Mr. Zieff seems never to have determined what sort of romance he wanted to show, and as a result the movie is constantly contradicting itself.

As a film about heroism, it is chiefly remarkable for its gutlessness.

This often compelling window into the boys’ culture is muddied by overly slick stylization.

Lots of people will probably like The Kentucky Fried Movie, just as they like Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's hamburgers. But popularity is still no reason for deifying mediocrity.

Ghost Stories is the third anthology film by this foursome of Indian filmmakers. As with any samplers, however, there are some tastes better left forgotten and others one hopes will be expanded into fuller, even more terrifying forms.

Peter Werner, who has directed some stylish television shows (''Moonlighting'' episodes and the mini-series ''L.B.J.: The Early Years'') is competent but dull here. The endless car chases through parking garages and close-ups of the two friends talking seem conceived for a television-size scale and budget, then blown up to fill a larger screen.

There isn’t enough in the way of good jokes or clever references to investigators of yore to make the film appealing, and the flatness of Timmy’s delivery, which is supposed to scan as deadpan, doesn’t contain enough nuances to make much of the humor land.

It's a shapeless mass of film stock containing some brilliant moments and a lot more that are singularly uninspired.

Just as the much grander Jaws became less scary the moment its mechanical shark appeared, the early virtues of Land collapse once the island is reached and the traffic jam in artificial monsters develops.

King works to portray a tight mesh of relationships around Cole, directing Elizabeth Palmore’s valiant adaptation of the sensitively rendered Carter Sickels novel. But lacking a strong central performance from Ettinger — who gets stuck on a half-pained, half-exasperated setting — much of the movie feels like a series of comings and goings, entrances and exits.

The cast perform with conviction, and the whole movie is attractively, solidly put together. But its dramatic components, fraught as they are, are tepidly delivered.

Horse Girl delves into a troubled mind only to get lost among its oddities, forgetting the sensitivity that drew it there in the first place.

The most successful sequences are the ones that find new ways of illustrating the meaning of a poem besides lingering on the face of the performer uttering purposefully syncopated and painstakingly intonated lines.

Seen with or without foreknowledge of its methods, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is only fitfully engaging — suspect as documentary, insubstantial as fiction.

Formally lively, The Nowhere Inn is a true meta exercise in the sense that the more derivative and self-conscious its conceptual gambits seem (stick around: The reflexivity continues after the end credits), the more it proves its ostensible point.

There is plenty of drama, and some hard feelings . . . but not a lot of intrigue or honest emotion. I guess if that’s what you’re after, it’s best to stick to Twitter.

A horror film that is not so much frightening as it is depressing. It is thin and dopey, which is perfectly O.K., but in place of invention it uses contrivance, and in place of imagination it uses shock.

Tiwari is better at probing the emotions under the drama than building a nail-biting, rah-rah finish, though she tries.

By the time Beauvais dismisses some chestnut trees as “bland,” the movie screams nothing so much as the pained self-absorption of depression — an anguished revelation, but dead-on.

Though Jessie Buckley, as Wynne’s suspicious wife, and Rachel Brosnahan, as an amusingly pushy C.I.A. operative, add welcome jolts of female energy, The Courier is essentially the story of an extraordinary male friendship. The men’s mutual compassion peaks too late to save the picture, but is no less moving for that.

To appreciate it fully, however, one must have a completely uncritical fondness for Kirk Douglas as he acts his heart out in two roles; for picturesque landscapes; for silly plots, and for dialogue that leans heavily on aphorisms too homespun to be repeated in a big-city newspaper.

A little bit of Into the Night is funny, a lot of it is grotesque and all of it has the insidey manner of a movie made not for the rest of us but for moviemakers on the Bel Air circuit who watch each other's films in their own screening rooms.

The intersectional core of the movement is rightfully emphasized, yet in the apparent push to make this movie as instructional and inspirational as possible, the dialogue gets saddled with some heavy-handed exposition.

Amiable and colorful as it is, the movie is also spectacularly inconsequential.

The Stepfather is too often disappointingly thin.

Despite its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time, its superstar cast and its $23 million budget, Mr. Babenco's Ironweed is skeletal, a mere outline of Mr. Kennedy's far more resonant book.

