The Final Frontier is the funniest - okay, the most intentionally funny - Star Trek yet. [9 June 1989]

Renegades is not just another silly action flick; it's a well-made silly action flick, a superior brand of cotton candy. If you have a taste for the stuff, this should go down just fine. [02 Jun 1989]

Not much flair to this vehicle. [26 May 1989]

When it sticks to its strengths - broad physical comedy, Pryor's poetic profanity, Wilder's finely tuned panic - See No Evil, Hear No Evil is a modestly amusing comedy. Were it not so concerned about Speaking No Evil, it might be a good deal more. [13 May 1989]

OH DEAR, what grade to assign The Rachel Papers? Hmmm, seems this is a British coming-of-age flick that turns out to be a whole lot like the U.S. coming-of-age flicks we've seen a whole lot of. Sure, better cast, earthier language, niftier accents, but the same paint-by-number formula punctuated by the same tacked-on "be true to yourself" moral. Heck, let's be generous: passing, barely passing. [12 May 1989]

Earth Girls Are Easy is a 100-proof hoot, an intoxicatingly inventive movie that spins a fresh variation off a familiar theme. It's a high-octane frolic, pure and simple (but never simple-minded), a flick that owes more to ALF than to E.T., and far more to Busby Berkeley than to Rod Steiger. A wacky journey into the cinematic beyond, it defies every label but one: Fun, Fun, Fun. [12 May 1989]

A mere action suspense adventure lacking the depths of the original. [14 July 1989]

Despite a few wrong turns early on, the movie gathers graceful momentum and heads straight to the warm heart of the book - that fond spot located just on the safe side of sentimentality, a feel- good place that doesn't leave any feel-stupid fallout.

Had the film version of Pet Sematary, adapted straightforwardly by King himself from the novel, and directed with horrifying ineptitude by Mary Lambert (Siesta), been any good, it would have been a sizzling shockeroonie, in that it deals, to borrow King's italicized style, with things best left undealt with, notably resurrected murderous children and the terrors instilled by terminal illness. [24 Apr 1989]

Rippling with resonance, Dead Calm is Jaws in a human form, a shape profoundly complete and completely disturbing. [07 Apr 1989]

The Dream Team is a jolly romp of a movie. It won't make you think very much, but it's just about guaranteed to make you laugh. [07 Apr 1989]

With his breathy, antic delivery, pouring out his heart in staccato bursts, Cusack puts a nice loop on the sensitive teen theme. For his is an upbeat, mature brand of sensitivity, the healthy kind that makes fine discriminations, not nasty judgments.

Nothing - not great actors, brilliant direction, splendid costumes or beautiful people - could boost Troop Beverly Hills over the obstacle presented by its screenplay. [22 March 1989]

Fletch Lives exists only to provide a vehicle from which Chase can crack wise, get into ridiculous situations and put on disguises. A lot of this silliness is amusing (some of it very) and not a little of it borderline tasteless.

Despite an inspired central section involving Robin Williams as the King of the Moon and Valentina Cortese as his Queen, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a near-disaster of Ishtarish proportions. [11 Mar 1989, p.C3]

Robert Downey Jr., the kid who holds his own against James Woods in "True Believer", gives Chances Are what charm it has, but there's no saving this mystical romantic mess. It's fitting that the sexy and funny Downey has been cast as a soul trapped in another body - in Chances Are, he's imprisoned in a sitcom that's all situation and no comedy. [10 March 1989]

A nice little dream, too, hardly epic but weirdly satisfying, the kind you wake up from and dearly want to re-enter, just for another drowsy moment or two. [3 March 1989]

Like most simplifications, Lean On Me's genially despotic approach has its attractions, and it works fine as a movie. Simplification worked fine in Rocky and in The Karate Kid, too, but unlike those essentially simple films, Lean On Me oversimplifies a very complex issue. And unlike those films, Lean On Me leaves one pondering the fact that, in real life, things aren't ever simple. [9 March 1989]

