Multiplicity weaves such an uninteresting plot around its bland, generic principals that it rarely reaches the absurdist heights its premise demands.

Two reasons it's impossible to resist "Independence Day": because of its pitch-perfect cartoonish dialogue ("Now you're never gonna get to fly the space shuttle if you marry a stripper!") and because the Captain, like Indiana Jones, is so unflappably tough.

A whopping wrong turn throws this lightweight, benign-looking movie terminally off course.

Mr. Murphy proves himself a surprisingly strong actor here, playing Sherman with sweetness and poignancy, not to mention loads of funny weight-related humor.

Written mostly as ensemble comedy, Striptease grinds to a halt whenever the star goes through her dance paces, most of which prove awkwardly strenuous and are daring only by the standards of A-list movie stars.

Gratifyingly complex and beautifully told, this tale explores a huge array of cultural, racial, economic and familial tensions. In the process, it also sustains strong characters, deep emotions and clear dramatic force.

Eraser means to show off the star's standard persona against a backdrop of lavish special effects, which is certainly a formula that's worked before. But this is no "Terminator," since its tricks are so much more arbitrary and over-the-top.

The latest and most uncertain of Disney's animated efforts, with its manic mood swings and cloying, none-too-cuddly hero.

This film maker's supremely tactile, sensual style and his taste for exoticism are captivatingly on display in Stealing Beauty, even if the film's philosophizing sometimes lacks the intellectual heft of a cotton puff.

A grim, sour Jim Carrey comedy that erases the boundary between anarchic humor and sociopathic malice.

Seldom is it clearer that a film is nothing more than high-gloss jokey escapism, or that when visual cliches are this relentless they become weirdly fascinating in their own right.

The pleasures are familiar, but not the least bit inspired.

Though Heavy begins beautifully, it isn't always able to sustain its balance between narrative subtlety and inertia.

The Arrival, like so many science-fiction films, begins as a promisingly eerie mixture of pseudo-scientific exposition and chilly paranoia. But once its plot has been bared, it turns into a muddled chase movie filled with glaring inconsistencies.

Dragonheart joins Mission: Impossible in wasting the talents of charismatic European actors, and in cobbling together exciting-looking ads that are much better than the finished film.

Instead of building sustained comic set pieces, it takes a machine-gun approach to humor. Without looking at where it's aiming, it opens fire and sprays comic bullets in all directions, trusting that a few will hit the bull's-eye. A few do, but many more don't.

A sleek, whooshingly entertaining update of the vintage television series.

Ought to please an undemanding kiddie audience, but Flipper offers little else in the way of excitement or plot.

Hurtling pace, by-the-numbers character development and exotic science. Tornado-chasing suddenly takes on a sex appeal not usually associated with horrendous storms.

The film's energy begins to flag after less than an hour, and as its pulse slackens it turns into a quirky allegory, punctuated with brilliant visionary flashes that partially redeem a philosophic ham-handedness.

Mr. Schlesinger draws lively performances out of his cast and surprising variety out of the film's secondary sights, which range from a gala soiree to a heap of steaming dung.

Isn't much when it comes to either deliberate or inadvertent humor. But it does have a few amusing moments.

A surprisingly skittish fable of adolescent powerlessness, grandiosity and the nursing of psychic wounds. As the witchcraft escalates, the movie exchanges its psychological acuity for garish special effects that hammer home a ponderous warning to once and future witches: be good or else.

The film's greatest directorial success is in finding a thoroughly entertaining way of inviting the audience to share Valerie's point of view.

The team that gave the world "Dumb and Dumber" returns with something feeble and feebler.

Ms. Garofalo, in a lovely, winning performance, gives Abby lots of heart while also making defensive snappishness a big part of her charm.

Where most movies portraying sociopathic behavior make some attempt at psychological explanation, Butterfly Kiss offers no background to Eunice's craziness. As she throws herself furiously through a bleak highway landscape of anonymous gas stations and convenience stores, she appears to be a self-created avenging demon radiating a powerful but loopy charisma.

