Though it cannot regain the brash originality of ''Raiders of the Lost Ark,'' in its own way 'The Last Crusade' is nearly as good, matching its audience's wildest hopes.

In Road House, Patrick Swayze has the most laughable role since Tom Cruise juggled a few liquor bottles and danced to ''The Hippy Hippy Shakes'' in Cocktail...Next to Dalton, Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing seems like Hamlet. Mr. Swayze does some dirty fighting here, but mostly the role requires a blank expression. At this point, Road House makes his career look like a bad joke.

What emerges is an amazingly fresh visual immersion in space, and a film that works far better when dealing with inanimate objects than with humans.

As Harry and Julie, Mr. Edwards and Ms. Winningham make an unusually refreshing pair.

It's the none too promising assumption of See No Evil, Hear No Evil that one physical disability complements another, and that Wally and Dave are made for each other. Yet, against all odds, the movie goes on to prove it with a lot of good, unlikely humor that is often not in the best of taste.Mr. Pryor and Mr. Wilder have never worked better together, possibly because they are playing characters who, being blind and deaf, are not especially funny to begin with, but who also have a certain amount of intelligence.

With a scatter-shot style that includes lengthy, often lame song-and-dance parodies, as well as special effects, slapstick and satire, the film can't begin to sustain its lunatic premise. But during the lulls between witty scenes, there is always something amusing to look at. Mr. Temple and his collaborators create a near-California so cartoonish and crayon-colored that the film comes to seem like Aliens in Toyland.

The movie is based on characters that originally appeared in DC Comics, and means to be funnier than it ever is. It almost achieves its comic goal in one scene in which Swamp Thing and Heather Locklear, as Mr. Jourdan's innocent stepdaughter, attempt to consummate a love that cannot be. The film is otherwise composed entirely of special effects that alternate with whimsy.

The movie grows more and more desperate until it seems to go to pieces like poor brilliant Bagley. The final madness has less to do with wit than with a cinematic effect. The film's good humor, however, is consistent.

Miss Denis's mastery of film-making technology, which is something that can be learned, is equaled by her splendid control of narrative, a more elusive talent. She is astonishing. There are no dark corners in the story. Everything that happens is vivid and clear, though subject to the kind of speculation that tantalizes and rewards.

K-9 doesn't have a shred of credibility. And Mr. Belushi, despite some rough edges, lacks a strong enough macho growl to make Dooley seem like a police dog in human clothing. But with its surefire dog tricks and breezy pacing, K-9 is at least mildly diverting.

Lover Boy should have had the courage to admit it is hopelessly tacky.

A superficial and sporadically witty piece aimed at such easy targets as family squabbles, small-town folk and beauty contests. The film is not actively awful; just dull and banal. [28 Apr 1989, p.C12]

A work so smartly written, so beautifully filmed, so perfectly acted, that it does the almost impossible trick of turning sentimentality into true emotion.

Chet Baker's face, and the extraordinary ways in which Bruce Weber has photographed it, encapsulate the story of Baker's life in a succession of ghostly, indelible images that are at once hauntingly beautiful and desperately sad.

The movie fails mostly because it doesn't trust the audience to do any of the work. What the dialogue doesn't carefully explain or predict is explained or predicted by ominous music and special effects. The movie seems to be playing to itself.

Anyone who has watched television for even a night will be able to predict every scene in She's Out of Control with total accuracy. It is an extended version of familiar, bland sitcom situations, with Mr. Danza playing a smoother-edged version of his character on the endlessly running hit ''Who's the Boss?''

Major League trots out the standard formula, but has the wit to make fun of it now and then. The film is so loopy that it glides over its cliches and indulges in some congenial movie-baseball silliness.

Disturbing for all the wrong reasons.

There's nothing dreadfully wrong with The Dream Team, Howard Zieff's new comedy, except that it's not funny too much of the time. On those occasions when it is funny, the humor less often prompts laughter than mute appreciation of the talents of the principal performers - Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd and Peter Boyle.

The movie's endless action sequences are so stylized and overedited that they lack any visceral punch. And Mr. Van Damme's Gibson is so opaque that he makes Mel Gibson's Mad Max seem weepy by comparison.

The predictable surface of Say Anything is constantly being cracked by characters who think and talk like real people and by John Cusack's terrifically natural, appealing Lloyd.