Skin Deep, the latest and 36th off the line, could sum up his whole checkered career - it's that good and that bad, by turns terrifically funny and terribly flawed. [3 March 1989]

In High Hopes, Leigh regularly expresses love for the very people to whom he is putting the boot... As a satire, High Hopes is an esthetic joy. [14 April 1989]

Label this one a howler, and add a postscipt to the sequel: shoo Fly II, go forth and don't multiply. [11 Feb 1989]

THERE'S NO excuse for Her Alibi. A hyphenated hybrid like this - romance- comedy-thriller - demands a lot of stirring; if nothing else (and there rarely is much else), it must at least be smooth, colorful and easy on the palate. Instead, the stuff here goes down like lumpy porridge on a grey morning.[3 Feb 1989]

Match your expectations to the level of the humor - measurable at about knee-high to a snake's belly - and you just might enjoy Who's Harry Crumb? I mean, we're talking low comedy here, boasting more pratfalls than another losing night at the Gardens. But there is a redeeming factor in this manic equation, a high-flying blimp by the name of John Candy. [08 Feb 1989]

Just a guffaw here, a chuckle there, ho-hum, and that's all, folks. [27 Jan 1989]

PARENTS defies all categories but one - it is a virtuoso display of movie-making, a multi-textured and pyschologically intense work unimaginable in any medium except film, a tale fantastic in style yet deadly serious in its intent and absolutely horrifying in its implications. [27 Jan 1989]

A horror-less horror flick where the monstrous Thing doesn't even put in an appearance until well past the two-thirds mark. Sorry, ugly guy, but that goes way beyond fashionably late. [18 Jan 1989]

Only the comedy is successful, and only intermittently. [14 Jan 1989]

The laughs in Working Girl are the laughs of near-recognition - just good enough to make us wish they were much better.

Clive Barker is not without a sense of humor. And he's certainly not without a sense of what will scare his audiences senseless. [28 Dec 1988]

Flashy Talk Radio offers little but babble: A mindless, hollow look at a sad symbiosis. [21 Dec 1988]

Laughter, tears and Bette Midler: Santa's done a whole lot worse. [23 Dec 1988]

No matter how many times the script instructs us that Valmont is "conspicuously charming," Malkovich is not charming, conspicuously or otherwise.

Only after the Hollywood hypnotism wears off is it apparent that Rain Man, fundamentally an artsy sentimentalization of "The Odd Couple," is somewhat less than the sum of its perfect parts.

Most of this is bald, and very funny; some of it is witty, and even funnier. [14 Dec 1988, p.C9]

The problem with Sucka is that the film is more clumsy and lifeless as a comedy than most of those blaxploitation pictures were as drama. Sucka instead is so awkward as to take two steps back for every one step forward: the film uses black women, for example, as rudely as did the movies it sends up. [17 Feb 1989, p.C3]

Shtick is what Twins is all about, but there's good shtick and bad shtick, and there's enough good shtick in Twins, the majority of it involving Arnold Schwarzenegger's exposure to modern U.S. mores, to keep the momentum going. [10 Dec 1988, p.C3]

Even Dan Aykroyd and Kim Basinger together, acting their hearts out, can't move this turgid script to liftoff velocity. [15 Dec 1988]

Kurt Russell has never seemed more clever, Mel Gibson more vulnerable nor Michelle Pfeiffer more goddess-like. Once upon a time, before the pictures got small and the hills were obscured by smog, the Hollywood sign read: "Hollywoodland." That was back when Tequila Sunrise, an intelligent, escapist epic for adults, wouldn't have seemed the anomaly it seems today. [2 Dec 1988, p.C1]

In Scrooged, a sub-Saturday Night Live re-make parody of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Ghostbuster Bill Murray busts up two of the festive ghosts (Christmas Past and Future) and mugs more than Mr. Magoo. [24 Nov 1988, p.C19]

The film as a whole, beautifully drawn and gracefully set into balletic motion, teaches a few welcome lessons regarding ecology and racial tolerance. [19 Nov 1988]