Mulholland Falls is so well cast and relentlessly stylish (thanks to some fine technical talent assembled here) that its sheer energy prevails over its shaky plot.

But the film, written by Phoef Sutton and Lisa-Maria Radano and directed by Richard Benjamin in a style cute enough to peel paint off the walls, can't do much to generate romantic sparks between its two young leads.

Couch-potato comedy can't get any lazier than Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, but that counts for most of this film's slender charm. [19 Apr 1996, p.C8]

The Kids in the Hall's first feature isn't anything more than a sloppy showcase for the group's costume-changing tricks, but sometimes its sheer chutzpah can be amusing. Just as often, flashes of complete plot incoherence or atrocious taste spoil the effect.

Easily summarized, the plot is entirely secondhand.

Celtic Pride has ingredients that could have made for a tough knockabout farce. Unfortunately, the film, directed by Tom De Cerchio from a screenplay by Judd Apatow, doesn't know the meaning of the term "light touch.

The movie's mentality is su'med up in one cutaway shot. A split second before a man's face is about to be shoved into a boat propeller, the movie flashes to another man pushing half an orange onto the head of a squeezer.

Memo to Shaquille O'Neal: Don't give up your night job.

Despite its underlying predictability, Courage Under Fire manages warmth, intelligence and a healthy share of surprises.

A nasty little thriller that starts out on a somewhat higher plane but eventually trades in its level head for conventional scare tactics and violence.

A technological marvel, arch and innovative with a daringly offbeat visual conception. But it's also a strenuously artful film with a macabre edge that may scare small children. And beyond that, it lacks a clear idea of who its audience might be.

Pared down to a farfetched plot and paper-thin motives, the story relies on an overload of tangential subplots to keep it looking busy. [3 Apr 1996, p.C15]

In A Family Thing, an earnest upbeat fable about the meaning of brotherhood in America, first-rate film acting infuses a contrived story with enough flesh, blood, wrinkles, warts and beads of sweat to make it intermittently surge to life.

The film is full of gratifying gags, but it also has to strain for newly enlarged scope.

Mr. Russell's wonderfully mad odyssey of a movie, in which a man sets out to find his biological parents and winds up meeting more weirdos than Alice found down the rabbit hole.

With a fine vengeance along with flashes of great, unexpected tenderness, Mr. Solondz lethally evokes every petty humiliation that his seventh-grade heroine can't wait to forget.

Mr. Lee isn't as successful at shaping a story around Girl 6, but enjoying her company is all his slender, sunny film really tries to do.

The profound pleasures they offer derive not only from their deft metaphysical playfulness but also from their storytelling genius.

One thing you can say for Ed, a chimpanzee whose baseball-playing expertise propels the Rockets, a minor-league team, to glory: his behavior is a lot more human than any of the other characters in this flimsy, laugh-free family comedy

A good, taut movie for red-meat action audiences, but it's not one you will be seeing on an airliner. Not ever.

For all its exaggerated ordinariness, this film seems to start where others leave off.

An American remake with plenty of new pizazz.

[Almodovar’s] returns to the mordant but sympathetic comedy of his early, best work. Though the new film is not as antic as "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," it is funny and free of the nasty undertone that has made him seem tired and tiresome lately.

While its slender, two-tiered plot links love affairs that happen largely by accident, the film's real interest seems to lie in raffish affectation. Mr. Wong has legitimate visual flair, but his characters spend an awful lot of time playing impish tricks.

As cinematic Armageddons go, this one is a real bust...Although it succeeds in crudely outlining the fable of a magic toy box and the demonic secrets carried down in the bloodline of its inventor, it is otherwise incoherent and (except for Mr. Bradley's Pinhead) wretchedly acted. Farewell, Pinhead and company. You won't be missed.

There was more Allenesque potential in (Schaeffer's) earlier ``My Life's in Turnaround'' (directed with Donal Lardner Ward) than there is in this painfully cute concoction, which is about two old friends with a pact to leap off the Brooklyn Bridge. There are too many occasions when the viewer may wish they would just go ahead and jump.