Its detailed fantasy world, including a dark turn-of-the-century mining town and candy-colored futuristic space bikes, is as alluring as any live-action film. Yet this two-hour story about a lost princess, a flying island and space pirates is liable to strain the patience of adults and the attention spans of children.

As snappy and assured as it is mean-spirited. Its originality extends well beyond the limits of ordinary high school histrionics and into the realm of the genuinely perverse.

Only fleetingly amusing, but Miss Long does make it fun for a while.

Fletch Lives looks less like ''Fletch 2,'' which it is, numerically speaking, than ''Fletch 7,'' the bitter end of a worn-out series.

Leviathan compares favorably with the other recent aquatic horror film Deepstar Six but probably not with anything else.

With their remarkable contributions, ''Baron Munchausen'' is full of moments that dazzle, just for the fun of seeing the impossible come to life on the screen. What the Folies-Bergere once was for the foot-weary tourist, ''Baron Munchausen'' is for the television-exhausted child. Nothing much happens, but you can't easily tear your eyes away from it.

Romantic comedies, of which Chances Are is nominally one, are better off making their characters appear glamorous and attractive than making them look like ineffectual, long-suffering nincompoops, which is the case here.

There are some witty moments, as when the straight man, Proctor, played as usual by Lance Kinsey, uses a squeaky rubber squeegie to wash a window while his partner, Harris (G. W. Bailey), holds a stethoscope to the window to eavesdrop on a conversation taking place on the other side. But most of what takes place in Police Academy 6, from the flying billiard balls to the exploding cigars, are things you have seen someplace before. [3 March 1989, p.1-17]

This is one incoherent movie; I have a hunch that the writers could not figure it out, either.

Audiences are apt to root for the film's Mr. Clark even when they aren't entirely enthusiastic about what he's doing. Much of this is attributable to Mr. Freeman's fiery and compelling performance, but a lot of it also comes from the director John G. Avildsen (''Rocky''), who has stacked the deck in every way he can.

Mr. Ritter is an engagingly comic actor, but the women in his life are so uncharacterized, in the writing, casting and the playing, that the comedy fizzles. All that's left is a movie about a seriously alcoholic writer making a mess of things.

High Hopes manages to be enjoyably whimsical without ever losing its cutting edge.

Meant to be funny, but it only swells the sinus passages. It is a painfully inept comedy.

The Mighty Quinn is an entertaining, touristy sort of movie that manages to be lighthearted without being soft in the head.

The film's view of Eddie Dodd is occasionally on the facile side, but Mr. Woods's performance is crackling and passionate enough to give the character depth despite that; it's also laced with snappish, self-mocking humor that Mr. Woods delivers particularly well. This performance is so razor-sharp that Eddie can be seen coming alive with each little triumph, reveling in each little maneuver and taking each little disappointment terribly hard. His enthusiasm is irresistible.

The Fly II is competent but hardly clever. The only respect in which it matches Mr. Cronenberg's Fly is in its sheer repulsiveness, since this film degenerates into a series of slime-ridden, glop-oozing special effects in its final half hour.

A romantic melodrama of a boringness to make your average tooth extraction seem preferable.

In Who's Harry Crumb? Mr. Candy has a varied role, a good supporting cast, a script full of comic setups and every imaginable opportunity to shine. But the result is little more than a weak comedy, one that suggests Mr. Candy is potentially a great deal better than his material.

The screenplay, by Harold Nebenzal, leaves one end of this story conspicuously untied, but it does its best to titillate the audience with a mixture of teen-age porn and trademark Bronson spitefulness.

For those who know such places, Mr. Parker, who is English, evokes the texture, the gritty, fly-specked Southernness, the brooding sense of small-town menace, the racial hatred, with considerable accuracy.

This comedy has the earmarks of humor and even a few genuine laughs, but it also has a prefabricated, automatic-pilot feeling.

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.

Gleaming the Cube (the title refers to achieving the skateboarding equivalent of cosmic bliss) has an intrigue plot that is unremarkable, and it doesn't do anything terribly novel with the relationship between Brian and the policeman (Steven Bauer) who helps investigate the case. It becomes somewhat more interesting in exploring the Vietnamese community of Orange County, Calif., especially in its tinier details.