C’mon C’mon is a nice movie about characters who are so nice that I almost feel bad for not being nicely disposed toward them or this movie, even with Joaquin Phoenix as the guy and Gaby Hoffmann as the sister.

The material itself, thoroughly unsurprising on the stage, is if anything even more so on the screen.

There is nothing objectionable about Michael Bully Herbig’s glossy political thriller, Balloon, but there’s nothing particularly exciting about it, either.

As amusing as these interludes are, they read as attempts to force an exaggerated sense of mystery into an ultimately simple and moralistic tale about the futility of vengeance.

Rhinestone isn't unrelievedly terrible. It is helped by a director, Bob Clark, who treats the material good- humoredly and takes it lightly, as well as by a funny supporting cast.

Having been handed a script that, at its best moments, is a wan though benign reminder of the original version of The Thing, Mr. Schepisi seems uncertain whether to distract the audience's attention by decor or to send up the cliches of a certain kind of science-fiction. Unfortunately, he plays it straight most of the time. [16 May 1984, p.17]

Something like a sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The characters are different, but the perspective on teen-age Americana, West Coast-style, is very much the same. This time around, though, the material is less funny.

While this latter-day noir never builds up the froth of lurid delirium that brings genre pictures into a headier dimension, it’s got enough juice to hold your attention.

The River has a meticulously detailed physical production and, from time to time, is acted with passion by its cast. Yet its ideas are so profoundly muddled that the film must run mainly on sentimentality.

The movie is full of the kind of atmosphere that can be created by elaborate sets, dim lighting and misty landscapes, though it has no singular character or dominant mood.

The High Note is pleasant enough but disappointingly timid and thoroughly implausible.

THE muddy football game that concludes The Best of Times is such a rouser that it almost makes up for the incomplete passes and stopped runs that precede it.

Imagine a Chekhov play without drama, an Oscar Wilde farce without humor, a Visconti film without desire, or a very long party at the home of a distant acquaintance, and you will have some idea of Malmkrog, Cristi Puiu’s latest film.

It’s all very resonant stuff, performed by an earnest and committed cast. But Sea Fever speeds through these turns of plot as if to check them off a list, with characters dropping dead before they’ve had a chance to earn our sympathy.

[It] has a gentle approach to its characters and an occasionally striking visual style. What it doesn't have is much momentum or originality.

Based on Fisher’s own life experiences, Inside the Rain switches erratically between comedy and drama while juggling many half-realized plot threads. But the movie’s strange, inconsistent rhythm ultimately works as a reflection of Ben’s manic and depressive states.

Miss Peters is funny and charming lip-synching Helen Kane's I Want to Be Bad, and Mr. Martin is something of a revelation as a danceman. The movie, though, is not easy to respond to. It's chilly without being provocative in any intellectual way.

Craig’s comic delivery belabors gags that should run light on their feet. Rather than serving up a variety of zingers, the movie settles for one joke per character, repeated endlessly. . . . Instead, the best bits of comedy come from physical slapstick.

Bad Therapy is the cinematic equivalent of lukewarm water.

The shot-calling undermines the movie’s pro-psychedelics argument, because there is no way to control for the psychosomatic effects of starring in a documentary. Nor does Dosed do much to counter or even address objections to mushrooms or iboga as treatments, although it does include firm warnings about the need for supervision.

Raiff deserves credit for an unexpectedly elliptical coda, but much of the chatter between the leads has the emo-tedium of dorm room blather.

Spanning more than half a century, Tigertail goes back and forth in time, tracing the events that allowed Pin-Jui to achieve his American dream yet made him so aloof to his loved ones. It does this to mixed results.

Mr. Bronson is stony as ever, and a little more nattily dressed.

The sub-90-minute run time isn’t an emblem of concision; the movie simply ends too soon.

The Schrader screenplay, based on an original story by Mr. Schrader and Mr. De Palma, is most effective when it's most romantic, and transparent when it attempts to be mysterious.

Despite Weitz’s sensitive direction and a superb cast — including Frankie R. Faison as Marian’s patient husband, DeWanda Wise as Matt’s patient love interest and Paul Reiser as his patient boss — Fatherhood can’t quite deliver.