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, is certainly indebted to the plastic and neon schlock of Hollywood director Frank Tashlin, but the farcical epic of actress Pepa Marcos is closer in innovative energy to the transformations of Fassbinder than to the recycling of Spielberg and De Palma. [20 Jan 1989, p.C1]

The premise of Child's Play, in which the murderer is a much-merchandised doll patterned after cartoon characters known as Good Guys, is long overdue. Unfortunately, the package in which the present arrives is often too little, sometimes too much, and always too late. [11 Nov 1988]

From its eccentric score (a mix of spaghetti western and funky blues) to its bizarre casting (ex-wrestlemanaic Roddy Piper in the lead role), the flick leaves us off-balance and guessing. By the time we figure out there's not much to guess at, the credits roll by and the jig is up. [5 Nov 1988]

The performances are pristine in their theatricality, Raul Ruiz Anchia's lighting is neo-classical in its velvety richness, and the script (by Mamet and Shel Silverstein) is unfailingly intricate and consistent, for all its flamboyant use of coincidence. But it is the art of Don Ameche's courtly, charismatic characterization that lifts Things Change above the level of a crafty, enjoyable stunt.

This is just another generic war movie of the kind that revels in combat's greater glories. You know the type - the camaraderie that never quite rings true, the plot that never once makes sense. In short, the whole bombs-bursting- in-air, truth-through-the-night jive. [21 Oct 1988]

No one can doubt there's a consistency of vision in Russell's work, though at times it seems more the vision of a great set designer than a great film director. [8 Oct 1988]

Inoffensive in its simplicity; its high, if naive, spirits send viewers out into the all too real streets clothed in the glow of a fantasy well-spun.

An experience that is sometimes unbearable and always riveting. [14 Oct 1988]

Alien Nation lives out precisely the fate of the alien nation it depicts - both full of potential, both hoping to please, and both immediately co-opted, enslaved by the same commercial forces that granted their release. [12 Oct 1988]

Sharply written by Billy Crystal and ably directed by Henry Winkler, Memories of Me turns out to be an enjoyably sentimental surprise - what it has going for it that the psychodramatic versions don't is a sense of humor, but it covers the same serious issues with a similar amount of depth. [07 Oct 1988]

At two hours and 43 minutes, Eastwood's Bird is a hypnotic, darkly photographed, loosely constructed marvel that avoids every cliche of the self-destructive-celebrity biography, a particularly remarkable achievement in that Parker played out every cliche of the self- destructive-celebrity life. [14 Oct 1988, p. C1]

David Cronenberg's gelid masterpiece.

Taken as a psychological parable, Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst is thoughtful and provocative. Taken as a political parable, it is gallingly reactionary, but it is also right, in more than one sense of the word. [28 Oct 1988]

An idiosyncratic masterpiece and one of the few films in history that gloriously earns the appellation Proustian. [25 Sep 1989]

Although Lumet has a reputation for letting his actors run wild, he keeps the reins tight here, and we're rewarded with a series of superb performances. [16 Sep 1988]

It's a masterpiece of exposition and compression. An allegorical examination of a transitional period in U.S. history. [01 Sept 1988]

Missing from Married to the Mob, written by Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns, is the freewheeling structure, but everything else that makes Demme one of the friendliest of major U.S. directors is in glorious evidence. [19 Aug 1988]

In-jokes for horror-film fans abound (the dog is named Jason, the monster in the Friday the 13th series; a cafe is the Craven Inn - Wes Craven directed the first Nightmare on Elm Street), and it's possible that those fans will be satisfied with the expensive, surreal special effects unleashed by director Renny Harlin. Everyone else is apt to agree with the teen-ager who dismisses Freddy by saying, "We all got better things to dream about." [19 Aug 1988]

This happy daydream contains Coppola's most assured work since "Apocalypse Now;" save for its modesty, it is in no way inferior to his masterpiece, "The Godfather" Saga. [12 Aug 1988]

Scorsese and Schrader have made a courageous film that people of all religions or no religion should be able to watch with identical fascination. [10 Aug 1988. pg. C.4]

The movie blows through the Brat Pack smoke screen - it is superior to Colors in that regard - to reveal the troubled, lonely and sometimes crazy males behind the macho, misogynist posturing of men in groups. You couldn't find a nicer bunch of killers. [12 Aug 1988, p.C3]

While worse films have, no doubt, touched the heart of the general public, Mac and Me is not only crass, it's boring and insulting to children's intelligence. [16 Aug 1988]

May be less than the sum of its parts, but its parts are more impressive than most other wholes around.

