Visually impressive, splendidly performed, thematically significant, this is a movie in full possession of every key cinematic asset except one -- a solid script. Casino is a polished vehicle with an untuned engine.

There's a giddy, absurd charm to the story, in which the strange setting only enhances the comfortable familiarity of the narrative and characters.

These days, when presidential bouquets are named Gennifer Flowers, and when we all know what Jack Kennedy did beneath the White House covers, this sort of Capra-corn, even in the guise of light comedy, just doesn't have the same taste. More salt, please, and hold the butter.

For devotees of the genre, the bad news is the best news: Bond is back and nothing has changed except the stuntman's canvas - it's bigger than ever, duly pumped up to Schwarzeneggarian standards.

The movie is a competent formula kid flick stuffed to the dimples with movie deja vu, a sop to those Hollywood-bashing politicians who want old-fashioned family values on their celluloid. [17 Nov 1995]

The result is a curious mix - a picture that simultaneously seems meanderingly loose, affording the cast plenty of performing space, and suffocatingly tight, choking off the audience from any interpretive engagement.

Director Steve Oedekerk, who also wrote the script, simply provides a frame for the string of Carrey sight gags, which come fast and constantly. Some work, some fall flat, but the overall momentum is never allowed to flag seriously.

Fans of Allen, the comedian, will be glad to hear there are more chuckles here than in his last film, "Bullets Over Broadway." Fans of Allen, the plot craftsman, will find a lot less discipline and imagination in the writing. In truth, Mighty Aphrodite is mighty slight.

The film is significantly inept even when Crawford is not on the screen. [03 Nov 1995]

At best, Leaving Las Vegas is pure alchemy -- it makes of flawed humanity a hymn, and of forlorn hope a beacon.

There's are nagging problems with the script, which feels like it has lost a few pages during its rewrites. Instead of an orderly, inexorable pressure of events, we get a surfeit of red herrings, followed by the rather uninteresting killer simply stepping out of hiding.

The movie features Eddie Murphy as a vampire who is both cool and sucks. The same evaluation might apply to the entire film, which is neither as good as it might be nor as bad as you might expect. The long- in-the-tooth Dracula story, which has been updated and set in the black community of contemporary Brooklyn, is a pulpy mishmash of horror and comedy, equal parts the product of its comedian star and its creepshow director, Wes Craven. [1 Nov 1995, p.C2]

Doomed to be cool, but not very deep. Some of this movie is grossly amusing while some of it is just plain gross. [24 Nov 1995]

Hackman is unexpectedly hilarious. With protruding top teeth and a professorial beard, he's a motormouth, badgering and abusing one minute, wheedling and fawning the next.

Talky, crude and sexist, Mallrats is significantly less funny, a flatulent sequel to the director's small start.

Growing-up films are bad enough without a shameless all-girl rip off of Stand By Me. [20 Oct 1995]

The lows never last too long - something invariably jumps out to recapture our interest or prompt a chuckle.

Strange Days, then, isn't nearly strange enough. Once the premise has lost its promise, and Fiennes's brave attempts at characterization are sacrificed to pseudo-dazzle, everything appears awfully humdrum and, yes, distinctly dated. So dated that in the crowded and pat climax, as the ball drops on the year 2000, all that's missing is Dick Clark himself - damn, it's out with the old and in with the older. [13 Oct 1995]

The latest offering from the serial scribe who scripted Showgirls has another femme with an overactive libido and not much else. [13 Oct 1995]

Like the stationary figures it portrays, Kicking And Screaming is alive at the edges; it comes with a vibrant border of trenchant asides, tossed-off remarks that blend the solace of protective irony with the sterner stuff of hard truth.

A bland, workaday detective flick that should have been much better than it is.

Giddily impudent in its execution, pummelling in its message, To Die For is finally a comedy black enough for the tabloid television age.

It's intriguing, appalling, savvy, nasty, grossly unsettling -- you may not like what you see, but you'll definitely be affected by the sight.

There's nothing even mildly intriguing, or remotely galvanizing, about Showgirls.

If you like your archetypes writ large and your sentiment over easy, then Unstrung Heroes is the flick for you. [15 Sep 1995]

This is an adaptation that must have been hard to screw up, yet screwed up it has been. If the movie is far from dreadful, it's even further from the searing experience it could have been.

Take nothing seriously - not the action, not the gore, not the plot, not the theme. Instead, view Desperado as it's meant to be seen - a comedy - and you're in for an unalloyed treat; heck, you're in for one of the funniest flicks of the year.

Respectable by the tube's standards, even a cut above dumbed-down Hollywood, but hardly the stuff of creative renewal.