It’s always nice to see characters break free, but you need to care whether they do. One insurmountable problem with this story is that Iris just isn’t interesting enough and certainly not developed enough either as a character or in terms of the performance.

Random Harvest is a strangely empty film. Its characters are creatures of fortune, not partisans in determining their own fates. Miss Garson and Mr. Colman are charming; they act perfectly. But they never seem real. And a sense of psychiatric levels is not conveyed in either the script or direction.

As slick as a blood spill and as single-minded as a meat grinder, Nobody hustles us along with a swiftness that blurs the foolishness of its plot and the depravity of its message.

Like the project itself, Spaceship Earth winds up caught in the gulf between rigor and showmanship. As entertaining as it can be, it is also disappointingly deferential to its subjects — the work of a filmmaker in thrall to characters who have welcomed him inside the bubble.

The revelation of Lipstick is another Hemingway, first name Mariel, Margaux's 14-year-old sister, who plays her sister in the film. As the chief witness to the events within the movie, and its ultimate victim, she gives an immensely moving, utterly unaffected performance that shows up everything else as a calculated swindle.

Because much of the rest of the story is so underdeveloped — notably Claire’s intimate life with her frustratingly generic children — the character overwhelms everything, including the fragile realism.

Drawing on a fascination with cults and utopian communities, the director and co-writer, David Marmor, has created a mildly entertaining survival story whose depiction of psychological indoctrination far outstrips its generic dips into torture.

Sandberg started his career in small horror films, and doesn’t seem to have much ambition to scale up. Most of the sequences are cut from medium shots strung together without much style — they may as well be a "Saturday Night Live” sketch.

In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice, and hearing it in all its aching, swaggering glory, you understand how it set off an earthquake.

Even with the personal elements, the lean feature also feels like an educational program, to a fault.

There’s a pleasing humility and introspection to this Bruce — a ruler no longer sure if his patriotic purpose is worth the carnage. His joints may be stiffer than his resolve; but, in placing the warrior temporarily aside, Macfadyen and his director have helped us more clearly to see the man.

A pulsating rage at the way society neglects women in particular, its weakest members in general, courses through the movie. More than the displays of flayed flesh, it’s what sticks.

Yes, the computer-generated colors, overseen by the director Cal Brunker, are bright, the pups have soulful eyes . . . and the story line . . . is, um, a story line.

Despite some flourishes (such as a mirror-like crystal cave), “Transformania” feels locked into the routine rhythms of its plotting and makes one-note jokes out of its human incarnations.

The film, ultimately, still lacks Liberto’s own sense of agency.

If the movie’s points can be well taken, its rhetorical strategies are often facile.

Leopold and Persi are both compelling performers, but the writer-director Yuval Hadadi renders their characters with little subtlety.

Despite the movie’s sympathy for the high stakes of Henry’s adolescence, the myopia of his point of view settles over “Chemical Hearts” like a layer of grime.

I don't automatically object to contemporary allusions, but I prefer to find them myself, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller is so busy pointing them out to us that the effect is to undercut its narrative drive and the dignity of its fiction.

Spelling the Dream is a film about winning, delivered with glossy visuals and a gratingly optimistic score that draws to a close with its champion showered in confetti — an obvious symbol for this overarching (and under-questioned) celebration of American multiculturalism.

While Clouds is as doe-eyed and puppyish as an acoustic serenade, Baldoni is wise to recognize that attention must be paid to Zach’s survivors.

The film is invested in accurately depicting the details of its character’s lives, but its collection of studied impressions doesn’t coalesce into a coherent final portrait.

The movie was directed by Jack Gold from a screenplay by John Briley and it's fuzzy on a number of key issues that possibly could have made it fun, had they been sharper.

Except for the locations, which are real, and the color, which is color, the whole thing suggests the dim listlessness of the late late show edging toward the catatonia of 3 A.M.

Pakula, when he is not in dulging in subjective camera, strives to give his film the look of structural geometry, but despite the sharp edges and dramatic spaces and cinema presence out of Citizen Kane, it all suggests a tepid, rather tasteless mush.

