The movie's attitude toward the mentally and emotionally disturbed is even worse. If Crazy People displayed an ounce of real wit, one wouldn't care, but it's so smug in its ignorance that it begins to look elitist.

More problematical is the tone of the film, which attempts to be both compassionate and goofy, though the events are funny only if they are seen as farcical.

Mr. Greenaway turns this tale of a bullying criminal and his unfaithful wife into something profound and extremely rare: a work so intelligent and powerful that it evokes our best emotions and least civil impulses, so esthetically brilliant that it expands the boundaries of film itself.

Ernest Goes to Jail so resembles a high-spirited cartoon that it is likely to be more amusing to children and less painfully obnoxious for parents than its predecessors.

What it doesn't have, unfortunately, is enough true conviction to rise above novelty status. Nor does it really have a plot.

Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles was directed by Steve Barron, who has a number of music videos to his credit, and shows off the skills of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, without which there would have been no film at all.

Something special.

Mr. Frankenheimer relies on standard touches at times, but he also fills The Fourth War with interesting little asides.

Andrew Klavan's screenplay, adapted from a novel by Simon Brett, comes up with funny lines now and then, but it never has any clear idea whether it is a black comedy, a satire or maybe even a psychological study of a serial killer.

It isn't necessary to believe Blue Steel fully to find it gripping all the way through, and to be both fascinated and frightened by its icy, gleaming vision of urban life. For the audience, it's both a sobering and invigorating experience. For Ms. Bigelow, it's a breakthrough.

As directed by Harry Hook, the new Lord of the Flies offers much spectacle for the eye and almost nothing to keep the mind from wandering.

Unlike most teen-age movies, which attempt to impose some kind of adult order and significance on the events they recall, House Party has the light touch, rude wit and immediacy of rap as improvised by someone in top form.

Not since "Howard the Duck" has there been a big-budget comedy with feet as flat as those of Joe Versus the Volcano. Many gifted people contributed to it, but there's no disbelieving the grim evidence on the screen.

Bad Influence is full of sharply observed subsidiary characters and details of dress and behavior. Among other things, they help ease one past the plot's point of no return.

With its devilish attention to polite little touches, its abundant bitchiness, its decrying of the Handmaids' oppression along with its tacit celebration of their fecundity, The Handmaid's Tale is a shrewd if preposterous cautionary tale that strikes a wide range of resonant chords.

The movie finally is never very convincing. Even the special effects aren't great. Mr. Connery, however, wears the movie as if it were a favorite old hat. He makes it look good.

Glory is celebratory, but it celebrates in a manner that insists on acknowledging the sorrow. This is a good, moving, complicated film.

Surrounded by Mr. Barker's visual clutter and lack of narrative energy, Mr. Cronenberg's presence only highlights the difference between a gruesome but first-rate psychological horror story like Dead Ringers and a mediocrity like Nightbreed.

A flaccid movie version of Jim Harrison's slightly less flaccid 1979 novella...The movie is soft and aimless. Revenge is the kind of film in which subsidiary characters and events are more interesting than anything the movie is supposed to be about. Even the brutality has no shock effect.

To his credit, Mr. Ropelewski comes up with fairly novel forms of mayhem and makes an effort to tie up most of the loose ends when the film is over.

Mr. Seagal is effective for both his novelty value and his ability to be both literally and figuratively disarming. And the film itself is a lively one for its genre, ambitious enough to do more than simply string fight scenes together.

Ms. Midler's performance manages to be both involving and wildly inconsistent. The story is so full of holes that both she and Ms. Alvarado sometimes experience full personality changes from scene to scene.

Tremors wants to be funny, but it spends too much time winking at the audience. More than anything else, it looks like the sort of movie that might have been put together so that tourists visiting Universal Studios could see a movie being made.

The very appealing Mr. Garcia has an intense, studied cool that is nicely offset by bilingual outbursts. And Mr. Gere makes the most of Peck's smiling villainy, giving him a powerful physical presence and a dangerous, unpredictable edge.