Even the fish lack personality in Deepstar Six, a film that makes the exotic undersea world not much more interesting than the average bedroom closet.

The January Man is well titled. It's a big-budget mainstream production that, in spite of its first-rate writer, director and cast, manages to fail in just about every department.

The Accidental Tourist often relies on Miss Tyler's methods without tempering them, and gives a tone of crashing obviousness to material that need not have seemed that way. [23 Dec 1988, p.C12]

Working Girl is enjoyable even when it isn't credible, which is most of the time. The film, like its heroine, has a genius for getting by on pure charm.

Though the script for Hellbound is related to the Barker story, the film drops its plot whenever a fake-looking monster walks on the screen. Ogling strange creatures is the film's true reason for being.

A mess of a movie that comes complete with a conventional beginning, middle and end, and long, spongy flashbacks...a nearly perfect example of how not to make a movie of a play.

In much the way that Raymond stays detached, the performance seems to exist outside the film but, instead of illuminating Rain Man, it upstages the work of everyone else involved. [16 Dec 1988, p.C12]

Nothing Miss Close has done on the screen before approaches the richness and comic delicacy of her work as the Marquise. [21 Dec 1988, p.C22]

Line by line, the dialogue isn't all that quotable, but there is consistently funny life on the screen. The film's comic timing is nearly flawless.

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka is a lively but uncertain mixture of nostalgia, silliness and genuinely unpredictable humor.

Twins turns out to be, among other things, sad evidence that witty direction is becoming a dying art.

Unlike the screenwriters, who often cross the thin line between wit and silliness as they outline Celeste's neo-I Love Lucy-isms, Miss Basinger reveals unfailingly sound instincts for comedy.

It will help if, while watching The Naked Gun, viewers can assume a mental age of about 14. The jokes will seem fresher that way, and they will also, much to the writers' credit, seem screamingly funny at times.

The movie has the fuzzy focus of someone who has stared too long at a light bulb. Narrative points aren't made and the wrong points are emphasized. It could also be that too much footage was shot so that, when the time came for editing, a lot of essential material had to be cut out.

Scrooged works in fits and starts. The mundane demands of the sentimental story keep interrupting what are, essentially, revue sketches, a few of which are hilarious.

Cocoon: The Return is so tired, in fact, that it can barely recapitulate the winning formula of the original hit.

The Land Before Time isn't heavily plotted; it doesn't do much more than concentrate on the amusingly lifelike dynamics among the dinosaur children as they make their journey. Luckily, it isn't very long either. At a just-right length of 73 minutes, it ought to win audiences' hearts without wearing out their patience.

It's not that Oliver and Company is not up to par. It actively denies its own unique heritage. [18 Nov 1988, p.C8]

Luckily, High Spirits has a good cast and enough joie de vivre to rise above some of its underlying clumsiness.

The best that can be said for the film is that it leaves Ernest behind now and then to focus on Santa, who is played by Douglas Seale with sweetness, sincerity and an amazing amount of dignity, considering his surroundings.

The screenplay for A Cry in the Dark, adapted by Robert Caswell and Mr. Schepisi from a book by John Bryson, isn't perfect, but it provides Miss Streep with the kind of raw material that allows her to create a character who, while being perfectly ordinary, is always unexpectedly special.

Child's Play has some limp dialogue among the clever touches. Its appeal is clearly for upscale horror fans rather than a general movie audience. Yet it is a fitting successor to the classic television horror stories it takes off from.

Mr. Carpenter has directed the film with B-movie bluntness, but with none of the requisite snap. And his screenplay (written under the pseudonym Frank Armitage) makes the principals sound even more tongue-tied than they have to. [4 Nov 1988, p.C8]

In this film, suspense and psychological horror have given way to superhuman strength and resilience...The one effectively handled scene is the last, which promises a sequel with a feminist twist.

An enchanted lark about wiseguys and those hustlers who think they are wiseguys, but aren't.

It's hard to imagine what the film might have been with anyone other than Mr. Hackman in this role, for this actor's quintessential decency and ordinariness have never seemed more affecting. It's precisely the lack of bravado in Hambleton that makes him an interesting character, and a poignant anti-Rambo.

Not a worm is left unturned in Ken Russell's buoyant, mischievous and predictably overwrought new film.