When a poetically inclined film fixates on the same image too often, it is a sign that the movie may have succumbed to its own dreamy esthetic. That is one of the problems of The Neon Bible, the English director Terence Davies's hallucinatory portrait of the American South half a century ago.

If Down Periscope, directed by David S. Ward, has the ingredients for a lively spoof of everything from Mutiny on the Bounty to Crimson Tide, they are slapped together so crudely that nothing gels, including any sense of a coherent ensemble. The tone of the acting, which is set by Mr. Grammer's blandly laid-back performance, is all wrong for a genre that demands over-the-top hamming.

The movie is a giddy triple somersault of a film that makes no sense whatsoever, although in its best moments it is as much fun to watch as a death-defying circus act.

A gloomy film with a story whose outcome... is an especially foregone conclusion.

A mildly facetious tone limits Anderson's film to the lightweight, but the collective enthusiasm behind this debut effort still comes through. What's best about Bottle Rocket is not the laid-back pranks that inflate its story to feature length but the offbeat elan with which that story is told.

Doesn't deliver.

In this sendup of Treasure Island, there are no compelling heroes or villains, and the suspense is minimal. Most of the fun lies in watching the Muppets defuse the swashbuckling tale of its scariness by superimposing their own precociously verbal identities onto their characters.

But this knotty investigative thriller has trouble achieving the rock-solid credibility to hold an audience in thrall.

Has warmth and good cheer. The film is loosely focused, but its ensemble cast is as affable as anything on television these days.

Mr. Woo orchestrates his giddy, daring stunts on a newly spectacular level. There's plenty of physical audacity on screen.

Despite great scenery, the distinctive visual ideas of Mr. Scott ("Alien," "Blade Runner") and the strong dramatic presence of Mr. Bridges, most of White Squall remains listless and tame.

The two-minute trailer for Black Sheep is so crammed with pratfalls that it appears funny. But a full hour and a half leaves this comedy looking one-note and virtually laugh-free...This may sound like a John Belushi role, but Mr. Farley has little of Mr. Belushi's gift for sneaky, subversive mischief. He spends his time here just getting his thumbs caught in a car's hood, being dragged on his stomach until sparks fly, etc. Almost all the film's jokes involve physical pain.

Mr. Rodriguez demonstrates his talents more clearly than ever -- he's visually inventive, quick-witted and a fabulous editor -- while still hampering himself with sophomoric material.

In Mr. Holland's Opus, Mr. Dreyfuss gives a warm and really touching performance. He's firmly in control of the film's comic moments and just as comfortable delivering the film's calculatingly Capraesque payoff: a good cry.

Thoroughly incoherent... A dreary fizzle. [12 Jan 1996, p.C12]

The movie should have been a steadily escalating rampage that results in outrageous property damage. Instead, it wastes too much of its time developing the cardboard characters of the hotel manager, Robert (Jason Alexander), and his two mischievous sons, Kyle (Eric Lloyd) and Brian (Graham Sack).

Darting around a futuristic Los Angeles on motor scooters that can fly, these plucky whiz kids are so indomitably cheery that they seem more mechanical than the demented cyber-messiah who tries to destroy them. At least he has a temper.

A free-for-all comic spoof that brings the "hood" genre of Hollywood films full circle. Crude and chaotic, the movie stridently stands every serious theme and anguished emotion from those two groundbreaking films on its ear. [13 Jan 1996, p.21]

This rabidly bad revenge movie is directed by John Schlesinger, who made "Midnight Cowboy," "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" and "Billy Liar" -- and unfortunately more to the point here, "Honky Tonk Freeway" and "Pacific Heights." Never in his varied career has Mr. Schlesinger made a film as mean-spirited and empty as this. The sole purpose of "Eye for an Eye" is to excite blood lust from the audience after the killer, played by Kiefer Sutherland as a walking smirk, slips through the hands of justice because of the improper handling of a sperm sample. Mr. Schlesinger shamelessly underscores this outrage by including a glimpse of the O. J. Simpson trial.

How bad could it be? Not exactly awful. But not funny, sexy or romantic either, which doesn't leave anything for this inert and oddly confused movie to do.

