a plane, but we begin to suspect that he could craft a better script as well. [17 Apr 1987, p.D1]

Think for a moment about a film that depends for much of its appeal upon a romance between Michael J. Fox and Helen Slater. No, not as May-December or even July-August, but June-June, as in peers in love. It's Smurf-meets-girl -- not just a mismatch, but a confusion of species. [10 Apr 1987, p.D1]

Road is about as much fun as a flat tire. [10 Apr 1987, p.D5]

Astoundingly, considering the fall of this film series from low aim to no aim at all, the original cast remains aboard. [8 Apr 1987, p.D8]

When it's working Blind Date is frenzied and very funny. It's a return to form for Blake Edwards, who has made a good many bad movies over the past 10 years. And in Willis and Basinger there is the kind of team that, back in the good old days, would have launched a series -- not sitcom/sitdram, but big-screen. [27 Mar 1987, p.D1]

Chetwynd's design, to show the POW plight in terms as dreary as its reality, works against the movie at almost every point. [20 May 1987, p.D8]

Hollywood Shuffle isn't perfect. It usually looks as cheap as it was, and some of the messages land with a thud instead of a zing. But its central point -- hold onto your dream and your dignity -- is inspiring. A promising filmmaker has been born. [12 June 1987, p.D-5]

It's not very good, but there are redeeming features. [24 Apr 1987, p.D1]

Even the torrent of verbal abuse is rewarding in this warm, evocative comedy with a heart made not of tin, but of gold. [13 Mar 1987, p.D7]

Raising Arizona is the best comedy about kidnapping ever made. Small category, admittedly. This is a film that gets a laugh -- legitimate, unqualified, not a sick laugh at all -- out of a running gag in which a baby is left in the middle of an Arizona highway by thugs on the lam. Cars bear down, a "biker from Hell" attacks. How many filmmakers could get away with baby-in-jeopardy jokes? [10 Apr 1987, p.D1]

Junk, but amusing junk. [17 Mar 1987, p.B5]

Parker is flashy and gory and fun as usual. If only there were more to the thing. Then Angel Heart might not seem so dumb. [06 Mar 1987, p.D1]

Lethal Weapon is neither a good film nor good entertainment, but it will be a big hit. It takes two popular stories, scrambles them together and delivers something truly bizarre. It's The Cosby Show meets Rambo. [06 Mar 1987, p.D5]

The entire Nightmare on Elm Street oeuvre has been hailed by critics as a fascinating exercise in id projection and Freudian cant, which helps explain why criticism is in low regard. A better reason to see Dream Warriors, if indeed there is one, is that it's really pretty gross and neat. [06 Mar 1987, p.D2]

Prostitution is hardly a new topic for film, of course, but Working Girls was directed by a woman, working with a largely female crew, and that is unusual. So is Borden's technique, which is almost anti-technique. It's the film's strength, and its weakness. [27 Mar 1987, p.D5]

In the romantic comedy Mannequin, a dummy comes to life. The movie never does. [18 Feb 1987, p.D6]

A combination rock-and-roll tearjerker and domestic drama. It is gloomy, boring and sentimental. [06 Feb 1987, p.C5]

Black Widow lacks the deeply felt uneasiness of Five Easy Pieces or even the on-and- off rough animality of The Postman Always Rings Twice. It is a polished, professional picture, but it could use a little more heart. [6 Feb 1987, p.C5]

Penn makes all this fun. He doesn't camp, though he's not above borrowings and homages, and you can count the Hitchcocks. Penn's approach is almost elegant, even though this is little more than a bauble. We're not supposed actually to believe any of it, but merely to come along for the ride. [11 Feb 1987, p.D7]

So Woody Allen has turned nostalgic for at least a movie. He remembers the old days. He knows it's a cliche to think of those old days, whenever they were, as simpler, sweeter times. But Allen can turn the cliche on its head, and convince us that they were indeed, if not more innocent, more interesting times. And not just for him. [30 Jan 1987, p.D1]

Midler has emerged as the best funny woman on the screen. As Sandy, she makes abrasiveness appealing. But her work here can't compare with what she did in Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Ruthless People. Neither can Outrageous Fortune. [30 Jan 1987, p.D1]

Worst of all, though, is Huppert. This fine actress, who has been so effective in European films, walks through her part. Her last American film was Heaven's Gate. For her own sake, she should stay away from Hollywood. [16 Jan 1987, p.D5]

Given the rather cramped capacities of his crowd, this makes Estevez a prodigy of sorts: His Wisdom isn't good, but like Estevez' work as a performer, it's never quite bad enough to write off. [5 Jan 1987, p.C1]

The filmmakers obviously had something to say, but Dogs in Space is wretched. The photography is fine, and some of the performers do well, but sitting through this film is headache- inducing. [4 Dec 1987, p.D5]

This version was directed by Gene Saks, who is Simon's stage director, and who presumably knows what he wants. Getting it is another story -- Saks seems to have been so concerned with cooling down the play, taking the "theater" out of it, that he let the warmth go, too. [25 Dec 1986, p.B1]

Platoon lacks the sweep, the heroic (and anti-heroic) vision of Apocalypse Now, and it lacks that film's signal strength, which was its evocation of the visceral appeal, the sheer romance of war, at least to those not fighting it. Some of Coppola's images in Apocalypse Now were among the most beautiful in contemporary film. Platoon is merely terrifying. [16 Jan 1987, p.6]

Much of King Kong Lives in fact seems designed by and for invertebrates. It is well known that if you leave a monkey in a room with a typewriter for long enough, the monkey will write an intelligible story. With screenwriters, on the other hand, there's no guarantee. [22 Dec 1986, p.C5]

Please. Quick. Somebody stop Jim Carabatsos before he writes another movie. Carabatsos, author of the vile new Clint Eastwood movie Heartbreak Ridge, has created another trashy screenplay in No Mercy, thus affording stars Richard Gere and Kim Basinger the chance to sully their careers. [19 Dec 1986, p.7]