The Song Remains the Same is a movie to listen to Led Zeppelin by. If you want to listen to Led Zeppelin. If you don't, there's no point going. If you do, it's still a dubious proposition...The scenes showing the group performing are more informative though not much more powerful.They are dominated by the singer, Robert Plant. A great mass of yellow curls tumbling around his shoulders, Mr. Plant sashays around the stage, posturing, pouting and conducting a meaningful relationship with the microphone. It looks like a sheep trying to seduce a telephone pole.

It is truly providential that a new horror melodrama called The Blob is so woodenly presented on the whole, for a little astute showmanship applied to such a plot would have been enough to scare the quills off a porcupine.

It is not until Footlight Parade has been struggling through its plot for more than an hour that the fragments of song, costumed nymphs and technical virtuosity are finally integrated in a complete performance.

As Feral — directed by Andrew Wonder from a script he wrote with Priscilla Kavanaugh and Jason Mendez — moves forward, it doesn’t always do a great job of splitting the difference between a raw depiction of harsh reality and ostentatious deck-stacking.

Like the stage show, this Technicolored shindig, which laughingly pretends to be a biography of the famous swimmer, Annette Kellerman, is a luxuriance of razzle-dazzle that includes Hippodrome acts, water ballets, bathing suit shows, diving performances, low comedy, anachronisms and clichés. It also includes an abundance of Miss Williams and Victor Mature, but it does not include the felicities of a reasonably fascinating script.

Amiably anecdotal, the movie gets wry results from Dolan and other players, including Rob Brydon as a would-be ladies man and Tamsin Greig as a “hipper” mom than Sue.

Zaree makes an eloquent and arresting protagonist, though her documentary is a bit too tidy for its own good.

The harmony among the kids, particularly the older girls Kari (Lidya Jewett) and Sarah (Eva Hauge), is the film’s greatest asset, and the director, Elissa Down, uses their natural charm as a crutch for the run-of-the-mill story.

For a film granted so much up-close access with its subject, Picture of His Life hears surprisingly little from Nachoum himself. Between vérité clips of the journey, the film is inundated with archival footage.

The movie tries to convince you that Douglas is better than his worst self and can transcend the dehumanizing degradations in which he’s mired. But not even the filmmakers seem convinced, which may explain why they embrace baroque brutality topped by a dollop of audience-mollifying sentimentality.

In the end, Now and Then doesn't work well enough as nostalgia for adults or as a story that girls today might identify with. Yet its young ensemble makes it vibrant and enjoyable, even when it fails to surprise.

This is a pretty movie to be sure, with attractive cinematography, period costume and production design. But the film has no political or philosophical weight, and it is ultimately a movie that is as hard to take seriously as its somewhat dunderheaded protagonist.

Jones’s former affiliation presumably helped with access; adherents seem to trust her, and some clips are credited to the church. It also gives her a complicated, at times surprisingly sympathetic outlook on the cult.

For all the sincere and shrewd direction and the striking outdoor photography, this R. K. O. melodrama fails to traverse its chosen ground.

Complications culminate in epiphanies and brief triumphs, as is customary. But this genial, well-intentioned movie never quite lands a real emotional punch.

What's remarkable is how seldom it delivers. For all its technical brilliance, not even Ms. Foster's intense, accomplished performance in the title role holds much surprise.

The satire of the 50's is more bland than biting, dependent on authentically garish costumes and sets. And when the horror-film scenes begin to intrude on normal life (what is hanging from the cellar ceiling, anyway?) Mr. Balaban can't make the dark elements seem comic enough to mesh with the rest of this nightmarish joke.

Raggedy Man is something like a country-and-western ballad that relates a supposedly sad, melodramatic story but whose simple, repetitive, upbeat rhythms effectively deny the awfulness of the events being sung about.

Too listless to fizz and too peculiar to win us over, French Exit, directed by Azazel Jacobs, is hampered by clockwork quirkiness and disaffected dialogue.

The mood is meditative, the camera patient; yet the film is too dramatically shy and narratively slight to stir.

The competing agendas surrounding the case would prevent anyone from making a cohesive Hawkins documentary, and Storm Over Brooklyn never settles on a satisfying point of view.