Movies don't get more derivative or less comic than this.

Behind the film's easygoing mood there is firm directorial control. This, together with Mr. Roemer's keen sense of personality and place and his wry humor, accounts for why The Plot Against Harry holds up so well.

This intelligent, revolting, artistically made and entirely empty look at a murderer comes close to a cinema of pure technique. It is profoundly disturbing, even more for the questions it raises about the use of film than for the mutilated bodies that litter the screen.

Even more impressive than the tact, warmth and humor of Sidewalk Stories is the fact that it exists at all. Mr. Lane has flown quite fearlessly in the face of fashion, and done this so confidently that any comparisons with Chaplin deserve to be appreciative.

Violent as it is on the surface, Akira is tranquil at its core. The story's sanest characters plead for the wise use of mankind's frightening new powers, lending the whole film the feeling of a cautionary tale.

Gentle and moving as it means to be, Always is overloaded. There is barely a scene here that wouldn't have worked better with less fanfare.

Tango and Cash is loaded with sweating, straining, smashing and grunting, with bulging-bicep shots and sadistic special effects. Watery electrocution sequences are a particular favorite, since these mean wet clothes, shooting sparks, writhing bodies and other current staples of high style. Images like these are so all-important in Tango and Cash that the idea of storytelling has virtually been annihilated.

It is a film of enormous visceral power with, in the central role, a performance by Tom Cruise that defines everything that is best about the movie.

Mr. Beresford and Mr. Uhry, working in concert, see to it that the essential spirit of Driving Miss Daisy shines through the sometimes deadening effects of literalism.

The movie proceeds at the pace of a child reluctant to go to bed. It dawdles over irrelevant details and grows sleepier and sleepier until it seems to be snoozing, though still standing up.

Video-addicted kids may well find this exciting, but for anyone old enough to stay out later than 9 P.M. it's a distinct bore.

The three stars are good actors, but they have nothing much to work with. Their biggest challenge is to make the audience believe they are blood relatives, a question that would be quickly dismissed if the script were more compelling.

Blaze has been beautifully photographed by Haskell Wexler in the soft, lulling colors of the Louisiana countryside, against which Ms. Davidovich's amusingly garish costumes stand out as markedly as they're meant to. The costumes, by Ruth Myers, are particularly good, with ice-cream-colored suits for Mr. Newman that allow him to dominate the film visually just as surely as he dominates it dramatically.

Miss Streep dives into this thimble-sized comedy and makes one believe - at least, while she is on the screen - that it is an Olympic-sized swimming pool of wit.

Mr. Mogotlane makes Panic much more than a symbol, treating him as a raffish, amusingly overconfident figure at first and a visibly shaken man as the film progresses, until at last he utters the single syllable that encapsulates the film's final point.

The film's outstanding nastiness, which is often diabolically funny until a poorly staged final battle sequence simply takes things too far, has something real and recognizable at its core.

Fatigue is in the air. This third look at the quintessentially middle-American Griswold family, led by Clark (Mr. Chase) and the very patient Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo) is only a weary shadow of the original ''National Lampoon's Vacation,'' which found a lot to laugh at as it followed the dopey paterfamilias Clark and his quarrelsome brood on a hellish cross-country journey in their station wagon. The new film does little more than reintroduce these familiar characters (with new actors playing the children, who would otherwise be college age by now) and let them get on one another's nerves in earnest.

Back to the Future deserved a chance to come back, especially under the cheerful, enterprising, mathematically minded stewardship of Mr. Zemeckis and Mr. Gale. Their new film isn't an ordinary sequel. It's as if the earlier film had been squared.

Steel Magnolias is pop entertainment of an especially condescending, superficial sort. Its bitchiness and greeting-card truisms are made no more palatable by the fact that Mr. Harling probably wrote it with as much sincerity and passion as Mr. Shepard put into "Fool for Love."

For every necessary touch that Valmont has reduced or dispensed with (the climactic duel scene, for instance), there is another, less vital moment that has been expanded.