Though in essence this is little more than a girls' romance novel brought to life, it has been filled with heart and humor. The place, the people and even the largely predictable situations in which they find themselves are presented in an entirely winning way.

A consistently engrossing melodrama, modest in its aims and as effective for the cliches it avoids as for the clear eye through which it sees its working-class American lives.

Bombay is a place of noise, restless movement and no privacy whatsover. It is squalor accepted as the natural order of things, and thus accommodated. Miss Nair does not share this fatalism, but in ''Salaam Bombay!'' she allows us to examine it without panic, and without patronizing it. She is a new film maker to watch.

Eventually, though it happens later rather than sooner, the conventional aspects of Alien Nation overwhelm the novelty.

Tepid...A big Punchline problem is that it's impossible to tell the difference between Miss Field's routines that are supposed to be awful, and the awful ones that are supposed to be funny.

Directed by Robert Mulligan in an unapologetically sentimental style, Clara's Heart succeeds in tugging the heartstrings only when Clara herself is on screen.

A film that assumes it's up to the job of dealing with life and death and love, but is not even up to dealing with lobsters.

Bird is less moving as a character study than it is as a tribute and as a labor of love. The portrait it offers, though hazy at times, is one Charlie Parker's admirers will recognize.

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is a lame attempt to cash in on her character's success.

What makes the performance(s) even better is that Mr. Irons invests these bizarre, potentially freakish characters with so much intelligence and so much real feeling.

Patty Hearst is a model of swift, spare, unsentimental film making about a character who can never be known, as most fictional characters are, and about a specific time and circumstances that, with hindsight, seem incredible.

For a film so exhaustively loaded with silliness, Kansas is remarkably dull. [23 Sep 1988, p.C17]

What makes Crossing Delancey so appealing is the warm and leisurely way it arrives at its inevitable conclusion. All the different aspects of Izzy's busy, contradiction-filled life are carefully drawn, giving the film a realistic, well-populated feeling and a nicely wry view of the modern world.

One of those dimly realized personal statements that ultimately says a lot less than the written program notes that accompany it.

Running on Empty works best when it plays upon emotions generated by the Popes' unique predicament, something that it often does rather shamelessly. It helps that Sidney Lumet has directed the film in a crisp, handsome style that diminishes the maudlin or unlikely aspects of its story, even when they threaten to intrude.

For Mr. Sayles, whose idealism has never been more affecting or apparent than it is in this story of boyish enthusiasm gone bad in an all too grown-up world, Eight Men Out represents a home run.

Morris has fashioned a brilliant work of pulp fiction around this crime. [26 Aug 1988, p.C6]

Although Michael Dinner's direction is noticeably better than the material, the film aims consistently for the lowest common denominator.

Married to the Mob works best as a wildly overdecorated screwball farce.

Elm Street 4' does have an endless onslaught of astonishing, often grotesque special effects .Mr. Harlin only has to keep things moving, which he does with restless camera work, swirling high above Freddy and his victims. Freddy, who says I am eternal, seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, immune to directors and scripts.

Mr. Coppola has done things this fancily before, but never with so clear and moving a sense of purpose.

despite such maladroit moments, The Last Temptation of Christ finally exerts enormous power. What emerges most memorably is its sense of absolute conviction, never more palpable than in the final fantasy sequence that removes Jesus from the cross and creates for him the life of an ordinary man.

Young Guns is best watched in the playful, none-too-serious spirit in which it was made. Though the film concentrates reverentially on its young stars, it also includes good performances from a few grown-ups, notably Terry O'Quinn as a lawyer and Jack Palance as the story's wild-eyed villain.

With its cardboard family and familiar aliens, MAC and Me would seem like the generic version of E. T. if it were not so full of brand-name commercials.

The dialogue reports funny things instead of showing them. The movie remains in a limbo halfway between the informed anarchy of Monty Python comedy stripped of all social and political satire, and the comparatively genteel comedy of "The Lavender Hill Mob." [15 July 1988, p.C8]

Cocktail, which opens today at the Cinema 2 and other theaters, is ''Saturday Night Fever'' without John Travolta, the Bee-Gees and dancing. It is an inane romantic drama that only a very young, very naive bartender could love. How it got that way is difficult to understand.