Once you've embraced a show for its stupidity, you might as well go all the way and applaud its dullness, triviality and bad taste.

The plot falls with a thud, but the movie is surprisingly involving owing to performances by Connery, who is always an unfaltering standard of honesty and truth; by Fishburne, who has to flip-flop his meanness for frustrated indignation in the end; and by Harris, who actually seethes so hard the veins stand out on his bald skull.

Tedious, unfunny.

The Quick and the Dead takes on a more serious tone - as if, even in this loonily amoral environment, we're supposed to care about atrocities. The film builds to a satisfyingly catastrophic climax full of biblical flames and fluttering bank notes, but there's far too much dead time along the way.

Smart and unsentimental as it is, Shallow Grave is more than a little forbidding.

Here he has Whoopi Goldberg, Mary-Louise Parker, Drew Barrymore and James Remar to distract us from the depths to which Ross habitually stoops in the never-ending quest to reacquaint an audience with its cheapest emotions.

The Secret of Roan Inish freely mixes Celtic myth and everyday reality. But "Roan Inish" is a different kind of ride, less intentionally rollicking and more reverential.

Delpy and Hawke begin to grow on you and Linklater and his actors achieve a point midway through the film when the characters are so attractive and smart and emotionally daring that you'll be happy to spend the night with them.

Legends of the Fall never makes you think too hard; its woes-of-a-proud-family formula takes a back seat to a self-conscious visual style that strains toward the level of myth.

Nobody's Fool belongs to that hoary but no longer frequently seen genre, the slice of life. And for at least some of its duration, Benton - creator of more oleaginous cuts of celluloid, like Places in the Heart - slices keenly and artfully. We get a good sense of the nature of existence in snowbound North Bath, N.Y., where the advantages and shortcomings of small-town life are sometimes hard to tell apart.

Demon Knight may be a good career move by director Ernest Dickerson ( "Juice" ), proving that he can work with a reasonably large budget on a genre film. But the picture breaks no ground, and in terms of his own development, it's hardly a step forward.

Loach's film offers something dearer than any crowd-pleaser can: the bracing consolation of a truth told without dilution.

Still, Singleton's willingness to take risks makes this a worthy, thoughtful film. Especially noteworthy: His sensitive handling of a love triangle between Kristen and her boyfriend and Kristen and another woman.

There's not much mystery here; there's only one outcome that could possibly make dramatic sense. And once you realize that, there's not much to do besides watch some very adept performers chew on their lines.

[Krishnamma] gives the story a dimension of pent-up anguish and melancholy.

It's clever but not often original.

Aside from avuncular Lewis and two-bricks-shy-of-a-load Dunaway, this movie's greatest asset is Depp. With his scooped-out cheeks, flower petal mouth and an innately balletic approach to communicating with the camera, he is as natural a performer as film has seen in many years.

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]

[Nair's] sure touch with the details of social decorum carries the film through. [14 Feb 1992, p.D3]

At times, the movie, which has tedious stretches that blunt its charm, is more like a really good idea than a successfully realized picture. [17 Nov 1989, p.C2]

The animation is dazzling (two-thirds of the movie is set underwater). The love story between mermaid Ariel (the sweet voice of Jodi Benson) and mortal Prince Eric (Christopher Daniel Barnes) is fairy-tale wonderful. And there is a slew of terrific side characters that make the movie as entertaining for adults as it is for children.

Oliver & Company comes across as a rather shabby transitional work, one that lacks the sophistication of today's 'toons and doesn't hold up to the Disney classics of yesteryear.

A poignant and racy movie. The dancing is pretty great, too.

Kurosawa pulled out all the stops with Ran, his obsession with loyalty and his love of expressionistic film techniques allowed to roam freely.

It's a glimmering hunk of fractured brilliance riddled with Orwellian paranoia encased in a production design seemingly pieced together from the shared dreams of Franz Kakfa and Salvador Dali, and shot from cruelly low angles.

To Live and Die in L.A. is as urgent and exhilaratingly paced as anything William Friedkin's done.

It's the boys' most immediately gratifying movie: The goods are delivered in a hearse.

Part aerobics workout, part self-styled dreamscape, Sense is a hyperactive piece of performance art that begins as the stripped-down dress rehearsal of a garage band and builds into a mighty, exhausting spectacle that shakes as much ass as it kicks. [Review of re-release]