There is no reality here, and no style: Cocktail waters down the philosophy of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and serves it in a shot glass to hustlers. High school hustlers. [29 Jul 1988, p.C11]

This is Romero at his best - a set-piece of sustained chills all precisely shot and rhythmically cut, good enough to make us forgive (if not forget) the cast that is merely competent, and an ending that is downright tepid. But even at half-throttle, Romero can quicken the pulse. Worse than it could have been, Monkey Shines is still better than most. [29 July 1988]

The virtue of Midnight Run is not that it does anything new; the virtue is that it does everything old so well.

In The Dead Pool, Dirty Harry is downright dusty. The erstwhile right-wing San Francisco homicide inspector has mellowed so much in the fifth installment of his adventures that he's become the darling of the liberal Bay Area media and he seems almost bored by blowing people away. [13 Jul 1988, p.C7]

Nowhere in Phantasm II is there the wit of Phantasm the first. [8 July 1988]

License to Drive, directed by Greg Beeman and written by Montreal's Neil Tolkin, is not only stupid, a virtual requirement of summer teen exploitation movies, it's also nasty: it's been designed to turn its swooning target audience into a pajama party of neurotics. [08 July 1988]

In past celluloid lives Eddie Murphy has been responsible for a handful of the most popular movies ever made, which explains why he has been able to bring Coming to America to your neighborhood theatre with its misogyny, technical ineptitude and witlessness intact.

Without warning, the picture falls hard into the very trap it had so studiously avoided, the one marked Expensive Gimmick... The same feature that begins like no film you've ever seen ends like every cartoon you've always avoided.

Red Heat, a terrifically funny and always frantic flick that hides a fascinating subtext beneath its commercial veneer. Very commercial - this should be a boffo hit; and very fascinating - the premise that props up the hit speaks volumes about America in the twilight of Reagan. [17 Jun 1988, p.C1]

What can you say about a film the comic high point of which is Dan Aykroyd standing half-naked in a bathroom while extracting hairs from his nostrils with manicure scissors? For starters you can say it's bad, as bad as a film can be that looks to National Lampoon's Vacation for creative inspiration. [17 June 1988]

A loopy, loving nine innings full of comic curve balls, emotional home-runs and euphoric, summertime music.

THE PRESIDIO is a formula flick that can't even manage its own simple arithmetic. This is meant to be an action-thriller with comic overtones, the kind where a pair of mismatched cops corral the heavy-duty nasties while treating us to a steady stream of lightweight banter. Because it's a TV premise, brought to half-life by a forgettable script and bland direction, the poor thing seems mighty uncomfortable on the big screen, washed out and embarrassed, eager to abandon the pretense and rush to its rightful home in the movie-of-the-week margins. [10 June 1988]

Director Gary Sherman, a special effects maven who also co-wrote the movie, soon gives in to heavy-handed cliche.

Sure, the premise is identical age-reversal comedies, but this one uses a much higher octane, animating a tired idea with a timeless script, and the result is pop humor at its most appealing - wit and charm spiced with a measured pinch of farce and just the right hint of melancholy. [3 Jun 1988, p.E1]

Sitting through what is so far the worst movie of 1988 is enough to make any cuckoo's nest seem sane. [3 June 1988]

Rambo's return is thick with usual thrills. [26 May 1988, p.C1]

Above The Law is beneath contempt, a movie whose esthetic politics stand somewhere to the right of tyrannosaurus rex. You know the type. Take your standard-issue Vietnam vet, martial-arts-mastering, renegade cop and turn him loose on the mean streets of any photogenic city (Chicago and its El, in this neon-and-sleaze case). [26 Apr 1988]