Harlem Nights is not the disaster some people might have been expecting. Mr. Murphy has appeared in far worse films written and directed by people much more experienced.

The appeal of character and story line here is thoroughly overshadowed by the various technical feats involved in bringing the film to the screen.

The dialogue sounds as if it had been gathered by means of microphones hidden in diners, buses, waiting rooms, restrooms, motels and park benches. Sometimes it is hilariously banal, with never a word wasted.

A marvel of skillful animation, witty songwriting and smart planning. It is designed to delight filmgoers of every conceivable stripe.

An intelligent, beautifully acted adaptation.

Under Bob Radler's direction, the sequences involving tae-kwan-do, a lethal ballet-styled hybrid of kick boxing, judo and karate, carry very little visceral charge until the last 15 minutes, after which the movie expires in a saccharine slush of blood, sweat and tears.

Instead of moving the audience, Mr. Goldberg achieves the kind of effect that Jack Benny got when he played his violin. The flesh crawls.

Mr. Branagh has made a fine, rousing new English film adaptation of Shakespeare's ''Henry V,'' a movie that need not apologize to Laurence Olivier's 1944 classic.

With its freewheeling mixture of gore, surrealism and Freud, it will do almost anything to grab attention. If the movie's metaphors are as obvious and as portentous as the heavy metal music that punctuates the action, Shocker at least has the feel of a movie that was fun to make.

No less amazing than the material Mr. Annaud has captured on the screen is the fact that he has gone to such crazily elaborate lengths to capture it at all.

An appreciably better-than-average revenge drama.

Fat Man and Little Boy is so confused, so stunningly ineffective, that General Groves's hawkish statements are more persuasive than the dove-ish apprehensions expressed by the scientists. Even the sight of a scientist dying horribly of radiation poisoning fails to be moving.

Mr. Allen's most securely serious and funny film to date.

Cute is the operative word for the movie, which stars some good actors doing material that is not super.

Halloween 5, which was directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard and opened yesterday at area theaters, is a bit more refined in its details than the conventional horror movie.

It's a film specializing in smoky, down-at-the-heels glamour, and in the kind of smart, slangy dialogue that sounds right without necessarily having much to say.

Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant Jr.'s glum, absorbing film about a clan of heroin addicts who travel around the Pacific Northwest Looting pharmacies of their supplies the way Bonnie and Clyde cleaned out banks, gives Matt Dillon the role of his career.

More than enough sadism to go around. But the net effect is less excitement than overkill. The screenplay, by Larry Brothers, has a tendency to forget old plot elements as it picks up new ones.

The film reminds us again and again that Monk was as important a jazz composer as he was a pianist.

Because Johnny Handsome is a film by Walter Hill (The Warriors, Streets of Fire), it crams the following things into its first five minutes: gunfire, screeching brakes, a drug-popping hoodlum, a moll in black leather, a violent robbery, one murder, sinister masks, shattering glass. But because this is Mr. Hill's work, these ingredients are slapped together with high style.

At its best, Black Rain has the glitzy quality of an extremely long and clever television commercial. One can't be sure what is being sold, but the eye isn't bored.

Dry White Season is no less predictable than its predecessors, but its frankness and sincerity matter more than its fundamental bluntness.

Sea of Love is a lugubrious imitation of a second-rate television movie, over-produced and over-cast. Mr. Pacino tears into a role made out of rice paper, for messy results, while Miss Barkin does her level best to seem simultaneously sexy, homicidal and innocent, which is not easy.

The Big Picture, the first theatrical film to be directed by the talented Christopher Guest (a co-writer and a star of ''This Is Spinal Tap), is a consistently genial, intermittently funny send-up of the current Hollywood scene as demonstrated by the rise and fall of an award-winning film student.

Sweetie looks like a small movie, and in every measurable way it is, but it possesses remarkable strength and tenacity.

Banality is precisely the problem with Shirley Valentine, the one-woman stage play that has been turned into a misguided, fully cast film.

