With a few quiet, moving scenes and a lovely ending, the film betrays an artist's touch, no matter how hard Kitano tries to make it look easy.

With the exception of a couple of inspired moments, Mary Reilly is merely a curious variation of an often-told story.

A scary example of bad movies happening to good people.

As cosmetically sanitized revisions of history go: This is as good as it gets.

The needle on the laugh-o-meter barely budges.

The script, based on British pulp writer James Hadley Chase's novel "Just Another Sucker," is a muddle, and no actors, no matter how compelling or talented, could make its silly dialogue work.

You can draw a straight line from "Reservoir Dogs" to "Pulp Fiction" to Suicide Kings.

It's that predictable sweetness that makes any of this more than just bearable.

Chain Reaction is one explosion after another, none of which seem to advance the . . . uh . . . plot. But, of course, in a movie this lead-footed you spend more time wondering what the filmmakers were thinking, or if they were thinking, than about the few plot-like fragments that do present themselves now and then.

A laughably disconnected hostage drama that rails against the perceived nightmare of inner-city public schools.

An edgy, hypnotic entertainment that's like a Club Med production of "Lord of the Flies."

One of the most blithely, giddily ridiculous movies to come along in ages.

The ordinariness of the material gives way to the winning personalities of the stars.

The movie itself simply misses the mark.

Given Midler's comic skills, which haven't been displayed much in her recent films, Hocus Pocus could've been a nice fat slice of goofy fun. But in the hands of director Kenny Ortega, the choreographer/music-video director who created the movie-musical disaster ''Newsies,'' Hocus Pocus is just loud and chaotic -- a good-natured mess that sputters and flares and grounds out before our eyes. [16 July 1993, p.C1]

The picture is a relentless blast of color and movement that's based on the old TV show, but boils down to a supercharged version of old-time Saturday-afternoon movie serials.

Dante's Peak expands the concept of badness in movies.

You feel the full weight of the movie's three hours, since the filmmakers only had 90 minutes' of plot.

A weakly performed rehash of master-slave role-reversal tales.

A piece of baseball fluff...Costner cinema, pure and simple.

It's a tale of two missused Academy Award winners trying to justify their participation in a moribund, noisome redux of any disposable prison movie you care to remember by lobbing Oscar clips at each other.

The chief terrorist is played nicely with war-weary desperation by Marcel Iures, a Romanian actor with the sucked-in cheeks and ennui of a Jeremy Irons.

Carrey's style is to keep the jokes moving so quickly and with such force that you can hardly stop to consider how stupid they are.

A great film of the urban, North American night. His voyeuristic camera roams the streets that come alive with sexual promenades after sunset, and it lingers in noisy, jam-packed bars, watching men search for the man of their fantasies.

An impressively competent "how will male teen star get with female teen star at high school dance?" romance.

Blakeney can't decide if this is a quirky romantic comedy or a quirky mob essay, and you can see the movie thinking itself into a rhythmless hole with cement shoes.

In Total Eclipse, directed by Agnieszka Holland, they fail to persuade us that their versions of the 19th century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine were great artists. They just seem like rattle-brained hedonists with superiority complexes. Genius ought to be as alluring as any other well-developed human attribute, like beauty or sexuality. If this is genius, we are in trouble.

There's an unstable genius brewing beneath Mary Katherine's scarlet headband. As "SNL" women go, only Gilda Radner seemed as willing to rib so much of herself for our pleasure.