So you figure, what the hell, go with it and enjoy it for what it is, which is C-plus, but A-minus for effort and B-plus for honesty, and since you gave the book a D-minus, you decide you're going to tell your friends to skip the book and see the movie. Then you're left with only one nagging question as you walk out of the theatre into the bright lights of whatever big city you happen to be in: how is Pepsi going to feel about Michael J. Fox doing so much coke? [1 Apr 1988]

Take Topper. Add a pinch of Pee-Wee Herman and a dollop of the Addams Family. Mix in Nightmare on Elm Street (any part will do), The Money Pit, and the lighter side of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The result will be unlike any movie ever made, and it won't begin to come close to Beetlejuice . [Apr 1, 1998]

Army life sugar-coated in self-serving memoir. [25 Mar 1988]

Stand and Deliver honors its title; it's a good news movie in a bad news world. [15 Apr 1988]

If Vice Versa becomes the hit it deserves to be - adults who accompany their kids will be glad they came along for the joyride - Reinhold may be able to flex artistic muscles that have been necessarily flaccid until now. [11 Mar 1988]

Richard Pryor can be a funny man, but not in his latest film. As static as moving pictures can get, Moving chronicles the adventures of a relentlessly middle-class family forced to relocate from choice New Jersey to nowhere Idaho. [10 Mar 1988]

Polanski has always inspired comparisons to Hitchcock, back to Cul-de-Sac and up to Rosemary's Baby and beyond, but this is the first time he has intentionally set out to replicate the thrills, chills and laughter of Hitchcock's best work. He succeeds, but with a difference: the last half-hour, at once improbable and horrible and self-referentially satiric, is pure Polanski. [27 Feb 1988]

The script (by Robert Reneau) is snappier than the movie deserves, and supplies a dose of wise-guy humor to director Craig R. Baxley's idiot version of James Bond Gets Down in Motown. [15 Feb 1988]

As rock-and-roll flicks go, director Joan Freeman's Satisfaction , is a real bar band of a movie; it's derivative, unambitious and uneven, but it's also not half bad. If you bend your mind around its most awkward moments, it also offers at least some of what the title promises. [19 Feb 1988]

It marks the first time in a decade that Sidney Poitier has worked in front of the camera. Well, after such an extended absence, maybe he wanted to limber up slowly, just a little light stretching to iron out the kinks in his actor's reflex. If so, the guy made the perfect choice. As flicks go, this is definitely a low-impact workout. [12 Feb 1988]

All the silliest racist cliches are perpetrated: the dark people with their dark magic; British actress Cathy Tyson, as a Haitian psychiatrist who is occasionally possessed by demons and lapses into frenzied love-making; evil third world politics hand-in-hand with black sorcery. [5 Feb 1988]

The first comedy about that war, Good Morning, Vietnam manages to be uproariously funny without ignoring or trivializing the tragedy. It's awkwardly contrived here and there, especially during its recon patrols into Vietnamese life, but for the most part Mitch Markowitz's skeletal script is smart enough to dig in, hunker down and stay out of Robin Williams' line of fire. [22 Dec 1987]

Nice try, spermatozoa. You look forlornly out of place in this make- believe version of reality, where pregnancy intrudes on those well placed to cope with it, and moral issues are fudged wherever possible. [15 Jan 1988]

A funny, strange and wondrous little film. [31 May 1988]

From the first stylized shot to the final comic resolution, Moonstruck is completely sui generis - hard to describe but easy to love.

The reign of the last emperor, a reign in name alone, was an exercise in style over substance; it is perhaps fitting that his cinematic biography should follow the same incarcerated course. [20 Nov 1987, p.D1]

FOR BATTERIES Not Included, intelligence is not required. [18 Dec 1987]

I'll personally toast the buns of anybody I hear saying anything good about the movie Broadcast News. Broadcast News is for boobs. It doesn't apply to us. Anyone who thinks otherwise is invited not to think, because thinking is for statues. [16 Dec 1987, p.C5]