The Package is a feeble attempt to keep the old-fashioned cold-war thriller alive in this era of glasnost...Mr. Davis has directed what may be the worst movie Gene Hackman has ever made.

The movie is so inept in almost every particular that even its love scenes, when a grimacing Kris Kristofferson mashes his grizzled face against an impassive Cheryl Ladd, are likely to produce giggles.

The wonder of Mr. Hata's anthropomorphic fairy tale, which opens today at Cinema 3 and other theaters, is that it is cast with real animals who seem to share deep affection. And the mixture of realism and fantasy lends this children's film a poignancy that cuts much deeper than might a similar story featuring animated characters. [25 Aug 1989, p.10]

The movie is so witless and confused in tone that its seedy racetrack clientele only emerge as dim, inarticulate cartoons.

Mr. Penn plays Meserve with terrific elan. There is plausibility in every movement and gesture, and especially in his crafty handsomeness. His Meserve is the sort of man one credits with thoughts when the mind may, in fact, be completely blank.

Sometimes funny and, in the way of small-screen entertainment, so perfectly predictable that one could mail in the laughs.

Though the film hints at psychological intrigue, it never moves beyond the limits of its genre.

Astonishing... One of the freshest American films of the decade. [4 Aug 1989]

Ron Howard's bittersweet adult comedy, Parenthood, lays out an entire catalogue of psychological stresses afflicting family life in white middle-class America, then asks if the rewards of being a parent are worth all the agony.

A conventional but delightful tale of self-discovery and heroism from Mr. Miyazaki, it feels like Disney one moment, Truffaut the next.

It isn't [Hanks's] fault that the five writers don't come up with five funny lines or one exciting scene.

But (Jason) will never change and never die, not while cheap, dull ax-murder movies can yield one witty, misleading, probably lucrative commercial.

The movie remains one of the most startling and moving animated films ever. It is also, with the likes of “The 400 Blows,” “Kes,” and “Vagabond,” one of the finest films about being young in an indifferent world.

The movie is forever digressing so that Mr. Yankovic can offer media spoofs that have only the most tangential relation to the story. [22 Jul 1989, p.1.15]

Long before the film is over, one is left frustratedly grasping after characters and an ambiance that have evaporated into formulaic freneticism.

For all its clever updatings, stylish action and witty escapism, Licence to Kill is still a little too much by the book. Mr. Dalton is perfectly at home as an angry Bond, and as a romantic lead and as an action hero, but he never seems to blend any two of those qualities at once.

Like the sitcom version of a Woody Allen film, full of amusing lines and scenes, all infused with an uncomfortable sense of deja vu.

Before it skids out of control in the final sequence, the film is so careful to preserve its successful comic-action formula that it follows the most basic law of sequels. If you liked ''Lethal Weapon,'' you'll like Lethal Weapon 2; it's almost as simple as that.

A remarkable piece of work. [30 June 1989]

The trip, however, is well worth the effort for anyone whose sensibilities have been worn numb by the idiocies of most conventional films.

With its sluggish script and unaging characters, The Karate Kid Part III has the rote sense of film makers trying to crank out another moneymaker.

Anyone looking for a true sense of his importance in the history of rock-and-roll will be let down by Great Balls of Fire. But though the film may skimp on the truth, it is loaded with terrific music and outrageous fun.

It's neither funny nor solemn. It has the personality not of a particular movie but of a product, of something arrived at by corporate decision.

The director, Joe Johnston, paces this adventure to suit the film's tone. It is swift and smooth, never wild or raucous.

Even the special effects are more to the point of the comedy than they were in the first film. For some reason, this appears to leave more room for the sort of random funny business that Mr. Murray and his friends do best, or to which they react with most aplomb.

Captain Kirk and his crew go where too many film makers have too often gone before.

The film is dominated and destroyed by Mr. Cage's chaotic, self-indulgent performance. He gives Peter the kind of sporadic, exaggerated mannerisms that should never live outside of acting-class exercises.

More than Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Hogan behaves like a self-invented comic-book character sprung to life. No Holds Barred is as cartoonish as its star.