Fierce and disturbing, with a plot that skillfully resists following any familiar course. The film's hero fears that he's half-crazy, and for two hours Mr. Gilliam artfully keeps his audience feeling the same way.

Quietly courageous drama .

For all the talk nowadays about a revival of swank, nothing in contemporary fashion can compete with the glamour of upper-class English life in the 1930's as it is elegantly caricatured in Ian McKellen's updated Richard III.

Its ecological concerns, nuance and occasional lyricism place it squarely within the Ghibli oeuvre but not among its masterpieces.

Grounding the zaniness is the chemistry between its two likable stars. Beneath their crusty eccentricities, Max and John are teen-agers at heart, a Wayne and Garth for the "Modern Maturity" set. As Max, his leathery face beaming with pleasure, might put it: "Holy moley, is this a dumb movie!" But it is also fun.

Cutthroat Island proves too stupidly smutty for children, too cartoonish for sane adults and not racy enough for anyone who regards Ms. Davis in a tight-laced bodice as its main attraction. The only serious incentive for seeing this spectacle is a fascination with extravagance, since Cutthroat Island is indeed scenic, hectic and big.

However endlessly film makers around the world have told that story, Mr. Zhang reimagines it with immense grace and turns it into a deeply felt tragedy.

Mr. Stone's compassion for his subject overwhelms his film's false moves. And the barrage of undramatized, undigested data gives way to a much tighter and more artful vision...the film starts snowballing its way to real dramatic power. [20 Dec 1995, p.C11]

Its sensational looks pale beside storytelling weaknesses that expose the more soulless aspects of this cat-and-mouse crime tale.

Eschewing warm, cuddly imagery just as Mr. Van Allsburg's book does, the film affects a strange, artificial style that has the invasive weirdness of "Gremlins" but none of the charm.

Because movies have become so invested in the unleashing of violent emotion and the escalation of hostility, that expressions of restraint, reconciliation and forgiveness can easily be read as corny cop-outs. Cry, the Beloved Country is not corny, and it doesn't cop out.

The movie is best appreciated as a collection of whimsical toys drawn from a fantasy grab bag that encompasses everything from Grimm's fairy tales to "Star Wars."

Mr. Pollack's film runs into these obstacles so hard, in fact, that it runs right over them without difficulty. His "Sabrina" succeeds as a breezy, lighthearted throwback, made without benefit of the Hepburn magic but with much else in its favor.

Grandly entertaining...matches the Austen-based "Clueless" for sheer fun. [13 Dec 1995]

The result is a film as maddening and unpredictable as the character herself, held together by a fierce, risk-taking performance and flashes of overwhelming honesty.

The bourgeois splendor of the Banks house is a major feature of Father of the Bride Part II, a cheerful, harmlessly ingratiating sequel on a par with its 1991 predecessor.

Mr. Garcia gives one of his sleeker dreamboat performances.

However hamstrung it occasionally becomes, "Wild Bill" is impressive for a thoughtful, daring spirit and a charismatic hero, so unapologetically larger than life.

Thanks to exultant wit and so many distinctive voices, Toy Story is both an aural and visual delight.

Of all the bravura visual effects in Martin Scorsese's dazzingly stylish Casino, it's a glimpse of ordinary people that delivers the greatest jolt.

With great looks, a dandy supporting cast, a zinger-filled screenplay by Aaron Sorkin ("A Few Good Men") and Mr. Douglas twinkling merrily in the Oval Office, The American President is sunny enough to make the real Presidency pale by comparison.

Mr. Brosnan, as the best-moussed Bond ever to play baccarat in Monte Carlo, makes the character's latest personality transplant viable (not to mention smashingly photogenic), but the series still suffers the blahs.

Under the direction of Andy Tennant, the Olsen sisters lay on the icky-poo cuteness with several trowels, often delivering their lines as though they were reciting the alphabet.

But Mr. Penn mostly keeps a tight, impassioned grip on this material, preventing it from wandering too far afield. The influence of John Cassavetes is again clear in the characters' emotional sparring, which has energy and heart.